How Big Business Built the Food Pyramid

ever since we were kids we were told to rely on the food pyramid to tell us how much of each food group we were supposed to eat in order to lead healthy lives but as it turns out there wasn't really a whole lot of science backing that up instead there was a whole lot of dough and not the tossing kind today on weird history food we're looking at how big business really built the food pyramid but before we get started be sure to subscribe to the weird history Food Channel and let us know in the comments below what other corporate conspiracies you would like to hear about okay time to decipher these American food hieroglyphs in the mid-1800s Wilbur Olin Atwater was a revolutionary nutritionist he earned his PhD in agricultural chemistry from Yale University and his thesis on Maize was the first ever modern chemical analysis of a food to be performed in the United States it was pretty amazing from there he landed himself a job teaching chemistry at Wesleyan University where he conducted Landmark experiments on agriculture and eventually nutrition it wasn't long before the U.S government like ice cream scooped him up and by the late 1870s Atwater was conducting experiments on the nutritive value of fish and other invertebrates for the U.S Fish Commission along with studies on meat consumption for the Smithsonian institution he was considered the nation's leading nutritionist and the United States Department of Agriculture even allowed him to speak on their behalf in an 1894 publication of farmers bulletin it was the talk of 1894. therein Atwater wrote the evils of overeating may not be felt at once but sooner or later they are sure to appear perhaps in an excessive amount of fatty tissue perhaps in general debility perhaps an actual disease judging by his feelings about the evils of overeating it's a good thing Atwater didn't live to see the invention of pizza delivery the publication turning point for the USDA after being founded in 1862 the USDA had previously abstained from Doling out nutritional advice but like any nagging Nancy can tell you once you start giving out advice it can be hard to know when to stop just two years later Atwater would go on to publish his magnum opus the chemical composition of American food materials everyone remembers where they were the day that book dropped this nutritional guide documented the fuel value for caloric content of everyday Foods along with their fat carb and protein contents however scientists at the time didn't have a good grasp on exactly how vitamins and minerals affected the body and so they were left out of atwater's guide altogether regardless atwater's guide would act as the primary handbook for the usda's recommendations for decades to come in other words a single man was dictating the government's position on nutrition that is until the food rationing of World War II in 1943 the USDA created the first predecessor to the food pyramid it was pretty basic in fact it was called the basic 7 divided into seven different categories this chart attempted to steer people away from malnutrition during wartime food shortages it consisted of equal parts one green and yellow vegetables two oranges tomatoes and grapefruit three potatoes and other vegetables and fruits four milk and milk products five meat poultry fish or eggs six bread flour and cereals and seven butter and fortified margarine that's the most powerful margarine in addition they also included a disclaimer that invited citizens to eat any other Foods you want which seems like it negates the entire purpose of the wheel guess you could fling it around with your friends or something at the time nutritionists criticized the wheel for giving each category equals space on the wheel making it look like one seventh of a person's diet should be entirely butter wait it's not supposed to be still varieties of fresh produce produce appeared in three of the basic seven groups and noticeably bread flour and cereals only appeared in one thirteen years later the USDA would update their guidelines for the post-war era still trying to fight off malnutrition they came up with a daily food guide for thrifty families which at this time consisted of just four basic groups vegetables and meats would get a visual bump taking up more space on the chart than the milk and bread categories while tragically butter and margarine melted off the chart completely the daily food guide was only meant to show the minimum amount of each category that a person should eat in one day it wasn't until 1980 that the USDA fully matured into its nagging Nancy stage thank you while early nutritional guides fixated on solving malnutrition and keeping people from starvation America began to face an all-new problem as the 50s turned into the 60s people were putting on too much weight and the government needed to put a stop to it as concerns around both obesity and dietary related cancers grew into the 1970s the USDA came under pressure to be more specific with their dietary guidelines and to tell people exactly what they should and should not eat so in 1980 they released the food wheel the first stab at spelling out the precise portions of which foods a person should consume on any given day under the new guidelines vegetables were suddenly on the outs and Breads and Grains Rose in prominence the USDA suggested that veggies should make up 20 percent of a person's diet while Breads and Grains should make up closer to 40 percent all the while both the recommended meat and fruit intake fell to a mere 10 percent each it was a carb Lover's Dream but a dietitian a nightmare so what happened in the 1970s there was an indiscriminate push against fat without any substantial scientific evidence many came to believe that all fats were bad and all complex carbs were good what's more they thought that replacing meat and dairy with bread and cereal was the best move you could make if you wanted to live into an old age they didn't discriminate between the healthy fats that lower cholesterol and the unhealthy fats that give you heart disease so they threw their fat baby out with its fatty bath water and they ditched fats altogether at the time though scientists were already aware of distinctions between different types of fats research had been conducted in the 60s and 70s that demonstrated the nutritional disparities between consuming saturated and unsaturated fats and it was common knowledge among nutritionists that there were distinct differences between the two these in the no nutritionists likewise sounded the alarm on the impending Health catastrophe that inflating these two fats would cause but their warnings went unheard the argument was that it was better to give the public a simple easy to follow died than to weigh a guideline down with nuances therefore all fat must be labeled bad because they believe the average citizen wouldn't be able to understand that there were different kinds of fat consumers believe the message and they sought out as many low-fat and zero fat products as they could find ignoring other vital factors in the process like sugar content the food industry responded and they began to sell all sorts of low-fat or zero fat cookies chips and other junk Foods making up for the