An Engineer Dismantles the Food Guide Pyramid (L-O-N-G)

Warning: this is from a conversation between me and my husband—there are no known findings or resources that point to this conclusion, and it may not even be fact. I just thought the whole thing was interesting, and wanted to share it with you.

It all began with a Yahoo News story about how obesity isn’t such a big deal as long as the obese person is healthy on all other counts—blood pressure, blood sugar, lung capacity, urinalysis, etc, and was followed by a comparison to the so-called “obesity epidemic” versus the Madrid runway model ban on anyone under a certain BMI number. It made no sense—we’re supposed to be fighting fat, yet in some places, they’re actually fighting skinny! Where is the middle ground?

From there, we moved on to his test results from that day’s doctor visit—we had a long, winding conversation woven (however loosely) around a the central theme of nutrition. His doctor reported that his blood pressure was to die for (meaning fantastic), his blood sugar was excellent, and his cholesterol nearly non-existent. “Numbers—I need numbers!” was my reply. He rattled them off, and I told him what I knew of baselines old and new. The new baseline for cholesterol was 140, the new blood pressure goal was 116/55, and the new blood sugar number was anything less than 100. We both remarked about how low these baseline numbers had gotten in light of the so-called obesity epidemic, and this led to a new twist in the conversation.

I was briefly surprised at his cholesterol number, because we eat tacos with pork lard-fried tortillas at least once a week, if not more, and I bake with coconut oil. So much for the saturated fat scare!

The comparison of old and new baseline establishments introduced the idea of a “fudge factor”—that’s engineer-speak for “room for error.” By lowering what used to be perfectly acceptable benchmarks of good health, any overages would be caught in the “fudge factor”—good health would be maintained even though the new benchmarks were breached, deceiving the patient into thinking he/she could and should do better.

This inevitably led to the inclusion of calorie intake and the Food Guide pyramid. Hubby says that since food policy is formed by the government, and he works for the government (but in a different capacity), there is about a 90% “fudge factor” built into every set of guidelines and benchmarks established by this entity. The USRDA allowances, for example, are a known minimum establishment of what it would take to keep a person alive, but not necessarily in good health. We carried this one step further and applied it to the Food Guide Pyramid—especially in the “caloric intake” department. Where is it carved in stone that 2000 calories a day is THE magic number for an average adult? Where is it carved in stone that the Food Guide Pyramid is the last word on what amounts of what nutrients makes up a healthy diet, and for whom?

We then began a list of all the things we’re “supposed” to eat every day according to the guidelines—all the ½ cup servings of all the food groups in a day for one individual. Hubby asked me if I knew how many calories it added up to, and I replied that I didn’t know for sure. “Fruits and veggies are mainly water, and don’t have many calories at all,” I replied, “but the rest of it would depend on the choices within the food groups.”

A quick mental tally, however incorrect, gave us the impression that if someone were to follow the Pyramid to the letter each day, the caloric intake would probably be more than the established 2000 calories per day, most of it in starch form.

Here’s where it got interesting for me: one of my formerly-owned metabolism books included a quiz on how many calories it would take to maintain my current BMI. My end result was 437—far less than a starvation diet of 1200 calories, or what was established again by our own government as a Third World starvation diet intake.

I connected the dots from here, wondering if the entire Food Guide Pyramid and the whole recommended caloric intake baseline number weren’t plagued by the 90% “fudge factor.” If this is the case, we’re ALL consuming way more calories than we need to, and the result is this government-induced obesity epidemic. I know personally that neither one of us could eat all the supposedly-required amounts of food they recommend each day, and I’ve compensated for this in my own way: instead of five servings of fruits AND five servings of vegetables, I make a huge and varied salad with mixed baby greens or spring mix as the base, and add fruits and vegetables to it—one big serving of a multitude of fruits, vegetables, and greens all in one shot. We have this with dinner, the next day’s lunch, and I even have some for breakfast on occasion.

