Food Pyramid Is A Pyramid Scam (or how USDA poisons you)

[Morphic Tide]

I am not moving goalposts, you are just making shit up.

These are not the same statement, in any way:

1) And why would anyone overeat unless food does not provide necessary nutrients? You do realize you are basically arguing here that starvation is the natural mode of existence for human body?

Yes, and none of that means obesity, or grains, are healthy.

Responding to a criticism of the former with the latter is in fact moving goalposts.

If you eat proper food, you basically cannot overeat because you will throw up first.

You keep making these rather dramatic and absolute claims, then hide behind citations several steps removed from them that thereby fail to support the point you have actually made. Show this, not abstracts stating trend lines vaguely in the same direction.

As a result, regular consumption of potatoes significantly increases risk of diabetes:

Again, your source does not support you:

This meta-analysis support a significant positive association between high potatoes consumption and risk of T2D, especially the consumption of French fries.

French fries differ from unprocessed potatoes in typically adding large amounts of fat in the frying, directly contradicting your underlying point that carbs are by far the worst calorie source. This is five times the effect, with the data on potatoes alone having a lower bound of a flat line at 1.0, or in other words no effect at all.

The thing that gives a solid counter-point is this citation contradicting my assumption that starches are slow uptake, which further undermines the value of the study you cited to the points you've made by noting a higher glycemic index, the value used for the turnaround to blood sugar, for boiled potatoes than french fries. Together, the two meta-analyses imply that more diabetes occurrences came from the item with less effect on blood sugar. Do tell how that works with your position revolving around abrupt blood sugar impact.

Additional absurdities include ice cream and soda having lower glycemic index values than most grains (though not corn, and barley is very far down), and the reference pure glucose not having the 100 the index is defined by but instead 103 plus or minus 3, meaning from 100 to 106. As well as fructose, of corn syrup infamy, being down at 15.

As I explained god-knows-how-many-times already: bread being toxic is literally a consequence of everything else you consider "irrelevant spiel". Antinutrients, lack of satiety, insulin response etc, those are all different aspects of the same problem. You are only complaining because you don't understand the topic and more impotantly, you don't care to understand it. You just want to defend your addiction.

Antinutrients are in fact irrelevant to the claim that carbohydrates themselves are poison. The foods being typically nutrient-poor is in fact irrelevant to the same claim. Your claim is "the substance class is actively bad", your evidence is "not in good enough foods", these are not logically equivalent positions as you have been insisting I treat them as.

 

[Wilykit]

The tech industry has been very much a largly parasitic eninty, especially post 2000s tech and I have a feeling it's ownly going to get worse with the rise of AI

As far as plastics go...don'y you know that plastic is so much better for the environment than paper or glass? Think about all the trees you're saving comrade.

I never understood how people could fall for the greatness of plastic. I grew up with paper grocery bags. My in-laws use them as weed barriers in their garden. They decompose and ate back in the soil. Glass bottle don't decompose but they are perfectly stable and don't contaminate the environment. On top of that plastic is made from oil and we all know the problem oil has caused over the years.

 

[DarthOne]

I never understood how people could fall for the greatness of plastic. I grew up with paper grocery bags. My in-laws use them as weed barriers in their garden. They decompose and ate back in the soil. Glass bottle don't decompose but they are perfectly stable and don't contaminate the environment. On top of that plastic is made from oil and we all know the problem oil has caused over the years.

Ignorance and the fact that it was ‘new’ with the assumption that ‘new equals good’ I suspect.

 

[Cherico]

Ignorance and the fact that it was ‘new’ with the assumption that ‘new equals good’ I suspect.

A civilization can not chase new trends forever, eventually people just get tired of it and just want stability.

 

[colorles]

I don't think anybody in this thread is arguing that grains - or any sort of carbohydrate for that matter - are the pound for pound equal when it comes to satiety and nutrient density of meats and organs and genuine dairy products. I could live on meats and organs alone. I could live on genuine, full fat pastured dairy alone. I could not live on carbohydrates alone; in fact, I can and have overeaten on carbohydrates in the past. Exercise can mitigate this; but, I find the most important thing to be to eat plenty of proteins and fats with any meal of carbohydrates. even when I eat fruit I often like to eat nuts or shredded coconut with it. exception being citrus fruits after a long run in the summer heat; citrus fruits and stuff like watermelon are amazing after that. But that has more to do with hydration than anything.

