I remember in high school FACS class having to track my diet and try to keep in line with the food pyramid. Maybe I was measuring servings wrong but I had to constantly eat sandwiches, bread and pasta to keep up with the amount of bread/grain needed. What was the rationale for this?
In: Biology
Lobbying.
When the original food pyramid was created, certain groups lobbied the government to have their food categories disproportionally represented. Nutritionists knew that most of your diet should be veggies, but the lobbies that represented farmers (that overwhelmingly grew grains) were able to put pressure on the government to add more grains (same with the dairy lobby).
The more modern “My Plate” is more in line with actual nutritionist recommendations (albeit still problematic with the dairy section).
The food pyramid is still a thibg here where I live, in denmark. Its just the official reqomended diarary from the official health departement- based on science and not lobby groups (lobbying is a thing here… but nowhere as bad as in the us). Health and Food Scientists would have a field day if politicians and administration started to revers recomendations bases on lobbyist, and the medea would jump on it instantly. Thank good for our media laws, they get tax cuts or other public help only if they follow the journalist unions and media ethics… And a few have been exposed to not follow it and subseculetly lost the monetary support and had to close.
Back then, say around the time of WW2, people were active; and country people, especially, worked hard at physical jobs. Not to mention walking from place to place. Just getting enough calories for all that energy was an expensive business. So there was much more emphasis on plain bread’n’butter.
To an extent, this still applies to growing children and teenagers.
Nowadays adults are far less active – and hopefully less poor. Need less carbohydrate and more fruit’n’veg.
QED
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