America’s food pyramid is now flipped, going all in on full-fat foods.
“You see cheese, red meat [and] butter prominently displayed in the food group,” said Dr. Nate Wood, physician and chef, and head of the culinary medicine program at the Yale School of Medicine.
“Red meat and saturated fat in general is not going to be a good thing for our health, and that concerns me as a physician.”
In contrast, “the nuts, seeds [and] legumes take up a very, very small portion,” he said. “So a lot of issues there with where the specific foods are placed.”
The changes to the dietary guidelines, which were announced this month by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., urge Americans to consume fresh vegetables, whole grains and dairy while avoiding highly processed foods and added sugars.
“My message is clear: Eat real food,” Kennedy said at a White House briefing.
The original food pyramid was introduced in the ‘90s and that visual was replaced by MyPlate under the Obama administration, now supplanted by the upside down Food Pyramid.
‘Good science’
While the flipped pyramid is garnering attention, Wood said its accompanying dietary guidelines offer diverging – and in many cases valuable – nutritional advice.
It’s that document that Americans should focus on, he said.
The guidelines advise eating “a whole lot of plants, [and to] take it easy on saturated fat and ultra processed foods,” Wood said.
“Everyone wants to look at the picture [of the upside down pyramid], but the picture might lead you astray,” Wood cautioned. “I would look at the document. The document has good science. Follow what it says.”
Wait, what now?
The document follows established science, and the pyramid looks like what Kennedy wants it to look like, and there’s a lot of industry influence, Wood said.
“The Cattlemen's Association, the Dairy Council, General Mills, Novo Nordisk, which is the maker of Ozempic,” he pointed out.
The dietary guidelines in the document are not to be dismissed as mere suggestions — they form the basis for what goes in school lunches, and what people in the military get to eat.
“The dietary guidelines are actually OK and helpful in a lot of different ways, largely because they don't differ too terribly much in many ways from previous guidelines,” Wood said.
But why the difference?
“I think the nutrition experts who were identified to help make the guidelines had a job to do, and they have Ph.D.s in nutrition, and they had a moral and academic responsibility to follow the data, and for that reason, the guidelines really follow the data,” Wood explained.
“Most people are going to see [the pyramid] on their social media. And I think the current administration is really interested in garnering public approval through perception,” he said.
“So if they're able to kind of squeak by these guidelines that really conform to traditional science and our academic understanding of what is and isn't healthy, when they deviate from that, they're able to slide that under the radar by showing us this new, shiny food pyramid that doesn't really reflect the guidelines.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