I just wanted to make that clear. It would really suck having to subsist just on grains alone; and I know that I would be sick and weak and miserable on such a diet. But, as a caloric supplement to a diet plentiful in proteins and fats from meats and organs and/or genuine full fat pastured dairy? Especially if you are an athlete? Any athlete will tell you that carbohydrates are an important part of performance and recovery. Alongside plentiful fats and proteins of course.

 

[Wilykit]

Could we even support the numbers of people alive now if everyone started eating mostly meat/fats and almost no carbs. I know large amounts of carbs are bad but wouldn't we need a lot of people to die in order to do it.

 

[LordsFire]

Could we even support the numbers of people alive now if everyone started eating mostly meat/fats and almost no carbs. I know large amounts of carbs are bad but wouldn't we need a lot of people to die in order to do it.

No.

Malthus was wrong.

Everybody who has echoed his conclusions is wrong.

Most land in the world is unused.

You can use crappier land for grazing than you can for crop farming.

Space and production capacity is not the limiting factor.

There is a limit to how much population Earth can support, but I wouldn't worry about that until we're well past 20 billion people, and it's looking like we may not even hit 10 with current trends.

Expense and government interference is the limiting factor.

 

[Aldarion]

Responding to a criticism of the former with the latter is in fact moving goalposts.

And you still refuse to understand that those two things are fundamentally connected. Grains are not healthy in large part precisely because they provide calories but zero necessary nutrients. It is not the only reason, but it is the main one. I am not "moving goalposts", I am trying to make you understand a complex problem which you are trying to reduce to simple issues.

Do I have to bring out a picture book for you to understand that?

You keep making these rather dramatic and absolute claims, then hide behind citations several steps removed from them that thereby fail to support the point you have actually made. Show this, not abstracts stating trend lines vaguely in the same direction.

I cannot "show" that because it is personal experience. You on the other hand have shown absolutely nothing so far, you just keep repeating "but it cannot be so".

French fries differ from unprocessed potatoes in typically adding large amounts of fat in the frying, directly contradicting your underlying point that carbs are by far the worst calorie source. This is five times the effect, with the data on potatoes alone having a lower bound of a flat line at 1.0, or in other words no effect at all.

You either have not read the sentence you have quoted, or are flat out lying.

I will assume the former, so let me help you understand:

This meta-analysis support a significant positive association between high potatoes consumption and risk of T2D, especially the consumption of French fries.

...significant positive association between high potatoes consumption and risk of T2D, especially the consumption of French fries.

To help:
"significant positive association" - it means that there is in fact a link between X and Y
"between high potatoes consumption and risk of T2D" - link in question is one between high consumption of potatoes and significantly increased risk of Type 2 Diabetes
"especially" - even more so than; to a greater extent than other things being noted; it is a word used to single out one thing above others sharing the same characteristic
"the consumption of French Fries" - thing being singled out are the French Fries

In other words: high consumption of potatoes significantly increases risk of Type 2 diabetes, and consumption of French Fries is far worse than consumption of other types of potatoes.

Just because French Fries are exceptionally bad doesn't mean that potatoes are not bad. In other words, your quote actually supports my point about carbs being bad. As for your point about fat in the French Fries, see my response to the quote below:

The thing that gives a solid counter-point is this citation contradicting my assumption that starches are slow uptake, which further undermines the value of the study you cited to the points you've made by noting a higher glycemic index, the value used for the turnaround to blood sugar, for boiled potatoes than french fries. Together, the two meta-analyses imply that more diabetes occurrences came from the item with less effect on blood sugar. Do tell how that works with your position revolving around abrupt blood sugar impact.

Additional absurdities include ice cream and soda having lower glycemic index values than most grains (though not corn, and barley is very far down), and the reference pure glucose not having the 100 the index is defined by but instead 103 plus or minus 3, meaning from 100 to 106. As well as fructose, of corn syrup infamy, being down at 15.

Yeah, because things are more complex than that. Glycemic index alone is not of much use, as you will have understood had you bothered to actually read what I have written throughout the thread. What also matters is nutrients that food provides, how satiating food is, as well as the portion size. Glycemic load is far better indication than glycemic index:

Although even it is not perfect, as you also need to consider satiety signals and so on. As I pointed out previously: grains are bad not just because of sugar, but because they provide no nutrients. And entire purpose of food is to provide nutrients to body, so if you don't have nutrients, you will be feeling hungry irrelevant of the glycemic load. But if glycemic load is high you will be feeling hungry irrelevant of the nutrients as well. So you need to consider both.

