I can still routinely get potatoes in season at 20c/lb, carrots in season at 40c/lb, bananas at 60c/lb, dried legumes at $1/lb or not much more, frozen ground meat in the ballpark of $3/lb, eggs for less than $4/dz (almost as much protein as a pound of fatty meat), boneless skinless chicken breast under $5/lb, butter and cheddar cheese at right about $5/lb, 2% milk at $1.25/L (skim milk powder is a bit more economical if you don't want the milk fat)...

In less healthy options, white flour at 45c/lb, polished white rice less than $1/lb (sometimes as low as 70c), rolled oats at $1.50/lb (though I'm leery about the glyphosate), select dried fruits in the ballpark of $3/lb, bacon at $3.60/lb...

all $CAD, by the way. I converted weights but not currency. Last time I looked at American food prices, you guys had way cheaper meat than us after currency conversion.

> One thing I also do is that (i have the luxury of time to do this, which I recognize is something not everyone has) if i want something really sweet and it's not a fruit, I generally make it myself. If I am having a birthday party, I'll make the cake myself. If my nephew wants to leave christmas cookies out for Santa, I'll make them myself. If I want ice cream, I have an ice cream machine and I'll make it myself.

... Generic sandwich cookies and tea biscuits under $2/lb (though they used to be considerably cheaper)....

I absolutely agree with you about the sweet cravings, though.

I too do the same. However, I, like you, live in a major metropolitan area filled with millions of people. Walking, or biking a few K or miles to the grocery store isn't unheard of.

>Do American Wal-Mart locations in small towns charge higher prices than ones in major cities in the same state?

To my knowledge, that's also illegal here. The thing is though, food deserts aren't due to proximity to a large city, they are more due to location economics. No offense meant when I say you're thinking about this the wrong way - let's break it down.

Here's the scenario: you're a food importer, bringing in food to Canada. You have 1000 kilos of, let's say, strawberries.

Because import costs are high, you want to make sure all those 1000 kilos sell, and sell quickly because it's fresh produce and it will spoil pretty quickly. You could likely just bring all of them to the GTA, and they'd all sell, because the GTA is nearly 7 million people so there's plenty of demand (and money).

If you really were concerned about sales and proximity concentration, you could extend the GTA area to the entire golden horseshoe, which is roughly 11 million people, all within a few hours drive to the heart of the GTA. Cool, right? You could quickly sell all those strawberries.

Except now you're ignoring Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton, etc. So you have to spread those 1000 kilos around to major metro areas, because that's where demand is. But what are you ignoring here? The very rural parts of the country, because it's harder and more expensive to transport goods there, and there's not as much money because there's little to no economy in extremely rural areas - so certainty of sell-through is not as guaranteed as it is in major cities. I'm talking Nunavut, the northern islands, Yukon territory, etc. It's also extremely hard to model demand from those areas.

So even if you said, ok, I'll send 1 kilo to 1 rural area. Well, you're going to run into trouble because you're not going to have the demand, nor does the locale have any money so even if there was demand (and the economy strong enough for people to be able to spend on your berries), you have to make less money because you're spending more money to transport produce, and as you say - it's illegal to charge different prices depending on location.

So, in a very tight margin business like produce importing, what will you do? You'll ignore the most rural areas, because it's just too risky. And so will your competition, and as well, adjacent business that import other types of foodstuffs that have the same constraints you do.

And BOOM, food deserts are created.

In the USA, there's plenty of people whose closest grocer is an hour away. And because that grocer is in a pretty remote location, there's not many distributors who are willing and able to risk high-cost produce going to that grocer, because there's no economy to justify a higher cost product. So you get nothing but processed junk at those stores, because it doesn't go bad, it doesn't spoil, and can sit on the shelf for months.

Anyways, if you pay close attention to how people live in advanced countries you'll notice we do almost everything we can to fuck up our health: bad sleeping schedule, way too much time spend siting, bad eating habits, &c. People half starving in the 1700s on a mediterranean diet were doing better than the average modern american when it comes to health.

That's really not true at all. For example, rabbits love sweet stuff like fruit and will readily kill themselves by eating too much, which causes their delicate hindgut fermenter digestive system to shut down.

Like humans, they simply aren't adapted to conditions where they have unlimited sugary food like fruit, so they will eat too much when given the opportunity.

With that said, I do partly agree with you. I do think that becoming too divorced from the natural world drives a great many ills.

I think the challenge is finding the balance. We sure don't have it now.

Okay, sure, I'll start eating a very sugar-focused diet as that's what my body (via high release of dopamine) tells me is best.

Here's industry reports

https://www.nationalbeefwire.com/doctors-group-applauds-comm...

https://www.wattagnet.com/business-markets/policy-legislatio...

