Maintenance Phase - The Food Pyramid

00:00:00.000 do you know what i realized i was listening back to the daily harvest episode i realized i think

00:00:20.000 you and i are becoming like the us weekly of like food regulation agencies and like public health

00:00:27.620 than nutrition academia do you know what i mean like yeah it really feels like we're getting

00:00:31.980 a little bit like you know what i heard oh yeah it's uh federal regulators they're just like us

00:00:37.520 yes uh okay do you want to tag us in uh welcome to maintenance phase the podcast that recommends

00:00:48.940 31 servings of grains but only three servings of oils and sugars and fats or something i'm

00:00:56.460 Aubrey Gordon. I'm Michael Hobbs. We have we have so much news before we start the show.

00:01:02.380 We've never had this much news before. I'm gonna start us off and then you tell me what I have

00:01:06.880 missed. Okay. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash

00:01:11.600 maintenance phase. You can also buy t shirts, mugs, tote bags, whatever you like at T public.

00:01:16.620 Both of those are linked for you in the show notes, along with a link to pre order my new book,

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00:01:46.280 it's the same so if you're already supporting us on patreon we don't want you to spend more money

00:01:50.500 supporting us for the same bonus episodes don't do that and further news further news uh i have

00:01:57.740 a new podcast yay called if books could kill where we're talking about the worst ideas of

00:02:05.940 the last 50 years and the airport books that helped spread them and it is live now wherever

00:02:14.000 you get your podcasts and our second episode is about outliers that will either be up by the time

00:02:20.180 you hear this or will about to be up by the time you hear this you know i have a real soft spot in

00:02:25.680 my heart for it's all fake yeah it's all fake is my kink you should host some sort of podcast along 0.78

00:02:31.520 those lines oh interesting maybe with a miniature homosexual that you know maybe i'm just i'm just 0.89

00:02:35.580 tossing out ideas and today we are talking about the food pyramid we are talking about the food 0.66

00:02:44.100 pyramid. Michael, what is your personal relationship to the food pyramid?

00:02:50.340 Well, I feel like the food pyramid is this interesting artifact where it's sort of like

00:02:54.360 the official government recommendation on food, which means that people are kind of vaguely aware

00:03:00.800 of it, but also it seems to exert like no influence. Yeah. The government does not have

00:03:06.600 the kind of propaganda apparatus that like the Gatorade and McDonald's people have. Yeah. I'm

00:03:12.820 not totally clear on like what it actually says. I know there's been various controversies around

00:03:19.580 it. I also know that when we grew up, it was the four food groups, right? And then it was the food

00:03:27.460 pyramid. And now it's my plate. So they keep tweaking this. So yes, sort of. The food pyramid

00:03:35.000 was an educational tool developed with the rollout of a publication called Dietary Guidelines for

00:03:42.420 Americans, which comes out about every five years. It's regularly updated. It's a very lengthy

00:03:49.260 government report. I read one that was 168 pages and it's designed to lay out the USDA's nutritional

00:03:58.480 best practices. The food pyramid and my plate are illustrations of those best practices,

00:04:05.600 but the document is way more complex than that because that document is the foundation for all

00:04:13.420 government nutrition programs. Right. So when I say that it exerts very little influence on

00:04:19.800 Americans, what that really means is that like very few Americans eat individually according

00:04:24.340 to the food pyramid, but also in some ways we're all eating according to the food pyramid. I assume

00:04:29.340 this affects like school lunches, veterans meal programs, senior meal programs, prisons,

00:04:34.240 like all the other places where the government is involved snap. Yep. Yeah. So the USDA is human

00:04:40.440 nutrition information service, H N I S, uh, which we'll talk about a fair amount in this episode.

00:04:47.100 Wanted to develop something that was peer reviewed, scientifically sound and like easy

00:04:54.520 for people to use something that people could actually pick up and use and would know what to

00:04:58.220 do with it. You're at the grocery store, you're trying to figure out what to buy and they want

00:05:02.120 to give you some guidance on like think about these things more than these things right it's

00:05:06.400 hot or not for macronutrients or swiping left or right so there are lots and lots of food pyramids

00:05:14.060 sweden has one singapore has one india has one the first person to come up with the idea of

00:05:21.500 creating a food pyramid as a nutrition education was a massively influential figure in food and

00:05:28.860 nutrition in sweden her name is anna brit ang satir oh look at you chirping look at your

00:05:35.240 pronunciation look at me making my swedish friend listen to me say it 50 times

00:05:40.420 so anna brit ang satir comes up with her food pyramid in the 70s in sweden her food pyramid 0.96

00:05:54.040 has just three layers she just goes think the most about these things a little bit less about 0.79

00:05:59.180 these things and a little bit less about these things at the top do we have a sense why she

00:06:03.600 called it a food pyramid and not a food triangle none of these are pyramids and it's driven me nuts

00:06:10.180 for like 25 years uh i didn't find anything about it as you can imagine most of the uh sort of stuff

00:06:17.920 on her is written in swedish which i do not read okay yeah that's our original food pyramid the

00:06:23.760 one that we're going to talk about today is the 1991 to 1992 sort of food pyramid. We'll talk

00:06:28.900 about why there are two years in there. I'm going to send you a picture. Oh, yes. God,

00:06:35.780 the flashbacks. Is it all coming back? Yeah. First of all, they have like a little gray

00:06:41.480 shadow on it to make it look 3D, but it's a fucking triangle. You're so mad about the shape. 0.99

00:06:47.680 Just so we're all clear, it's the food triangle.

00:06:51.280 So mad.

00:06:52.660 At the top, it says fats, oils, and sweets, use sparingly.

00:06:57.620 That's layer one.

00:06:59.240 Layer two is milk, yogurt, and cheese, two to three servings.

