The headline of this NYT op-ed says it all: “Kennedy Is Telling Americans How to Eat. It’s Not Crazy Advice.”
That’s funny; the news article about the guidelines says that they “flip the food pyramid on its head, putting steak, cheese and whole milk near the top.” That doesn’t sound like such good advice!
If you actually read the linked op-ed (I don’t recommend you do), you’ll see that it categorizes two of the items on the new dietary guidelines as “good,” one as “totally fine” (meaning that there’s no evidence for it one way or another, so she’s giving Kennedy credit for a recommendation that at least isn’t bad), two as “complex” (which is actually negative, given that she describes one of these as “this advice may be counterproductive” and the other as “unrealistic for nearly everyone”), and two as “weird” (which I guess is the author’s positive spin).
This is just pitiful. There’s an official government publication with 8 recommendations, 2 of which the op-ed writer characterizes as “good,” and her summary is “These guidelines are a very good start for telling people where to go; now the job should be helping them get there.”
This is what we’ve come to? Official guidelines are being praised for being “not crazy”? She doesn’t even make an argument that the advice is net positive.
Step back for a moment. The U.S. government has access to top nutritional experts (also to top economics professors, for that matter). If they’re giving 8 pieces of advice, these should be 8 pieces of good advice. This isn’t like baseball, where .300 is excellent and .500 is impossible.
Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m not naive here. I don’t think the government’s perfect. Experts can be wrong, also food and nutrition policy are notoriously subject to political influence: the milk lobby, the meat lobby, etc. Last I checked, we still have ethanol subsidies!
But that’s the point: if the government is giving bad advice, that’s bad! To praise them for not being uniformly crazy . . . ummmm, that’s like if your boss’s idiot nephew comes into the office to tell everyone how to do their jobs, and after he leaves, you loudly say, “Hey, this new advice is — dare I say it? — overall very sensible. Junior made a good point when he told the sales force to be more customer-focused. And when he told the engineering team to think outside the box, yeah, you have to admit he’s onto something there.”
My political take on this is that the author is a Democrat and suffers from something I’ve noticed in popular history writing, which is a form of reasoning that focuses on the mistakes on “our side” and assumes that whatever “their side” does is pre-ordained. It’s a sort of fundamental attribution error by which our decisions and mistakes are based on context and circumstance, whereas theirs are based on their unchangeable character.
That’s the soft bigotry of low expectations: setting the bar so low that being mostly “not crazy” is enough. We should be holding the government to a higher standard than that!
More and more I’m thinking that it was a national disgrace that Ted Kennedy got away with Chappaquiddick.
I suspect it is a vestigial instinct of finding common ground / opportunities of bipartisanship.
“A broken clock is right twice a day”. Except the analogy fails because our democratic republic isn’t a clock.
Student:
Yeah, it’s a tough balance. On one hand, the authorities shouldn’t be releasing a document full of bad advice with a bit of good advice mixed in. On the other hand, the authorities of all political persuasions are releasing stupid statements all the time.
Also, Chappaquiddick, which established the principle that a Kennedy can do absolutely anything and get away with it.
I don’t know why they keep publishing op-eds by Emily Oster. She has a long track record of bad takes. And she’s an economist, not a nutritionist.
I see it as a type of grifting (along the lines of Andrew’s “focusing on the mistakes on ‘our side'”) that attempts to proffer wisdom in seeing both sides, or poking holes in the hegemony of “our side” in favor of the other, over simply attending to the truth. (For instance, how many of her “good” recommendations had already been part of past guidance?) For Oster, this has been obvious since her days as champion pandemic minimizer.
This is an extremely uncharitable reading of the article. Take the no added sugar for kids. This is probably a good guideline and the author says so. She classifies it as complex because it’s unrealistic to expect people to follow and it and, like many vices, is fine in moderation. Why would you classify that as “negative?” Much of your statistical advice is also sound in principle but unrealistic for most people to follow consistently. Should I conclude your recommendations are bad?