And straight up lobbying groups

https://www.nationalchickencouncil.org/new-dietary-guideline...

https://www.meatinstitute.org/press/recommend-prioritizing-p...

Lobbying groups, putting out press releases, claiming victory...

Here's some things you won't find in any of the documents, including the PDFs at the bottom: community gardens, local food, farmers markets, grass fed, free range... Because agribusiness doesn't make money with those.

Just because you might like the results doesn't mean they aren't corrupt as hell

A demand for the average American to eat more meat would have to explain, as a baseline, why our already positive trend in meat consumption isn't yielding positive outcomes. There are potential explanations (you could argue increased processing offsets the purported benefits, for example), but those are left unstated by the website.

[1]: https://www.agweb.com/opinion/drivers-u-s-capita-meat-consum...

[2]: https://ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detai...

I don't understand people freaking out over this - outside of a purely political reflex - hell hath no fury like taking away nerds' Mountain Dew and Flamin' Hot Cheetos.

Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.

Whole grain bread or infant formula can be “highly processed” despite very healthy.

In the end someone else cooks for you and packages it. They can cook healthy or not or in between, add a lot of salt or little, .. as always it’s more complex.

1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01099-1

2 https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/nutrition-research-r...

I find when it comes to health advice, generally government sources can't be trusted because there's too much special interests and money involved. You really have to do your own research.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

Americans eat so much processed food simply because it is much cheaper than fresh food. Processed food is made to get consumers addicted (through convenience, taste, etc.) and encourage them to consume much more. Fresh food is almost the opposite.

I grew up in a country where freshly made food is actually cheaper than processed food, even to this day. People who stick to a traditional diet are mostly thin, while those who stick to a processed food diet gain a lot of weight.

https://www.food-safety.com/articles/11004-a-2025-timeline-o...

I enjoy an occasional steak but if the goal is to improve diet of masses, it’s not the food I’d put at the center.

You can engineer healthy food. The problems isn't the processing. Its that most people who are engineering food do not have "healthy" among the goals.

We're conflating "designed" with "designed recklessly".

It matters because a lot of people can't afford the diet suggested here. The messaging needs to distinguish between adding protein powder because there's no meat available, and living on Cheetos because there's no meat available, and "highly processed" fails to do that.

Good initiative from the government, i wouldnt have expected them to do something that messes with junk food corporations profits like this

I also don’t like the emphasis on meat protein. Small amounts of meat protein a few times a week are definitely healthy for most people, but organic (not soaked in pesticides) beans, lentils, etc. are almost certainly a healthy way to consume extra protein.

I sense the ugly hand of the meat industry in realfood.gov. I think if more people understood how (especially) chickens and pigs are tortured in meat production, it would help people who are addicted to excess meat cut back on their consumption to just what they need for good health.

EDIT: the documentary movie The Game Changers (2018) is an excellent source of information. The scenes interviewing huge muscular vegetarian NFL football players really put the lie to the ‘must have meat’ addicts. That said, I still think small amounts of meat protein are very healthy for most people.

- More protein (than the prior RDA of 0.39g/lb) can lead to inadvertent caloric restriction and weight loss, and obesity is driving a large number of negative health outcomes. Also improves lean mass (muscle) retention during weight loss.

- Processed foods have lower satiety per calorie, and hence can lead to the same outcomes described above.

- Most people can benefit from eating more fruit and veggies. (Lots of people who change to vegetarian inadvertently eat significantly fewer calories because the food is not calorie dense)

The one glaring part I have a hard time reconciling is:

- This new Real Food guide seems like it's going to increase people's saturated fat intake, which is not good. DASH/Mediterranean diet seems to be a better model than both the prior and new pyramids.

6-11 servings of grains, 3-5 veges, 2-4 fruit, 2-3 dairy, 2-3 protein (all sources), minimal fat was absurd and bad. Protein is until you hit your needed macros. Fats are as needed. Processed grains are basically empty calories. a cup or two of whole grains is all you really need and thats it.

Weird branding and culture war stuff aside, this is probably the least objectionable thing this health administration has done.

That said, I don't know if this would actually move the needle much. The Japanese diet includes so much more processed foods and less protein and they still live longer, healthier lives. I think the ultimate factors are still portion sizes, environment, activity, and genetics.

Pasteurization saves lives. Flash-frozen foods retain more nutrition in transit, while freezing seafood kills parasites. And even the best bread and butter are as processed as food can get.

I'm reading the "chemical additives" list and it's a mix of obviously harmful things with known safe things added in trace concentrations - there's no intellectual rigor and a lot of fearmomgering.

I'm not opposed, as protein seems to be a good target to prioritize, but claiming there's a war on protein just seems so out of touch to the point of absurdity. It's practically the only thing that people care about right now.

It’s not the healthiest food, but it’s a much weaker risk factor than diets high in processed foods (including processed meats), refined carbs, added sugar, and excess salt.