Boiled potatoes and french fries are both bad because both raise blood sugar and are not very satiating - but French fries are far worse than boiled potatoes because they had been fried in seed oils (only French Fries not necessarily fried in seed oils are ones you fry at home). And frying in seed oils has several mutually-reinforcing debilitating effects:

• Turns out that when you eat fat and carbs together, effect on organism is far worse than if you had eaten each of them separately because body does not distinguish very well - so when carbs kick off the insulin response, oil gets grabbed and stored alongside the carbs.
• Seed oils are inflammatory, and especially so when exposed to high temperatures. This means that not only do they bring in a load of carbs together with fat (meaning that body cannot handle said carbs as fat- and carb- pathways are different) but they also damage the organism at the same time. And inflammation is one of major causes of obesity (and then obesity causes further inflammation, and so on ad nauseum).
• Seed oils are in fact worse than sugar when it comes to obesity. But thing is, many of the factors that make seed oils so bad (linoleic acid specifically) are already present in the grains - so grain-based diet still has some and perhaps all of the results of eating seed oils.
• Oh, and about high temperatures? Production of seed oils involves exposing seeds to high temperatures, which means that your sunflower oil comes packaged already pre-oxidized. And if you fry something in it, that is already second-stage oxidization - compare to butter and olive oil which are 1) more resistant to heat damage and 2) not oxidized even before they had been bought.
• Then you have the fact that french fries are carbs. Yeah, so are potatoes. But difference is in preparation temperature. Potatoes are cooked, which is a temperature of 100-odd degrees Celsius (water won't get much warmer than that as it will evaporate). But french fries are fried, which is a temperature of 200 - 250 degrees Celsius. And this leads to formation of acrylamide, which is toxic and cancerogenic.
• Lastly, seed oils in fact stimulate hunger in a manner similar to what sugar and carbohydrates do. This is the exact opposite of the behavior of the, say, olive oils or animal fats, both of which are highly satiating.

You need to understand that everything we are talking about here relates to each other. Nothing is black and white: food that may appear good based solely on blood sugar response can still be very bad if it doesn't fulfill other factors (primarily, nutrient availability), and the opposite.

That is why I had been, as you say, "moving goalposts". Assuming you are actually interested in honest debate, it would appear that you have a serious case of tunnel vision. But when it comes to diet, "A" is never "just A"; there is always a range of factors to consider. And frankly, forum debate is a very bad format for discussing such a complex topic. I know my writing can be scattered, but do try to follow, will you?

As for grains and wheat in particular? They check all the "bad" boxes. High in carbohydrates? Low in actual nutrients? Pro-inflammatory? Yeah, they've got all the dietary sins covered.

Additional absurdities include ice cream and soda having lower glycemic index values than most grains (though not corn, and barley is very far down), and the reference pure glucose not having the 100 the index is defined by but instead 103 plus or minus 3, meaning from 100 to 106. As well as fructose, of corn syrup infamy, being down at 15.

See above. Ice cream and "soda" both have moderately to very high glycemic load.

Antinutrients are in fact irrelevant to the claim that carbohydrates themselves are poison. The foods being typically nutrient-poor is in fact irrelevant to the same claim. Your claim is "the substance class is actively bad", your evidence is "not in good enough foods", these are not logically equivalent positions as you have been insisting I treat them as.

They are not, because carbohydrate-rich foods are typically very rich in antinutrients as well. We are discussing food here, not chemistry. If I talk about "carbohydrates", that generally means "carbohydrate foods", except where specifically (or through context) noted otherwise. And if carbs make you absorb antinutrients at a higher rate than you would otherwise, can you really claim carbs themselves are not poisonous?

Speaking if carbotoxicity, read this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6265656/

 

[colorles]

Could we even support the numbers of people alive now if everyone started eating mostly meat/fats and almost no carbs. I know large amounts of carbs are bad but wouldn't we need a lot of people to die in order to do it.

Large amount of carbs without plentiful physical activity and eating meat and fats along with it...is unhealthy. Otherwise they are fine to eat and this coming from a man who eats alot of potatoes and alot of meat. It doesn't have to be one or the other. Although to be honest, alot depends on person to person and ethnicity to ethnicity. Humans are not all the same and will all not be healthy on the same combinations of foods and lifestyles.

 

[Typhonis]

What effect does regular fasting have on weight gain and diabetes?

 

[S'task]

I never understood how people could fall for the greatness of plastic. I grew up with paper grocery bags. My in-laws use them as weed barriers in their garden. They decompose and ate back in the soil. Glass bottle don't decompose but they are perfectly stable and don't contaminate the environment. On top of that plastic is made from oil and we all know the problem oil has caused over the years.

. . . Because plastics provided significant advantages over prior materials?