Your description of her “totally fine” as “meaning that there’s no evidence for it one way or another” is incorrect. There is plenty of evidence for both costs and benefits. It’s a tradeoff, but many experts think it is a sound default recommendation.
And maybe a weighted average is applicable here? Emphasizing whole foods and exposing your kids to peanuts is like 100x more important than whatever they say about beef tallow and that they drew a weird picture to summarize the recommendation. Further, you can’t bat 1.000 here because their is no expert consensus.
My two cents is that RFK gets a lot of bad press because he has implemented lot of bad policies and advice (e.g. vaccines), and therefore journalists are quick to judge him negatively. But the new guidelines are plausibly an improvement over the previous iteration and in fact many legitimate scientists support them.
Justin:
I’m not saying all the recommendations in that document are bad. I’m saying that an official document should only have good recommendations. The idea that it should be praised because it’s not all crazy, that it’s a mix of good, mid, and bad recommendations, that’s what I’m calling the soft bigotry of low expectations here.
Nobody is arguing that it should be praised because its not all crazy. Rather, the argument is that it should be praised because it’s an improvement over the previous guidelines which suffer from the same issues you raise here. I don’t have the expertise to say whether that is correct, but at least some experts agree with it.
A second argument is that because the initial reporting on this was so bad and one sided, it’s useful for a corrective take. Having read several of those articles, I do have the expertise to support this argument.
“…I’m saying that an official document should only have good recommendations. …”
So how certain do you have to be that a recommendation is good in order to include it? Suppose an official document contains 10 recommendations that are each 10% likely to be wrong. Then the document is likely to contain a bad recommendation. Does that mean it should not have been issued?
James:
If an official government document has 10 recommendations, I think that all of them should be reasonable–at the time the document is written! Knowledge will change, and so some of the recommendations can be retrospectively problematic.
It’s my impression that the reason for including questionable or bad recommendations is not scientific uncertainty but rather the influences of business lobbyists and political ideologues.
In any case, sure, I would’t expect a government document to be perfect, as we know that government can indeed be strongly influenced by lobbyists and ideologues.
But when the document contains 8 recommendations, only 2 of which can be labeled as flat-out “good,” that does seem like a problem, and it’s the soft bigotry of low expectations that the op-ed writer is presenting the overall package as praiseworthy just because, in her judgment, it isn’t completely “crazy.”
One bizarre piece of the story is whole grains. Fiber is good, right? And if you get the germ as well as the bran, you’re benefiting even more. Well, whole grains are at the very bottom of the pyramid, that little tippy point that everything else rests on. Something to stay away from most of the time. But, according to the Times, whole grains get a nice writeup in the text version of the guidance. So, putting it all together…..well, you can’t put it all together.
Aside from the weird politics of the current administration, the rank amateurishness is grotesque. In a way, that sends the real message — it’s not important, we’re just doing this stuff because we have to.
Try eating just veggies + meat then some fruits. Whole grains are cheap carbs that make you eat more. Refined sugar is even worst of course (which is totally missing). This looks good to me based on my own experience:
https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf
It looks good, but so does the original pyramid, or any other set of recommendations from heart association or diabetes assoc.
The issue is nobody follows any of that. Most of us eat more of everything than before.
It’s really the food cylinder we all follow, not the pyramid.
Maybe I have never seen the original food pyramid, but the one I grew up with was essentially the opposite of this one.
Quite funny to see you comment on every topic with the same confident and dismissive tone. You’re either an expert of unseen proportions or a plain bs-er.
Many people never learned to research topics for themselves, and rely on picking which authority/consensus to listen to. This makes actually knowing about stuff seem like magic, rather than the reality of applying more effort, and good heuristics for how to apply it.
Its the same as science vs NHST. To NHST-users, someone applying science seems to have unbelievable, even magical, capability to anticipate what comes next.
Based on available science, putting red meat at the top of the pyramid is pretty crazy.
I think even based on available science, available science might be flawed, incorrect, corrupt, and who knows what else more.
