Just flip it upside down.
I saw the new food pyramid and actually laughed out loud.
It’s literally just the old food pyramid flipped upside down.
It also happens to be the perfect metaphor for the best way to live a healthy, free, prosperous life.
Whatever the government experts tell you to do, just do the exact opposite.
Of course, once you stop and think about it, it’s actually pretty dark.
Because what it actually means is that the guidance we were given for decades—the guidance that shaped school lunches, hospital cafeterias, grocery stores, doctors’ offices, and dinner tables—wasn’t just slightly off, it was a complete inversion of reality.
How many generations were raised to believe that fat was the villain, butter was dangerous, eggs were an indulgence, and red meat was something you were supposed to “limit” (like how you’d limit cigarettes or reckless driving), or replace altogether with some type of meat-like frankenfood?
In place of normal, whole foods that human beings have subsisted on for millennia, we were sold on an entire industry of highly processed, low-fat foods that removed the parts that actually nourished and then packed them full of sugars and artificial flavors so people could swallow them.
And while eating sugar was still considered an indulgence by those who crafted the old guidelines, most people didn’t realize that the amount of sugar they’d occasionally eat in treat-form paled in comparison to the amount of sugar that was being pumped into all the “healthy” food they were already eating.
The terrible truth that most people still don’t know is how fat took the fall for what the “experts” knew sugar was doing to us.
I’m warning you that reading further will infuriate you. Especially if you have loved ones who have suffered because of the lies they were told.
In The Tuttle Twins Guide to True Conspiracies, we tell the true story of how Big Sugar played a very real role in the way we’ve been instructed to eat for the last fifty years.
When scientists started studying what was causing the rise in heart disease and various metabolic problems, evidence quickly began putting sugar in the crosshairs. Big Sugar found out, and started dumping money into research that incentivised scientists to find a new fall guy.
Fat took the hit, and just like magic, the dangers of sugar faded into the background as the official narrative blamed fat for all the things that sugar was actually doing.
Like clockwork, once the “science” was settled, the government guidelines followed.
From there, the rest was basically automatic.
The guidance became official and questioning it stopped being normal and started being suspicious.
Families who stuck with butter instead of margarine were treated as reckless; parents who fed their kids real food instead of low-fat, fortified products were told they were ignoring settled science; doctors who pushed back found themselves labeled quacks.
When obesity, diabetes, and chronic illness exploded anyway, the answer was never, “Maybe we got this wrong.” Instead, the experts doubled down and told the sick and dying to follow the rules harder. When that failed (because of course it did!), there was always a new drug to prescribe, which of course brought with it a whole list of side-effects worse than the thing it was supposed to be curing to begin with.
Repeat infinity.
The damage done by “trusting the experts” changed how people cooked, how kids ate at school, how nurses cared for the sick, and how families thought about food.
Honestly, if the CIA wanted to numb a population and make them sick, tired, and dependent so that they wouldn’t ask questions or be difficult to “manage,” I don’t know that they could have done any better than what the FDA has done.
Makes you wonder, huh?
Speaking of the CIA, this weekend is Martin Luther King’s birthday.
He’s become a pretty controversial guy over the last several years as the public learns more about his private side, but I still view him as someone who was trying to bring about good changes and who definitely ran afoul of some very, very powerful people.
Those people are still running a lot of the things way back, deep in the swamp, and behind the scenes.
This weekend is a great time to talk to your kids about the ways the government uses its power to manipulate the public into adopting certain views and attitudes. History shows that sometimes, when that doesn’t work, they resort to drastic measures to silence opposing voices.
In honor of truth-tellers and change-makers, we’re running a sale on our 7-book Guidebook Bundle. You’ll get all of our Guidebooks, including True Conspiracies (which features a chapter on MLK!) for 25% off their regular price.
Sadly, a large swath of the population sees blindly following authority as a virtue.
(We can thank Horace Mann, the “father” of modern education, for that, but that’s an email for another time…)
Education, health, crisis response—the moment someone steps outside the approved guidance by homeschooling, opting out, asking questions, or choosing tradeoffs, they find out very quickly how many people treat government-backed professionals as unquestionable authorities.
COVID made that horrifyingly obvious.
At some point, the truth actually stops mattering. No amount of research can change the hive-mind, and no amount of personal experience can soften the hardened heart. The only thing that matters is if you are a person (like them) who complies, or someone (like those “others”) who does not.
I know I joked earlier, but there’s actually a lot of truth to it.
If you want a surprisingly effective way to interpret government advice, flip it upside down and start there.
Not because every expert is lying, and not because every recommendation is malicious, but because incentives matter. And there’s no way for us to know how people or groups were incentivized to reach the conclusions that they did. So because industries lobby, and because bureaucracies protect themselves—because the people issuing sweeping guidance rarely pay the price when they get it wrong—we have to raise our kids to be able to truly think.
It’s why the work we do focuses so much on teaching kids how to think, reason, and ask important questions instead of handing them a list of approved conclusions and things to believe.
Simple questions, like:
Who benefits from this advice?
What incentives are shaping it?
What happens if it’s wrong—and who actually pays the price?
Those questions would have saved a lot of families a lot of trouble when the original food pyramid became gospel, and hundreds of times since, but most people never learn to even ask them.
I’m glad the pyramid was flipped.
I consider myself pretty MAHA-friendly, because a lot of what I have seen just puts the onus on people to choose for themselves what they think is best, and that’s pretty good public policy.
But I don’t want any of us to forget how long it took, or how much resistance there was toward anyone who noticed early that something about the official story didn’t add up.
The people who publish guidelines don’t live in your body.
They don’t raise your kids.
And they don’t suffer the consequences when their certainty turns out to be wrong.
So we have to be ever-vigilant in seeking truth and acting according to our own consciences. And we have to teach our kids to be even better than we are.
Our Guidebook series is a great way to teach your kids using real-life examples of people who did important, hard things. Check them out today!
— Connor