The Food Pyramid Scheme

Legacy of Longevity

I was thinking about my grandfather the other day, an important man in my life who passed away several years ago in September of 2014, but who had lived into his 80’s. A remarkable feat on many matrices, especially when considering that the average life expectancy in the Western world has only increased by 20 years since the 1950’s, and that even today a person living into their 80’s and being alive long enough to actually have a chance to see Halley’s Comet pass by the earth twice is a rarity.   

We inherently know that not all people age at the same rate and we’ve been told that aging starts on the inside, at the cellular and molecular level, even in spite of the myriad of life events that may influence the course of a human lifetime. For some, genetics obviously play a large part, but increasingly science is unravelling the fallacy of inevitable aging and instead of treating aging as a natural and inescapable part of living, it’s now looking at it as an illness seeking a remedy.

I’ve been biohacking my own aging process ever since I first learned that my grandfather was dying of terminal cancer. When he was told that he had 3 months left to live, and certainly looked the part of a shrivelled and defeated man who wouldn’t make it three weeks never mind a few months, I went on a literal life and death quest to find out what I could do to help him as Western medicine had assured us that they’d run out of all possible options.

What I discovered in virtually no time at all was that by radically and rapidly changing his diet to one based on ketogenics and then boosting his systems with supplements and easy fitness regimens, I was able to extend his death bed prognosis by more than 3 and almost a full 4 years. In the process he was also restored to levels of vitality, mobility, ranges of motion, and fitness greater than he’d experienced since he was in his forties.

Confronting Dietary Myths

In the process I found out that, while my grandparents and parents had been diligently following all the recommendations inherent in the food pyramids put forth by many governments to promote daily nutrition intakes, what this system – offered more or less unchanged across most of the westernized world – was really doing was no more than serving as a marketing “pyramid scheme” designed to keep corporate farming and food industries profitable, while truly doing more harm than good for anyone following it.

But to learn that truth, I had to look, because there’s no playbook on how we should really be treating the human instrument that our minds and our essence live within, only a vast wasteland of machinations and dead ends seemingly solely designed to increase corporate profits, with little regard to the needs of the actual beings that proper food intake impacts.

Corporate Influence on Food Choices

There’s a whole ton of reasons for this, some of which include what appears to be a very highly intertwined group of companies that oversee our lives from cradle to grave and that seem to systematically prepare us to be handed off to each industry within a fully integrated chain as our lives progress from one stage to the next until our health inevitably fails and ultimately we’re left to be disposed of by the final funerary link in the chain.

With more than 8.075 billion people on Earth, it really isn’t all that great a stretch of the imagination to consider that if push came to shove that, “Soylent Green is people!”, might not be so much science fiction as an actual food conglomerate blueprint for eventually feeding a hungry planet. But for now, we’ll leave this thought to Charlton Heston and what his movie envisioned as being the reality we were supposed to experience in 2022.

Regardless of where it comes from though, make no mistake about it, food is a challenge that we’ve long sought to get definitive and solid guidance on. Yet while the truth may be out there, the influence of seemingly uncaring, profit oriented corporations in our diets really became cemented in my consciousness when I first became aware of some of the ingredients that were included in a particularly large batch of dog food.

Now I know that unless push comes to extreme shove that people don’t typically eat dog food, but for many people who have dogs as members of their families it’s no stretch of the imagination to know that they’re often better taken care of than the humans in the group. So, with this in mind, kindly follow along with me here for a moment as I share how I came to know an uncomfortable truth.

A close friend of mine had their dog die in August of 2007, a result of contaminated food ingredients that came out of China. The pre-mix content that was shipped around the world and supplied by Binzhou Futian Biology Technology Co. Ltd. was supposed to include wheat gluten and other “healthy” fillers but was instead heavily contaminated with melamine, a highly toxic chemical, that the suppliers had intentionally included as a way to artificially claim higher protein content.

Given the highly interwoven nature of global supply chains at the time, at least 150 dog and cat food makers around the world got their pre-mix directly from this one supplier and many tens of thousands of pets died from kidney failure a few months later after their owners had fed their pets so-called “premium” and other more expensive canned and dry foods that they thought were superior and safer in quality but were instead all highly contaminated with this toxic melamine protein booster.