Anyway, here’s another song by Jesse Welles titled “College” and a link to a book by Dowden titled “Logical Reasoning”. The two might be related depending on one’s views about certain things.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6mPBEFkv1w
https://www.csus.edu/faculty/d/dowden/_internal/_documents/logical-reasoning.pdf
Anonymous –
“I think even based on available science, available science might be flawed, incorrect, corrupt, and who knows what else more.”
Sure. But what would you have public health officials use as a basis for recommendations other than available science?
Quote from above: “Sure. But what would you have public health officials use as a basis for recommendations other than available science?”
“Availabe science” is of course difficult to interpret, but in this case I take it to imply following certain advise that certain people put forward like has been done in the past concerning not eating (a lot of) certain fats (which may not be viewed as having been sub-optimal or incorrect or whatever advise).
Perhaps nutritional advise should be a result of some sort of combination of 1) common sense, 2) historical and biological perspectives, and 3) an interpretation of currently “available nutritional science” that incorporates certain viewpoints like that it can be corrupt or faulty. Add to that a pinch of the “less is more, simple is better” view and approach and you might have something different than the “follow the most recent science” approach.
I think one should be capable of making certain claims, or interpreting certain scientific findings relating to food intake with an increasing degree of certainty and importantance. I am not a food “expert” or biologist or nutritionist, but when I look at the food pyramid or “scientific” advise given in the past which may now be viewed differently perhaps it might show something in light of the above. Take the egg yoke thing for example. Wasn’t that part of some advise regarding the “bad cholesterol” or “too fatty” or whatever advise from decades ago? If so, perhaps it can be viewed in light of the above. Would it have made sense, and be plausible, for people in the past thousands and millions of years to 1) eat eggs, and 2) eat both the egg yolk and the egg white when eating eggs.
Such pondering may be useful, regardless of current “available science”. Then you can also think about how certain things related to the taste or some other aspect of natural, whole foods might be evolutionarily ingrained (pun intended) and may provide a clue to a human being to eat it or not. No “available science” needed perhaps. People have lived for thousands or millions of years without “available science” I reason (at least from a certain perspective), which may provide some avenues or clues to possibly consider when it comes to thinking about what to eat and why.
The entire thing makes me also think about the recent discussion about polling. You can possibly search some articles about “why nutrition studies generate contradictions and mistrust” and make some possible connections to the polling discussion in the recent blog post, especially regarding possible overload of information, too many details, possible corruption and manipulation, etc. etc. etc.
One issue everybody is overlooking is that the guidelines are just that, guidelines. That famous food pyramid was just a suggestion. Who actually followed it? The consumption of all forms of fat, sweets, what have you, did not go down because gummint suggested to eat it sparingly way back when. If anything it’s gone up, just like everything.
We have calorie surplus problem, whatever form it comes in.
Have you seen the Twitter/X @DougJBalloon “NYTPitchbot” account? It does similar stuff deliberately as parody. It’s a one-note joke, but every news cycle is an opportunity to play it.
“Whether it’s Democrats putting their pronouns in email signatures or Republicans shooting and killing unarmed drivers, both sides have taken actions that the other side finds threatening.”
“Whether it’s ICE executing innocent American civilians or liberals retweeting Heather Cox Richardson, both sides have engaged in some truly appalling behavior.”
“Donald Trump has set the United States back 20 years economically and scientifically. But I saw my daughter wearing a Che t-shirt on Facebook. I have never felt more politically homeless.”
Thanks for the quotations. I wish I had created any of them. Offensiveness is in the eyes of the beholder. Things militarily being what they are currently in Minnesota, and being a step slower to my left, I am grateful to my father for my pale white skin and blue eyes.
Did Emily Oster write the headline? If her editor wrote the headline and it was aimed more at getting clicks than accurately capturing what Oster wrote, that could (at least partially) explain the apparent conflict.
No way to know, of course, but the headline doesn’t feel out of line with the thrust of the piece. If the headline is hers, it feels like she may have intended “it’s not crazy” less as “this is great advice” and more as “this is actually not as terrible as you might expect, given the source.”
