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.
“some scientists in Iowa figured out how to extract sugar from corn, and high-fructose corn syrup was born.
But there was a problem. The high-fructose corn syrup that American corn farmers were producing was more expensive than sugar. To get food and beverage companies to buy what Andreas was selling, Andreas needed to make his sweet stuff more attractive in the market.
And one way to do that is to make your competitors’ products more expensive.
That’s exactly what the federal government has been doing for decades. In 1976, President Gerald Ford tripled the import tax on sugar. If you tax something, you’ll get less of it. Or, well, you get a more expensive version of it. That’s exactly what happened with imported sugar.
By 1988, sugar came to sell at 22 cents a pound in the United States despite the world price being just 10.5 cents per pound, with each cent increase adding $250 to $300 million to Americans’ collective food bills.
Faced with the rising price of sugar in the mid-1980s, candy and soda companies did the thing that made economic sense: They stopped using sugar and switched to high fructose corn syrup.”
“After a few months in the program, Smith was no longer diabetic, and she has now been sober for two and a half years.
Her story highlights the success of the Healthy Opportunities Pilot, which launched in North Carolina in March 2022. The program had benefits beyond health and quality-of-life improvements; researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill found the program saved $1,020 a year per recipient on health care costs, and the 38,000 participants had “significantly lower” emergency room visits than their peers.
The program was unique, funded with a five-year, $650 million federal grant approved by the first Donald Trump administration. The idea was to use fresh food, safe housing and transportation — social and economic factors that researchers say determine 80 percent of a person’s health — to improve the lives of the sickest, most expensive patients.
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But the Healthy Opportunities Pilot shows the limits of such food-based interventions in public policy. These programs often require longer-term investments, chafing against the cost-cutting instincts that characterize Trump’s second term and legislatures in most red states — the policy level at which most MAHA ideas are put into practice.
In the case of HOP, the Joe Biden administration approved a Medicaid waiver last December to continue the program in North Carolina, which Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, hoped to expand throughout the state over the next two years. But in June, the Republican-led state legislature declined to fund it. State lawmakers argue the program costs more than it saves — a claim that state policy experts dispute because of the way Republican lawmakers were calculating the numbers. These experts say the long-term savings potential was given short shrift.”
“Mamdani said that he is going to pay for his grocery stores by “redirecting” $140 million worth of city funding that is already being spent subsidizing corporate grocers. As the Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney was the first to notice, that number is based on a misreading of a city website. The city subsidizes some private grocery stores at a cost of about $3.3 million per year. As some Bronx residents told Fox News’ Kennedy in a new video published by Reason, the city should focus instead on helping the homeless, dealing with “rats the size of cats,” and cleaning “all of the needles on the street.”
Direct assistance is a more cost-effective and less destructive way to support low-income households than government-run supermarkets, and it’s something the federal government already does in abundance. Through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamps, 1.79 million New Yorkers—20 percent of the city’s population—receive help purchasing groceries each month.”
Even if they were real people, it would be misleading to cherry pick certain people out of the many losing benefits and present this like it is representative of who is losing benefits. 2/2
“Senate Republicans will block a Democratic bill that would keep federal food aid flowing to 42 million Americans as they try to build pressure to reopen the government, Majority Leader John Thune said Wednesday.
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Thune separately told reporters that if the Senate starts “going down the road of … take care of this group or that group … it just begs the larger question, how long is this going to drag on?”
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Democrats and even privately some Republican lawmakers argue the Trump administration has the legal authority to tap a $5 billion contingency fund, or other USDA funds, to ensure SNAP benefits keep flowing during the shutdown. Dozens of Democratic governors and attorneys general have sued the administration over its decision not to tap those funds.”
“The plaintiffs are disputing the Trump administration’s statements that it doesn’t have the legal authority to use the $5 billion it has in emergency funds to pay for at least part of SNAP, which requires more than $8 billion to pay for November benefits. They also argue that USDA could tap Section 32 funds, which it did to tide over the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, to fully fund SNAP next month.”