In this enlightening episode of Real Science Radio, hosts Fred Williams and Doug McBurney tackle the bold changes in governmental dietary guidelines, a move dubbed as a ‘historic reset’ of US nutrition policy. Discover the origins of the food pyramid, a concept that was surprisingly conceived by communists, and how it found its place in American schools years before it was officially recognized in 1992. Examine the new dietary guidelines which are now embracing high-quality protein such as red meat, eggs, and whole milk, reversing decades of advice that placed sugary and high-carb foods at the pyramid’s base. Can
The pyramid was come up with by a bunch of communists in Europe. It wasn’t adopted in America, but it was in our schools by the time I was in school in the 70s and 80s.
SPEAKER 03 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune in to Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 03 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 02 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. This is Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams. And Fred, I’m Doug McBurney.
SPEAKER 04 :
If you didn’t know, Fred, it’s great to be back with you talking about real science on Friday.
SPEAKER 02 :
Hey, Doug, so did you see the recent change to the food guidelines by our government? I know you’re a big fan of the government, right? Big fan of the government, bigger fan of food. Yeah. The food pyramid, Fred. They’ve reversed the food pyramid. They’ve turned it upside down. Whoa. So the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services, and this is the thing, you know, that one of the Kennedy sons runs, Kennedy son, I guess we’re all sons. Bobby. Yes. Bobby Kennedy Jr. Right. And they released new dietary guidelines, and they’re calling it a historic reset of U.S. nutrition policy. Wow. I mean, the government doesn’t usually admit that they’re wrong about something that’s been going on for, I guess, about a half a century. Yeah. Unless something, I guess, serious is going on. Uh-huh. So I wanted to get your take on it. I mean, this was just released, what, a week or two ago.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, yeah. I heard all about this. And just imagine, Fred, if you could wake up the founding fathers and tell them, listen, guys, what you’re about to do means at some point, The United States is going to have a nutrition policy. They would have laughed at you in your face. They would have said, you’re kidding me. There’s no way that’s ever going to happen. Or they would have tried to build in a safeguard against the development of anything like a government nutrition policy. But we have one, Fred. Not only do we have a nutrition policy, which is… That’s embarrassing that we have one of those. But we have a Department of Health… and human services. Fred, what is a human service? Can you help me with this? Well, to serve humans. Is that like to serve man like on the Twilight Zone back in the 60s, Fred? I think it’s something like that. You know, this is real science radio, right? And so let’s talk about things that are real. Nobody really knows what a human service is, so I’m going to help you. Because before we acknowledge, Fred, that anyone should be employed coming up with food guidelines, whatever that means, we’ll try to figure that one out too. Because, Fred, I think I had food guidelines once when I was five, and I got them from my mom, if I remember. And that’s it, Fred. I think we’ve stumbled across the definition for a human service. Yeah. Your mom telling you what to eat. That’s a human service, right? There you go. I think that’s it. We’ve defined it for people. The people who created the department didn’t even know what it meant. And here we’ve stumbled across it by accident. A human service is like your mom telling you what to eat. But Fred. We know that about a century ago, the ungodly communists basically declared war against mom and against dad and against the family. And just by chance, they happened to have a handy department ready to replace mom and dad. And Karl Marx and Engels and Lenin, they couldn’t have named it any better themselves had they formed a committee to come up with the name. I think they call it the Commissariat of Health and Human Services.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, well, Fred in Russia. I was going to ask, though, because my… Yeah, you’re right. I mean, my mom told me what to eat. Uh-huh. Oh, yeah. And one of them was vegetables. I mean, we always had to eat our vegetables. So, Doug, I need to ask you, were you one of those kids that… Tried to, like, scatter your vegetables around your plate to make it look like you ate them or, you know, try to pull little tricks here and there. Absolutely. Or maybe you’re like Abigail. You know, my daughter, Abby, who’s, you know, has done some really good shorts for Real Science Radio. She’s got one of those coming up. Well, one time, taking them to school, I used to have the little baby carrots I’d give her and Ryan to eat baby carrots on the way to school. Oh, yeah. And then one day, I was cleaning my car, and in my back seat underneath the seat are a bunch of old, stale, rotten carrots.
SPEAKER 1 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
It came back to bite you, huh? Oh, man. Yeah. It’s like, what are all these shriveled up looking carrot? He kind of looked like he used to be a carrot. Yeah, Dad, we love them. Thanks.