loss of flavor from the loss of fat by adding in sucrose and high fructose corn syrup [Music] by the 1990s the anti-fat pro carbs movement was firmly cemented in the American conscience even organizations like the American Heart Association hopped aboard the misinformation train they advocated for limiting fat-based caloric and take to 30 percent of one's daily diet while increasing the number of calories individuals got from carbs to make up for it according to Scientific American however this 30 figure which became standard nutritional guidance for well over a decade to come was based on no long-term studies and was instead built off of several Surgeon General National research Council and dietary guidelines advisory committee reports likewise studies of the early 1990s showed that replacing calories from saturated fats with calories from carbohydrates did nothing to reduce the risk of heart disease and replacing calories from unsaturated fats proved to be an even worse catastrophe cutting out unsaturated fats and replacing them with carbs both increased the risk of heart disease and increased rates of obesity however none of this stopped the government from moving full steam ahead with even more recommendations and in 1992 the USDA unveiled their first ever food guideline pyramid at the pyramid's Pinnacle with a disclaimer of use sparingly where fats oils and sweets all lumped together in one dismal Peak below that were equal small portions of dairies and proteins slightly larger portions of vegetables and fruits and a gigantic base of bread just tons and tons of bread according to this pyramid you should try to harvest half a wheat field with your teeth each day the government then distributed this pyramid via posters and textbooks that went into schools the nation over and they began to inculcate the children of the 90s and the Arts with their bready vision for the world with this increased governmental guidance obesity levels continued to rise almost doubling from the 1980 Levels by the New Millennium enter the food Lobby angered by their small share of the 1992 food pyramid the the dairy councils stepped up their pressure on government bureaucrats to increase their recommended Dairy consumption likewise as people cried foul over the lack of differentiation between good fats and bad fats the national Cattlemen's beef Association fought hard against them to keep red meats in the same meaty catch-all as chicken and fish for their part Atkins nutritional zinc hell bent on reducing America's carbohydrate intake began to pour money into campaigns that would reduce the usda's future Carby guidelines against them though were the American Millers Association who wanted to keep starchy potatoes in with the rest of the vegetable category in 2005 with all this outside pressure and with money being thrown in every direction the USDA tried again they created the all-new my pyramid food guidance system an aesthetically vague rendition of their 1992 pyramid but one that included a little guy walking up the side to encourage people to exercise this new pyramid while still pushing people to Gorge themselves on bread encouraged the consumption of whole grains instead of processed grains what's more it pushed Dairy to a whopping 23 share of the new dietary guidelines doubling what they'd recommended just 13 years prior and raising questions of the food lobbies influence on the guidelines my pyramid also replaced the previously vague recommended servings with actual ounce and cup recommendations for each of its six categories and it likewise Associated each of these categories with six themes for everyone to remember personalization gradual Improvement physical activity variety moderation and proportionality in the years since the 1980 creation of the food wheel obesity rates in the United States have nearly tripled but in 2011 after 19 years of spreading misinformation the food pyramid was taken down for good it was replaced with the usda's my plate Campaign which is still in use today my plate breaks dietary guidelines down into just five basic categories fruits vegetables grains proteins and dairy noticeably absent is the butter category which we are still lobbying to bring back reversing their 2005 decision to encourage milk consumption Dairy now takes up the smallest visual portion of the five still according to the USDA my plate isn't actually meant to give specific one-size-fits-all dietary guidelines but to serve as a reminder for healthy eating but if you do want dietary guidelines the USDA releases a new set of them every few years their dietary guidelines for Americans 2020-2025 is the most recent addition however since the 2010 Supreme Court decision on citizens united food industry lobbyists have been able to spend busloads of money on political campaigns further influencing the ways the USDA conducts its business including how they set their guidelines for example when the USDA released its dietary guidelines for Americans in 2015 it promoted levels of dairy and red meat consumption that alarmed many nutrition experts including some the government had hired to create the guidelines in fact the guidelines flat out contradicted some of the information in the report from the dietary guidelines advisory committee that team of experts we mentioned earlier who are meant to advise the USDA on nutrition notably the report recommended eating less red meat because a research linking meat-heavy diets with heart disease and cancer in that same year alone Coca-Cola spent nearly nine million dollars on lobbying the entire meat industry spent almost 5 million and the broader agricultural industry spent just shy of 20 million and during the 2020 elections the food lobby as a whole spent a whopping 175 million dollars on political contributions listen you cannot fill America's schools with lucrative Coke machines unless you grease the right palms and the usda's happen to be the right Palms to Greece the most outspoken critics have pointed out that the USDA is a government entity concerned with food production rather than nutrition and argue that as such the USDA is never going to release guidelines suggesting that people eat less of the country's biggest Food Industries everyone wants a piece of the government and now more than ever before outside influences can affect future USDA guidance so before swallowing the government's recommendations on what to put in our mouths we may want to chew on who is behind those recommendations so what do you think do you follow the food pyramid let us know in the comments below and while you're at it check out some of these other videos from our weird history food

Channel: Weird History Food

Views: 131,547

Keywords: the history of the food pyramid, who built america's food pyramid, when did the food pyramid start?, history of usda food guidelines, origins of the food pyramid, weird history food, weird history food americana, food pyramid, food pyramid overview, types of the food pyramid, who made the food pyramid, usda, american food laws, american food history, food laws in america, dietary guidance, usda food guidance, today i found out, dr gundy podcast, freethink, tasting history max

Id: 5LUMhY27C_A

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023