The Lie of the Food Pyramid…

We all know this picture.

USDA Food Pyramid

About twenty years ago the USDA changed and finalized the food pyramid making grains and bread the base of the American diet.  For the last twenty years the health of the United States had steadily declined.  De-generative disease has increased.  Heart disease, diabetes, gastro-intestinal aliments, arthritis, asthma, food allergies, and a host of others have become the plague of the twenty-first century.

And its all based on a lie.

The USDA, United States Department of Agriculture, is not a public health organization.  The USDA’s role in government is to promote and sell the United States’ agricultural products to the people of the United States and the rest of the world.  In other words, their job is to get people to eat the foods that are produced by the US farmer.  Their job is not to tell us what a healthy diet should be.

The USDA first put forth food recommendations in 1894.  In 1916 Caroline Hunt published the first guidelines for eating in “Food For Young Children.”  Caroline was an early nutritionist who divided the food into five groups; milk and meat, cereal, vegetables and fruit, fats and fatty food, sugar and sugary food.  This pretty much stood from the early twentieth century until World War II when the USDA again got involved in food recommendations.  Why?  To help people deal with food rationing by getting them to buy more readily available foods.  After the war, they simplified it from seven elements to four; milk, meat, fruits and vegetables, and grains.  And it stayed this way until 1988 when they started looking for a more graphic way to represent the pyramid for use in schools.  The current pyramid was released in 1992.  At the time, there was a glut of wheat and corn on the market after two decades of intense production for a world market that no longer needed all the grain the United States could produce.

What’s a government agency to do when the world no longer needs US grain?  Market that grain to the people of the United States.

And it is all a huge lie.  The food pyramid is taught to our children starting in preschool and all through their educational career.  Young doctors, who are doing their residencies, have been raised on this and are promoting it to their patients as a healthy way to eat.  It is not.  Simply put, the health crisis in the United States can be directly attributed to the USDA food pyramid and its promotion of grains.

There’s the word…PROMOTION.

The USDA is there to promote agricultural products.  They don’t care if they sell to other countries or the the US population.  Caring isn’t in their job description, promoting US agriculture to the world (including the US) is.