It was especially ironic that the people who loved their pets enough to buy these more expensive foods were also unknowingly rapidly killing them through their acts of kindness as they sought out what they thought were nutritionally superior products that would assure their pet’s health.

So why, is the obvious question, would companies that make money off of the animals and people that eat their foods do anything to risk the lives of their consumers? Shouldn’t they want to see us live to be a thousand years old and become loyal and avid users of their products for virtually an eternity instead of consistently producing the kind of crap that they already know, through their own research, is actually doing more to hasten our deaths than virtually any other thing on the planet? How does it make any sense to actually be producing the goods that reduce the life expectancy of the end user for your products?

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the global food conglomerates have done just as much if not more research on their products than the tobacco industry did for theirs, or that the oil companies have done in regard to their complicity in climate change and pollution, or that some in big pharma did with the opioid crisis. And, just as they all knew well in advance that their products were inherently dangerous – despite us being told that 8 out of 10 doctors recommended smooth tobacco, and that eliminating leaded gasoline made it safe to use, and that OxyContin was less addictive than other synthetic analgesic drugs similar to morphine, or that many frozen foods marketed as healthy choices are actually loaded with modified sugars and unhealthy preservatives that have been shown to cause cancer – that no one ever seems to be able effectively step up to stop their well-funded, lobbying juggernauts of deception until it’s too late to turn back the hands of time.

Is it any wonder that Stephen Hawking modified his prediction that he expanded upon to take in a variety of additional factors beyond meteors and A.I. to conclude that humans had another 1,000 years of being able to survive on the planet down to a mere 100, and that he said it 6 years ago?

Historical Perspectives on Diet

It’s fascinating that back in 1894, the USDA’s first guidelines for a healthy diet told people to eat a diet that consisted of moderation in everything, a variety of nutritional foods, portion sizes in moderation, and to avoid eating too much fat. While not as exacting a diet recommendation as what top scientists might recommend today, given the time and the depth of knowledge available about nutrition, it was at least a start.

(For those of you who may be following my own dietary regimen that I’ve posted on my site, you’ll notice that unlike the above recommendation I include a lot of fats in my diet as our hormones are made from them and I believe it to be a vital part of my life extension routine. But again, and as I’m not a doctor or anyone making dietary or other recommendations for anyone other than myself, make sure to make your own decisions in all matters relating to your own health.)

In fact, the original USDA’s guidelines were probably better than the changing recommendations that the next hundred years or so would bring, and especially as one might argue were criminally bastardized by the introduction of the USDA’s Food Pyramid.

Modern Diet: A Critical Review

The very first “food pyramid” was a Swedish creation born of necessity as the country was in the throes of high and rapidly escalating food prices in the early 1970’s and there was little offered in the way of dietary guidance to help people manage on tight budgets.

The government tasked their National Board of Health and Welfare with coming up with a way to provide the needed recommendations. In 1972, they developed the idea of both “basic” and “supplementary” foods. They determined that basic foods were foods considered essential to a person’s well-being and that supplementary foods were required to provide vitamins and minerals that the basic foods did not.

It was a relatively sound system that dealt with their immediate crisis and the ministry also introduced the idea of a “dietary circle” that included a visualization of the required foods that were featured on a plate as a more easily understood guideline.

However, Anna Britt Agnsäter, working for the Swedish Co-operative Union – a retail/grocery co-operative – decided that the plate model could be improved on to better visualize the required portion sizes, and instead developed a triangular illustration that came to be known as the Food Pyramid and was unveiled in a magazine article under the title of, “Good Wholesome Foods at Reasonable prices.”

Although the Swedish government sought to distance itself from Anna’s pyramid and more closely align with the USDA’s first circular/plate model, the original food pyramid could be reasonably argued to do a better job of showing how much of each food should be eaten and what the foundational layers of a diet should consist of.

Now, if you were to go back and compare the original Swedish food pyramid with the first creation of the USDA’s own food pyramid, you’d immediately notice some very substantial changes, and these changes would ultimately result in increased levels of obesity all across the United States, a disorder that was all but unseen before the introduction of the food pyramid.

