Thread: What the hell is going on with the new US Dietary Guidelines?

This week in the Discord thread a Snacker asked me what the hell is going on with the new US Dept of Health Dietary Guidelines. 

If you’re one of the lucky people who have managed to avoid Dietary Guidelines Discourse online this week – lucky! – then they look like this:

My response in Discord was ‘lololololol how have MAHA invested so much energy into hating on the pyramid visual, to turn around and produce… a pyramid??’ 

It seems entirely in-step with an administration whose whole MO is to cause chaos, confusion, and to distract us from *gestures wildly* whatever the fuck this is.

The US ‘Food Pyramid’ was introduced in 1992 and has been through several iterations. Most notably MyPyramid in 2005, and MyPlate in 2011. The pyramid representation of dietary guidelines was developed in Sweden in the 70s, but often gets criticised for being confusing - pyramids are for mummies, not food! This is what led to the development of MyPlate (the UK’s Eatwell guide is also represented by a plate). The idea is that a plate visual makes it easier for people to see the relative proportions of what they ‘should’ eat at an average meal. 

The proto-MAHA contingency have long lambasted USDA dietary guidelines for being too heavily influenced by a corrupt food industry (and certainly, nutritional sciences has a big problem with conflicts of interest). But overall, they were balanced and fit in with the best available evidence.