The new government food pyramid matters because it affects major government food programs and student lunches. Otherwise, not many people dutifully follow the government dietary recommendations. There have been several changes over time and in 2011 they got rid of the pyramid and replaced it with a plate, which makes sense because we more often eat food on a plate than in pyramid measurements.
Butter and cheese in the highest tier doesn’t make sense. They are okay in moderation, but are not good in high amounts, and the highest tier implies you should eat a lot of it. Not only is eating too much of them bad, they are easy to eat a whole lot of all at once, and are high in calories.
Whole grains are good! They shouldn’t be relegated below butter and cheese. Whole grains are hard to overeat, are associated with better health, and are per-calorie better for you than butter and cheese. Butter and cheese being in a higher tier than whole grains is backwards.
The new pyramid promoting: protein, vegetables, minimally processed food, and healthy fats is good.
“Seed oils have become a major target of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, whose figurehead is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Seed oils are one of the driving causes of the obesity epidemic,” according to Kennedy, who has accused fast-food restaurants that use seed oils of poisoning Americans.
But among nutrition experts, opinions about seed oils and health are much more mixed, with plenty suggesting they’re fine in moderation, are better than alternatives, or are unwisely treated as a unit despite the fact that different seed oils have different properties and effects on health.
There’s also mixed evidence on the effects of common food dyes and additives)”
Early on, there was a real disagreement between specialists on the origin on Covid, with some supporting natural origins and some supporting a lab leak. But that debate is now essentially over. With more data carefully examined, the evidence best supports natural origins.
The virus was initially repeatedly found in a specific animal market, and even a specific stall that appeared to be the source. For a lab leak to be the source, the person or people who leaked the virus would have to have repeatedly visited that market every time they leaked it and nowhere else so that it looked like that market was the source.
“In dropping government recommendations Monday that children routinely receive shots for four diseases, Kennedy’s allies believe they are closer to realizing a top priority: a country in which people who claim vaccine injuries can more easily sue vaccinemakers for millions in civil court.
Manufacturers of those vaccines would no longer be shielded from liability, the plan’s proponents assert, and could be driven from the market amid an influx of lawsuits alleging injuries from their products. In that scenario, the anti-vaccine movement would have a high-profile opportunity to shape the public narrative about childhood shots in courts nationwide.
Kennedy and Health and Human Services Department officials announced that longstanding recommendations that children receive flu, meningitis, hepatitis A and rotavirus vaccines were downgraded to a category known as “shared clinical decisionmaking,” meaning patients are encouraged to confer with health care providers before getting the shots.
In all, the number of “routine” vaccine recommendations — which assume vaccination as the default — have now been cut by a third, from 18 to 11, since 2024.”
In rare cases, modern vaccines have negative side effects, and under normal law, people can sue and sympathetic juries can reward huge sums of money. This would make vaccines unprofitable, and without vaccines many many people would die from a variety of diseases. Instead, in the 1980s, we set up a parallel system for vaccines where people with negative side effects can get a payment, but not an exorbitant sum from a normal lawsuit. This system is underfunded and understaffed and could use reform to keep up with claims, but throwing the system out risks for-profit vaccine companies ending the production of vaccines, resulting in many deaths. So, the system is needed, unless the government chooses to manufacture vaccines themselves. People can still sue vaccine manufacturers for negligence, but that is hard to prove.
The current available evidence points toward Covid coming from an animal market, not a lab. There have been a lot of claims about it coming from a lab which have received a lot of coverage, but these have not proven out. All but very few of the experts in the field think it likely came from nature, not a lab. Many prominent people spreading the lab theory made a lot of money from it and some got jobs in the Trump administration. Republicans and activists have unfairly attacked people talking about the science and defunded their legitimate research, and used this as an excuse to defund a lot of other science.
Non evidence based recommendations from Trump’s CDC will result in deaths. The chaos of getting CDC workers to leave, and shutting down programs, and giving directives where the verbal and written directives don’t match, and restarting things when it is suddenly realized they are needed…is not good! Bad.
“What about his promise to maintain the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes? Nope. RFK Jr. fired all of the vaccine experts and loaded up the committee with anti-vaccination appointees.”
“Millions, perhaps even billions of us who got ourselves vaccinated against COVID-19 should be dead by now, or if not yet, very soon. For years, prominent wellness influencers and other internet personalities have predicted that mRNA vaccines will lead to mass casualties. Infectious disease clinician Neil Stone has helpfully (and amusingly) compiled a number of such dire predictions.”
The Supreme Court has used a doubtful gun study funded by a Second Amendment advocacy group to justify its decisions. The author has not published the study, has not shared the data, refuses to talk to anyone about it, refuses to testify in court about it, and one lawsuit dropped the reference to the study because he refused to testify. How the survey was represented was inaccurate compared to the actual survey questions.