SPEAKER 04 :
Sticking them under the seat. Oh, that’s classic. Yeah, Fred, I wasn’t the biggest fan of vegetables. My mom had to basically enforce her dietary guidelines some of the time. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yep. Yeah, that was my mom’s contribution to human services, the greater body of human services. But so, Fred, in Russia, they have what’s called the… Well, no, in Soviet Russia… They had the Commissariat for Health, which was the government bureaucracy that came up with healthcare policy. Here we have the Department of Health and Human Services. So before we get into the analysis, Fred, I just want to make it clear that I prefer to get my human services the old-fashioned way from humans. I don’t like to get them at a department. Something tells me, Fred, once you become… a minion in a department dispensing human services, you’ve somehow lost some portion of your humanity. I’d rather just have a human like mom.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yep. I agree. So this, apparently there’s this, I remember the pyramid, you know, they taught us the pyramid. I never really paid attention in that class.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, wait, wait, wait. Well, wait, wait. Now, I got to talk a little bit about the pyramid because I remember in grade school seeing the pyramid. Do you? I do remember seeing it. Well, here’s the thing. I didn’t know this. Did you know that there was no official pyramid until 1992? Oh, huh. So the USDA didn’t endorse the pyramid. that we’re about to describe, as laughable as it is, until 1992. Fred, neither one of us were in school in 1992. But you know what this reveals, Fred? That the communist leftists had already infiltrated the government schools. The pyramid was come up with by a bunch of communists in Europe in the 70s. It wasn’t adopted in America, but it was in our schools by the time I was in school in the 70s and 80s. And anyway, just another revelation about how much we’ve been infiltrated by leftist thought. It’s just, it shocked me. I didn’t know that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Interesting, Doug. So the pyramid… was in the public schools before the government actually endorsed it. So what was that pyramid? I mean, I remember a little bit about it. You had what? You had the low-fat, high-carbohydrate, grain-dominated model, right? And then the pyramid kind of goes up. And I think it had veggies in the middle or something and then beef at the top. Yeah. I think they’re switching it. They’re putting a lot of protein at the base of the pyramid now, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, I think so. I don’t remember the pyramid, Fred. I think I was making spitballs. Same here. I don’t remember taking any of that all that seriously.
SPEAKER 02 :
That’s what I learned about aviation and paper planes.
SPEAKER 04 :
right? I mean, I knew when I was in school, Fred, as much as I didn’t appreciate English and math, I did know that I was going to need those. And so I did pay some attention. But when they got into things like the food guidelines and the yellow submarine, they lost me. But the food pyramid, yeah, you described it pretty well, Fred. Sugar and carbs form the giant base. That’s supposed to be the the foundation of your daily diet. And then it goes up into some vegetables in the middle. And then I think there might be some beans and some peas, and then it ends up with beef. And then I don’t know if, I don’t know if sugar or I don’t know where lucky charms and pop rocks came. And they may not even made the pyramid crunch. They never could spell that right. That’s old. It’s old English. Well, Fred, the fact that they flipped the pyramid upside down, I mean, that’s worthy of comment because it’s rare that a government department or a bureaucracy or anyone even in the government ever admits that they ever made a mistake about anything. But it seems like after decades of this official policy, whether or not school kids take it seriously, it is some official policy, which, by the way, the food pyramid, it wasn’t neutral on what they call processed foods policy. Which Fred, I think processed food, it’s kind of a PC term for sugary junk food. We all know what they mean when they say processed food. They don’t mean food that went through a process because some of that food’s pretty good. All food goes through some process. What they’re talking about is sugary junk food. And the old food pyramid, Fred, pretty much promoted sugary junk food at the big base, the fat part of the pyramid, so to speak. Anyway, the whole pyramid, as I recall, was… It was like Lucky Charms and carbs and sugary junk food at the base. And then they promoted, it promoted this craze around low fat. Remember low fat? Everything was low fat. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And we find out years later that in order to make low fat milk, they added sugar or some other things to it so that it could be palatable. Because when you take all the fat out of milk, well, it tastes horrible. So they had to add sugar. And it turns out that we have obesity going up, diabetes going up, fatty liver, autoimmune disease, metabolic syndrome, all kinds of problems increased as the government dispensing of human services and advice on nutrition increased. And so the government’s finally acknowledging something that doctors and researchers and my mom have said for years.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. So on their website, they have this, the government website, nearly 90% of healthcare spending goes towards treating chronic disease, much of it linked to diet and lifestyle changes. More than 70% of American adults are overweight or obese, and nearly one in three adolescents has prediabetes, which is pretty shocking. That’s adolescents. This isn’t adults. Yeah. I’m 64. Okay. Yeah. I’ve kind of told everybody my age. I’m pre-diabetic. You know, I found that out, I guess, last year. Oh. But I’m okay with that. I’m 64. Yeah. Well, I guess I’m not completely okay. Well, I guess I got to kind of watch myself a little bit. But off air, Doug, we were talking about this, and you made a really good point, and I don’t want it to get lost. What’s really driving the problem? That part about 70% of American adults are overweight or obese. Is it really so much the processed foods as we’re just eating too much?