This salad is my junk food.

As much of it as we consume in a 24-hour period, it doesn’t add up to many calories by itself. Alas, we do eat meat, but the meat is no longer the main star on the plate.

If the “fudge factor” was applied to the 2000 calorie intake number, it would subtract 1800 calories off that number, leaving us with 200 calories. Compared to my recommended “maintenance” BMI intake of 437 calories, this would probably make me lose weight…or worse. I would definitely have to become a vegetarian to do this, and maybe go so far as to live on nothing but water. I am not a rotund person, as most newscasts depict obese individual on TV, but I am thick from head to toe, and am too short for my weight according to the BMI chart.

But the BMI chart cannot tell the difference between muscle and fat, so I’ll leave that alone.

Later that evening, I thought more about this ‘fudge factor” and what else it could be applied to in government terms, such as contract bids and overruns—could it be that this 90% “fudge factor” is built into each and every contract for bid, making cost overruns and time overruns baked into the cake, or an insignificant part of the project estimate? Is it possible that all the ballyhooing everyone does about overruns, fraud, waste, and abuse is really all for naught, and that the government added this “fudge factor” into the original plans? Lastly, what if a contractor comes in on time and under budget—does the regained money go into the “pork barrel” for redistribution? Is that where “pork barrel” monies come from?

The next day, I mentally returned to the Food Guide pyramid and wondered if all those “recommended servings” were yet another “fudge factor” to establish a false ceiling of what we SHOULD eat as opposed to what we NEED to eat for optimal health. If we were to apply that 90% reduction to each food group in the Pyramid, we’d get something closer to human proportions of food to be consumed each day (perhaps for sedentary people)—at least MY stomach tells me that!

Hubby has what has been called a “hiatal hernia”—part of his stomach slipped down into his diaphragm—and there is no known fix for this. If he overeats, it causes a weird attack similar to a gall bladder attack, and it recently has taken even less food than usual to fill him up, so I suppose even more of his stomach has slipped down. If I were to feed him the recommended 2000 calories a day, he’d be in the hospital getting his stomach pumped from overeating. To this day, he eats about a third what a normal man his age and size would eat, and he gets plenty full—there is no weight loss here, making me wonder some more about the recommended calorie intake number and the “fudge factor.” I also wonder if this is Nature’s version of stomach stapling.

I’ve already dismantled the salt and sodium intake numbers in a past article, and proved that the magic number of 21-hundred-whatever is dead wrong, and that 500 is the absolute minimum for electrolyte balance. Adding back the 90% “fudge factor” doesn’t come to 21-hundred-whatever, though—only 950. Still, it’s enough to make you wonder.

The idea topic was wrapped up a few days later when I introduced the twist of food politics into the Pyramid mix. I always figured that the food groups and their serving amounts had more to do with political pandering to farmers than it did for actual nutrition, because the basic information hadn’t changed much since the first guidelines were established—only the graphics and marketing have changed. Hubby said not to assume a conspiracy when something simpler can explain things, and said that 5 servings of something has a 90% “fudge factor” of 4.5, so the real amounts we’d need to consume daily is about a tenth of what the food groups and Pyramid tell us.

Speaking of conspiratorial thoughts, wouldn’t it be a riot if our so-called “obesity epidemic” was one of our own government’s making? It wouldn’t surprise me if this went hand-in-hand with the medical establishment’s lack of practicing optimal nutrition for preventative health care just to get Uncle Sam out of having to cut more Social Security checks. Are we literally being engineered to death by our own government? One wonders.

Meanwhile, I’m going to continue employing what I call the “No Child Left Behind” rule of health: I’ll keep eating to improve my test scores, since they are what truly matter in the end. Blanket guidelines don’t have anything to do with ME and my individual needs, and they don’t have anything to do with you as an individual, either. As long as my doctor’s happy, it doesn’t matter what society, the mirror, or some flawed BMI chart says!