00:07:04.060 Meat, poultry, fish, dried beans, eggs, and nuts, two to three servings.

00:07:08.380 The third layer is vegetables, three to five servings.

00:07:13.080 Fruit, two to four servings.

00:07:14.380 servings and then the bottom layer the widest is bread cereal rice and pasta six to eleven

00:07:21.840 servings so we should be eating very little like fat and sweet stuff and we should be eating a lot

00:07:27.980 of carb ricey stuff uh what do you think about this food pyramid mike like as we've talked about

00:07:34.080 so many times no one knows what they're eating or can recall it and no one knows what a serving

00:07:38.760 of any food is yeah yeah so like if you add up all of these things we're talking about like i don't

00:07:44.740 know 20 to 25 servings of food a day which like if you go by the absurd serving sizes that they

00:07:53.080 have a nutrition labels where it's like a half a cup of fucking blueberries or whatever is a serving

00:07:57.160 then like sure i don't know that's probably reasonable advice but like 25 servings of food 0.83

00:08:02.260 a day seems like a lot of food just on a sort of colloquial level yeah i will say people who have

00:08:08.160 been through the meat grinder of diets are absolutely envisioning what i am envisioning

00:08:13.740 right now which is a serving of meat is the size of a deck of cards or the palm of your hand yeah

00:08:19.180 yeah yeah yeah yeah the thing that really jumps out to me about this is that a for of course from

00:08:26.020 a graphic design standpoint it screams early 90s yeah but b the low fatness is what jumped out to

00:08:35.460 me yeah it's looking at this it feels so distinctly 1990s yeah because beans and nuts are up toward

00:08:45.620 the top of the food pyramid which is very different to how we think about them now right and that's

00:08:51.260 just because like high in calories the end also if you look visually right the it goes from sort

00:08:57.580 of six servings at the bottom to three servings to two servings which then implies that the things

00:09:03.000 at the top are like one serving a day yes but if it's fat oils and sweets there's like you're

00:09:08.760 really supposed to be using very little fat and oil i guess with when you're cooking or like

00:09:13.460 butter on bread it's goofy and like putting cooking oil in the same category as like desserts

00:09:19.640 is weird because cooking oil you're gonna use in multiple meals a day right the decision points

00:09:26.520 here feel a little murky as well right yeah so today we're going to talk about how we got the

00:09:33.420 1991 to 92 food pyramid which was at the time one of the most controversial sort of public health 0.96

00:09:41.500 documents i would say because of the triangles because of the track because it's not a fucking

00:09:45.960 pyramid riddle me this batman that would be justice so we're gonna do a little we're gonna 0.77

00:09:55.200 to get in the way back machine and we're going to talk about how we got nutrition guidelines

00:09:59.620 broadly in the u.s sort of what what was the lead up to this 91 controversy okay right the first

00:10:06.240 usda nutrition guidelines came out in 1894 oh okay they were written by someone we have talked

00:10:13.920 about before on the show whose name is wilbur olin atwater oh this was the fire guy right this

00:10:20.480 was the burn up your food and find how many calories are in it guy yeah atwater was the

00:10:24.480 usda's first chief of nutrition investigations he's the first guy in the department of agriculture

00:10:31.020 to start investigating nutrition he writes his guidelines those come out in 1894 as a farmer's

00:10:40.400 bulletin and he mostly focuses on basic food groups the main problem at this point in u.s

00:10:46.780 nutrition is that people are not eating a wide enough variety of foods oh food wasn't being

00:10:52.460 shipped in the same way that it's being shipped now that was sort of a rich people thing right

00:10:56.860 you kind of were eating what was growing around you and what was made around you and your local

00:11:02.460 you know climate may only accommodate some kinds of food so they were trying to get people to think

00:11:08.660 more broadly about what they were eating right so he gives his guidance and he talks about the

00:11:13.580 importance of fat and protein and carbohydrates and like you got to get all these things in

00:11:19.020 he also talks about mineral matter in your body is he about to invent the biocharger

00:11:25.680 no no his argument was that the way that you got minerals into your body was by eating 0.81

00:11:33.920 charred foods oh he's like a mylar guy he's like a burn the shit out of your vegetables and then

00:11:41.060 eat them that's your mineral matter your bones need it i think he just liked brussels sprouts 0.96

00:11:45.580 better that way. And he came up with a whole worldview. So Atwater releases his bulletin

00:11:50.700 and that's kind of the end of that. It's not until 1941 that broad consumer guidance

00:11:59.020 starts to become more of a thing. In 1941, the U.S. releases its first set of recommended

00:12:06.820 dietary allowances. So RDAs, which are the things when you like look on a nutrition facts panel in

00:12:13.200 the u.s oh right you'll see raw numbers and then you'll see percentages of like here's how much

00:12:18.300 you're supposed to get of that thing right with the asterisk yeah little asterisk rationing is

00:12:23.440 also happening during this time oh right so during world war ii there is a national wartime nutrition

00:12:30.540 guide okay and afterwards they just go you know what actually we're just going to keep all the

00:12:34.800 nutrition guidance in there and just say this is how you eat now okay it included seven food groups

00:12:40.760 called the basic seven it was generally regarded as being too complex to use people were like

00:12:48.400 there's too many food groups this is too many servings like they were going from zero to a lot

00:12:54.580 of very specific guidance in this document right right in the mid 50s that gets shifted to a guide

00:13:02.440 called food for fitness that focuses on four food groups so fruits and vegetables become one food

00:13:09.720 group together, right? Like stuff like that. Okay. It's not really until 1977 that the US

00:13:18.760 government approach to nutrition shifts from trying to get people to eat more to trying to

00:13:26.120 get people to eat less, right? This is when that sort of narrative shift happens. And when the

00:13:32.280 conversation gets less precise, honestly, right? Like some of it is eat less fats and sugars. And