You talk about glass bottles not contaminating the environment and being, in effect, perfectly stable. Certainly all true, but what happens when said glass bottle falls from table height onto a hard floor? They shatter, scattering hard sharp shards of glass all over the place and spilling whatever was contained in them that now needs to be cleaned up.

Meanwhile what happens if you drop a plastic container from the same height? It bounces, maybe deforms slightly, and if it contains a liquid the liquid might spill out but a person can often quickly pick up the container and not lose much.

Glass thick enough not to break from such a fall? Adds considerable bulk and weight to a product, whereas a similar sized non-breaking container made from plastic takes up a fraction of the volume and a fraction of the weight. This might not seem like much from a final point of sale consumer, but consider it from the other end of the supply chain; the difference between glass and plastic could mean significant cost savings in transportation and increased volume of shipments via use of plastic containers over glass.

Note that plastic predominately replaced glass containers, not paper containers, most products traditionally packaged in paper didn't convert to plastic specifically due to paper having the same set of advantages over glass that plastic does. The one exception to that is in bags for customers, and that has to do with the same reason that glass and plastic are used with some products over paper: moisture exposure. Paper does not contend with moisture exposure well, and as such can rapidly break down, since groceries are often mixed, plastic bags tend to be easier to handle just in case liquids spill, they contain the spill and don't lose structural integrity from it. Further as to paper vs plastic bags it also goes to that volume factor. Because of their nature, you really can only carry two or so paper bags at a time, meanwhile a person can load themselves down with six to a dozen plastic bags of groceries.

Basically there's a LOT of good reasons why food industry moved to plastic containers over glass, from both end consumer advantages to point of manufacture and transport advantages.

 

[Aldarion]

What effect does regular fasting have on weight gain and diabetes?

Regular fasting is great. It actually helps you regulate blood sugar, will reverse weight gain and can even reverse diabetes (luckily I never got so far to get diabetes, but you have testimonies online).

Part of this is because diabetes is caused by chronically high blood sugar - insulin resistance is merely a side effect of body trying to handle too much sugar in blood: as I said, unusued sugar is basically toxic so body tries to dump it into cells ASAP, but cells - even fat cells - can only accept so much sugar. So what happens is that body increases insulin production in an attempt to force the issue, but cells too adapt to insulin and get insulin resistant. And more / more frequently you eat, more quickly this process happens. This then leads to a mutually-reinforcing spiral until your cells are so insulin resistant that your body basically loses the ability to regulate blood sugar, and you have to take insulin shots because organism cannot produce enough insulin. But insulin resistance (and thus diabetes) can actually be reversed, at least to an extent. Just don't force your body to handle constant blood sugar spikes that appear as a result of frequent meals.

Second reason is that fasting helps you figure out what is actually food and what is just addiction; real food will keep you sated for most of the day so you will be able to do OMAD or similar fasting with no issue. Reason why that is is because said food will not cause massive variations in blood sugar - hunger is in large part caused by drops in blood sugar, which is why I for example always felt hungry after eating fruit or sweets (sweet food > blood sugar spike > insulin release > blood sugar valley = feeling hungry). And massive variations in blood sugar are one of causes of insulin resistance and diabetes (especially since they cause the above issue of frequent eating). So attempting to fast will help you figure out what food is healthy for you, because you will have to eat proper food in order to do a 16- or 24- -hour fast without feeling absolutely miserable.

Overall, people have succeeded in reversing insulin resistance and, essentially, curing diabetes, by going either onto strict fasting regime, strict ketogenic or carnivore diet, or most often, both at the same time.

 

[DarthOne]

. . . Because plastics provided significant advantages over prior materials?

You talk about glass bottles not contaminating the environment and being, in effect, perfectly stable. Certainly all true, but what happens when said glass bottle falls from table height onto a hard floor? They shatter, scattering hard sharp shards of glass all over the place and spilling whatever was contained in them that now needs to be cleaned up.

Meanwhile what happens if you drop a plastic container from the same height? It bounces, maybe deforms slightly, and if it contains a liquid the liquid might spill out but a person can often quickly pick up the container and not lose much.

Glass thick enough not to break from such a fall? Adds considerable bulk and weight to a product, whereas a similar sized non-breaking container made from plastic takes up a fraction of the volume and a fraction of the weight. This might not seem like much from a final point of sale consumer, but consider it from the other end of the supply chain; the difference between glass and plastic could mean significant cost savings in transportation and increased volume of shipments via use of plastic containers over glass.

