Thanks.
On the red meat stuff - I need to look into that more. A lot of it doesn't make sense to me.
For instance: The last package of pastrami lunchmeat I bought was 8 ounces (8 slices). It was 40 calories and 17.5 mg of cholesterol a slice. http://www.fatsecret...a=fjrd&rid=759136 Is a couple of slices of pastrami really horrible? Is "red meat" being lumped in together with 1500 calorie mass-market burgers with fake cheese and fake mayo and fake ketchup? Is a lean steak once in a while really bad? What if one doesn't eat processed meats? http://www.webmd.com...th-about-red-meat
http://www.heartpoin...lfoodpyramid.html says a 6 oz serving of grilled salmon has 100 mg of cholesterol and 14 grams of fat (=126 calories). 6 oz of pastrami would be 17.5*6 = 105 mg and 7.5g of fat (=67.5 calories). But grilled salmon is good and red meat will kill you.... :-/
The thing that appealed to me about this version of the pyramid was that portion control was among the most important factor. Sumo wrestlers get huge eating (mainly) rice - http://www.cnngo.com...tlers-diet-067161 . People starve in Bangladesh on rice. Surely the portions matter at least as much as the mixture of foods.
http://www.pbs.org/w...iews/willett.html
The rest of the pyramid?
Our alternative pyramid, like the USDA pyramid, does emphasize plenty of fruits and vegetables, but we've taken potatoes out of the vegetable group. We've put legumes and nuts as a layer. If you want to be a vegetarian, those are good protein sources. But moderate amounts of poultry, fish, and nuts can also make a diet be a non-vegetarian diet and still very healthy. And up at the top we've put red meat and dairy products, dairy fat, because those are high in saturated fat. ... At the top of the pyramid, we've put foods like white bread, white rice, white pasta, and sweets as those that should be used sparingly. And that was really the base of the USDA pyramid.
Some nutritionists have criticized your pyramid as "floating on a lake of olive oil."
The formal studies that had compared a more moderate fat intake as we've suggested, with low-fat diets, have actually consistently shown that people did as well or better controlling their weight on a moderate-fat diet compared to a high-carbohydrate, low-fat diet.
Even good fats are more fattening than good carbs. So they think you're contributing to the obesity epidemic, or there's a risk of that. A tablespoon of olive oil is 14 grams of fat.
There are all kinds of beliefs about the amount of fat in a diet, tremendously strong opinions. What we really need is sound data, and the studies that have been done show that people actually end up controlling their weight at least as well, and usually better, on moderate-fat diets compared to low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets.
Is it okay to get more than 30 percent of your calories from fat?
The evidence is quite clear that it's perfectly fine to get more than 30 percent of your calories from fat, and probably, in fact, it's even better to be getting more than 30 percent of calories from fat, if it's the healthy form of fat. ...
When you look at the causes of obesity, what do you find?
The causes of obesity and the obesity epidemic in the United States are extremely complex. In fact, obesity is sort of a tip of the iceberg of tremendous social change that's been going on during the last few decades. First of all, our activity patterns have changed greatly. We have children and adults now watching on the average, about four hours of television per day, and in study after study, we've seen just the number of hours of television watching being the strongest predictor of obesity. When I was young and came home after school, we'd all go out and play, and our mothers would have to drag us in for dinner. That doesn't happen very often anymore. Often the mothers are not there. Kids are inside. The television is used as baby sitters. We've also made it dangerous and uninviting to walk to places, to walk to stores, to ride bikes in urban areas, and that's removed an important amount of physical activity from our lives as well.
So the physical activities pattern's changed, but the food environment has also changed. We have food available fast and very low-cost and very convenient, almost everywhere. The food industry has invested many tens of billions of dollars in making their products more attractive, more sweet, more salty, more sexy, more seductive in every way that they can, and we're vulnerable to that promotion, and we are eating more. So you put these two factors together -- reduction in activity, heavy promotion of food -- and you've got, not surprisingly, an epidemic of obesity.
And serving sizes have ballooned. Back in olden days when I was a kid, a bottle of Coke was 6 oz...
Oh well. :-)
Cheers,
Scott.