For adults (25–64), the biggest diet-linked contributors to cardiometabolic death were sugar-sweetened beverages and processed meats. [1]

also form the paper:

High sodium intake → ~66,000 deaths (9.5%)

Low nuts & seeds intake → ~59,000 deaths (8.5%)

High processed meat intake → ~57,000 deaths (8.2%)

Low seafood omega-3 intake → ~54,000 deaths (7.8%)

Low vegetable intake → ~53,400 deaths (7.6%)

Low fruit intake → ~52,000 deaths (7.5%)

High sugar-sweetened beverage intake → ~51,000 deaths (7.4%) Low whole-grain intake → ~41,000 deaths (5.9%)

High unprocessed red meat intake → ~2,900 deaths (0.4%)

(Full table is on page 5 of the linked paper)

[1] https://episeminars.web.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/754...

I was amused to see (kilo)grams used for the weights. I'll admit that as an American, I have no idea what my weight is in kilograms. Body weight is something that I always think of in pounds. I do use grams sometimes in food prep, but I think even that makes me a bit of an abnormality around here.

Not that I am complaining about their unit choice. I think American's would do well to be a bit more "bilingual" in our measurement systems. Also, the measurements they give are a lot easier to parse than 3/128 oz per 1lb bodyweight.

I am consternated at the proliferation of refined grains. Here are my USA observations:

  - Grocery store or Amazon etc: Whole grain breads and flours are in the  minority, but it's possible to get them

  - Restaurants and bakeries: Impossible to find whole grains; 100% refined

That number seemed unreal to me, so I looked it up. I think it represents the total pre-processing weight, not the actual meat meat consumption. From Wikipedia:

> As an example of the difference, for 2002, when the FAO figure for US per capita meat consumption was 124.48 kg (274 lb 7 oz), the USDA estimate of US per capita loss-adjusted meat consumption was 62.6 kg (138 lb)

Processing, cutting into sellable pieces, drying, and spoilage/loss mean the amount of meat consumed is about half of that number.

I find that to be a challenging amount of meat. It's a lot! And to find out that's average???

Americans eat way too much meat. Cheese, too.

Also, you need to adjust for demographics. In 1900, 35% of the population was under 15: https://demographicchartbook.com/index.php/chapter-5-age-and.... Today it’s only 19%. Children and babies obviously eat a lot less meat than adults, and they make up a much smaller share of the population today than back then.

> It has become internationally famous for embracing and promoting an unhealthy diet of incredibly large hamburgers. Customers are referred to as "patients," orders as "prescriptions," and the waitresses as "nurses." All those who weigh over 350 pounds are invited to unlimited free food provided they weigh themselves on an electronic cattle scale affront a cheering restaurant crowd.

> The menu includes the Single Bypass Burger®, Double Bypass Burger®, Triple Bypass Burger®, Quadruple Bypass Burger®, Quintuple Bypass Burger™, Sextuple Bypass Burger™, Septuple Bypass Burger™, and the Octuple Bypass Burger™. These dishes range in weight from half a pound to four pounds of beef. Also on the menu are Flatliner Fries® (cooked in pure lard) and the Coronary Dog™, Lucky Strike no filter cigarettes, alcohol, Butterfat Milkshakes™, full sugar Coca-Cola, and candy cigarettes for the kids!

https://heartattackgrill.com/press

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38118410/

What happens is that the excess of protein stays in your system, but, if you don't use the nutrient by exercising, the caloric excess will obviously make you fat.

"These findings demonstrate that the magnitude and duration of the anabolic response to protein ingestion is not restricted and has previously been underestimated in vivo in humans."

Though of course "meat" is too vague a category to be helpful. Obviously there's a link between beef and heart disease and colorectal cancer. There seems to be no health problems associated with consuming chicken or seafood.

EDIT down-thread to prove my point you'll see people citing studies in favor of and against the new recommendations. The studies are almost always in animals or use self reported data with tiny sample sizes.

That is, how many pounds of meat the average American eats in a year. An increase of 100 pounds means about an extra quarter-pound a day.

You need to go to much more recent times to get worsening results/predictions.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8805510/

> Conclusions: As observed from the food availability data, processed and ultra-processed foods dramatically increased over the past two centuries, especially sugar, white flour, white rice, vegetable oils, and ready-to-eat meals. These changes paralleled the rising incidence of NCDs, while animal fat consumption was inversely correlated.

Americans also just need to eat less period, but that’s a separable issue.

This is something I have been thinking about and researching for awhile, because there is so very much confusing language out there.

Your quote says over the last century, so I'm going to use roughly 1920 as the baseline. It also refers to a per capita increase of meat consumption by 100 pounds, or about 45.4 kilograms (to make the math easier). This is roughly an increase of 124g of meat per person per day (or about 3oz if that makes more sense to you).

