Federal Government Promotes Eating Unhealthy, Sugary Foods Rather Than Meat
The National Institutes of Health is encouraging unhealthy eating. It recently funded the development of a “food compass” that encourages people to eat sugary foods like Lucky Charms, while discouraging people from eating common sources of protein. The “food compass” assigns a high score of 78 to chocolate-covered almonds — which have lots of sugar and fat, and far less protein — and a good score of 60 to Lucky Charms, which have sugar and very little protein, compared to a score of just 26 for ground beef, which has lots of protein, and typically more protein than fat. A score of 78 is in the range “to be encouraged,” while 60 is in the range to consume in moderation, and 26 is in the range for foods whose consumption is “to be minimized.”
This foolishness about food is nothing new for NIH. A 2010 study funded by the National Institutes of Health encouraged parents like me to stock our refrigerators with apple sauce, even though apple sauce has basically no nutrition unless vitamins are artificially added to it, since much of the vitamin C in an apple is destroyed when it is processed into apple sauce. Meanwhile, the NIH warned against consuming potatoes, which are rich in vitamin C, potassium, and various minerals. Baked potatoes are healthy, although some of potatoes’ vitamin C is lost if you process them into french fries. Potatoes have much more vitamin C than bananas or apples. And they have more potassium than supposedly potassium-rich bananas.
The NIH-funded food compass repeats the past mistakes of the federal government’s “Food Pyramid,” which encouraged consumption of empty carbohydrates rather than protein and other nutrients. As a young man, I foolishly followed that food pyramid, while my identical twin brother ignored it. I ended up fatter and less healthy than him. Countless Americans were left with a misleading impression about what to eat by the Food Pyramid. As Inspira Health notes:
The USDA’s initial pyramid diagram was divided into six separate horizontal sections, spread across three tiers. The bottom tier, which included grains such as bread and pasta, recommended that an individual eat 6-11 servings of these foods per day. The middle tier recommended adults eat 2-5 servings of fruits and vegetables and the top tier recommended adults eat 2-3 servings of dairy and protein.
But many people found the stacked tiers confusing and interpreted them as steps to advance through. … This led some people to eat only grains throughout the day, as that was the largest—and seemingly most important— tier on the pyramid.- READ MORE
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