00:13:39.220 some of it is just like eat less period right they call it internally they refer to it as the

00:13:43.640 eat less pyramid when they're developing the food pyramid oh wow yeah okay wild as hell

00:13:48.580 so that brings us to the real ramp up to what i know is a favorite of uh of mine and of yours

00:13:58.520 a big interagency fight

00:14:01.260 getting jurisdictional on them so in 1977 the u.s sort of dietary goals that big guideline sort of

00:14:12.500 overarching document that we talked about earlier starts getting some pressure to address the rising

00:14:18.980 costs of health care okay through individual nutrition guidance okay so that seems real weird

00:14:27.760 to me right if your concern is with the cost of health care the first place to start would be like

00:14:33.060 the health care system fucking correct necessarily we need to tell people what to eat and the like

00:14:38.580 you know 100 or fewer decision makers in that at the top of that health care system right not 0.90

00:14:45.060 millions of individuals whose attention you're going to have to scrap and fight to get right

00:14:49.940 so congress decides that nutrition research needs to have like a permanent and lasting home

00:14:56.320 in the U.S. government, which it didn't really at the time. There are two agencies in contention.

00:15:01.840 One is the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the USDA, and the other is the Department of Health,

00:15:09.820 Education, and Welfare, which is now HHS.

00:15:13.340 Hugh? It was called a Hugh?

00:15:14.880 D-H-E-W.

00:15:16.780 Oh, D-H-E-W. 1.00

00:15:18.940 D-H-E-W. 1.00

00:15:20.160 D-H-E-W.

00:15:20.800 Okay.

00:15:21.340 It just makes you sound like the person who pronounces the W in sword.

00:15:25.280 or the h in white you know so just as like some grounding hhs's mission today is quote

00:15:35.440 to enhance the health and well-being of all americans by providing for effective health

00:15:39.760 and human services and by fostering sound sustained advances in the sciences underlying

00:15:44.560 medicine public health and social services okay that feels very nutrition compatible to me oh i

00:15:50.300 see where you're going because the usda exists to like promote agriculture correct yes it's

00:15:57.560 overwhelmingly focused on maintaining relationships with and sort of meeting the needs of the

00:16:03.780 agriculture industry man i am so glad i cut this out of the food poisoning episode did you have

00:16:09.380 this in there yeah because this this comes up a lot in the food poisoning literature that the usda

00:16:13.300 has a dual mandate that it needs to promote american agricultural products i.e we should

00:16:19.700 all be eating as much as possible at all times right because that's good for the farmers because

00:16:23.780 we're buying milk and buying cheese and spending money and also it's supposed to be regulating

00:16:28.720 the same farms and like making sure that they're safe and giving out information to americans to

00:16:34.440 eat less. So in 1977, Congress passes the farm bill. And in that farm bill, they wrap up this

00:16:43.780 question of like, where is nutrition education going to live? And they pick the USDA. The worst

00:16:48.900 possible place. It just seems weird. No, it seems like a weird, bad choice. So not the people that

00:16:54.260 do health, the people who do farm stuff. Totally. So Marion Nestle has a little passage in an essay

00:17:00.260 that she wrote about this, where she sort of explains a little bit of like, what was the

00:17:05.280 landscape at the time around this decision? It says, members of the select committee representing

00:17:10.980 states with large meat, dairy and egg producer constituencies demanded changes in the dietary

00:17:16.940 goals. The committee revised the report and published a second edition in which among other

00:17:22.820 changes, the original statement, decreased consumption of meat and increased consumption

00:17:27.460 of poultry and fish was altered to read decrease consumption of animal fat and choose meats,

00:17:33.880 poultry and fish, which will reduce saturated fat intake. You can hear the like, industry

00:17:40.700 influence, right? Rather than saying stop eating meat and eat more poultry and fish. They said,

00:17:47.160 choose your meats wisely and make sure that it will help your saturated fat intake, which most 0.94

00:17:51.780 Americans at this point don't have any idea what the fuck that means. Yeah, this this sentence 0.67

00:17:55.380 doesn't even make sense. Decrease consumption of animal fat and choose meats, poultry and fish,

00:18:00.980 which will reduce saturated fat intake. How can eating something reduce like it doesn't bonkers.

00:18:07.180 It's just weird to not say choose foods low in saturated fats. It's bizarre. And I think this

00:18:12.980 is another layer in the science communications is hard element of this story, which is it's way the

00:18:19.260 fuck harder when you're trying to serve so many different people's interests. So that's the

00:18:25.920 like sort of landscape around this decision. Within a few short years, the USDA's Human

00:18:33.640 Nutrition Information Service, that's H-N-I-S, H-N-I-S, H-N-I-S, starts in on making their

00:18:41.540 dietary guide for the public. This is what will become the 1991 food pyramid. They are starting

00:18:47.100 it in 1980 if you want to get a sense of how fucking long oh my god michael we are on page 0.77

00:18:56.400 six of 19 pages of notes for this the whole time was like should they be circles or triangles 0.76

00:19:02.760 11 years back and forth okay so it's very fucking funny because the first thing they come up with

00:19:08.800 is called the food wheel okay they did temporarily choose circles and ultimately the biggest battle

00:19:14.820 here is totally going to be a battle between a three-dimensional circle and a three-dimensional

00:19:19.600 triangle the food sphere for americans the food orb so they started on making this in uh the early

00:19:28.260 80s they come up with this food wheel graphic but people just they kept testing it out and people

00:19:32.800 were like i don't understand wait can you can you send it to me i love i love terrible graphic

00:19:38.260 design bad graphics hang on let me see if i have it handy boop boop boop boop oh my god this looks

00:19:44.360 so good oh the drop shadows totally there's forced perspective food wheel it looks like

00:19:52.680 the he-man logo like that's what it looks like is like the opening of like an 80s saturday morning

