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New Symbol For Healthful Eating: Hello Plate, Goodbye Pyramid

by April Fulton
NPR News



It's a pretty safe bet that not many people will mourn the demise of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's food pyramid — the 20-year-old symbol of the department's dietary guidelines — when it's officially retired Thursday.

Just about everyone agrees the pyramid was complicated, and tried to get too many messages across at once — more dairy, less sweets, exercise, portion control, etc.

But the new symbol is simple — a plate divided into portions. And that's a good thing, said first lady Michelle Obama at a news conference on the subject.

"Parents don't have the time to measure out exactly three ounces of chicken or to look up how much rice or broccoli is in a serving," she said.


The pyramid has been maligned for some time.

"I'm surprised they didn't go to the dodecahedron as their next alternative," quipped John Stanton, who heads the food marketing department at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, to Shots.

Here's USDA release explaining what's up with the plate:


The plate features a lot more fruits and vegetables. In fact, half the plate is devoted to fruits and veggies. That's good news for fruit and vegetable producers like Lorelei DiSogra, vice president for nutrition and health at the United Fresh Produce Association.

DiSogra worked on the "half plate" message for more than a decade in various jobs, including one at the National Cancer Institute. "Half a plate is a very effective communications tool. It's very compelling, it's very clear, it's very straightforward," she says.

In other words, it's everything the pyramid was not. Less prominent on the plate is meat. In fact, it's not even named.

Americans are not going to throw out their grills, says Planet Barbecue author and host of PBS' Primal Grill Steven Raichlen. But they might start thinking about using meat the way many other countries around the world do — as more of a flavorful condiment than "this belly-bludgeoning, plate-burying hunk of protein."

A simple plate is a good idea from a marketing standpoint, St. Joseph's University's Stanton says. "The consumer spends maybe a maximum of three seconds looking at a food in a grocery store," he says. "Can you think of a busy mother trying to put delicious, nutritious food on the table, looking at a pyramid?"

Been there, done that, and, nope.

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more from me-chell obama and the food nazis later.

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Food Nazi's? WTF? Encouraging kids to eat better is a good thing isn't it? what the hell has all this to do with Nazi's?

Godwins law, look it up.

Jesus!

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Originally Posted by Dødherre Mørktre:
more from me-chell obama and the food nazis later.

Funny, I thought nazis were right-wing? :-P

Oh yeah, it doesn't have to make sense as an insult does it.....?

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Originally Posted by Kieran Colfer:


Funny, I thought nazis were right-wing? :-P

another liberal lie, miles. they were the national socialist party of germany.

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Originally Posted by Dødherre Mørktre:

another liberal lie, miles. they were the national socialist party of germany.

You know, it is possible for something to be said by a liberal that isn't a lie....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism#Ideology

Just because they have "socialist" in the name, doesn't mean they were socialist - look at the "Democratic" People's Republic of Korea (AKA North Korea), or the German "Democratic" Republic (AKA East Germany). The clue isn't always in the name.

Next thing you're going to try to tell me is that the Nazis were actually commies because they had "socialist" in the name, and the whole invading Russia thing was only a ruse to trick the capitalists in the west....

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but this is one such lie. the nazis were socialists by every modern definition of the word. this all goes back to the outdated european way of thinking that the nazis were of the right, while the communists were of the left. it's this very way of thinking that has allowed modern europeans to move to socialism.


THE OMINOUS PARALLELS, by Leonard Peikoff...

Excerpt from Chapter One.

(just had to add this first paragraph, as it reminds of parallels we see today)

The German university students were among the earliest groups to back Hitler. The intellectuals were among his regime's most ardent supporters. Professors with distinguished academic credentials, eager to pronounce their benediction on the Fuhrer's cause, put their scholarship to work full time; they turned out a library of admiring volumes, adorned with obscure allusions and learned references.



The system which Hitler established -- the social reality which so many Germans were so eager to embrace or so willing to endure -- the politics which began in a theory and ended in Auschwitz -- was: the "total state".

