Death by Food Pyramid

by Denise Minger

This book was awesome. I read it for my Paleo "book club", but I would not call this a paleo book. Minger is very good at remaining objective and is careful not to push any one diet. She emphasizes the fact that there is no such thing as one ideal diet which will work wonderfully for everyone. She breaks down a few genetic factors which will influence the type of diet a person does best on and explains the effect of those genetics. It was enough to finally make me want to sign up for 23andMe.com

This book is perfect for people who don't understand science. It's about science and how studies are conducted, but Minger does an excellent job of making all of her information very accessible. She doesn't bog the reader down with variables and statistics. Instead, she explains the most pertinent parts of science and the terminology that gets used in published studies. She explains what a well-conducted study needs and what we can glean from studies that are less than ideal (because we can rarely, if ever, get a perfect study). Best of all, Minger does not tell us what to do or whom to believe. Instead, she urges us to be skeptical of any and all studies and she gives us the tools that we need to discern the sources of valuable information from the ones that are best taken with a large grain of salt.

My favorite part of this book was the section that pertained to the title. I had thought that the food pyramid was based on the work of Ancel Keys and did not realized that money played any real part in it. As Minger points out, "USDA" stands for "United States Department of Agriculture", not "United States Department of Nutrition". The department's job is not to promote nutrition, but to promote American agriculture. Apparently when the food pyramid was designed, the wheat business was the one with the deepest pockets, hence the prominent place in the largest section of the pyramid. The meat and dairy businesses were not happy about the arrangement, and some minor concessions were made in their favor, but it does appear that Keys' dogma also played a role in the building of the pyramid.

While I had been aware of Keys' influence on society's current conventional wisdom, I had not realized that the USDA had hired a team of nutritionists to design the first food pyramid. What those nutritionists came back with looked a lot like what I think of the Paleo food pyramid looking like. Granted, there have been some variations on that pyramid, but the main similarity was the restriction of grains and sugar. It made me feel better about my eating habits and emphasized what I had already known about the need for vegetables to be prioritized in our diet.

Minger points out that Paleo is not the only lifestyle with devoted followers and she breaks down each one (Paleo, Mediterranean, and whole foods plant-based) in terms of their pros and cons. She points out what they have in common, but she emphasizes that their greatest overlap is not in what they include, but in what they exclude. They all exclude sugar, refined grains, and vegetable oils, providing evidence that what we don't eat might be at least as (if not more) important as what we do eat.