This equates to a daily increase in per-capita protein intake by 25-30g (depending on which meat and how lean it is).

In 1920, the average American adult male was about 140 pounds, and ate about 100g of protein per day, which works out to roughly 0.71 grams per pound of body weight (or about 1.6 grams per kilogram).

In 2025, one century later, the average American adult male is 200 pounds, and if he eats the same ratio of weight to protein, you would expect that he would eat around 140g of protein per day, which is slightly higher than the increase in per-capita meat consumption over the same time.

However, if you look at actual statistics of what people are eating in protein, you'll see that the average American adult male is actually eating about 97g of protein per day, or about 0.49 grams per pound (1.1 grams per kg), which is much less than we ate a century ago, which means that that the increase in meat consumption doesn't match change in protein, so is offset by either less non-meat protein, meat with lower protein content (e.g. more fat), or both.

There was some discussion lower in the thread about bodybuilders vs normal people, and about basing your calculations on lean body weight vs full bodyweight. Lean body weight calculations are often used for bodybuilders, but those numbers are elevated (typically 1 gram of protein per pound of lean body weight). For someone who is sedentary to lightly active (e.g. daily walks), the calculation is based on full body weight, not lean body weight, and is about 0.7 gram per pound (or 1.5 grams per kilogram), which matches this recommendation exactly.

Hitting these targets has been shown to greatly increase satiation, reduce appetite, but it does not make you lose weight, and it is not permanent (reducing your protein intake removes the effect, which makes sense). However, long term studies show that people who increase their protein intake to these levels and lose weight (through calorie reduction or fasting) keep that weight off.

Finally, from what I've been able to cobble together, high protein intakes combined with high fat and high sugar intakes does not have the same effect as a diet that matches the recommendations here (ie. it's not just about higher protein intake, it's about percentage of calories from protein, which should be around 20-25%... 200 pound sedentary to lightly active adult male, 140g of protein, or 560 calories, in a total diet of 2250-2800 calories, depending on activity level)

I really enjoyed "keeping up" with her when we were dating, because I was really tired of eating the same things all the time. There's really a lot of delicious plant proteins if you take the time to look.

(That being said, our kids like meat. We just don't eat it all the time.)

Personally I'm not a fan of any diet that recommends high meat consumption and I say that as someone who eats everything.

Cattle outweighs the total livestock on this planet by a 10 to 1 factor.

While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment, they seem to always ignore the extreme cost on the environment and pollution caused by cattle. Even focusing on CO2 emissions by industry avoids the elephant of the room of the insane levels of methane produced by cows, a gas that's 200 times more harmful.

There is little evidence that a meat heavy diet is good for people, but there's plenty of evidence of the contrary.

So, to be honest, while I don't freak out and I'm all for freedom, there has to be also some kind of consciousness into how do we use the resources on this planet, and diet is by far more impactful than the transport of choice.

The issue is that "Ultra-Processed" does not mean "candy and sugary drinks" and even "sugary drinks" is overly broad. Can SNAP pay for sugar-free Coke but not classic coke? What about Gatorade?

SNAP already had reasonable restrictions. This very much feels like a "middle management style" project. Dedicating resources to a nebulously defined BIG project regardless of whether or not it actually improves outcomes.

I can think of one issue here. Ultra-processed foods, candy, and sugary drinks are cheap and shelf-stable. They're cheap because they're subsidized. Fruits and vegetables are more expensive, and they don't last very long. So a person on a very limited SNAP budget will get less food under the new restrictions.

The answer, of course, is to make it so that fresh produce and other healthy options are cheaper than the junk food. I have a hard time seeing that happening, given how susceptible the administration is to being "lobbied".

For example at one store there was confusion as to why a ready to eat cup of cut fruit packaged with a plastic spoon from the store's deli department was ineligible, but a slice of cake packaged with a plastic fork from the store's bakery was eligible. Apparently the cake being made with flour makes it OK, regardless of how much sugar is in the cake and the icing.

SNAP changes like this may be better on a population health level, to be sure. On this I have no evidence. But each restriction placed on food for people living in destitution may mean some people go hungry. (And this excludes issues of caloric density.) I would like to see better data, but sadly, there is none.

The sources of those macronutrients also matter. The ideal range for saturated fat is 5-10% of total calories. Meat consumption, especially red meat, is associated with higher risk of colorectal cancer. Dairy consumption is associated with higher risk of prostate cancer.

I haven't read the new guidelines in detail but if they're recommending red meat and whole milk as primary foods, then they are not consistent with the research on cancer and cardiovascular disease risk and I doubt that people following them would meet the AMDRs or ideal saturated fat intake.