I have no idea whether Oster wrote the headline or not. But the point of the headline doesn’t seem to be about the substance of the guidelines at all – the “news” it is conveying is that not everything RFK says/does is bad. This is an attempt to appear balanced while exhibiting a strong distaste of RFK. One one hand, it is a low bar as Andrew says. On another, it is an indirect criticism of RFK. I personally don’t like these indirect statements as they are a form of dishonesty. Rather than directly saying what you think of RFK, it is a way to criticize him while appearing to be balanced (and even say something nice).
In a similar vein, I could say that there are some things Trump has done that I agree with (there are, although it is precious few, given the number of things he has done and the universal disapproval I have for the way he has done things). While it is a true statement, it really belies the fact that I have no respect for how he has done things, and I disapprove of the vast majority of the substance of what he has done. What would be the point of saying that not everything he has done is bad? Is it to make me seem “objective?” If the point is to separate the substance of decisions with the manner in which they are made, then I can see value in that. But the point should be that regardless of any sense there is in the new guidelines, the way that RFK has run HHS is awful. There is value in separating substance and process, but I think the important point is that the process is terrible, regardless of the actual substance of the decisions.
Fair points, Dale. My main point was I wasn’t sensing any dissonance between the headline and the article. I think we’d be in agreement that picking out the good bits in a mixed policy bag is intellectually dishonest, whether the writer is a fan of the changes or a skeptic who wants to come in with a surprising/balanced/objective take.
Thanks for expressing this clearly and IMO accurately.
I can clearly remember being taught this food pyramid stuff at school and later on coming across more and more information that things may be different or should be different than those earlier pyramid guidelines. Anyway, I did some quick searching just now, and came across the following website which may do some of the kinds of things I sometimes notice when hearing or reading things from “news” sources and “experts” and “the media”:
https://www.eatingwell.com/new-food-pyramid-11882035
1) The following is written: “While labeled as “essential,” fruits and vegetables come secondary to animal products, per the pyramid.”
I notice that two of the pictures of this new pyramid that accompany the article on this exact website seem to have some animal products and fruits and vegetables on exactly the same (top) height in the pyramid. It is therefore noteworthy to me that the above quote is depicted there as well.
2) The following is written: “The new food pyramid features saturated-fat-rich foods like cheese and red meat in the widest part (at the top), which suggests that they should be consumed more than those foods closer to the bottom, which heavily feature legumes and whole grains,” Peck notes. “This is inconsistent with what we know to be true, which is that saturated fat should be limited to 10% or less of total calorie intake.”
I notice that, if I am understanding things correctly, the saturated fats should be limited to be 10% of total calories which might very well be something very different than saturated-fat-rich-foods like cheese and red meat being limited to 10% of total calories. In other words: even leaving the validity of the 10% alone, I assume eating lots of saturated-fat-rich foods might still result in a calorie intake of 10% or less saturated fat. I don’t know the details regarding all the numbers, but this to me does not at all necessarily seem “inconsistent”.
3) The following is written: “There’s also some healthy food groups that aren’t prioritized on the pyramid, like gut-healthy fermented foods, and beans and grains take more of a backseat towards the bottom of the visual.
“Both legumes and whole grains are a valuable source of fiber, a nutrient the vast majority of Americans are not consuming enough of,” she explains.”
I did a quick search and many fruits and vegetables (e.g. brocolli, peas) have lots of fiber in them, and they are depicted right at the top of the new food pyramid if I am able to correctly interpret the pictures of a brocolli and a bag of frozen peas. The step of first naming some food groups that aren’t “prioritized” and subsequently connecting them to fiber and subsequently talking about how important fiber-intake is makes it seem like fiber isn’t “prioritized”. However, fiber is included in many fruits and vegetables depicted in the top of the pyramid.
On top of that, there are some little words and sentences here and there like “inverted”, “this isn’t your avarge food pyramid”, “it’s upside down”, “this is inconsistent with what we know to be true”, “simplify” that add to the possible (deliberately or not) painting of a certain picture (which may not be accurate or valid). All in all, this might be a nice example of how things might come across when writing about things in a particular way.
