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The first dodgy substance I experimented with here at college wasn’t drugs or alcohol, but raw milk in a Mason jar. I think hyper-processed foods are worse than cigarettes, and the only foods you should eat regularly are those your grandparents would have recognized.
So yes, I want Americans to be healthier. Something needs to change, but the new food pyramid, released by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. earlier this month, won’t bring about any meaningful difference to the state of American health. Nevermind the new food guideline’s dubious claims and problems of inconsistency — obesity and chronic disease won’t be solved by the government issuing a nice picture, a slick website, and a press release into the current cacophony of easily accessible health information that already exists.
More than 70% of American adults are overweight or obese, and nearly one-third of adolescents have prediabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Almost 90% of health care spending goes toward treating chronic disease, much of it linked to diet and lifestyle.
Initiatives issued by the government encouraging the general public to eat healthy rarely succeed.
When the first simplified guidelines, published in 1980, encouraged people to “eat a variety of foods to assure an adequate diet,” the national obesity rate was around 15%, according to the National Library of Medicine. In 1992, when the now-infamous original food pyramid with its six to 11 servings of grain per day was introduced, that rate was 23.3%. When the Department of Health published the remarkably bland and insipid MyPlate diagram in 2011, it was up to 34.9%.
Maybe these guidelines have done something to combat obesity, but clearly not enough.
The new food pyramid isn’t that different from previous guidelines. The insistence on healthy fats and picture of juicy red steak seem heterodox, but the text of the guidelines include the previous recommendation to limit saturated fat to less than 10% of total calories. This is almost impossible to maintain with an actual dietary emphasis on the steak, butter, and healthy fats the pyramid champions.
Even if people don’t regularly follow them, the government does use nutrition guidelines to dictate things like school lunches. While some critics point out that updating school lunches could strain funding, these cafeterias are already providing the healthiest meals Americans eat, according to a 2021 study by Tufts University. Even if you accept that it is the government’s responsibility to directly change dietary habits, the obesity epidemic is coming from outside the state’s realm of direct influence.
As an archetype, Americans do their own thing, but given our proclivity for ignoring the government, combined with the fact that the pyramid doesn’t introduce as much new information as it seems, and a lack of infrastructure to enable change in school cafeterias, the new food pyramid just isn’t going to change all that much.
We are at an extraordinary point in history. A calorie surplus instead of deficit is now the norm, and many of those calories are designed to be as addictive as possible. The problem Kennedy highlights is real, but he’s misled to assume the issue is one of education or information. Like calories, the world’s knowledge — including basic beneficial eating habits — is at our fingertips, if we look for it. The government informing people to “Eat Real Food,” while commendable, only adds to the noise. A goofy upside-down triangle won’t Make America Healthy Again.
Henry Fliflet is a junior studying English.
