It's Upside Down!

My God, they actually did it. RFK and friends released their newly remodeled Food Pyramid and it's exactly what Cartman wanted to do 10 years ago.

this isn’t the first time that our government has attempted to fix the nutrition recommendations in our country.  When I started teaching health in 2008 I still had a chalkboard and was showing VHS tapes of what constitutes a Healthy Breakfast.  These videos still used the old pyramid to guide what kids should have been eating.  Apparently, we’ve learned in recent years that big sugar paid off the government to villainize Fats while downplaying the harmful effects of Sugar.

As US kids kept getting fatter the obvious answer was to rework the pyramid.  But the Obama’s didn’t want to fully admit that South Park was right.  So instead, Michelle decided to not completely flip the pyramid.

So she turned it. Nothing really changed. I know because I pretended to grade 1,000 6th grade Ven Diagrams comparing the old to new versions, and most kids left it blank. (made for easy grading.)

But, obesity rates kept rising, and something drastic had to be done to save the lives of so many chubbsters.  In 2009 we did it, the nutrition equivalent to landing on the moon.

The MyPlate.  That’s right, turns out triangles are too hard, but a circle… Now that's something even the dumbest kids can understand.  They have been drawing circles since Pre-K, and guess what it worked.  Look at the following graph, rates start dropping around the same time the Plate hits the classrooms.

Uh Oh,  apparently a circle isn’t infinite, cause after a few years its magic ran out.  I guess kids realized that eating grapes with their fried chicken wasn’t much fun.  

Have no fear, RFK is here!  And his new food pyramid is the ultimate troll job.  They literally just flipped it.

And guess what, it's actually better.  Hopefully, we didn’t spend a billion dollars to do something that my 8th graders could have done for nothing but a pretend health grade.  Let's hope it's just the beginning.  Schools need way more than a new shape every five years. 

The first thing cut in education is always extra-curricular. Sports, Clubs, Cooking Classes, Shop Classes, Recess, PE, Music.  All the stuff you remember liking from schools has been slowly disappearing in many districts.  There is very little left in education that grasps students' attention and connects them to the school environment.  Instead, adults just repackage the same old and try to sell it as new and better.  Obesity gets better when we start giving kids more chances to move.  Instead, they go home to adults that are stressed out from working more to get less and are perfectly ok letting a computer entertain their kid because they just need a break.