00:19:59.180 cartoon the palette whips yeah it's the uh it's the superman lettering is what they have food

00:20:06.600 more or less they've got that kind of effect on it and basically it's a pie chart but they've put

00:20:12.780 forks and knives next to it to be like you know how you always arrange your food into pie chart

00:20:17.540 wedges yeah into little triangles on your plate my grains and eggs then they've done a bunch of

00:20:23.540 weird like whooshy kind of graphic effects out of each one the the the attempt at 3d boy is by far

00:20:32.040 the worst thing about this they're they're trying to make them like pop out of the wheel but it just

00:20:37.720 makes them look smudged i wonder if we would like it more if we had on those like red and green

00:20:42.140 3d glasses red and blue it really looks like we should be like yeah at a drive-in wearing those

00:20:48.960 like red and blue cardboard glasses the only difference i can see like in the content between

00:20:55.860 this and the food pyramid is that this has alcohol on it it does have alcohol in the use sparingly

00:21:01.040 wedge the guidance is pretty similar it's not super duper different right but those pie charts

00:21:07.960 have like dashed lines in them to divide them up into like subcategories right yeah so like

00:21:16.780 you have six to eleven servings of grains but they have a dashed line suggesting that half

00:21:23.380 of those should be whole grains and half of them should be enriched grains yeah right they've got

00:21:29.600 fruits that are divided up into different subcategories of fruit right right that just

00:21:35.320 makes it visually cluttered and harder to imagine taking with you to the grocery store i mean this

00:21:42.700 is kind of the central dilemma about science communications right is how much information

00:21:47.680 do you want to include because obviously these things are like fairly important distinctions

00:21:52.080 absolutely but the more of these distinctions you add the more just visual soup you're going

00:21:56.900 to end up with totally so they try out the food wheel the food wheel is kind of a disaster people

00:22:02.440 are just like, what are you handing me? What is this? What am I supposed to do with it?

00:22:06.420 So this actually went out. This wasn't like behind the scenes. This actually was official

00:22:09.700 advice from the USDA. Totally. In 1984, they used it for like a year or two. And then people were

00:22:14.400 like, nope, just kidding. So in 1988, they decide to hire a PR firm to come up with and test

00:22:22.760 different graphics, right? That PR firm starts testing graphics and they land on the pyramid.

00:22:27.940 And that same year, Congress sort of reconsiders their division of labor between USDA and HHS.

00:22:37.460 Ultimately, Congress reaffirms that the USDA should be the lead agency.

00:22:42.200 They're like, we thought about it.

00:22:44.200 We're fine.

00:22:44.920 We were right the first time.

00:22:48.140 On reflection.

00:22:49.360 So they say, like, the USDA is still the lead agency, but that HHS and the USDA need to collaborate enough to, like, speak with one voice.

00:22:59.680 Oh, man.

00:23:00.120 As a former NGO person.

00:23:02.380 It's a tall order to speak with one voice.

00:23:05.280 We're going to have everyone be in charge.

00:23:07.740 No.

00:23:08.680 Get out the RC chart.

00:23:10.920 Find out who's accountable, responsible, consulted, informed.

00:23:13.840 the number of projects i've worked on where it's like not clear who's in charge and it's like

00:23:17.860 one agency is doing it but like has to consult with the other agency and it's like what the 0.89

00:23:22.120 fuck does that mean oh boy oh boy i i can see the the jurisdictional disaster coming it's bad 0.91

00:23:28.780 so now we're fast forwarding to 1991 the huniz staff has been working on the food pyramid 1.00

00:23:35.880 uh for three years now and they have vetted the shit out of it okay according to food politics

00:23:45.440 marion nestle's book food politics that food pyramid was reviewed by 36 nutrition experts

00:23:52.620 outside of the agency it was presented at 20 conferences they were interviewed by 20 different

00:24:00.000 media outlets about it they met with over 30 textbook publishers to be like new guidance is

00:24:07.260 coming out okay they sent their full manuscript and the graphic design and everything through the

00:24:14.080 usda's whole intensive clearance process and they got approval at every level okay at this point

00:24:21.860 again they've been working on this project for 11 years in february of 1991 they finally get

00:24:31.580 their final approval and they send their pages to the printer okay pages go to the printer in

00:24:36.620 february they'll be back by the end of april okay in march there's a new usda secretary on board it

00:24:42.900 oh my god see i know i know you well enough to know that you're giving me these little details

00:24:48.660 That's going to lead up to some huge problem.

00:24:51.800 We haven't had episodes when you've been like, hey, Aubrey, what month did that go to the printer?

00:24:56.320 Yeah, tell me more about the sending it off to the printer's process.

00:24:59.940 So in March, Ed Madigan becomes the new secretary of agriculture in March of 1991.

00:25:07.360 He had been a Republican member of Congress since 1972.

00:25:11.800 So he knows his way around Congress, and he's also been a fierce advocate for farmers, particularly dairy farmers.

00:25:23.740 Foreshadowing.

00:25:24.140 This is when things start to happen really quickly. On Wednesday, April 10th. This is how quickly the New York Times releases a story saying that a health advocacy group called the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine sent a letter to the USDA saying, hey, by the way, what if you made your whole nutrition guidance vegetarian?

00:25:54.140 What? Yeah, they were like, we know that animal fats are like not great for people. What have you just made it all? We think the responsible thing is to make it vegetarian. Okay, the meat lobby loses its collective fucking shit. Okay, the guy who is lobbying now for the pork lobby is a previous USDA secretary himself. Okay, he calls even the suggestion that there would be vegetarian nutrition guidance, quote, the height of irresponsibility.