The reasons for this rise in obesity were simple, because this new eating model was not supported by science in any way, shape, or form, but instead almost entirely created through the efforts of intensive lobbying from various food group producers in the United States.

An easily seen example of this is that in USDA’s first 1992 version of the pyramid, dairy gets its own section, as well as the inclusion of a previously unheard of suggested 6 to 11 servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta per day.

According to Luise Light, a person working with the USDA when the pyramid was being developed, these additions were totally reflective of the interference being injected into the project by the food industry giants.

In fact, the meddling was so great that I’ve attached below Luise’s own written complaint when it comes to the items on the pyramid that she claims were simply being sold to the highest bidder:

In short, the guidance that we’ve been given and that generations have lived by for at least the last 35 years were simply bought and paid for by industry lobbyists and have virtually nothing to do at all with any actual science to help us to determine the contents of a healthy diet.

In truth, if you want a better (although in my estimation still flawed) representation of the contents of a healthy diet, Harvard University offers its “Healthy Eating Plate” as a guide for a healthy and balanced diet.

However, if you’re stuck on the imagery and instruction provided by the pyramid shape, the Tibetan Food Pyramid also offers some locally sound suggestions, although it was primarily designed to recognize the food challenges of the region, but it has stood up surprisingly well to more rigorous scientific analysis (although once again not a diet that I adhere to).

My point is that taking into account global necessities, dietary needs, and resource availabilities, these pyramid recommendations are, when free of corporate lobbying, at least good places to start for those content on hoping to achieve the generally accepted lifetime expectancy of about 76 years.

But interestingly enough, and as I quickly learned on a recent trip to Oxford, England, even basic food pyramid recommendations are useless when there aren’t even available options in the stores where people shop.

Navigating the Modern Food Landscape

Having just settled into a rental apartment for the week, I went to the local grocery looking to get some food to fill the fridge for the week. Within mere minutes I started to feel palpably angry, and I very, very rarely ever let anything get under my skin, under any circumstances, but I was properly frustrated with how difficult it was to find things to eat that weren’t harmful to a person’s health. 

And sure, everything in moderation is probably okay, but I was standing in the heart of a place where people shop every day and where the stuff that I was surrounded with was astounding for its total lack of nutritional value.

I spent about an hour searching and sifting through things and I couldn’t even find one natural, unadulterated Greek yogurt. It was all either fake stuff, or “Greek yogurt flavoured”, or zero fat with fillers chemically enhanced to simulate thickness and flavor. 

Further looking around, I was astounded at the choices that people were just carelessly grabbing and tossing into their baskets and it was actually painful to watch. And yes, I understand that a lot of people can’t afford higher quality food, but in this case it wasn’t even an available option. It was simply aisle after aisle of empty calories augmented by marketing messages that seemed to be totally misleading and directing people to blindly believe that they were making smart and healthy choices.

I was all the more amazed by this because when people around the world are asked to describe the appearance of British people, a majority immediately make reference to their bad teeth. In fact, in Mexico when dentists look at people with bad or crooked teeth, they call the condition “dientes Ingles” – English teeth.

And how did the British become synonymise with having bad teeth? It started in the early Victorian era of the 16th century when people would actually go so far as to use sugary toothpaste in an attempt to get their teeth to rot because it was a sign of affluence. If you could afford sugary foods, you were obviously wealthy.

Throughout the years, and as Britain grew wealthier as a nation, there was a pronounced move towards more heavily processed and softer, sweeter foods, and this too led to the further deterioration of dental rigidity, jaw size, and overall health.

But while this image of dental appearance has now mostly been dispelled as advanced knowledge, hygiene, and dentistry has influenced the former “British” look and replaced it ever-increasingly with the Hollywood version of the “American” smile, it would seem that the very foods that created this “Austin Powers” type of dental stereotype are increasingly predominant.

As I sadly looked around the shelves of this nutritionally empty grocery store, and watched person after person both hurriedly and seemingly obliviously gather useless food item after useless food item to take home to feed to their families I’ve become convinced that we haven’t even started to see, teeth notwithstanding, the myriad of negative health effects that are going to come a few years down the line from all of the processed garbage being put each and every day into people’s bodies.

