so I gotta rant about nutrition
So I am sitting eating my lunch of microwaved Palak Paneer and Ak-Mak crackers. I glance down at the old school style USA nutrition pyramid. It is a little different than the one I remember from my childhood. It has junk food at the top listed under 'use sparingly' where the one from my youth said 'desserts 1-2 a day' or something, that was the tip of the pyramid. Milk and Cheese is 2-3 servings a day, Meats are 2-3 servings a day, are the second tier, vegetables at 3-5, fruit at 2-4 in tier 3 and the base of the pyramid is 6-11 servings of bread, cereal and pasta.
Holy crap that is a lot of food, that is minimum 15 servings of food a day, three meals, that is five servings a day, and every meal includes a vegetable and three freaking servings of bread or cereal. Three servings per meal!
This was pretty similar to my memory of the chart from my childhood. No fucking wonder there is an obesity problem in this country! So I thought "Wow, I wonder if that is still what the government promotes."
http://mypyramid.gov/ is what I found.
The USDA has completely changed their tactic. The food groups are no longer heirarchically stacked giving implied weight to one group over another (and of course in American culture, the top of the pyramid is where you want to be so junk food is where it is at.) but are now lateral stripes on the pyramid (to the point where the pyramid structure no longer makes a lick of sense, so they put stairs on the side of it, and it is like the incline to good health or something, but you know once you have spent decades forcing a bad analogy and associated brand like symbol down the throats of the masses, you can't let a little thing like applicability stop you from continuing its use.) the 'pyramid' changes depending on your age and your level of activity. You can choose from less than 30 minutes (flagged you will notice in the URL as Sed which I assume is short of Sedintary), 30-60 minutes (Low in the URL) or 60 or more minutes (Active in the URL).
No longer is it measured in a generic and unidentifiable 'servings' but it is measured in 'ounces' (for grains and meat) and 'cups' for most everything else. It also recommends half your grains be whole grains and that you vary your vegetables (ie that four cups of potatoes daily is not sufficient to count as your four cups of veggies.) The serving quantities seem reasonable and overall, if maybe not a little over simplified it actually seems like a responsible modern recommendation on nutrition.
I wonder what skewed the nutrition pyramid of my youth so much? I wonder if it made sense when it was created, that is that more grain products were created equal then, if it was invented before Wonder Bread started mass stripping nutrition from its food, replacing it all with indegestible foam (which seems unlikely considering the tenure of wonder bread). Or I wonder if it was the result of buereacratic indifference. Either way it seems like growing awareness of the consumer has had an impact on what bars the USDA is allowed to hold up to measure a 'healthy' diet.