00:26:23.380 This whole fucking thing seems like a Veep episode to me where it's like this group issues a letter, but like the group is not even that important. We're not talking about JAMA or something. We're talking about like a random group. And it's like everyone could have just ignored this letter. 0.95

00:26:40.020 Yeah. The weirdest thing about this whole fucking firestorm is that it starts because 0.99

00:26:46.280 a group of doctors sent a letter to the USDA being like, have you thought about vegetarianism? 0.99

00:26:53.340 Yeah.

00:26:54.100 So this becomes a very big news story. Marion Nestle describes this as front page news for

00:27:01.540 the next year.

00:27:02.860 What?

00:27:03.540 One year. Three days later, Malcolm Gladwell writes a follow up story when he

00:27:10.000 was a fucking reporter for the washington post throw malcolm gladwell into this jesus christ 0.97

00:27:16.660 spin the wheel cameo sure he quotes a nutrition professor from columbia and he quotes the 0.99

00:27:27.040 researcher behind the framingham heart study both of whom said like a vegetarian thing sounds great

00:27:34.080 that sounds like a good idea and it seems in line with what we know about nutrition

00:27:36.960 eat fewer animal products seems good what at this point they've ordered the printing of the food

00:27:42.660 pyramid but it hasn't been released yet the gladwell piece includes discussion of the food

00:27:48.320 pyramid and what's in the food pyramid so basically he like breaks news in that washington post story

00:27:54.700 by actually revealing like the contents of the food pyramid which people did not know before

00:27:58.660 yeah that story came out the weekend that the cattlemen's association was having its annual

00:28:05.720 meeting in D.C. Nice. On Monday, the cattlemen have their scheduled meeting with the Secretary

00:28:14.580 of Agriculture, Ed Madigan, who's brand new on the job. And this is how Marion Nestle describes

00:28:22.620 that meeting. Boop. Boop. According to one account, the Secretary had also learned of the

00:28:28.740 pyramid for the first time in Saturday's paper. I bet a lot of you were surprised, he said to the

00:28:34.380 ranchers when he walked into their April 15th meeting. I'm the secretary of agriculture and I

00:28:38.780 was surprised too. The cattlemen complained that the pyramid would cause people to eat less meat

00:28:43.860 and that meat should not be displayed so close to fat and sugars. They joined the National Milk

00:28:50.500 Producers Federation in demanding that the USDA withdraw the pyramid. Ah, so that's what they're

00:28:56.520 mad about. It makes them look bad. And over the next two weeks, one trade association after the

00:29:03.760 next one lobbyist after the next joins in these increasingly forceful protests right this does

00:29:11.280 remind me of like so many like ngo processes i've gone through where you go through months and months

00:29:16.440 of sending things around and getting comments and changing it and you finally come up with this like

00:29:20.300 totally anodyne thing and then somebody's boss finds out about it and is like well we can't have

00:29:25.620 this and then you have this huge freak out when you have like two days to produce the document or

00:29:30.620 like the boss will be like i've got a way better idea for how to solve this problem it's not a

00:29:35.320 document it's a new organization let's found it yeah yeah and also like a thing that we kind of

00:29:40.960 fucking skated past is the usda secretary telling the cattlemen in their meeting oh it's the first

00:29:47.660 time i'm seeing it it's a weird lie to be like i've never even seen this so the next piece that 0.98

00:29:54.460 malcolm fucking gladwell writes is a little less than two weeks later it's saturday april 27th

00:30:01.740 and the headline of that piece is u.s drops new food chart oh secretary ed madigan pulls the food 0.89

00:30:10.340 pyramid from the printer and says oh there's a bunch of testing we didn't do to make sure that

00:30:15.920 it's effective we have to test it on children oh my god so he's not even admitting that like yeah

00:30:21.800 we're getting yelled at so we're changing what we're doing nope and people are like we didn't

00:30:27.080 test it on children because children were never the audience yeah because children are not like

00:30:31.020 creating their own food and like shopping for themselves so it doesn't even make any sense

00:30:34.440 it's like very clearly an excuse and like all of the media at the time is just like usda caves to

00:30:42.320 industry pressure yeah after this announcement that he has pulled the food pyramid all hell

00:30:49.380 breaks loose the usda gets hundreds of protest letters from the american cancer society the

00:30:58.260 american dietetic association the society for nutrition education they get it from the fruit

00:31:04.920 and vegetable lobby who also have a lobby and now they're pissed off right and ultimately this sort

00:31:11.400 of peaks when the American Medical Association passed a resolution demanding that the president

00:31:21.080 make an executive move to rehouse nutrition education from the USDA to HHS.

00:31:28.900 Oh, my God. You know what this is?

00:31:30.540 What is it?

00:31:31.300 This is like a cancel culture story where it's like somebody does something and then

00:31:36.940 a bunch of like right wingers or whatever are yelling at them on the internet and they're like

00:31:41.540 we're gonna change this thing or like we're we're not gonna release this movie or whatever

00:31:45.100 and then a bunch of left wingers start yelling at them for caving into the pressure and so in doing

00:31:49.820 so you end up pissing everybody off they totally did so this all gets covered in the new york times

00:31:55.300 they run a story called are cattlemen now guarding the hen house oh that's you can do better another

00:32:01.480 one is called catering to cows or consumers. That's okay. It's fine. They should have done

00:32:07.060 something like under pressure. The new food pyramid is removed. Michael, that would actually

00:32:13.380 be pretty good. You're getting like dad joke fired this time. Unmatched. I turned 49 months ago.