Quote from above: “I can clearly remember being taught this food pyramid stuff at school and later on coming across more and more information that things may be different or should be different than those earlier pyramid guidelines.”
If (any of) my comments above make sense, it might show how a pretty simple and basic level of reasoning skill (or what’s the appropriate term here) might be useful for many things. It’s also because of that, that I think that stuff like reasoning and logic should be taught at schools, starting from age 5, 6, 7 or something like that and up (where I was likely taught this food pyramid stuff).
I am no food “expert” or no “journalist” or “website author” but I can (apparently) point to a few, possibly essential and crucial, sentences in the piece that may paint a certain picture that may not be accurate or valid. Learning about, and honing, reasoning and logic skills might make this possible, and might be very useful for many things in one’s life. Seems pretty useful and important to me to learn about, and I keep wondering why I wasn’t taught much, if anything, concerning that stuff. Not even at university.
Not.
Even.
At.
University.
And to the recent commenter talking about intellectualism and listening to Joe Rogan or something like that in a recent blog post discussion here: perhaps this is all provides a nice reason why some people might like to listen to Joe Rogan. Perhaps there’s some value to be found there, in more ways than one. If I am not mistaken Kennedy has been a guest there, and so has Jesse Welles. The latter is a musician who makes songs, one of which is what I am listening to now. Here’s some lyrics of the song I am listening to now that I think are fitting in this all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P6Am38Eym4
“I met real poets
The one’s that don’t even know it
They work at Jiffy Lube
They work at Braum’s
They don’t read the papers
They’re just-a rolling along”
That’s an easy one! They don’t teach the skills of reasoning and logic (AKA Critical Thinking, eh?) because they do not want nor value a critically thinking populace because such a populace would not tolerate nor allow their power-hungry, oligarchial, dystopian vision to come to fruition. It’s all part of their long game plan.
Ah, perhaps that’s why “the tools of learning have been lost”…
Whatever may be the case, seems pretty important to learn about all that stuff if only to try and decide which foods to eat and why. Here’s Dorothy Sayers 1947 paper titled “The Lost Tools Of Learning” which I like a lot.
https://dn790008.ca.archive.org/0/items/sayers1948losttoolslearning/Sayers%2C%201948%2C%20Lost%20Tools%20%3A%20Learning_text.pdf
I get the impression that whoever wrote the food guide never heard of vegetarians let alone vegans.
OOPs, my mistake. I missed the vegetarian sections on first reading.
The famous religious wars between various versions of Christianity pale in comparison to conflicts between vegans and vegetarians. My one experience of being in the household of vegans was quite educational because I had not realized how many vegan alternative items exist in food stores.
That’s true. I am a vegetarian angry at vegans for pushing veggie items off the menu.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2021/may/20/who-moved-my-cheese-the-silent-battle-between-vegetarians-and-vegans
The whole thing is pretty bizarre. While the pyramid graphic is indeed upside down and there’s a big steak at the top (which is now the base of the pyramid), the pyramid also doesn’t actually indicate relative proportions of food groups at all, it’s just a bunch of pictures of food in a pyramid shape. The text itself isn’t all that interesting. In a token paean to Kennedy and his ilk’s recent trendy obsession, protein is emphasized towards the top of the document and for some reason they recommend full fat dairy. Most of the rest of it is pretty much the exact same recommendations that we’ve been getting, including things like limiting saturated fats which directly contradict Kennedy and his crowd’s absurd public endorsements like deep frying a turkey in beef tallow. The theatrics and the pyramid and the introduction and the MAHA stuff seem to be meant to give an impression of a radical shift or inversion, while the actual doing is of course done by the same bureaucrat scientists as before.
The MAHA crowd’s obsession with protein is really bizarre because there’s not really any evidence that the average American is underconsuming protein. There seems to be this prevailing sense that protein has been underemphasized or even that the government previously was trying to take away their protein.
