“Janine, someone with your qualifications would have no trouble finding a top-flight job in either the food service or housekeeping industries.” – Ghostbusters
What celebrity loves cereal the most and is always prepared to eat it? Reese. With her spoon.
It sounds like how you would describe my hair.
“Tufts.”
Weirdly, it’s also a college in Massachusetts, which has very little to do with my hair. The last time I was in Massachusetts, I was looking for a lumberjack dressed like a patriot – I heard they had a Boston Lager©.
But back to Tufts®. It turns out that when famous showman P.T. Barnum wanted to give a college money, he chose them, I’m guessing because he likes a good joke. Although P.T. Barnum didn’t really say, “There’s a sucker born every minute,” it looks like Tufts© has adopted that phrase as their motto.
And the suckers that Tufts™ is currently targeting is . . . us.
American “official, government-approved™” nutritional guidelines have been a mess for all of my conscious life. Food quadrants. Food pyramids. Food tetrahedra. Actual government policy since 1969: “The same 1500 calories of sugar is better for you than 1500 calories of steak” – which came from after nutritionists (from Harvard™, no less!) in the 1960s got paid off.
My friend turned vegan – it was like I’d never seen herbivore.
I think that the results over the last fifty years have plainly shown that the government-suggested diet is awful. And I think that, further, the cheapest foods that many people consume on a daily basis is equally awful, but more on that, later.
The first conference on nutrition was held in 1969, and you can see how well that has worked out by all the skinny and fit people wandering around. The idiot in charge of this is a spell-check challenging person by the name Dariush Mozaffarian. To me, his name sounds like the founder of a Jamaican cannabis religion, but, no, he’s the head of a group that’s working with Joe Biden to further enrich big food companies no, make people fatter no, “build bigger backsides”.
I’ve seen the preliminary results of the mess that they’re likely to introduce. It’s called a Food Compass. The “compass” combines “9 domains and 54 individual attributes” to produce a single number between 1 and 100. I’m not kidding, and they claim to have done this evaluation on over 8,000 foods.
1 is “bad”. 100 is “good”. I don’t know if that makes it much of a compass, but I can already see that this is headed south. Instead of “don’t eat crap” it’s now going to be some ludicrous phrase like “Follow the Food Compass™ to Health®” and then Kamala will giggle like she’s been hotboxing ether with Hunter.
Yup, this is likely going to be official government policy – and one of Mozaffarian’s papers is titled, Mandating front-of-package food labels in the U.S. – What are the First Amendment obstacles?, so that should make you certain that there’s no threat of government force to mandate everyone. Oh, wait, this is Biden. His world consists only of mandates, pudding pops, and looking for fresh hair to sniff.
If The Mrs. made whiskey, I’d love her still.
Thankfully, Hair Plugs University®, oops, Tufts™ put a list of some of the foods that they had rated. I had a batch of comparisons I was going to make but decided I’d just put out a list so you could judge how well the compass works for yourself. I want to remind you, that these numbers came directly from the Tufts’© website:
- Tomato Juice, 100
- Cheerios™, 95
- Almond milk, 86
- Orange Juice, 78
- Chocolate-covered almonds, 78
- Soy milk, 71
- Potato Chips, 69
- PowerBar©, 67
- Peanut butter sandwich, 66
- Fritos®, 55
- Pineapple, canned, heavy syrup, 51
- M&M’s™, 44
- Chocolate ice cream cone with nuts, 37
- Cheddar cheese, 36
- Steak, 33
No, I didn’t goof up. This isn’t Bizzaro™ World©. These “scientists” are trying to say with a straight face that eating M&M’s© is better than eating steak. That eating potato chips is healthier than eating cheddar cheese. I could keep comparing, but food analogies are the Cheetos® of conversation.
I keep breath mints in my sleeveless jacket. I call it my Tic-Tactical® vest.
It is clear that these recommendations are going to be very, very bad. On the list as better than cheese and steak (which we have been eating for millennia) is candy. Also on the list are many things that simply have never existed in nature. How does one milk an almond or a soy? Where are the nipples even at?
Part of the problem with highly processed foods (like Cheerios™) is that they are essentially pre-digested. They hit the digestive system harder and faster than their more natural and unprocessed counterparts, which also creates spikes in insulin. Oh, wait, that seems to be a problem that leads to obesity and early death.
As found.