SPEAKER 04 :
We’re pigging out too much. I don’t want to make anybody feel bad. But I noticed like I came to a point in my career, Fred, where I I knew I needed to lose weight. And I found out that if I dramatically reduced the amount of food that I ate and then exercised and mixed in a salad once in a while, it made a huge difference. Did you have croutons and resting on that? No. Oh, no way. No. Fred, I was eating like rabbit grade food for, anyway, it was awful, but I managed to do it. And then, and Fred, when I did the kind of dramatic diet adjustment there to get through my weight loss experiment, it helped to kind of change my whole, I don’t eat the same way I did anymore. It took a little bit of self-discipline, but mostly wife discipline. Mostly, it took someone else outside hitting me with the whip, you know, cracking the whip. That helped a lot. That’s a human service, by the way, when your wife tells you what to eat.
SPEAKER 02 :
You know what was a big eye-opener for me, Doug, is when I finally went on a diet. My family didn’t believe me that I was going on a diet because I’d been on like 58 diets. Yeah. It really meant nothing. And I finally got serious about it because I had, you know, I was starting to get high blood pressure. And my own research, which I always encourage everybody, you got to do a ton of your own research. And pretty much my biggest problem was I was overweight. And so I went on a real diet. And the biggest eye-opener for me was when you think about food and exercise, you’re Food, eating too much food far outweighs exercise. I’m sorry. That’s what I learned. I had this app that would tell me the number of calories that each thing had and how much calories I burned like playing basketball. So I would put those numbers in and I’m 53 at this time. And I remember when I played basketball, I wasn’t playing really hard anymore because I’m just older. And so I put in shooting around instead of a basketball game. And it was something like, I don’t know, 400 calories in an hour. Doug, do you know that just one bag of Twinkies in the vending machine is 400 calories? That wipes out the entire exercise. So I guarantee you through my entire life, every time I did something rigorous or I played basketball, I would have a big meal that night, not realizing I’m actually gaining weight because I guarantee I ate more food than the exercise took off. So definitely encourage people to exercise, but it’s the food. That’s the bottom line. You’ve got to cut the food out.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah. It’s funny, Fred, that you went about in your early 50s. That’s pretty much what happened to me. And a very similar story. When I found out how many calories there were in this little delicious thing compared to this like a one-hour workout, it was painful to realize, no, that little delicious thing, that’s got to go. Yeah. It’s got to go. Oh, no. Say it ain’t so. So, Fred, we got to get back to the guidelines here. Yeah, let’s do it. And the fact that the government has actually reversed course on some of the things that they’ve been telling us since I was in grade school. Anyway, let’s see. I pulled it up here, Fred. One of the most striking parts of the new guidelines is they’re going to re-embrace high-quality protein, including, Fred, ready for this? Are you sitting down? Red meat. Red meat.
SPEAKER 02 :
Red meat. Yes, it’s back. So right now, all the liberals watching our show, those vegetarians are pounding their fists and they’re throwing stuff at the TV. Right. You guys are wrong.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes. Well, we’re violating their religious ordinance of foregoing good tasting food to have lousy tasting food so that they can feel better about the fact that they’re a bunch of godless heathens. Well, one of the advantages of knowing God and having a relationship with God is and having him forgive your sins is that you don’t feel nearly as guilty about eating things like red meat. You can feel pretty good about it. And now even the government’s saying red meat, Fred, eggs, seafood, dairy, they’re no longer going to be treated as like guilty pleasures that we have to feel guilty about or we have to go over to NPR and get some sort of absolution from the high priest there. We can eat now.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, can you believe eggs were demonized for so long? Yeah, they got cholesterol and you got to cut back on your eggs. And, you know, that was totally wrong.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, yeah. They’re basically backing away from this idea that full fat dairy is harmful. In fact, Fred, I just read whole milk is going to be allowed back into the school lunches. They’re going to let the kids have milk at school again. That’s a major reversal of policy. I mean, it’s not quite big enough. I’m all for let’s get milk into the schools and get kids out. I mean, you know where I stand on that. But at least it is some reverse. Who’s going to drink the milk?
SPEAKER 02 :
I just say, yeah, get milk and kids out of the schools, public schools.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, yeah. Get them all out. Get it all out of the public schools and let’s turn those schools into food processing plants. Well, maybe we can turn them into something functional, something useful.
SPEAKER 02 :
So we talk about eggs. Now, red meat. Yeah. I’m real happy about that one. Cause like I said, I never paid attention to a pyramid. I kind of ate what I liked and I’d like me a good old big T-bone. Yeah. So is that allowed now? A good big old T-bone or does it have to be a certain kind of cow? Does it have to be Buffalo meat?
SPEAKER 04 :
Does it have to be made out of crickets?
SPEAKER 1 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Grasshoppers? I think they’re saying that red meat is actually okay. Any kind of red meat you want, Fred. Now, I don’t know that I’ve read anything in the new guidelines about moderation and consumption, but I would assume that since they’re dispensing the human services of telling us what to eat, they would also include at least a little bit of of advice on how much of it to eat. But the strongest language in the new policy, Fred, is actually, it’s not really about meter or fat, it’s about processing. Yeah, it talks about eating real food. It talks about eating real food, and they’ve dubbed other types of food highly processed food. Which I’m pretty sure that that means there’s a lot of added sugar. They call them ultra-processed foods. And they say, Fred, the ultra-processed foods. And that doesn’t sound good, right? Ultra-processed? That’s even worse than processed. That’s worse than highly processed. It’s ultra-processed. That should not be the mainstay of a healthy diet, Fred. Now, they don’t come out and just say, don’t eat so much sugary food. Like, let’s say your mom might have said that. They don’t come out and say that because then I think, Fred, they’re worried that they might offend people by threatening everybody’s built-in excuse for why they’re kind of fat and wheezy and they just can’t get around much anymore. It’s actually because they lack the self-discipline to limit the sweets and the junk food. But the human services dispensers, they don’t want to insult anybody. And so the commissariat there, they encourage everyone to blame big corporations and ultra-processing. And then go get some government-subsidized GLP-1 shots under the new big, great… Is it big healthcare plan or is it a great healthcare plan? I haven’t read through that yet, Fred, but it’s big and it’s great. I know that. And we need it quickly. That’s… Hey, that’s pretty good. That’s pretty good. Yeah, just so I have read enough, under the recently announced big, great health care plan, the Trump administration is going to include subsidies and discounts for GLP-1 drugs. That’s if you’re on Medicare or Medicaid, which if you want to be on either one of them, you can be. And they’re going to keep the cost of the GLP-1 shots $2.45 a month or less, Fred. That’s less than a used Hyundai. Tell me this isn’t a great deal. It’s a great deal. It’s fabulous. It’s brilliant. So what is GLP-1? What are those? That’s Ozempic. Those are the, I can’t remember the exact name, but it’s a specific type of peptide that makes you feel like you’re not hungry. It’s the shots Oprah took. And then when she stopped taking them, she gained like 200 pounds and she’s all upset about it. Isn’t it funny that Oprah thought that she could start injecting herself with a drug and that would solve her weight loss problem? Hasn’t she had a weight loss problem since like 1980? Ever since I can remember. No, yeah. It’s like a long running soap opera. And the latest thing I heard her complaining about is that the GLP-1 shots, once you stop taking them, they stop working and you balloon up like the Goodyear blimp again. It’s like, Oprah, put down the donuts. I mean, please. Anyway, maybe listen to your mom, Oprah. Just remember what your mom said. She was right. You know, Fred, without dad and mom at home, You know, dad’s not there anymore. I mean, the government effectively outlawed dad. And they’ve got mom off making widgets so she can finance the payment on last year’s vacation. We end up with RFK, of all people. having to now re-engineer and rejigger the government’s advice on the connection between food and fat and sugar and the food pyramid and chronic disease and health care costs. And Fred, even national security, that was part of the justification for the rejiggering. They say that the kids are too fat to join the army.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, it says this, a diet-driven chronic disease now disqualifies many young Americans from military service, threatening national readiness and limiting opportunity, which is true. Well, that’s part of it, yeah. One in three adolescents have, you know, they’re pre-diabetic. That’s amazing. And, you know, we talked about this on prior shows, Doug, this whole thing about peanut allergies, nut allergies, and the huge uptick in autism. I mean, something’s going on. So… And Asperger’s, I know that’s a mental thing, but some of these, even in my mind, some of them are just made-up diseases, part of really just symptoms of a big problem. And part of it is what we have been eating. So I’m kind of okay that in a way with them shooting an arrow in the old pyramid. They have a new pyramid and they’re talking about too much processed foods. I can kind of see that. But to your point, why do we need an agency to do this? The government telling us what to do. They told us what to do for years. It didn’t work. We still got fat. How about they stop eating so much food? Cut back on the booze, you know? Yeah, yeah. How about that? They didn’t really do much to the alcohol recommendations other than say cut back.
SPEAKER 04 :
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, did they say cut back? That’s I know that I believe Donald Trump’s teetotaler. He doesn’t drink at all from what I understand.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Now, RFK, I don’t know about that guy. I mean, he comes he comes from a long, fine Irish tradition. So we’ll just leave that one alone. But hey, when it comes to the kids, they can’t join the army. I’m sure that the diet has something to do with it. but along with the porn and the video games and their godless upbringing. We can’t just say it’s the food those dark Democrats were telling us to eat all the time. We need to make America healthy again. I mean, that is part of it, I’m sure. But I think Bobby Kennedy still… I mean, when it comes to social issues, like the abortion pills that he advocates, which none of the Republicans are proposing to ban… not even in the big great healthcare plan. I think that right at the base of the great big healthcare plan and whatever pyramid they come up with, if the government is going to be so audacious, is to suggest that what we eat or any way that we take care of our own health, I think there should be a right to life that upholds the whole pyramid. That should be right at the big fat base because without the right to life, you don’t really need to worry about what to eat or… Or what to drink or any of that. But anyway, I see the irony in that. So you’re right, though, Fred. We need to appreciate the good part of what the government is doing and at least recognize that much of it.
SPEAKER 02 :
But the big part, and you just touched on it, is parenting. And so there’s a problem with, just like you said, kids playing video games, porn. They’re sitting in a chair for hours on end. And you actually lose calories when you stand. And I’ve got a stand-up desk now where I work, and I probably… stand more than half the time now. Oh, good. But you’re so right. I mean, I didn’t even think of that earlier before the show is like all these kids is playing video games at home and they’re getting fat. Yeah. Like you and I were with BB guns and shooting eyes out of frogs in the pond.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right. Yeah. And when, and when mom and dad said be home by dark, we had to be home by dark. And so we had this way of evaluating darkness and, Until it was pitch black, it wasn’t dark. And that’s when we would start to run home from wherever it was we were out playing. It wasn’t dark unless you couldn’t see on your way home.
SPEAKER 02 :
I want to squeeze in the interesting fact of the week.
SPEAKER 04 :
Oh, no, no, Fred. I want to get right into your analysis of nutrition versus chemistry. Come on.
SPEAKER 02 :
We will. We’ll get into that. Okay. All right. I got to hit you up with this one. And it actually plays into a story, a news story, the science story we’re going to do probably next week because I don’t know if we’ll have time today. But here we go. Here is the interesting fact of the week. What weighs about the same as a paperclip, runs on electricity, contains more moving parts than a jet engine, and performs about a quadrillion operations per second?
SPEAKER 04 :
It weighs as much as a paperclip? Yep. Okay, because that really doesn’t compute, Fred, what you just said, that it does all that and it weighs about the weight of a paperclip. Yep.
SPEAKER 02 :
And it does a cockroach. Well, you know what? I can almost give you that one. Almost. Not quite, because they don’t quite compare. The human brain. The human brain? Yes. Oh. But the cockroach isn’t a bad guess, because that’s got a brain, too.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, it’s got something going on there, Fred. And so I’m going to just follow. I’m going to file an official petition now, Fred, that when we get to heaven, we get God to help us run the math on that. And he might be able to say, well, Doug was pretty close to right with the cockroach.
SPEAKER 02 :
I hesitated a little bit here, but I’m like, okay, well.
SPEAKER 04 :
And then when he shows us what the human brain actually did, it’ll probably blow our minds.
SPEAKER 1 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
But Fred, my brain weighs more than a paperclip. I think what you mean is a section of the brain about the size of a paperclip does all that stuff.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, this says it’s the brain weighs about the same as a paperclip. I guess it’s, you know, we know the information in the brain weighs nothing because the information doesn’t have mass. So where does that information come from? Well, how do we make a healthy brain, Doug? Getting back to the guidelines.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hey, we’re running out of time in this broadcast, so go to our website to catch the rest of this
