Reason.com has an interesting article of the White House's recent anti-obesity initiative and a peak at the newly redesigned food pyramid, along with the usual anti-government seasoning.
I've got some thoughts at my other blog.
I try not to cross post too often, but part of this blog's 1000 & 1 things is health & fitness. So I thought I would expand upon my other post.
So here goes: Don't even get me started on the food pyramid. It was a staple in schools and on food containers while I was growing up. Nice orderly progresssion from grains/carbs at the bottom (base), progressing up through fruits and veggies and meat and finally ending up in the smallest, topmost portion with fats and sugars. It was very nice.
And pretty much completely wrong.
Turns out, the carbs and grains that made the base of the pyramid really shouldn't form the base, because outside of a few whole grains and vegetables, carbs shouldn't be the base of your diet. Why not? They are mostly empty calories, and worse yet, they are relatively calorie dense and don't fill you up like, say fats and protiens. And lets just forget that the smallest part of the old pyramid makes a demon out of "fats," despite that saturated fats are probably one of the more healthy things you can eat.
So you see, the pyramid was pretty much entirely ass backwards or upside down, take your pick.
To make matters worse, based partly on that pyramid and party on advocacy from decades earlier, companies started abandoning fat at all costs. The result - trans fats and low-fat foods with high calorie counts. Both have since been discovered to be evils in the battle of the bulge.
Oh, and I forgot the best part of this little cross-over article: it gives me a place to crow about the fact that I'm down from 230ish pounds to 220 pounds. Almost all of it fat, as far as I can tell. And while on vacation R. and I worked out and I took a "fitness test" offered by one of the treadmills. It rated by VO2 Max as "above average."
Here I come, 210.
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