"The concept of personal liberties of the individual as opposed to the authority of the state had to disappear; it is not to be reconciled with the principle of the nationalistic Reich," said Huber to a country which listened, and nodded. "There are no personal liberties of the individual which fall outside of the realm of the state and which must be respected by the state... The constitution of the nationalistic Reich is therefore not based upon a system of inborn and inalienable rights of the individual."

If the term "statism" designates concentration of power in the state at the expense of individual liberty, then Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism -- the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies -- which has characterized most of human history.

In degree, however, the total state does differ from its predecessors: it represents statism pressed to its limits, in theory and in practice, devouring the last remnants of the individual. Although previous dictators (and many today; e.g., in Latin America) often preached the unlimited power of the state, they were on the whole unable to enforce such power. As a rule, citizens of such countries had a kind of partial "freedom", not a freedom-on-principle, but at least a freedom-by-default.

Even the latter was effectively absent in Nazi Germany. The efficiency of the government in dominating its subjects, the all-encompassing character of its coercion, the complete mass regimentation on a scale involving millions of men -- and, one might add, the enormity of the slaughter, the planned, systematic mass slaughter, in peacetime, initiated by a government against its own citizens -- these are the insignia of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Nazi AND communist), which are without parallel in recorded history. In the totalitarian regimes, as the Germans found out after only a few months of Hitler's rule, every detail of life is prescribed, or proscribed. There is no longer any distinction between private matters and public matters. "There are to be no more private Germans," said Friedrich Sieburg, a Nazi writer; "each is to attain significance only by his service to the state, and to find complete self-fulfillment in his service." "The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."

In place of the despised "private individuals," the Germans heard daily or hourly about a different kind of entity, a supreme entity, whose will, it was said, is what determines the course and actions of the state: the nation, the whole, the GROUP. Over and over, the Germans heard the idea that underlies the advocacy of omnipotent government, the idea that totalitarians of every kind stress as the justification of their total states: COLLECTIVISM.

Collectivism is the theory that the group (the collective) has primacy over the individual. Collectivism holds that, in human affairs, the collective -- society, the community, the nation, the proletariat, the race, etc. -- is THE UNIT OF REALITY AND THE STANDARD OF VALUE. On this view, the individual has reality only as part of the group, and value only insofar as he serves it; on his own he has no political rights; he is to be sacrificed for the group whenever it -- or its representative, the state -- deems this desirable.

"Private property" as conceived under the liberalistic economy order was a reversal of the true concept of property [wrote Huber]. This "private property" represented the right of the individual to manage and to speculate with inherited or acquired property as he pleased, without regard for the general interests... German socialism had to overcome this "private", that is, unrestrained and irresponsible view of property. All property is common property. The owner is bound by the people and the Reich to the responsible management of his goods. His legal position is only justified when he satisfies this responsibility to the community.

Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of CONTROL. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property -- so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property.

If "ownership" means the right to determine the use and disposal of material goods, then Nazism endowed the state with every real prerogative of ownership. What the individual retained was merely a formal deed, a content-less deed, which conferred no rights on its holder. Under communism, there is collective ownership of property DEJURE. Under Nazism, there is the same collective ownership DE FACTO.

During the Hitler years -- in order to finance the party's programs, including the war expenditures -- every social group in Germany was mercilessly exploited and drained. White-collar salaries and the earnings of small businessmen were deliberately held down by government controls, freezes, taxes. Big business was bled by taxes and "special contributions" of every kind, and strangled by the bureaucracy. At the same time the income of the farmers was held down, and there was a desperate flight to the cities -- where the middle class, especially the small tradesmen, were soon in desperate straits, and where the workers were forced to labor at low wages for increasingly longer hours (up to 60 or more per week).

But the Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument. Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, SOCIALISM. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. "Socialism" for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism -- in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.

"To be a socialist", says Goebbels, "is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole."

LIBERTARIANISM is of the right, STATISM is of the left. whether its communism, socialism, or fascism, they're all just different spins on state control. this is the very thing that the founders of america sought to shield the people from. miles, this collective mentality has already taken hold of europe, again. and now it's spread across the atlantic.

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freedom is about a helluva lot more than voting and economics.