Dr Marty Makara from the FDA announced this week that the FDA are in the process of revamping the Food Pyramid. Let’s take a look at what he said and what that could mean for us going forward.
Less Petrochemicals in our Food
Dr Makary called out the Biden administration’s choices for front of package labeling of nutrition facts. They chose to highlight added suger, sodium and saturated fat. Now the added sugar is of course a very important thing for everyone to know and probably the most important factor in choosing healthy foods but the other 2?
What should be on the label is how many petrochemicals are in the food. How many preservatives? How much seed oil? How many ingredients that have been invented in the last 100 years that humans never evolved to eat? These are the facts people need to know when selecting the best foods to feed their family.
Where Your Calories Come From Matters
The dogma so far is that the only thing that really matters when choosing food is the total number of calories consumed. As if 200 calories of steak and 200 calories of chocolate cake are essentially the same thing. But we are learning that our bodies respond in different ways to different foods.
Carbs cause a large spike in insulin, a fat storage hormone. Eating calories from cheap carbs, junk food and fast food is far more obesogenic than the same number of calories from meat and vegetables.
Less Industry Influence of Food Choices
One GIANT change is the FDA will be removing all Big Pharma representatives from FDA advisory councils. They can still come in like any member of the public and ask questions but no more direct influence from within the councils themselves. Anything we can do to Big Pharma out of our government, I’m a huge fan of.
The Food Pyramid is Used to Determine School Lunches
One giant change we will see from this is that the food pyramid is used to determine the types of nutrition that go into school lunches and prison meals. Do you have any idea how many dry pieces of Sysco pizza I was served in middle school with a pint of 2% milk and told that was a nutritionally complete lunch?
The vegetable was the tomato sauce and the meat was the microscopic bits of what I hope was beef that lightly sprinkled on top. And that was 40 years ago, who knows what they are serving now.
At the risk of repeating myself, I really like what RFK and the MAHA movement is doing in government today. I wish the Godspeed in solving what I believe are the biggest problems of today.