Cheerios© are certainly not as bad as M&M’s©, but both steak and cheese are better. And better for you. Steak and cheese are better, in my opinion, than every food ranked higher by the idiots at Tufts©. It will likely soon be government policy to encourage people to jam their cheeks with food that will kill them.
The food industry is about this: getting the most profit. How to do that? Jam the most calories into a food that tastes good enough to make people come back for more. Health? What’s that? Health doesn’t show up on the balance sheet.
If only someone could solve this problem. If only . . . oh, wait. Want to find physically healthy people with odd beards? Look to the Amish farmers that spend their days eating the food that comes off their farms. The first study I found on the Internet indicated that only 4% of Amish folks were obese.
Huh.
Do you know what drives me buggy? Me horsey.
Now, the Amish are also physically active, too, in most cases. But not in all cases. And they have pies. And cakes. But they don’t have almond milk. Or soy milk.
But when you look at their beards?
Tufts. And I’d trust those tufts over P.T. Barnum’s Tufts™.
That’s an amazing post John. Full of chuckles. Too bad the subject is so serious. Dinner for me last night was a porterhouse steak with cucumbers in a brine solution. My cardiologist says salt and fat very bad! I’m having the same for my daily meal tonight.
My cardiologist doesn’t look very healthy. He is 20 years younger than me.
I had a steak last night, too. And I’m probably going to avoid most of the foods above it on the list. And cheese is awesome.
Saw this on ZeroHedge, I believe, a week or so ago. Egg fried in butter rated something like 8?
This makes the late black sheep of the Tufts Family, Sonny, look like a genius. Bullwinkle had an autographed, 8×10 glossy B&W in his bedroom.
Yup, egg fried in butter is an 8 on one list I saw. And it’s very tasty. And still better for anyone than potato chips.
I’d be laughing hysterically if the Babylon Bee had run this article, but instead, it’s just sort of sad.
Yeah, when the Babylon Bee can’t do parody because the news is moving too fast . . . wow.
Academia really has arrived at full retard.
It’s interesting that almond milk is as high as it is. From what I recall, it appeared on the scene for those that are lactose intolerant. If you don’t eat cereal (like I don’t), you don’t need to worry about what to put on it. My gut doctor told me that cheese and full octane yogurt were OK. Lactose intolerance is natures way of telling you that you aren’t a child and don’t need milk any more.
When I was going through cancer therapy, one of my docs said (when advising my wife what to feed me) the closer it is to what God intended, the better it is for you. An orange is better than orange juice (much of which has sugar), A baked potato was better than mashed potato.
Funny thing is these eggheads can’t even look around the world to observe others diets and health – like your mention of the Amish. I remember reading where the French eat a far fattier diet than us, yet are more healthy on a whole.
There literally is nothing in my house on that list until you get down to cheddar cheese. Which begs the question for me;. Where’s beer on the list? It’s food, innit? Seems like the beer in my fridge would have more grainy goodness than cherios.
Yeah, everything I’ve seen shows the more processed the food is, the faster it hits the system, and bigger the hormone spike.
Based on that list, I am willing to bet a lot that the Tufts “diet compass” was dreamed up by a woman. My wife, bless her rolls, just ate the rest of a hunk of 7-layer chocolate cake for breakfast that she took home from the restaurant where we ate last night. She (and legions of her chubby sistas) will be thrilled to hear that her long-time staple of candy for breakfast is now considered healthier than steak and eggs.
Not that I wish to knock it, but how is tomato juice deemed the ultimate healthy food? I would have guessed either calves’ liver or grilled salmon, but what do I know? I am only 4 pounds lighter than I was as a senior in high school (even after having put back on ten pounds since succumbing to the clotshot late last year, d@mn my own eyes). And I still deadlift double bodyweight every Friday. I sure didn’t get here by gobbling M&Ms and “healthy, whole grain, sugar-crusted sh!tballs”.
The agenda is so blindingly obvious now and they aren’t even bothering to try to hide it. We’re being literally fattened for slaughter. Consider that pResident Poopypants is warmly regarded by media for his ice cream obsession, whereas DJT was openly ridiculed for mainlining Diet Coke.
As I recall grilled salmon was pretty high on the list (in a good way). There were some reasonable rankings, too. I had (for too long) bought into the calorie model, not realizing it was much more than that.
