Remembering the food pyramid.

Do you remember the food pyramid?

I have no idea if the food pyramid is still taught in school, but it was taught in my school. Every classroom in my formative years had a poster, not dissimilar to the image below, pasted firmly to the wall.

School officials, and presumably their superiors, could have had only one goal in mind: indoctrination. Simply put, no other explanation makes sense for children too young to pack their own lunches or make their own dinners. Nor is there any reason to believe that commonly accepted advertising principles would apply, like advertising to children to get them to pressure their parents into buying a certain toy. The fact is that the food pyramid was not a power ranger action-figure; it was plain, boring even. But there the posters were — on my classroom wall.

No, the poster was clearly there as part of a process to plant an idea into my future head, bypassing my parents duty to educate me on nutrition around the dinner table, and instead creating a lifelong idea of what is considered nutritious: an inception by the well-meaning government. The goal was to get them young. Indoctrinate enough children early, and society will reap the benefits of long-term health for years to come based on the best advice from the wise, science-driven public health officials who know exactly how to optimize our nutritional choices.

Who wouldn’t want to optimize public health policy to ensure that we are living our best, most nutritious life? The government, after all, knew best.

The food pyramid was simple, even for a child. A one-size fits all public health guide meant to fight the pandemic of the mid-1990’s: obesity. Carbohydrates were a staple food that made up most of the diet with a little bit of lean-meat protein sprinkled in. Fats were to be avoided.

The campaign was brilliant in its conception. Instead of the hammer public health policy has used in the last two years, the food pyramid had a sense of subtlety that even concerned parents would not question. But we can easily imagine a scenario in our current panopticon where officials used a heavy-handed approach to mandating dietary choices. Does enforcement through strict regulation of grocery store purchases really seem that far fetched in the context of 2022? A message at the end of your receipt that says “Avoid using the healthcare system by eating healthy with our scientifically proven safe and effective dietary guide. We are all in this together”.

Teachers watching children eat their lunch — suspending children that do not eat their grains in the right proportion. Is this so different from where we are as a society today? Whether people want to believe it or not, there would have been strong proponents of using the food pyramid as a stick rather than a guide. There always are with any public health issue that people are passionate about. As Marion Nestle, writing in 1993 noted, “[w]hat is at stake here is no less than the health of the public, an issue of vital importance at any time but of particular concern during this era of health care cost containment”.

Of course, there were varying perspectives on nutrition prior to the adoption of the food pyramid, and many of those perspectives were well established, common-sense practices. Those practices managed to survive and thrive during the adoption of the food pyramid. The public health officials did not embark on a totalitarian effort to clamp-down on differing nutritional advice, nor cancel those that gave it.

People did cut down on their fat intake as a proportion of their daily caloric intake after the adoption of the food pyramid, but only because their intake of carbohydrates increased. Consumers were eating more fat and more calories. While food pyramid recommendations probably cannot be blamed in isolation for these changed dietary patterns, one does have to wonder whether the push for a higher carbohydrate diet has some causal patterns here or if these changes were coming from other sources (ie., the arrival of the strangely anti-inflationary growth in serving sizes at most restaurants, the continued increase in food processing, or the growing adoption of genetically-modified foods). In any case, the science began to revert back to the widely held belief of the late 19th and early 20th century that fat should make up about 30% of one’s diet, which is about as large of an admonishment of the food pyramid as there could be.

However, I do not want to get into the intricacies of nutrition or diet. I certainly do not want to try to inform anyone’s opinion about the right food schema. I have neither the knowledge nor will to do so, and enough people on the internet try to do that. Rather, my issue with the food pyramid is the ridiculousness of a one-size fits all model. Most of us, as we move through life, learn what works best for us. For example, when I eat a keto diet, I feel better, have more energy, carry less fat, and rarely get sick. The architects of the food pyramid would probably call me anti-science for even saying so, but it works for me and leads to my best outcomes.

However, what works for me, may not work for you. The best way to optimize public health is not to give people a guide on what kinds of food to eat or even in what proportions. Optimizing diet is a matter of providing people with the general knowledge needed to make the right choices or else they may get the wrong idea. This can be done with little influence or intervention. Strictly regulating food through nutrition labels (remove that silly “recommended daily intake” column) is probably at the very limit of where government becomes useful. When the government is asked to take a stance on public health, it leads to a generalized, one-size fits all model that ignores individual circumstances and needs often based on flawed methodologies. Provide those stances with mandates and other broad-use totalitarian tools and the damage to long-term public health can be immense.