00:32:22.100 It's nothing but dad jokes from here. So the media story and the firestorm here isn't about

00:32:28.620 the food pyramid is wrong right it is all about holy shit this lobby seems to wield so much 0.85

00:32:36.900 influence if you can derail an 11 year project right that's gnarly so we're now moving into may 0.73

00:32:43.280 of 1991 the secretary gives a statement to time magazine saying everyone says i did this because

00:32:50.280 the cattle and dairy industries that's not true actually 60 percent of our budget as an agency

00:32:57.820 is devoted to nutritional programs, but no beneficiary of any of these programs was

00:33:03.620 included in the focus groups that chose the pyramid symbol. He's like, we got to get those

00:33:08.500 people from our nutrition programs into these focus groups. He is clearly casting around for

00:33:14.480 excuses and the kids one didn't work. So now the secretary have said, we have to do all this

00:33:20.660 research. And now the USDA is on the hook to do all this fucking research that the secretary just 0.99

00:33:26.880 made up now they've dialed themselves into this like absurd like potemkin process we are fully 0.98

00:33:33.620 in like keystone cops territory just like comic slapstick incompetence weirdness right yeah so

00:33:42.640 they do several focus groups and they come up with muddy results basically they found that a few

00:33:50.260 different graphics did about the same level of job i feel so bad for the people that had to do this

00:33:55.940 it's such garbage it's like fake process for like a little bit of pr so then michael they do their

00:34:04.080 research the research comes back with like not great results so the usda is like do it again 0.98

00:34:09.760 do more research oh my god so they fully like do a second round of research where they straight up

00:34:18.300 put up the food pyramid up against the preferred graphic from the cattle and dairy lobbies which

00:34:26.480 is a bowl okay and the bowl is divided into little segments and like it's sort of vertical strips of

00:34:32.640 a bowl that goes this much of it should be meat and this much of it should be dairy and this much

00:34:36.160 of it should be vegetables and blah it's the same information but their argument is essentially like

00:34:42.020 the pyramid seems hierarchical and i'm like yes exactly well that's the whole point usually more

00:34:46.440 of some stuff than other stuff that's what that's the message they're trying to convey so then they

00:34:51.320 sort of like come up with basically the same results as before which is like some people

00:34:55.760 like the pyramid and some people like the bowl this is all happening through the summer and fall

00:35:00.520 of 1991 and in april 1992 here is what happened this is a quote from a book called death by food

00:35:10.560 pyramid. Nice. Yeah. It says, after sopping up $855,000 in tax dollars, hosting 29 focus groups

00:35:18.880 in five cities, testing 415 potential designs, and clogging media outlets with ongoing gossip

00:35:27.020 about the food guide's progress, the USDA confirmed what it had concluded the year prior.

00:35:32.520 The pyramid was the most effective symbol for teaching Americans what they should be eating. 0.98

00:35:37.700 it's a fucking veep episode this is ridiculous years of back and forth all this damage control 0.97

00:35:45.220 and it sounds like they're just going with like the original design yeah they sure are there are 0.98

00:35:50.320 some changes that have been made one more silly change that happened around this before we get

00:35:55.000 into the serious changes around this time they stopped calling it what they had been calling it

00:36:01.500 all along, which was the Eating Right Pyramid. Kraft said it was copyright infringement since

00:36:08.020 they had a line of prepared meals at the time called Eating Right. And then Kraft's competitors

00:36:13.000 also complained and they were like, that's like free advertising for Kraft. So like everyone was

00:36:18.320 mad about that name. Well, also Food Pyramid is a better name. So fair enough. So what we're going

00:36:24.200 to talk about now is a set of sort of revisions. The source on this one is someone named Louise

00:36:33.580 Light. She is the former USDA director of nutrition education research. And she has written a book

00:36:41.980 and in it, she talks about sort of like, here's what happened to the food pyramid. What she does

00:36:47.420 not say is whether this happened between 1991 and 92 when the food pyramid was pulled or whether

00:36:55.480 this happened earlier in the process so we don't know when this happened right but this is part of

00:37:01.620 the road to the final food pyramid right so louise light has this quote this is a passage from a piece

00:37:10.120 that she wrote she says when our version of the food guide came back to us revised we were shocked

00:37:15.640 to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. The Ag Secretary's office

00:37:20.220 altered wording to emphasize processed foods over fresh and whole foods, to downplay lean meats and

00:37:25.500 low-fat dairy choices because the meat and milk lobbies believed it would hurt sales of full-fat

00:37:30.220 products. It also hugely increased the servings of wheat and other grains to make the wheat growers

00:37:35.800 happy. The meat lobby got the final word on the color of the saturated fat cholesterol guideline

00:37:41.180 which was changed from red to purple because meat producers were worried that using red to

00:37:46.040 signify bad fat would be linked to red meat in consumers' minds. Man, this is some like liberal

00:37:52.680 arts dialectic theory. Somebody went to Oberlin. This reminds me of some of the like extremely

00:37:59.820 try-hard like semantic analyses. We haven't talked about this, I don't think, but you know that like

00:38:05.320 one of my major fields of study in college was semiotics. This is straight up garbage semiotics

00:38:14.680 territory. Great shit. Love it. She also walks through some other changes that she said were 1.00

00:38:20.980 made in the draft that they turned in. It recommended five to nine servings of fruits

00:38:26.540 and vegetables. Oh, and that's down to like two or three or something in the final one.

00:38:30.680 Correct. It ended up being changed back to five to seven a couple years later because they got so much pressure from the National Cancer Institute. Their first draft that they turned in said three to four daily servings of whole grains. And they actually had things made with refined grains like white flour, cereal, any of that kind of stuff in the use sparingly section at the top of the pyramid.

00:38:57.860 Oh yeah. That was never going to fly. At the time going into sort of designing the food pyramid,

00:39:04.900 there was one main priority, which reflected a cultural priority at the time, which was low

00:39:10.320 fat diets, right? Like that's the big thing. It's also been mentioned in a surgeon general's report

00:39:16.160 at this point. It is also important to remind you at this point that the food pyramid is an

00:39:21.560 illustration of existing recommendations. Right. It's not where you are litigating all of this

00:39:28.280 stuff for the first time. Right. They're making a food pyramid that they started designing around

00:39:32.400 the 1977 dietary guidelines. Right. Right. That's how far gone we are. Those guidelines

00:39:40.960 were pretty straightforward. Right. They said things like eat a variety of foods. They say

00:39:46.740 maintain an ideal weight, which I don't love, but it was also very in keeping with the time.

