After Gen Z’s diet was wrecked by experts, Mayor Mamdani should embrace the new food pyramid for schools |
At long last, Washington got it right with our new food pyramid.
Flying in the face of Big Food’s packaged and processed garbage, the inverted pyramid released by the USDA and the department of Health and Human Services puts nutrient-dense whole foods — red meat, eggs, whole milk, avocados, olive oil — at the top, where they always belonged.
As someone with a master’s in food studies from NYU and who spent years volunteering with the NYC Office of School Food and Nutrition Services, I’ve seen firsthand how decades of so-called expert advice has wrecked the diet of a generation of kids.
Take the typical school breakfast: nonfat yogurt with 24 grams of added sugar — six teaspoons — all in the name of “healthy eating.”
How did we get there? The 2010 Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act mandated that schools offer only fat-free or 1% milk to reduce saturated fat, phasing out whole milk entirely. The result was more sugar, fewer nutrients and less satiety.
Of course, this was a win for food companies who could sell the same product twice — once as watery blue milk or fat-free yogurt, and once again as butter or cream. Big Food wins, little kids lose.
Around 2018, former Mayor Eric Adams, who was then Brooklyn borough president, supported an initiative to offer healthy scratch-based cooking in all schools. It progressed with promise until the........