This new JFK Jr diet has something in common with the Paleo "cave man" diet, which at least makes some sense in the argument ("this is what our bodies have evolved to eat") if not the specifics. I'm not sure where the emphasis on milk/cheese and eggs comes from since this all modern, not hunter-gatherer, and largely unhealthy, and putting red-meat at the top (more cholesterol, together with the eggs), and whole grain at the bottom makes zero sense - a recipe for heart attacks and colon cancer.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/07/rfk-jr-nutrition-guidelines-...

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/looking-to-bu...

There was a story about this in the NYT recently (can't find it) and IIRC, it basically said protein is out and fiber is in. It wasn't that simple, but that was my takeaway.

There was a temporary period where I had some GI issues from changing what I ate very abruptly, but that wore off as my gut bacteria adapted

It's a fad diet being recommended, and parts of the advice being good don't make it good overall.

Because poor people should be allowed to enjoy some of life's pleasures as well.

All you have to do is look at this food pyramid and the old food pyramid and ask "if I had to feed one of these a week to my kid which would I pick".

It's clearly superior and it's just sad that people are so just defiant to good, for who knows what reasons.

The restrictions on SNAP are insidious because SNAP is supposed to enable one to live a normal life -- and that includes occasionally buying things that are not "healthy" in a bubble. The mantra that many health professionals will use is "there are no unhealthy foods, only unhealthy diets". Combine all that background with traditional stigma associated with SNAP/food stamp benefits and a picture starts to emerge of why policy was to embrace more foods and how this administration is often called the "administration of harm".

My understanding is that it adds a complex layer of regulation where one did not previously exist. Large retailers and grocers have the systems that can accurately track this. (Essentially: does your POS have the ability to sync with the Federally Approved Foods For Poors list or not.)

Smaller convenience stores (more common in places where poor people live) are less likely to have the resources be able to comply. Rather than get sanctioned for accidentally selling a Gatorade on SNAP, they will simply pull out of SNAP altogether. This means that even the non-sugary foods they have will no longer be available to people on SNAP.

The net effect is expected to be to remove SNAP purchasing ability from entire geographies. I understand the effect is expected to be most pronounced in rural and dense urban areas.

Its an addiction. Try taking away an alcoholic's alcohol and sit back and enjoy the infinite rationalizations about how its heart healthy and lowers stress and its just a couple a night, etc etc.

Its not like it is a tan suit.

Why should I trust them with the food pyramid? How do I know if anyone who actually has expertise was consulted when his signature move has been axe experts and bring in “skeptics” with no actual background since day 1?

I’m supposed to play ball and accept health advice from the antivaxxer who has led to countless unnecessary deaths? Who walked up with the president and said “Tylenol is linked to autism” with no evidence?

No way.

Edit: it’s worth mentioning that he and a bunch of “MAHA” proponents cite the natural and healthy food in Europe but never want to use the dirty word that makes it happen: regulation. If we are serious about unhealthy additives and other food concerns, then we need robust regulations. They aren’t serious about change. It’s easy to go “we’re gonna have everyone eat healthy and natural stuff” but when it counts they won’t do what is necessary. [also toned down my heated language]

What I hate, and react against, is the package deal. We get a better food pyramid, but we also get antivax imbeciles and a resurgence in easily preventable diseases. We get an official nod of approval given to idiots who think you can treat cancer with "alternative" treatments. We get blaming autism on Tylenol with incomplete and inadequate data or, wait, maybe not, or maybe, or whatever that was.

I think it reflects a deeper problem though. The "crunchy" "natural" alt-med orbits have usually had better ideas about nutrition. They've historically been right about whole vs. processed foods, more protein and fats and less simple carbs, sugar being bad, etc. Unfortunately they've historically been wrong about most other things. They're wrong about vaccines, wrong about just how powerful and effective diets can be, mostly wrong about psych meds, and wrong about giving the nod to unmitigated quackery like homeopathy.

I also think that tends to be a common problem with any and all populism, whether left or right. The present establishment may be corrupt or broken, but replacing it is hard, especially when it tends to have a talent monopoly. "Serious" people who go into medicine go to college, then grad school / med school, then get licensed, etc., and pick up establishment views. The people who want to do medicine but don't take this path tend to be amateurs and quacks and weird ideologues.

Venezuela's been in the news lately. My understanding of what happened to their oil industry is: they had it working okay with professionals doing it, and then there was a populist revolution. Then they kicked out all the professionals. Then they had no idea how to run an oil industry. The professionals were linked to a foreign power and probably taking too much profit at the expense of the Venezuelan people, yes, but they also knew how to extract petrol.

Edit: You see more sympathy here than many other educated places for this stuff, and there's a reason for that.

I think CS people are extremely open to autodidactism, probably too open, and I think that's because CS and programming is one of the few serious fields where it is actually common for an autodidact to equal or exceed a trained professional.

