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Friday Fun Thread for March 29, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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My brother's medical textbooks still have the picture of the OG Food Pyramid.

Shit's been discredited for at least a decade or more. 6 servings of bread a day? Are you fucking with me?

Though not nearly the most outdated thing I've seen in authoritative textbooks in India, most egregious example was an organelle supposedly responsible for oxygen metabolism in aerobic bacteria, which we've known since the uh, 80s, is actually an artifact of poorly done preparation before electron microscopy and not found in actual living organisms.

Sadly the margins of exam papers are too small to contain my frantic screaming, and the graders too overworked to care.

6 servings of bread a day? Are you fucking with me?

Not basing this observation on any science, but I see far fewer overweight people in France in neighbourhoods with boulangeries and pâtisseries on nearly every corner than I did in Ireland where meat is noticeably cheaper. Bread is very cheap here so presumably people are buying it fairly regularly to keep those businesses going.

Ireland is full of easily accessible processed food (we have delis on the corner serving chicken rolls, breakfast rolls and sausage rolls instead) so maybe just not eating that is the key, but it seems like you can get away with eating a lot of bread - even bread with chocolate and sugar - if you avoid the truly terrible stuff.

That pyramid contains an absurd amount of food, but afaik keeping animal product consumption pretty low (and not eating ultraprocessed junk) is supported by big data to prolong a healthy life, so it's not all wrong.

It's very far from right too. Like there are so many damn things wrong with it, especially the stigmatization of fats.

While nutrition is still a crapshoot, it's still better than what was in vogue during the Clinton administration.