I thought your First Amendment Food Label paper reference was a joke. Silly me.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0306919217307789
Here’s a link to Mozaffarian’s original Food Compass paper. The key thing to pay attention to is the blue table on page 2, where he lists his “secret sauce” of “54 attributes across 9 domains”:
https://rdcu.be/czv0a
Plain instant oatmeal scores 89; pita bread scores 1. Huh.
But HERE is the Mozaffarian’s paper to REALLY be afraid of. Hint: ESG stands for “Environmental, Social, and Governance”.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41430-022-01075-9
Eating bugs cannot be far away….
Nope. They want to do things that the First Amendment wouldn’t allow. Not good.
I quit listening to most government “experts” a long time ago. The truth of the matter is that most “experts” will conclude the exact thing demanded by the ones paying them.
The experts have, in many cases, done far worse damage that just letting people do what they knew was best.
It’s all understandable, when you realize the scientific principle was changed to get all that testing stuff out of the way. Money is important to scientists, and clinical trials are way too expensive. That, and with the increasingly level of stupidity of people in government, you really don’t have to be a scientist to be a scientist. All you have to do is put on a lab coat, get a word generator to create a few dozen pages of B.S., and get someone to introduce you to a brain-dead member of Congress. CNN will jump on board, you will be the darling of television, and nobody will wonder why you look like death eating a cracker because of your diet.
Oh there are studies and whatnot. You just have to track them down.
Like the one showing all the corporate cereals have high levels of glycophosphates.
Anything using Roundup as a dessixant just prior to harvest is suspect.
When I read about the use of Roundup to desiccate grain just prior to harvest, a couple of years ago, I decided to minimize my consumption of non-organic grain products. The tricky thing about assessing the danger of Roundup (glyphosate herbicide) is that it has very low toxicity to animal biology, but its impact is on the non-animal biology that goes on in our digestive system is difficult to assess, but some studies show to be significant.
Here’s one reference: “Gut microbiota and neurological effects of glyphosate”
Authors: Lola Rueda-Ruzafa, Francisco Cruz, Pablo Roman, Diana Cardon
“In this work, we state a possible link between Gly-induced dysbiosis and cognitive and motor aggravations in neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental pathologies, such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Hence, we review the negative impact that Gly-induced dysbiosis may have on depression/anxiety, autism, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.”
Also:
“Controversies over human health and ecological impacts of glyphosate: Is it to be banned in modern agriculture?” by Islam Md. Meftaul (et al).
“However, glyphosate has been reported to increase the risk of cancer, endocrine-disruption, celiac disease, autism, effect on erythrocytes, leaky-gut syndrome, etc.”
CNN only will put you on if you agree with the Leftist points.
Very interesting, but a little confusing. A food “compass” divided into 100 units. No north or south, mind you. So, a compass transits a circle of 100 units… a new unit called the tetra-gradian?
But since a compass has a full circle, are foods with scores of 0 and 100 equivalent? While 99 and 1 are quite similar in ? Maybe they should have used the food “thermometer” instead.*
Whatever. I TrustTheScience™, so I’m off to have a bowl of Cheerios® in tomato juice, garnished with potato chips.
But they’d have to label it “Rectal use only.”
Ha! I love the rectal thermometer. At least that would be one way to get some fiber.
I once remarked to a genuine USDA nutrition scientist that the lack of “settled science” on human nutrition is a black mark on science and society as a whole. What could be more important to health and economics than knowing the best ways to feed ourselves, and what have we had more time to study? Her answer: sign up here to be a nutrition research subject! So, I signed up, ready to do my part for science, until I discovered that I’d have to EAT THEIR FOOD before being bled and analyzed. If I could get them to assess MY diet, I’d be happy to bleed for them. (I’m 63 years old, 6’2″, 160 lbs, and shrugged off a covid infection in three days.) But I’m not going to modify my diet just to see what happens.
My wife passed away in March at age 70 1/2. She believed her doctors and nutritionist. She was diabetic and on dialysis and they killed her. Her last hospital stay, she was only allowed french toast with corn syrup disguised as maple syrup and regular Pepsi.
I miss the girl…
I am so sorry for your loss. The hospital [redacted]s are killing a lot of our loved ones these days. May God grant you peace.
And all of the “low-carb” diets they tested weren’t low carb, they were “several Snickers bars a day” low carb.
Hate to ruin the point but most Amish eat garbage. The local Amish grocery store sells more Mountain Dew and Doritos than anything else. On the other hand the Amish burn a ton of calories because they work so hard but a *lot* of younger Amish kids who don’t have a bunch of chores are starting to get really fat.