The zero capital cost near-zero real world implication nature of computational experimentation facilitates this. You can just read open literature and sit and play until you get good and it harms nobody and costs almost nothing. Math is another field where there have been genius autodidacts that have made huge discoveries. The arts are obviously mostly like this, excluding those that are very hard to learn alone or have capital costs.

Medicine is definitely not a field like this. I don't think you can autodidact medicine. As a result, doctors outside the establishment are usually not good. There have been historical examples, but few, and most of them came up through the ranks of real medicine before pushing a radical idea that turned out to be right.

Also note that even in CS and math, most outsider ideas are wrong. Outsider ideas are kind of like high risk / high reward investments. It's very hard for anyone, insider-trained or not, to formulate a deeply contrarian or wholly original idea that is correct, but when someone does it makes the news because it's both rare and often high impact. The hundreds of thousands to millions of deeply contrarian or original ideas that were worthless or wrong don't make the news.

i think it's a perfect example of why advocates for any policy should have specific, achievable, and well-documented goals - you never know who might be an ally. politicians don't want to do this sort of detailed work, they're looking for preexisting policy they can champion, and if you're standing there ready to hand it to them when they're looking for it you get get good stuff done.

https://www.familyconsumersciences.com/2011/06/usda-food-pyr...

Remember all the talk about banning COVID vaccines? In the end they just changed the wording of the federal recommendations and included things like "having a sedentary lifestyle" as one of the vague reasons to get a COVID vaccine. In some states you had to get a doctor to write a prescription, annoyingly, but the overall picture is that it's still much easier to get a COVID vaccine in the US than under something like the NHS.

The new "guidelines" for alcohol are pretty laughable though. I say that as someone who enjoys his fair share of beers. “The implication is don’t have it for breakfast," <- direct quote from celebrity Dr Oz during the press conference.

Unfortunately their stances on vaccines, supplements, and mental health make are still awful

Pathetic

Like, don't get me wrong, RFK will kill N*10^5, N*10^6 people with his outlook on diseases, but....how many people have had their lives wrecked by "fat makes you fat", "ketchup is a vegetable", and "eat a balanced diet composed entirely of sausage, flour, and sugar"? As a GenXer I've been dealing with the echoes of this for a long time.

I know it’s important to have an informative guideline, but isn’t it strangely reminiscent of “just say no”?

So funny to see people reflexively defend those things being left off because it confirms their own beliefs. A deeper inspection of the actual guidelines has them being very fair to plant proteins:

> Consume a variety of protein foods from animal sources, including eggs, poultry, seafood, and red meat, as well as a variety of plant-sourced protein foods, including beans, peas, lentils, legumes, nuts, seeds, and soy.

The thing is... the pyramid is just a graphic, the actual words give more context.

https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf

Similarly, it's a "complete" protein, whereas most vegetables and legumes are missing necessary amino acids.

The downside of beef isn't the "density" of nutrients: the downside is high saturated fat. Chicken breast, though, is similarly high in protein without the saturated fat downside.

Just because vegetables, lentils or nuts contain protein it doesn't mean it's the same/equivalent to the protein in an animal product.

Meat is actually super easy for humans to digest and it has no downsides to it. All vegetables on the other side contain plenty of anti-nutrients such as folate and oxalates.

Everything in human body, skin, connective tissues, tendons, hair, nails, muscles is essentially built out of protein and collagen. Fats are essential for hormone function.

To quote famed businessman and philosopher Eugene Krabs: "Money."

And of course broccoli and legumes doesn't have a lobby group, do they?

In terms of value meat is far more important than vegetables unless I am missing something?

Milk can help in regions with dietary low calories, but is mediocre or bad for fat US citizens.

I also found the food shown very misleading.

Possibly because those foods are culturally un-American or something silly like that

I guess one way to solve the elderly entitlement crisis is if we all just start dropping dead from heart attacks.

Are you abusing "dense" to mean calories over calories, rather than the expected calories over weight measure? Even a cursory search shows the latter to be untrue. The former is disingenuous, because despite "density", people do not eat kilograms of broccoli daily to hit minimum-viable protein targets.

At 23g/100g, lean beef has a very high protein/weight ratio. Similar to chicken and turkey breast and exceeded only by canned tuna and processed protein isolates like soy protein isolate, whey protein isolate, and wheat gluten. For comparison, protein content of firm tofu, lentils, and chickpeas is much lower, at 14g/100g, 9g/100g, and 8.5g/100g, respectively. They all contain a lot more carbs per 100g than lean beef.

Further, lean beef contains a full and balanced amino acid profile, which lentils, tofu, chickpeas, soy protein isolate, and wheat gluten does not. It's an excellent food. However there is evidence that charred red meat and red meat containing nitrites is associated with a slight increase in colorectal cancer, so people should be consuming minimally processed red meat where possible, as per the guidance.