Note that plastic predominately replaced glass containers, not paper containers, most products traditionally packaged in paper didn't convert to plastic specifically due to paper having the same set of advantages over glass that plastic does. The one exception to that is in bags for customers, and that has to do with the same reason that glass and plastic are used with some products over paper: moisture exposure. Paper does not contend with moisture exposure well, and as such can rapidly break down, since groceries are often mixed, plastic bags tend to be easier to handle just in case liquids spill, they contain the spill and don't lose structural integrity from it. Further as to paper vs plastic bags it also goes to that volume factor. Because of their nature, you really can only carry two or so paper bags at a time, meanwhile a person can load themselves down with six to a dozen plastic bags of groceries.

Basically there's a LOT of good reasons why food industry moved to plastic containers over glass, from both end consumer advantages to point of manufacture and transport advantages.

About that….



East Germany has you covered.

 

[S'task]

About that….



East Germany has you covered.

While that is interesting and all, the thinness of this type of glass is still much thicker and heavier than comparable plastic containers. So while it does beat the prior glass containers, it still isn't better than plastic for distribution. Further, for distribution of goods you generally WANT disposability, and that kind of glass is pretty much the opposite of easily disposable for a household.

Now, if we were reengineering our entire supply chain from the ground up with reusable glass containers in mind you probably could make a strong case for it, but with the system we have now, having a cycling distribution system for products isn't something that is feasible.

 

[Aldarion]

Now, if we were reengineering our entire supply chain from the ground up with reusable glass containers in mind you probably could make a strong case for it, but with the system we have now, having a cycling distribution system for products isn't something that is feasible.

That shouldn't be too difficult though. We already have a system of returning glass bottles to the store, and wasn't milk once upon a time delivered in glass bottles which were then returned to be refilled?

 

[DarthOne]

wasn't milk once upon a time delivered in glass bottles which were then returned to be refilled?

That it was.

 

[Marduk]

That shouldn't be too difficult though. We already have a system of returning glass bottles to the store, and wasn't milk once upon a time delivered in glass bottles which were then returned to be refilled?

Cost and convenience factors...
Many countries have that system for beer bottles. It's not getting more popular unless its use is mandated by law and artificial fees.

 

[DarthOne]

Cost and convenience factors...
Many countries have that system for beer bottles. It's not getting more popular unless its use is mandated by law and artificial fees.

Yeah and as we’ve seen, people will shit in the streets rather than use a bathroom if they can get away with it. People are lazy and undisciplined as a whole.

 

[Aldarion]

Why processed food is bad... and why calories alone are not enough for healthy diet:

 

[S'task]

That shouldn't be too difficult though. We already have a system of returning glass bottles to the store, and wasn't milk once upon a time delivered in glass bottles which were then returned to be refilled?

That it was.

OK, so, firstly, in most of the US there's no mass system for returning glass bottles to stores, that went out of style in the 1970s... pretty much due to everything going to plastic containers in stores. Now, perhaps in Europe you still have that infrastructure, and if so, then yes, scaling it up is much easier, but in the US we're not looking at doing something like that, we're looking at creating a system from, effectively, scratch with all the new costs that entails.

None of that infrastructure exists today and the cost of building it, running it, as well as the lower capacity that such a system would have for distribution over plastic containers can really justify the attempt.

Firstly, let's talk strictly about milk. In the days of glass milk bottles brought for delivery, milk was typically coming in from fairly local dairies, processed, and distributed on a fairly small scale to the end user, and bottles had to be brought back, washed, and sanitized before they could be used again. Modern milk distribution comes from a much more distant area and instead are delivered to the local store to be bought from there, and many population centers no longer have sufficient dairy production nearby to even HAVE local dairies, or to support the population on the local production. This scale issue makes it so that it would be next to impossible to implement on any large scale and it doesn't seem to me that there would be any cost savings to either the company or end user, in fact I'd expect this to INCREASE the cost of a staple that is already seeing cost increases.

Why cost increases? Well, firstly you have to build completely new processing plants for returned bottles, and there's both the initial and ongoing cost of running them. Now, granted, loss on the bottles should be mostly due to people stealing them rather than breakage, which is great, but you'll still have ongoing replacement costs. Then the packaging does weight more and take up more volume compared to plastics, so you reduce the amount you can transport and deliver, as well as now ALSO having the cost of retrieval. Oh, and there's the cost of building factories to, designing and producing these glass bottles as nobody presently manufactures them...

Long story short: there's iffy long term profit and no short term profit from doing such a conversion and it's likely to increase the cost of a staple product, which makes the limited benefits of such a conversation questionable at best.