Recently I had a popular tweet, which I thought I’d share it with you—since it helps understand why one might have doubts about the upcoming White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health, billed as the biggest event on food policy in more than fifty years.
Here’s the tweet:
I’d like to feel optimistic about White House Conference on Nutrition in Sept., but guy in charge created this food ranking system:
Frosted Mini Wheats, Lucky charms >> whole egg
Ice cream w/ nuts > ground beef
Honey Nut Cheerios > egg fried in butterhttps://t.co/17yj3vvmIZ😆😭 pic.twitter.com/V8IHqEGgyE— Nina Teicholz (@bigfatsurprise) July 17, 2022
(Full food-item rankings can be found here.)
This food scoring system, called the “Food Compass,” was published in Nature Food in 2021, with lead author, Dariush Mozaffarian, who is the Dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Mozaffarian and Tufts have also led the development of the White House conference slated for sometime in September.
The Food Compass, which gives top ratings to Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs, is absurd on the face of it. In all, nearly 70 brand-named cereals from General Mills, Kellogg’s, and Post are ranked twice as high as eggs cooked in butter or a piece of plain, whole-wheat toast. Egg whites cooked in vegetable oils are also apparently more healthy than a whole, boiled egg, and nearly all foods are healthier than ground beef.
Tufts University touts the Food Compass as the “most comprehensive and science-based” nutrient profiling system to date that “clears up confusion to benefit consumers, policymakers.” Created by a team of Tufts researchers under the leadership of Mozaffarian, the project ranks 8,032 foods and took three years to complete.
What kind of dystopian world has nutrition “science” entered into whereby a university, a peer-reviewed journal, and one of the field’s most influential leaders legitimize advice telling the public to eat more Lucky Charms and fewer eggs? Simply eyeballing these recommendations should be enough to know this diet is a get-sick, diabetes diet, a high-carb, sugar-laden, candy-coated highway to ill-health.