> The DGAs recommend a variety of animal source protein foods (ASPFs) and plant source protein foods (PSPFs) to provide enough total protein to satisfy the minimum requirements set at the Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) of 0.8 g/kg body weight for adults and to ensure the dietary patterns meet most nutrient needs [3, 4]. However, over the past 20 years, an extensive body of research has underscored the unique and diverse metabolic roles of protein, and now there is compelling evidence that consuming additional foods that provide protein at quantities above the RDA may be a key dietary strategy to combat obesity in the U.S (while staying within calorie limits by reducing nutrient-poor carbohydrate foods). Instead of incorporating this approach, the past iterations of the DGAs have eroded daily protein quantity by shifting protein recommendations to PSPFs, including beans, peas, and lentils, while reducing and/or de-emphasizing intakes of ASPFs, including meats, poultry, and eggs. The shift towards PSPFs was intended to reduce adiposity and risks of chronic diseases but was primarily informed by epidemiological evidence on The Scientific Foundation for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030: Appendices | 350 dietary patterns, even in some cases when experimental evidence from randomized controlled trials (RCTs) was available to more specifically inform this recommendation. Another key aspect that DGA committees have inadequately considered are the nutrient consequences when shifting from ASPFs to PSPFs. ASPFs not only provide EAAs, they also provide a substantial amount of highly bioavailable essential micronutrients that are under-consumed. Encouraging Americans to move away from these foods may further compromise the nutrient inadequacies already impacting many in the U.S., especially our young people. Compounding this is the recent evidence highlighting the fallacies of using the unsubstantiated concept of protein ounce equivalents within food pattern (substitution) modeling, leading to recommended reductions in daily protein intakes and protein quality since ASPFs and PSPFs are not equivalent in terms of total protein or EAA density. Given that 1) there is no Tolerable Upper Intake Level (UL) for dietary protein established by the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) and 2) consuming high quality ASPFs above current recommendations has shown no negative health risks in high quality RCTs, it’s unclear as to why previous DGAs encouraged shifts in protein intake towards limiting high quality, nutrient dense ASPFs. It's essential to evaluate the evidence to establish a healthy range of protein intake and to substantiate whether or not limiting ASPFs is warranted and/or has unintended consequences. An alternative approach that may be more strongly supported by the totality of evidence is the replacement of refined grains with PSPFs like beans, peas, and lentils. Given their nutrient dense profile (e.g., excellent source of fiber, complex carbohydrates, & folate, etc.; good source of protein) nutrient dense PSPFs complement but do not replace the nutrients provided in ASPFs (i.e., excellent source of protein, vit B12, zinc, good source of heme iron, etc.). By including high quality, nutrient dense ASPFs as the primary source of protein, followed by nutrient dense PSPFs as a replacement for nutrient-poor refined grains, a higher-protein, lower-carbohydrate dietary pattern can be achieved which likely improves nutrient adequacy, weight management, and overall health. -- https://cdn.realfood.gov/Scientific%20Report%20Appendices.pd... Appendix 4.9

Ruminant meat is absolutely one of the best bioavailable forms of a mostly complete amino acid profile, though eggs and dairy is more complete with differing ratios depending on form/feed.

As to lentils, tofu, chickpeas etc. They're fine for most people in moderation, but they are also relatively inflammatory and plenty of people have digestive issues and allergies to legumes (I do), soy is one of the top 10 allergens that people face. While almost nobody is allergic to ruminant meat.

Ultimately, everything is highly processed or we’d be eating rocks. The magnificent manufacturing line in animal or even plant cells is one of the most processed things at the finest molecular level that we know!

I think someone else cooking for you isn't the problem, the problem is at "packages it". Because, when you cook something at home, it's good for a few days to a week -- but food processors effectively always need various additives to keep the food shelf-stable for long enough for it to go factory -> warehouse -> store -> your house -> your meal. There are definitely exceptions (eg raisins are dried grapes, end of story) but generally this is the problem.

> Whole grain bread... very healthy.

Are you sure? Ever noticed how when you bake bread at home, it's basically 4 days on the counter before it's inedible, right? Yet commercial bread lasts for weeks.. ever wondered why that is?

As for processed food in general, I could be wrong, but my mental exercise goes along the lines of "would my great-grandma know what this is?" Eggs, butter, milk, fruits, vegetables, flour, rice, meat, fish, etc etc. But if it has an ingredients list and a nutrition label.. probably best to avoid making it a staple of your diet. Yes, I get it, cooking is a pain in the ass and everyone hates "the dinner problem", but IMO it's worth it for your health.

In general, the more processing steps involved, the more things companies can do to make the food more delicious, cheaper to produce, etc., at the expense of customers' health. There is also a significant correlation between "highly processed food" and "contains way too much refined grains and oil".