RE: whole grains Anonenuwieunfoid — as you should probably know, people’s taste in food and lifestyles vary a lot, which pretty strongly affect ad libitum diet efficacy. I think the recommendation to avoid grains entirely and consume most of your carbs through fruit is a pretty good average recommendation if you’re a sedentary person and you want to lose weight. If you want to perform well in athletic activities though, you’re gonna want more carbs than a typical person would want to consume through fruit.
Quote from above: “If you want to perform well in athletic activities though, you’re gonna want more carbs than a typical person would want to consume through fruit.”
“Do you even potato?”
Depends on preparation, but a baked russet has 37 grams of carbohydrates. Although I love a fresh baked potato with a little salt and fat, I’d have trouble eating more than one in a sitting, probably because it also has 3-4 grams of fiber. A cup of cooked white rice has 44 grams of carbohydrates and < 1 grams of fiber. The ability to easily scale grains up and down is also why they're popular with bodybuilder types.
Back when I ran competitively, even cooked white rice wasn't ideal on competition days. For that, you want straight sugar and electrolytes, like a marthoner's energy gel.
“My political take on this is that the author is a Democrat and suffers from something I’ve noticed in popular history writing, which is a form of reasoning that focuses on the mistakes on “our side” and assumes that whatever “their side” does is pre-ordained. It’s a sort of fundamental attribution error by which our decisions and mistakes are based on context and circumstance, whereas theirs are based on their unchangeable character.”
This has had it’s own LGM based designation for several years now, but I only just found out it has it it’s own wikipedia entry!
“Murc’s Law is a term that describes a tendency in political journalism to attribute responsibility or agency only to Democratic Party actors, while treating Republican actions as inevitable or structurally determined.[1] The term originated in the left-wing blogosphere and has since gained traction in commentary about press bias and political framing”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law#:~:text=Murc's%20Law%20is%20a%20term,as%20inevitable%20or%20structurally%20determined.
Also, RFK Jr. was considered a leftist until fairly recently and there might still be people left of center who are willing to go out on a limb to defend him for that reason, especially on subjects that sound like what he was already saying before 2020.
And this brings us to my point regarding Chappaquiddick.
I took you to be riffing on Berube’s First Theory Of Politics–”I used to consider myself a Democrat, but thanks to 9/11, I’m outraged by Chappaquiddick.”, but with the word after “outraged [at]” being “Kennedys” instead of “Democrats.”
I don’t know if Oster is a Democrat. I’d guess she’s a centrist of some kind. I imagine it’s hard to find a professional writer who’ll write about anything coming out of Kennedy’s HHS in the vicinity of words that sound like “well, that part makes sense anyway” who isn’t both-sides-curious or the kind of leftist who’s too pure for the Democrats. People who are going to dismiss what Bérubé says anyway.
(There has been some weirdness about health online from all political stripes and I only expect it to get worse, not better. I tuned in one day, before the election, to a radio interview that was going to explain why the “alt-right” was into weird “wellness” stuff and it just started out saying yoga is bad because . . . I’m not sure, but the gist was that taking a yoga class and refusing vaccines were on the same moral, political, and scientific level. I have no idea whatsoever what’s going on out there.)
J:
No, I’m dead serious about the Chappaquiddick thing. I think it was a mistake that Kennedy was allowed to get away with it.
The weird thing is that Teddy accomplished the most of any of the clan.
One problem with writing about the new recommendations for a wide audience seems to be that some of the changes are RFK-specific and bad, but others have had wide acceptance for a while already from experts. The previous pyramid probably had too much bread and pasta for current views on nutrition, and too little allowance for yogurt and similar good dairy products, and didn’t make enough of a distinction between good and bad oils (which the new recommendations make incorrectly). You don’t want people to go around saying “pasta is healthier than yogurt and only RFK thinks otherwise.”
The pyramid I was thinking of was the official one for most of my adult live, 1992 to 2005, apparently, and there have been two others since then. Not sure why the NYT used the pre-2005 version to illustrate their article.
If the fourteen years from 1992 to 2005 comprise “most of your adult life” how would do you describe the twenty years from 2006 to 2025?
Mostly, the years after I had a child :)