Give
this article to your dipshit nutrition professor, especially noting how the REAL experts lambast the carb-rich bullshit food pyramid, as in this excerpt:
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Ironically, U.S. government agencies' attempts to deal with obesity during the last three decades—encouraging people to eat less fat and more carbohydrates, for example—actually may have exacerbated the problem. Take the Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Food Guide Pyramid, first promulgated in 1992. The pyramid's diagram of dietary recommendations is a familiar sight on cereal boxes—hardly a coincidence, since the guidelines suggest six to 11 servings daily from the "bread, cereal, rice, and pasta" group. The USDA recommends eating more of these starches than any other category of food. Unfortunately, such starches are nearly all high-glycemic carbohydrates, which drive obesity, hyperinsulinemia, and Type II diabetes. "At best, the USDA pyramid offers wishy-washy, scientifically unfounded advice on an absolutely vital topic—what to eat," writes Willett in Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. "At worst, the misinformation contributes to overweight, poor health, and unnecessary early deaths."
Note that the pyramid comes from the Department of Agriculture, not from an agency charged with promoting health, like the National Institutes of Health or the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). The USDA essentially promotes and regulates commerce, and its pyramid (currently under revision; expect a new version in 2005) was the focus of intensive lobbying and political struggle by agribusinesses in the meat, sugar, dairy, and cereal industries, among others.
Food is the most essential of all economic goods. Fifty percent of the world's assets, employment, and consumer expenditures belong to the food system, according to Harvard Business School's Ray Goldberg, Moffett professor of agriculture and business emeritus. (In the United States, 17 percent of employment is in what Goldberg calls the "value-added food chain.") He adds that "7 percent of the farmers produce 80 percent of the food—and do it on one-third of the land in cultivation. In the United States, half the net income of farmers comes from the government, in forms like price supports and land set-asides." The food industry is huge and exerts enormous influence on government policy.
Consider the flap that arose after the United Nations' World Health Organization (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization issued a report in 2003 recommending guidelines for eating to improve world nutrition and prevent chronic diseases. Instead of applauding the report, the DHHS issued a 28-page, line-by-line critique and tried to get WHO to quash it. WHO recommended that people limit their intake of added sugars to no more than 10 percent of calories eaten, a guideline poorly received by the Sugar Association, a trade group that has threatened to pressure Congress to challenge the United States' $406 million contribution to WHO.
Clearly, some food industries have for many years successfully influenced the government in ways that keep the prices of certain foods artificially low. David Ludwig questions farm subsidies of "billions to the lowest-quality foods"—for example, grains like corn ("for corn sweeteners and animal feed to make Big Macs") and wheat ("refined carbohydrates.") Meanwhile, the government does not subsidize far healthier items like fruits, vegetables, beans, and nuts. "It's a perverse situation," he says. "The foods that are the worst for us have an artificially low price, and the best foods cost more. This is worse than a free market: we are creating a mirror-world here."
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