And what this will mean for generations to come makes me angry…

It’s not just a British problem, though. This issue is global, and it’s deeply concerning. We’re seeing an alarming trend of increasing chronic diseases worldwide, diseases that are often directly linked to diet. Diabetes, heart disease, obesity – they’re all on the rise, and it’s no coincidence. The food we’re consuming is playing a critical role in this health crisis.

Take sugar, for example. It’s everywhere, hidden in foods you wouldn’t expect. Ketchup – in the U.S senate in 2021 as well as in the Reagan administration, attempts to slash billions from the children’s nutritionally funded school lunch program often try to word their vegetable classification so that it can allow for the condiment to be designated as one of the three daily required vegetables –  bread, even so-called “health foods” are laden with it.

And it’s not just about cavities or weight gain. Excessive sugar intake can lead to insulin resistance, inflammation, and a whole host of other problems. Yet, it’s a staple in the modern diet, pushed by the same corporations that have twisted the food pyramid to serve their interests.

But it’s not just about what’s being added to our food; it’s also about what’s missing. The nutrients that are vital for our health are often conspicuously absent in our daily intake. We’re fed a diet rich in calories but poor in nutrition. Where are the fresh, whole foods that our bodies actually need to function optimally?

Ancestral Diet vs. Modern Food Habits

I often think back to the diet of our ancestors. They didn’t have processed foods or refined sugars. They ate what they could hunt and gather. It was a diet that was naturally balanced, rich in nutrients, and devoid of the artificial additives that plague our food supply today – additives we still have no idea about in terms of their actual long-term effects. 

This isn’t about romanticizing the past or suggesting we go back to living like cavemen. It’s about taking cues from our evolutionary history to inform our present-day dietary choices. While our computers and technologies have advanced by leaps and bounds, the evolution of our bodies hasn’t changed that much in the last few millennia, but our diet has – and not for the better.

So, what’s the solution? It’s not easy, given the overwhelming influence of the food industry and the misinformation that’s regularly peddled. But change starts with awareness. We need to educate ourselves about what we’re putting into our bodies. We need to question the status quo and challenge the dietary dogma that’s been literally force fed to us for so long.

Rethinking Nutritional Beliefs

Let’s talk about seeds, for instance. The common narrative is that seeds are packed with nutrients and are an essential part of a healthy diet. But when you stop to consider their role in nature, a different picture emerges. Seeds are the reproductive units of plants, and like any species, their primary goal is to survive and propagate. To this end, many seeds contain anti-nutrients – substances that are meant to deter predators, including humans. These anti-nutrients can interfere with our digestive process and absorption of minerals, leading to a range of health issues over time. While this is not definitive across the entire seed spectrum, it’s far more prevalent than imagined. Personally, I avoid seeds as much as I can simply following that evolutionary logic.

This concept isn’t just restricted to seeds. Many vegetables, touted as the cornerstone of health, are also loaded with compounds that can be problematic. Take oxalates for example, found in large amounts in foods like spinach and beets. These compounds can contribute to kidney stone formation and may lead to inflammation and other health issues. It’s a stark reminder that just because something is natural doesn’t automatically make it beneficial for human consumption.

And don’t even get me started on all of the Glyphosate being sprayed on vegetables… (and yes, there are alternatives in most cases).

Grains, especially modern wheat, are another food group that deserves scrutiny. They’ve been so heavily modified from their ancestral forms that they’re hardly recognizable. These modifications, while great for yield and hardiness, have come at a cost to our health. Modern wheat is high in gluten and other proteins that many people struggle to digest, leading to inflammation, digestive distress, and a host of other issues.

What about fat, then? I’ve mentioned fat earlier, but let’s dive a bit deeper. The vilification of fat, particularly saturated fat, is one of the greatest missteps in modern dietary guidelines in my opinion. Fat is essential for many bodily functions, including hormone production and cell structure. Quality is key here – fats from natural sources like avocados and grass-fed meats are vastly different from the processed and trans fats found in many packaged foods.

This leads us to a crucial point: the quality of the food we eat matters just as much as, if not more than, the specific types of food. A steak from a grass-fed cow is nutritionally different from one that’s been grain-fed and raised in a crowded feedlot. An organic vegetable grown in rich, healthy soil isn’t the same as one that’s been conventionally farmed and treated with pesticides.