00:39:52.220 Yeah. They say eat foods with starch and fiber. And they say avoid too much sugar, sodium,

00:39:59.280 fat, saturated fat and cholesterol. That language at some point got shifted from

00:40:06.040 eat less of these things to avoid too much of these things. Of course. So with all of those

00:40:13.760 adjustments with all of sort of flying in the face of its own committee right and their sort

00:40:17.880 of original recommendations the food pyramid is approved and americans never ate unhealthy food

00:40:23.920 again theme music thank you aubrey great episode everything's been great so i am just pulling up

00:40:34.200 a picture for you of what came next in food pyramid world oh is this the terrible wizard

00:40:40.180 devas one here we go yes oh my god this is such it's so aggressively bad okay so it is the same

00:40:50.220 basic structure as the previous one where it's like a triangle with foods but instead of the

00:40:55.780 layers going across the triangle they're going up and down so it now has foods that are all like

00:41:02.380 receding into the distance so it's like grains vegetables fruits milk meat and beans but it's

00:41:07.400 not clear how much of each one of them you're supposed to be eating because there are these 0.99

00:41:10.860 like fucking stripes going up and down the pyramid but then also you've got this fucking 0.99

00:41:16.920 doofus on the left hand side of the graphic who's like going up a flight of stairs 0.99

00:41:21.220 yeah so the perspective of this seems like 3d but then on the left hand side of it it's like 2d

00:41:27.280 because this guy's like walking up it's totally cluttered big food wheel energy yeah dude what

00:41:33.300 am i supposed to be eating yeah so this one came out in 2005 it's called my pyramid steps to a

00:41:42.420 healthier you incredible and there were continued concerns about the industry influence because

00:41:47.400 honestly i think if the industry could have designed a pyramid shape in 1991 this probably

00:41:55.340 would have been the shape they would have designed like the other food pyramid has problems but at

00:41:59.380 least it suggests a hierarchy just like as a graphic design principle it's like less of this

00:42:05.260 more of this yes whereas this one yeah like it doesn't suggest any hierarchy i realize that the

00:42:10.540 little bands are like ever so slightly thicker for some things but like it's not immediately 0.77

00:42:16.000 obvious and the whole fucking point of this is to make it immediately obvious to people it really 0.85

00:42:20.860 looks to me just to the naked eye it really this version looks like you should be eating the same 0.94

00:42:26.000 amounts of dairy grains and vegetables all on the same plane yeah is what this looks like to me just

00:42:32.440 at first glance and meat and beans includes peanut butter and eggs yeah which are not meat and beans

00:42:38.360 it's goofy i don't know so it is worth noting that this one also adds exercise oh that's what it's

00:42:45.940 trying to do with the stairs yeah that sucks it really looks like nutritional guidance designed

00:42:56.140 by clippy again it's like you're trying to do everything right it's like throwing in here like

00:43:00.220 floss your teeth and like use sunscreen and these other like health behaviors it's like do one thing

00:43:06.060 like eat this and not that so once this one comes out once the 2005 one comes out our old pal

00:43:15.140 at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Walter Willett, has been talking about the food

00:43:21.720 pyramid this whole time. And it's been like, they got everyone got everything wrong.

00:43:25.820 Oh, no. Are we going to have to agree with Walter Willett on this podcast in this episode?

00:43:30.220 No, we're not. Because Harvard went ahead and made its own food pyramid.

00:43:35.520 Oh, yeah. See, this one is also you're trying to do too much, Walter.

00:43:39.760 Yeah, totally.

00:43:40.400 okay so this is the healthy eating pyramid and it's like a series of like cartoon illustrations 0.80

00:43:47.280 and then again we've got oh man i i know the committee bullshit that went into this

00:43:52.400 so it's again a triangle but like the top of the triangle is like a little bit physically 0.89

00:43:57.540 separated and it's like okay i see what you did there use sparingly red meat and butter refined

00:44:04.540 grains white bread rice and pasta sugary drinks and sweets salt that's bad sparingly then we've

00:44:10.080 got dairy and then a little bit more nuts seeds beans and tofu fish poultry and eggs the base

00:44:17.280 layer of food is vegetables and fruits whole grains and healthy fats and oils oh and then 0.99

00:44:24.740 the next one down is other shit oh my fucking god so the base of the pyramid is daily exercise 0.99

00:44:31.320 and weight control. Walter, this is trash. Off to the side, optional alcohol in moderation 1.00

00:44:40.700 in parentheses, not for everyone. Oh, my fucking God. And daily vitamin for most people. It's 0.99

00:44:48.040 really not good. It includes more detail. It feels genuinely more instructive than the vertical

00:44:54.980 pyramid. Yes. Right. Like this one actually feels like something you could understand what

00:45:00.400 they're trying to say also you have the alcohol and the vitamins outside of the pyramid yeah so

00:45:06.600 there's no graphical representation of them they just describe in words you should do that in 0.68

00:45:10.760 moderation but surely the whole point of the fucking graphic is to suggest visually to me 0.81

00:45:15.500 what i should be doing in moderation so it's like you have these elements that are literally just 0.80

00:45:20.260 like floating out in undifferentiated space which like well at that point why don't you just put

00:45:25.040 fucking everything in undifferentiated space and just have a bunch of circles of different foods 0.95

00:45:28.440 and describe to me how much I should be eating them. 0.99

00:45:30.820 It's goofy.

00:45:31.500 It's so goofy.