However, it's absolutely possible to process the food heavily and add lots of ingredients and still maintain a healthy food if you actually care about the customer's wellbeing. It would just result in a product that is less competitive in the short term, so companies have little to no incentive to do it.

> Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has directed the Food and Drug Administration to review the nutrients and other ingredients in infant formula, which fills the bottles of millions of American babies. The effort, dubbed “Operation Stork Speed,“ is the first deep look at the ingredients since 1998.

> “The FDA will use all resources and authorities at its disposal to make sure infant formula products are safe and wholesome for the families and children who rely on them,” Kennedy said.

https://news.wttw.com/2025/06/03/kennedy-has-ordered-review-...

For example, normal simple bread should only have 4 or maybe 5 ingredients.

to keep this focused on hacker news. this is like asking the programming community to solve "some intractable social problem," and then sometimes you get an answer, "well, what we need is, a new kind of open source license."

disputes over guidelines and the meaning of highly processed, outside the academic humanities context, is kind of pointless right? if you are talking about cultural influence - you can't coerce people to eat (or not eat) something in this country, so cultural influence is the main lever government can pull regarding food - the answer to everything is, "What does Ja Rule think?" (https://www.okayplayer.com/dave-chappelles-ja-rule-joke-is-h...) that is, what do celebrities say and do? And that's why we're at where we are at, the celebrities are now "running" the HHS.

There's a definition for highly processed food, it's whatever Ja Rule says it is. Are you getting it?

Ultra-processed is where all of our issues are coming from. If you can't identify ingredients in something, or you see e-numbers, emulsifiers and such, it's UPF. Essentially any fast food, branded items, ready meals or heavily plastic wrapped long-shelf life stuff.

Cognitive decline and overweight conditions have risen in line with the uptake of UPF. A 10% increase in UPF leads to 25% increase in the chance of dementia. UPF lead to overeating, and the way they are processed causes them to cause insulin spikes in the body which lead to inflammation, including in the brain.

"processed" and "healthy" are oxymorons.

I think it's better to tell people to restrict themselves to "whole foods".

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/03/business/03plate.html

It's amusing how outraged people were when Michelle Obama did her Let's Move campaign focused on eating healthy and exercise and now people are pretending it's all new.

(There was also a version before that, in 2005. The "MyPyramid." That one emphasized exercise by having a person walking up a revised version of the pyramid. Though it had a whole giant category for "milk," admittedly as a knock against it. I'll grant today's did a good job in de-emphasizing dairy compared to 2005 and 2011.)

But what is this administration actually doing to change American diets? It's going to take a little more than throwing up a marketing landing page with a well produced video and nice photos.

I don't understand how people come to this conclusion

Beans/grains/legumes are cheap

Frozen veg is dirt cheap (and retains its nutrition as good as, or better than fresh). In-season fruit and veg

Which foods are more expensive?

People are door-dashing their salaries away and complaining about the price of fresh food...

Convenience and addiction makes more sense, certainly not price

When I was visiting the US I was shocked how much more expensive “real” food is. Here I am spending more if I eat out or processed food versus cooking my own food at home. In the US it was basically the inverse, didn’t make any sense to me. (N=1 and 10 year old experience, but it seems to have only gotten more extreme since)

In case you're not familiar with this allergy, it doesn't behave like other food allergies: instead of getting instant symptoms, it hits you hours later, making it hard to figure out why you suddenly have hives---unless you already know about alpha gal.

(there is an argument for why this shouldn't apply to grass-fed meat but that is an extremely small minority of meat sold)

What is the top thing shown on the plate here?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_them_eat_cake

The normal recommended daily intake for protein is 0.8 g/kg. 1.2-1.6 is silly; that's a recommendation for athletes.¹

Starches have been a dietary staple in pretty much every society forever. Sugars have not. It's silly that they treat grains as a "sometimes" food.

There's also the weird boogeyman of "processed food." Almost all food is processed to some degree & always has been. We've been cooking, baking, juicing, fermenting, chopping, grinding, mashing, etc. long enough that it influenced the shape of our teeth. Certainly we haven't been making Pizza Pockets that long, but the issue there isn't processing, it's ingredients. And the reason people buy Pizza Pockets isn't that they think they're healthy—it's that Pizza Pockets only need to be microwaved, and cooking a real meal takes time that a lot of people just don't have.

[1]: https://www.strongerbyscience.com/athlete-protein-intake/

The few friends I've known were attempting ketogenic diets over the years kept focusing on the protein side when the actual diet is supposed to be dominated by fat. They've all experienced kidney problems of one sort or another, surprise surprise!

Most of which are loaded with crazy amounts of sugar to make them taste good.

Have you ever looked at the label on a cup of non-plain "Greek" yogurt? (Which is 90% of the yogurt aisle.)