So, What’s the Takeaway From All This?

It’s not about following a strict diet or demonizing entire food groups. It’s about understanding the nuances of our food and making informed choices. It’s about seeking out foods that are as close to their natural state as possible and that align with our evolutionary biology. It’s about recognizing that the modern food environment is fraught with pitfalls and then learning how to navigate it wisely.

We need to challenge the status quo and question the dietary dogmas that have been ingrained in us. We need to look beyond the flashy marketing and misleading health claims and seek out foods that truly nourish our bodies. It’s a journey, and it’s one that requires patience, curiosity, and a willingness to learn and adapt. But it’s a journey worth taking, for our health and the health of future generations.

As for me, I’ve made a conscious decision to break free from the flawed dietary advice that’s so prevalent. It’s not just a diet; it’s a lifestyle choice, one that’s based on respect for my body and an understanding of what it truly needs.

And yes, it’s a personal choice. What works for me might not work for everyone. But isn’t that the point? We’re all unique, with different bodies, different needs. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to diet. But there’s one thing I’m certain of – the current state of our food system isn’t working for almost all of us.

I’m both concerned and hopeful. Concerned, because the path we’re on is unsustainable and unhealthy. Hopeful, because I believe in our ability to change. To choose better, to eat better, and to live better. The journey to better health begins with the choices we make every day, at every meal.

The difficult thing is, and its one that I can fully appreciate, is that given all the stresses of our modern world and the demands made upon our time, that it takes a conscientious and concerted effort on our part to weed through all the garbage that’s constantly tossed in our faces as “convenient” and “easy” because food, throughout the entirety of human evolution, has never been until just recently an “easy” commodity to come by. Where once it was a case of hunting and gathering in the harsh and not always productive wilderness, now it’s a case of needing to learn to hunt and gather through the perilous dangers of a corporate world where the predators present are looking to make quick dollars off of sugars and food additives, even if they know that the products that they’re selling are actually killing us – their customer base.

So, like much of the rest of the things that need to be fixed in the world, the solutions all start with each of us taking the actions needed to secure our own health and our own futures.

My hope is that we soon realize that the extra effort and maybe even the few extra dollars (although this isn’t always the case) that we need to spend now to secure worthwhile and sound food intakes will be returned later, many times over, by offsetting the countless thousands of dollars that we’ll need to spend on medical services caused by our failing health and the painful misery experienced by prematurely failing bodies that are all able to be attributed to the corporately directed, nutritionally void crap that we’re all literally having stuffed down our throats in the guise of being “healthy” or “convenient” choices.

The Power of Consumer Choices

Corporations will change if we force them to. But we need to be the source of the change. Endless picket lines or protest walks or even pleading with government representatives will never succeed in influencing the profit motive. If you want to effect change, you need to do it yourself, with your dollars, one purchase at a time. Because when fluffy puffs of sugary marshmallow corn kernel cereals aren’t flying off the shelves anymore, something that’s actually good for us will soon take its place. It might take a try or two, after all easy profit margins aren’t surrendered without a fight, and our personal determination to remain staunch will be tested and lied to and we may have to fight our baser urges to not allow ourselves to backslide, but given the full force of consumer spending, and letting our dollars do the talking, we’ll eventually create a world where food companies are left with no choice but to become nutritional allies and not death bed detriments.

The quest for optimal health is an ongoing process, one that involves continuous learning and adaptation. As I reflect on my own journey and the insights I’ve gained from pioneers in the field, I’m reminded of the importance of staying open-minded and critical in our pursuit of wellness.

So, let’s build a new pyramid, not built on the sands of misleading information and corporate agendas, but on the solid foundation of scientific understanding and ancestral wisdom.

In this way we’ll all have the chance at living long and meaningful lives filled with good health, joy, and purpose…

– Written by a human.

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Michal Prywata: Inventor, entrepreneur, and multidisciplinary engineer with a focus on frontier technologies. Founder of ventures in healthcare, agriculture, space, and AI. On a relentless quest to solve complex problems and extend the boundaries of human potential.