That isn’t a joke. It’s from the official HHS Facebook page.
I try not to think about Ancient Rome every day but I see things like this and it’s unavoidable. Rome was completely dependent on wheat from Egypt. Egypt was completely dependent on wheat from Egypt as well. It’s still so dependent that bread is subsidized so that it is available for the lower class to survive on. French baguettes? Subsidized in France.
This last year I have eaten so much bread. I’m making several pounds of it a week because I can make a pound of bread for less than a dollar. I mix up a big batch of dough and use it all up not even knowing what I’ll be making out of it in advance. It might get turned into bread, pizza crust or pitas. In fact I have 3.5 pounds of it rising on my kitchen island right now.
How much weight did I gain eating all this bread last year? I lost 7 pounds.
Bread is life. It’s the reason that people with gluten issues try so desperately to make bread they can eat. It was there at the birth of agriculture. It made cities possible.
But it’s way down near the bottom of this triangle and red meat is at the top. How are you going to make a good steak sandwich without more bread than steak? Assuming you can afford steak.
The German Nutrition Society (DGE) has shifted to a circle instead of a pyramid:
The portions of the circle refer to volume and not calories. In my opinion this design is superior to pyramids in general because all parts are equally important for a balanced diet, with hydration in the middle.
On my second look I’m confused about why so much vodka and gin is the center of a balanced diet.
Is there a version weighted by calories? Because I’m finding volume to be hard for me to understand because I’m so used to weighting by calories. A pound of tomatoes looks very different in size from a pound of tomato sauce but the two are nutritionally the same. But I do agree that volume would be easy for the average person.
On the new pyramid a whole roasted turkey has a higher priority than a 16 ounce steak. Who eats a whoy roasted turkey? Or is it a rotisserie chicken? It’s bigger than the steak so it must be a turkey, right?
Also when I looked at this before reading your description I was wondering if there was a difference between items closer to the center than the outside.
It’s still a better design than a top heavy triangle.