Meatless Monday: Food Pyramids throughout the decades (and how they screwed with the idea of “healthy eating”)

Food has come a long way, baby. You’d think it was easy enough to determine what a balanced diet is, but in the mid-20th century, when processed foods, fast foods, and general convenience foods were rapidly pushing out the good ol’ home-cooked meal of yesteryears, there arose a need to establish some sort of nutritional guideline.

Introducing: The four basic food groups!

These groups themselves have evolved over the years, from charts to pyramids to plates and everything in between. Let’s take a trip down memory lane and see just how the four basics — meat, dairy, grains, and fruits/veggies — have been treated since the mid-1900s.

Coined the “Basic Seven”, created with the first-ever Recommended Daily Allowances from the National Academy of Sciences, this first USDA food structure aimed to make sure people got their daily recommended nutrients, with the addition of “serving sizes”. Note, however, that they don’t define a “serving”… and that one of the food groups was butter!

Then came the Basic Four in 1956; the Seven were cut down, revealing a chart with the four basic food groups that children would learn for decades to come. Not to say the 1956 version didn’t include other groups… it did. But the Basic Four were the most important by far at that time.

This chart (and this era, being post-Depression) still focused on people getting enough, but soon, the tables would turn.

A TV documentary in 1967 named Hunger in America, hosted by CBS, reported the extent of hunger and malnutrition among low-income groups in the US, and people demanded an expansion of federal food assistance programs as a result. Senator George McGovern, selected in 1968 to chair the “Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs”, succeeded in wiping out malnutrition (by 1969, at least), and started focusing on other areas of health and nutrition.

One was addressing the same issue the American Heart Association was tackling at the time, that fat and cholesterol consumption should be lowered for better health. While the link between the two had never been scientifically studied, the “Dietary Goals for the United States,” published in January 1977, recommended that all Americans reduce their fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol consumption while increasing their carbohydrate consumption by 55-60% of daily calories.

Understandably, the cattle, egg, and dairy industries went crazy! Congress was essentially telling people that animal products were bad for you! Despite the pressure from these industries to revise the report, which occurred later that year, the damage was already done… and you can tell by the next graphic.

To mirror the way in which food should be approached — simply! — the USDA streamlined their chart while also addressing the link between too much of certain foods and the onset of chronic diseases. This chart adds “fats, oils, and sweets” to the four basic food groups, cautioning moderation. We all know how well that worked.

You’ll also note that milk and meat consumption remained at the same levels after this, despite the meat and dairy industries pushing for more inclusion.

The chart remained relatively untouched until 1992, when the USDA introduced a “pyramid” with bricks that represented proportions of foods in a supposedly balanced diet. But this chart was far from perfect: Critics pointed out that the good fats needed to develop and protect the brain shared a “brick” with bad fats that clog arteries, for instance, and bacon was put on par with poultry. (No, really!) And the pyramid allowed for so much bread that it would take years to attempt to reverse this trend.

And what’s with those little dots for fat and sugar, anyway?

Oddly, this pyramid was actually the original work of Sweden, a country with a heart disease death rate even higher than that of the United States. So… good move there, US!

Since then, multiple studies have been conducted that show the efficacy and healthfulness of a low-carb, whole foods diet, but the 1992 pyramid — nor its successor, below, in 2005 — reflected those scientific results.

In fact, the pyramid didn’t change much at all, except that it included a customizable website, which seemed to offset the little dude climbing the stairs to encourage exercise: Let’s put all this information online! Duh.

This pyramid didn’t receive a lot of good press at all, being dubbed “vague” and “confusing” from its onset. Apparently, no one caught on that some foods had smaller “wedges” to convey they should be eaten in smaller amounts. But really, who could tell that?

Oh, and back to the little dude: Apparently, if we exercise, we can climb right over the pyramid and eat whatever the eff we want! Or head straight for the old pyramid’s “fats, oils, and sweets”.

Since we were apparently too dumb to figure it out ourselves, the FLOTUS (Michelle Obama) brought us right back to the four basic food groups — grains, protein, and this time separate areas for fruits and vegetables — with a little moon-shaped dairy in a corresponding glass. Infinitely easier, but really, when’s the last time you saw a dinner plate half-full* with fruits and veggies?

Regardless, though, it was a great improvement on past pyramids. This one actually included grains (though it doesn’t show what kinds of grains…) as being equal to vegetables, and managed to at least imply that the simpler the food, the better it is.

*Always on the positive side, I see!

And finally, my favorite: Early this year, Harvard declared that dairy is NOT a healthy part of a balanced diet, and responded to all previous food charts and pyramids and plates with one of their own: One that subs milk for, get this… water! (Or coffee or tea, each with little sugar!) And has no other dairy to be seen! Instead, the Harvard experts suggested that “collards, bok choy, fortified soy milk, and baked beans are safer choices than dairy for obtaining calcium, as are high quality supplements”. You go, Harvard!

It also includes a number of other changes: A disclaimer for grains, encouraging people to eat whole grains and cereals rather than their bleached white counterparts; an area for lean meats and beans that limits red meat and excludes other fat-laden meats; the encouragement for good fats rather than butter and trans fats; the need for fruits and veggies to be of various colors (and not counting potatoes and French fries as veggies!); and a little “stay active” button to encourage you to get off your butt.

I’ll have a bit more about this plate in a later post, but all I can start with is… hopefully this will be adopted and used for better health overall. If anything, it’s a grand improvement!

You might also like: