I've decided to do a mini-series on what Americans actually eat.
We'll start off by reviewing what the experts say is the key to a healthy diet:
This is the infamous food pyramid, the basis for all the standard advice you hear from nOOtRiTIOn eXpERts-- red meat and animal fats, bad; vegetables, grains, and fruits, good.
If the advice is correct, a population eating more of the good foods (and less of the bad ones) should have become vastly more healthy- we can put that to a simple test.
The Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has a database which covers the the food supply of various agricultural commodities from 1961-2013.
https://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FBSH
(They also have a newer database covering 2010 onward, using updated methods, but I didn't use it. I figured 1961-2013 should be enough.)
The number I looked at is the food supply quantity (kg / capita / year): the total supply in kg of the particular food, divided by the population that year. That way it doesn't just reflect the fact that there are more people in America compared to the 1960s.
This is the supply / availability, not consumption, so there are going to be losses as a result of spoilage, shrinkage while cooking, etc-- these aren't perfect numbers.
But they're not going to produce more of what doesn't sell, so I think it's pretty useful as a measure of what Americans eat.
Starting with the foods at the bottom of the pyramid:
All these wonderful healthy amazing foods have seen BIG increases since ~ 1970 or 1980, in line with the experts' recommendations.
Now dairy and animal products:
('Milk' includes cheese, yogurt, and ice cream, while excluding butter.)
Dairy and egg consumption have stayed the same, while consumption of animal fats is down. I'd be interested in comparing whole vs skim / low-fat, but that wasn't available.
Meanwhile:
Finally, the meat section of the food pyramid:
What about poultry and fish?
Poultry consumption has gone up massively, and fish is higher too. While experts are mainly in the vegan / vegetarian camp, these are the types of meat they tolerate.
Comparing beef and poultry:
Americans have been substituting poultry for beef since the 1990s.
So what about all the wonderful health gains?
Well:
This is the height of different birth cohorts. Again, we find a general decline following the 80s-- and not just reflecting more and more Hispanics: white Americans are shorter today than they used to be.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827325001260
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db360.html
We've also gotten WAY more obese-- and this only looks at the early 2000s, not even the 60s or 70s. Family photos, movies / TV shows, etc of the 60s and 70s barely show any obese or overweight people--today it's become the norm.
This entire post gotten quite long already from all the charts, so I'm not going to add a text-wall-- what I'll do instead is post my analysis and observations in the follow-up / part 2-.
Trying to sum things up, however, we've followed the experts' recommendations: more vegetables and fruits and grains than ever before, lean proteins over red meat and especially beef, vegetable oils over animal fats, etc.
And yet with all of these healthy foods making up more and more of the diet, we're not healthier than we used to be (as you would predict): the population is shorter and sicker, and the growth in our life expectancy has slowed down.
Simple conclusion? The advice does not make sense!
I did have a follow-up to this post written, with various graphs essentially re-confirming the various trends I've discussed, but in the end I found my energy draining away from the subject.
ReplyDeleteI think it's because treating veganism as if it were an open question needing a scientific investigation to resolve is fake & gay, a massive waste of time in 2026-- there is nothing to solve, because everyone (including the vegans themselves) admits that these diets result in malnutrition and do severe damage to the mind and body.
And of course nobody can eat a vegan diet for long, so referring to it that way is being too generous-- since the stuff they eat is nutritionally empty, they are inevitably forced into relying on a billion pills and supplements. Unfortunately technology has not currently reached a state where supplements can replace nutritious animal products, so many of them simply wind up drawing out the suffering and making the malnutrition less noticeable, while their body slowly wastes away. So pointless.
This means that they still need animal foods, just like everyone else on Earth, but unlike everyone else they also force the rest of us to put up with endless amounts of scolding and preening and moralizing and hectoring, while-- as usual with people who have delusions of grandeur-- being totally wrong on the basic facts.
If you're curious as to why lower class Americans look the way they do, you don't need to listen to the experts or do your own investigation or even take my word seriously-- just go to a Walmart, and take a look at what they're buying, and then draw your own conclusions.
ReplyDeleteBut, again, the results are so predictable that it's hard to think of anyone in 2026 who would be shocked, or come away having learned anything new. It's obvious. And the only people who can't see it are either retarded, and thus incapable of learning, or in all likelihood just a bunch of pathetic elite-slurping midwits getting paid to rationalize the disastrous / failed / shithole state of American society in the 2020s. They will never admit the truth, because they get paid to lie, so laboring to convince them, bringing up evidence, etc is a waste of time. That's obviously not what's going on.
This is also why they are so hellbent on demoralization and denial and distortion of such basic, uncontroversial, obvious truths-- admitting them, and discussing them openly, would lead to the public reaching the natural conclusion that society's elites have failed pathetically, and really more or less abdicated their role, and that would be dangerous. So instead such views have to be targeted and demonized and suppressed, and with fanatical urgency (given how broad the crisis is, and how low the public's faith in the elites has plummeted).
Something else to remember about the working class is that very of them even have diets in the first place-- in the sense of an established, articulate, clear view of that they should and shouldn't eat. Let alone referring to historical evidence, reading books on the subject, and so on and so forth. To the extent that they do, I've only heard them regurgitate lo-fat / vegetarian views from the 80s or 90s, not paleo carnivore influencers or Alex Jones or whoever the elites are blaming their credibility-eviscerating failures on.
ReplyDeleteThe kind of people who follow diets are more educated / articulate, usually have more leisure time in order to devote their mental energy to such subjects, and crucially also have the money to micro-tailor their individual consumption in a way that is at least semi-independent from the market-- so dietary questions, like most issues in society, are largely discussed among the elites and the upper-middle class.
So working people eat what they can afford, and within the guidelines determined by the elite-- and since unfortunately we live in an era of widespread parasitism and immiseration, and are plagued with an expert class that is seriously incompetent (they cannot face basic truths and will not take responsibility after failing), not to mention a country overstuffed with cheap labor, that means they can't afford to eat much that isn't chemically-processed slop, synthetic garbage, non / anti-food, etc etc etc.
And this is why they look and feel so bad, because they are eating things that aren't even real food anymore, but which do happen to be cheapest items in the entire grocery store.
Again, as a final thought, when you go out (if you are capable of leaving the house), compare the prices for bread and rice with those for red meat and lamb, the prices of frozen-aisle microwave meals with those of chuck roast and stew meat, and on and on and on-- and then ask yourself what you would be eating, if you only had a limited amount to spend. It's so obvious, which means nobody on the midwit-infested shithole sites like Reddit will ever be capable of noticing it!
I forgot to add that these subjects also draw a handful of cooks and nuts, magic-powder vendors, and other bullshitting types-- Michael Tracey calls them podcast creatures, an apt label. They are certainly all over the place in terms of their actual beliefs, and they usually have no thinking skills whatsoever (just a lot of verbal bluster).
ReplyDeleteOne particular thing I've noticed is that they exhibit very strange patterns within their own beliefs-- you would think that extreme beliefs would be the result of ideological conviction, heightened levels of passion / ferocity, etc etc etc. But many of them wind up oscillating between various extremist positions over the course of their lives, in a way that suggests that they are both capable of extreme levels of commitment to their ideas and yet, at the same time, weirdly unattached to them.
So today's vegans will be yesterday's raw carnivore eaters (or the other way around), white nationalists and feds overlap, the SCIENCE! witch-hunters will brow-beat you for your lack of faith in their models and then openly profess faith in magic-- on and on it goes.
There's some piece of emotional wiring or machinery missing in their brains, which would otherwise provide negative feedback to them, and so they start off with a handful of correct views and gradually escalate into more and more dysfunctional behaviors, in a way that eventually alienates them from everyone else.
However, setting them aside, I'd say that nonetheless the majority of the discussion on diets takes place among the elites.