alt Hacker NewsAs a child of the 1980s, I feel so cheated that we were told to eat "5 servings of grains a day" pointing to bread and pasta -- when so many breads have added sugar and so much pasta has added sugar in the sauce.
How did no one speak up? Would people ever have spoken up if we didnt have social media?
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3-2-4-4 / day, I was told in California. Excess grains made sense in the old days when food was more expensive. Grains are cheap and easily stored. They powered progress through the 19th and 20th centuries, and only became problematic for the majority when physical labor became less common, simultaneously with the low-fat craze.
> many breads have added sugar and so much pasta has added sugar
Presumably "5 servings of grains a day" assumes no added sugar, otherwise it would say "5 servings of grains and some sugar a day".
I don't feel so violently on one side of this or another, but I agree with the spirit of your comment as a child of the 80s.
I think I ate white bread or something very similar to it almost every day for lunch (in school). Cold cuts too. A shit-ton of pasta, but I'm my family is Italian, so that was a given no matter what. Tons of granola bars. Basically every processed baked packaged thing you can imagine.
Your point about sauce hits home too. Sauce purists may disagree but I despise ANY sweetness in your basic red sauce.
Bread with sugar in it is problematic, but that doesn't mean all bread is bad. That would be like saying that boiled potatos are as unhealthy as french fries. Or rolled oats vs. sugary industrial cereals. Whole grains are actually really healthy.
Bread and pasta are staples in France and Italy, and still they are much healthier than the US. In France, there's nothing wrong with a baguette from a bakery (or even from a supermarket). You'll also find industrially produced white bread if you really want to, but people aren't buying that as much, because of their food culture. On average, they have a better understanding of what's good and healthy.
One of the key issues is understanding food as products rather than produce. By outsourcing your food to large companies, you are giving them an opportunity for cutting costs by reducing the quality of the production process (e.g. reduced fermentation time of the dough) or the ingredients (e.g. adding sugar for better browning or to make the product more addictive). It's a result of the financialization of everything and the need for growth.
Rather than buying branded products and going to chain restaurants, buy from smaller places or cook your own food, from scratch.