Reply #105: Yes, Pyramid is all outta whack

[lolly]

We've certainly been given bad advice on weight here in the U.S.

The "pyramid" that health classes teach us to follow tells us to eat 6-11 (yes, 11) servings of bread/pasta/cereal a day.

If I ate 6 small bowls of pasta every day, I would get into football games free with a "Goodyear" tee-shirt.

Two books--"Fast-Food Nation" by Eric Schlosser and "Food Politics" by Marion Nestle address the problem of American culture and government policies and how they've affected our weight.

According to Nestle, food producers contribute enough money to politicians to influence what the supposedly neutral agencies come up with (I know this is a shock to everyone at DU, who could NEVER believe that $ would influence government policy, but . . .)
Hence we can't advise people to cut out certain foods in any governmental literature.

Schlosser's bete noir is high-fructose corn syrup, which he believes affects our metabolism, making us crave more sweets and making it easier for our body to convert carbs to fat. It was approved for widespread use sometime in the 70s, made it MUCH cheaper for food companies to sweeten everything. Says the explosion in available snack foods and much of the supersizing phenomenon is due to the use of HFCS, which is much cheaper to use than cane sugar. This is why Big Gulps are so cheap. Food companies make a ton of money by selling double the number of calories for only a few extra cents, so that's why they encourage us to buy.