The data was from somewhere around 2010 or so?
I’d take your actual experience over Internet research any day (really!!), but I’d be willing to bet the Amish still have better diets than most of the Standard American Diet users, garbage and all.
“They compassed me about; yea, they compassed me about: but …”
” 54 individual attributes” ? Should it not have 57™? 1 for each State? More Patriotic?
Well, i Certainly hope they have it color coded, to indicate ‘threat level’. Worked swimmingly so far. Especially since it’s “new AND improved!”
https://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/01/27/threat.level.system.change/index.html
The eponymous green? Crickets. And relatives. (unsure of the spelling for that fancy latin, “et al.”, think it means “and Others”. Too.)
Dariush Mozaffarian? Clearly, he’s Scandinavian. (born August 19, 1969) Always struggled with irony vs. coincidence.
Working at a Scandinavian institution.
“Jean Mayer Professor at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. He is also Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine. Dr. Mozaffarian has stepped away from his role as Dean of the Friedman School for the 2022-23 academic year, returning on July 1, 2023, to focus on the translation and dissemination of scientific evidence into public awareness, policy, and innovation, including work to help inform the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health.”
i think he just says he’s Scandinavian, but he’s really not. ‘Minority’ admissions preference.
Kinda like Sacagawea…” identified her race as “American Indian” on her 1986 State Bar of Texas registration card to practice law in the state, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. The card, filled out in blue ink and dated April 1986, is the first reported document to show Warren declaring herself American Indian in her own handwriting.”
✋🏽”How(L)”
P.S. Stay out of the Bermuda Triangle while wearing.
The one thing he isn’t? Right.
do people actually look to the government for guidance on ANYTHING any more? to me that is evolution in action. what EVER they suggest do the opposite. that’s a no brainer.
It’s the basis for what the things they shove into the heads of kids at school every day so that they get those precious FedBux, that’s the danger.
The fear of fat that underlies all this crap is at best malpractice, but realistically fraud by Ancel Keyes in the 1950s and ’60s. He did a famous paper called the Seven Countries Study showing heart disease and deaths went up with fat consumption. The sugar companies buying off the studies showing the dangers of sugar are almost a footnote to Keyes.
The fraud was that he had data on 23 countries and only cherry-picked the seven that agreed with his conclusion to publish.
If I had done that with engineering data to prove an avionics system worked as desired, I’d be rotting in jail.
Keyes did some useful work, starving conscientious objectors in WWII in what’s called the Minnesota Starvation Studies, but he really had a dark side. When a study showed that his diet ideas hurt people instead of helping them, he had enough authority by then to bury it. It only came to light after Keyes’ death when one of the experimenters kids (grandkids?) found the paper.
It’s impossible to get a number of how many people Ancel Keyes and the FDA’s dietary guidelines have killed.
Ancel Keys didn’t just kill people with his arrogance and dead-nuts-wrong dietary theories. He led them to torture themselves slowly for decades, first. No other person, with the possible exception of George McGovern, who was the lead pig-ignorant pol behind the notorious and since-maligned “Food Pyramid”, was more responsible for the decades-long failed experiment known colloquially as the “low-fat diet” than Ancel Keys. That arrogant fool obviously did not take the Hippocratic oath to heart, pushing his unhealthy agenda well past the point where he, himself, recognized that his theories were wrong, and his advice would do more harm than good.
Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot? Pikers. Ancel Keys convinced generations of overweight Americans to off themselves using nothing more than bullying and megalomania. The worst villains always pass themselves off as benevolent saviors.
I’ve heard the Minnesota studies were also flawed, since the “starvation” really wasn’t starvation. Keyes has done horrifying damage – and killed millions before their time was due.
Here’s the one most important sentence from the official, peer-reviewed publication:
“…while the Food Compass was tested and validated against two major NPS and NOVA, next steps include testing against health outcomes, application to other product datasets and testing in other world regions with widely differing available food products.”
Assessing actual “health outcomes” related to this nutrition advice has not even been attempted yet. So, how is it other than a rehash of existing assumptions, prejudices, and intuitions?
Excellent, excellent observation. It’s a rehash of existing “official policy” and has never been tested.
“We have to pass the law to find out what’s in it.”
We have to eat the bugs to know what they do to us?