00:45:32.600 Oh my God, this, I'm having such flashbacks

00:45:34.820 to like the times I've tried to design logos and things

00:45:38.020 with like people in the office that want 0.96

00:45:40.280 like every single fucking thing to be in there. 0.99

00:45:43.360 Why would you have multivitamins 0.99

00:45:44.940 on the healthy eating pyramid?

00:45:46.940 Vitamins are not eating.

00:45:48.440 Why is there a scale at the bottom?

00:45:50.260 Why is there a tennis ball?

00:45:51.840 Oh yeah.

00:45:52.320 The text surrounding this also has even more weird,

00:45:56.860 intense guidance like in the fruits category in the narrative they talk about how you can have

00:46:03.680 one small glass of juice per day but the rest of it has to be whole fruit they are clear that

00:46:12.560 potatoes don't count as vegetables nice they add water requirements for how much water you're

00:46:19.280 supposed to drink every day and they're essentially just trying to add in more and more detail where

00:46:25.260 the previous pyramids have tried to strip that out and make it just like really clean and clear

00:46:29.960 and again like much guidance provided by government agencies is trying to do that with

00:46:36.640 limited language right right they're trying to use words less and harvard is like no here's all

00:46:41.960 the words so harvard goes so far with this food pyramid that they straight up like conduct a study

00:46:49.100 and release it comparing the harvard food pyramid to the usda food pyramid it becomes like a whole

00:46:55.040 big second wave to this story is people talking about the Harvard food pyramid. And that culminated

00:47:00.980 in my favorite thing, which is in one of those frontline interviews, they interview Walter

00:47:05.780 Willett. And one of the questions is just some nutritionists have criticized your pyramid as

00:47:11.800 quote floating on a lake of olive oil. So like, you know, all these people coming out of sort of

00:47:18.500 like low fat diet world are like, what the fuck? Why is oil? Why did it move from the top to the 0.90

00:47:23.620 bottom block we just don't have clear advice like the science is still so out on this stuff

00:47:28.180 totally yeah you can have oils as either use sparingly or like use a ton and both of those

00:47:33.500 are accurate reflections of what people are taking away from the research because the research isn't

00:47:38.740 fucking great just yet it's all over the place yeah from there we get my plate we get some other

00:47:42.780 nutritional guidance they're currently they just closed um nominations for developing the 2025 0.96

00:47:48.760 nutrition guidelines. Hell yeah. And we have heard less and less from the cattlemen and the dairy

00:47:55.540 industry and so on and so forth, because now it really seems like influence from the food industry

00:48:01.640 is just kind of how things work. Yeah. In that 2005 pyramid, we saw the guy exercising, walking

00:48:08.700 up the stairs right on the side of the pyramid. There has since been considerable evidence that

00:48:15.580 Coca-Cola bankrolled a ton of studies designed to shift the blame for both fatness and heart

00:48:22.600 disease from consuming sugar to a lack of exercise. I'm glad the sugar companies finally

00:48:28.660 got involved. Great. I love a good evil lobbyist versus evil lobbyist fight. So years later,

00:48:34.700 Frontline does a piece about the food pyramid. Okay. The name of that piece is The Fattening.

00:48:40.680 okay so a whole shit ton of the media since this happened around the food pyramid is like

00:48:49.320 if we just listened we could have avoided the obesity epidemic oh nice there wouldn't be so 0.95

00:48:56.520 many fat people if we could just have gotten this thing right right and i will just say as a fat 0.98

00:49:03.260 person that just sucks yeah it sucks that the reason that people care about this is that there 0.99

00:49:08.580 are fewer people who look like me in the world yeah it sucks that fat people are sort of the 0.99

00:49:14.280 scapegoat the boogeyman and the political football all at the same time right and i also don't believe 0.88

00:49:21.080 in like laying the blame anywhere for the quote-unquote obesity epidemic because i don't 0.96

00:49:25.680 think fat people are a fucking epidemic i think we're a gift right you're welcome we're here 0.98

00:49:30.080 isn't it great don't you want to treat fat people like someone you want to know instead of some like 1.00

00:49:35.120 looming specter of doom, which is how we're regarded in so much of this. And I think part

00:49:41.040 of what made this really hard was that those quotes weren't coming from food industry lobbyists.

00:49:46.780 They were coming from the press and the USDA and Congress. Right. And that is a horrific thing to

00:49:55.180 say to the people you are trying to give nutritional guidance to. Yeah. And then the last thing I will

00:50:00.660 say about the 91, 92 food pyramid is at our teeny tiny coda about it is that, you know,

00:50:08.340 so much of the freak out here was about what to do with fats and sugars. Right. And that has since

00:50:15.060 been pretty complicated by the research and pretty debunked, right? Right. Low fat diets are not

00:50:21.740 actually sort of the guiding star of nutrition guidance these days. That's been complicated

00:50:27.260 pretty considerably and the blame is now being pinned on sort of the sugar industry which was

00:50:33.020 working behind the scenes instead of in front of them right like it's just weird that like there

00:50:38.500 was this huge blow up and the way that it gets talked about now and i think marian nestle says

00:50:44.440 this in her book i don't fully agree but i get where she's coming from is she's like this is a

00:50:48.740 rare story where like science prevailed over industry because the food pyramid got released

00:50:55.760 and what i would say is oh is that a yay the the food pyramid was wrong i feel like that's uh

00:51:03.700 i'm glad that like super jerky rich lobbyists working for industries with too much influence

00:51:10.540 got their asses handed to them i like that part of it but like am i thrilled that we got that food 0.91

00:51:16.580 pyramid not really it would have been a much better use of money if they had just removed 0.99

00:51:21.620 the entire process.

00:51:23.320 Michael, Michael.

00:51:51.620 You

Maintenance Phase - November 15, 2022

The Food Pyramid

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