President Obama says we should allow the federal government to take charge of our healthcare; as usual, the “experts” are best positioned to instruct us how to live our lives.

Except they’re not.  Today, according to the AP, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention told Americans that they eat too much bread and rolls, and that such foods account “for more than twice as much sodium as salty junk food like potato chips.”  No wonder we’re fat.

Unfortunately, the federal government that now tells us that we eat too much bread is the same government that originally told us to stuff our pieholes with … bread.  Remember the original food pyramid?

I remember this pyramid – I grew up learning about it in my vaunted public school.  Notice how the bottom section is enormous, and suggests 6-11 bread, cereal, rice and pasta servings each day.  Why did the government originally mandate that?  According to Harvard Medical School’s Eat, Drink and Be Healthy (Simon & Schuster, August 2001), the government was attempting to help out farmers via the Department of Agriculture’s recommendations.

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The USDA is once again inserting itself underneath the Constitutional sneeze-guard of the Tenth Amendment. In a publicity rich media event, Michelle Obama and the USDA introduced a new dietary guideline graphic: an illustration of a plate, divided into four basic food groups. It’s a replacement for the Food Pyramid; which was a replacement for the original USDA nutritional guidelines called: “the four basic food groups” (illustrated with a pie chart).

Also, to give the new guidelines a youthful appeal, it has been named MyPlate, an obvious reference to the hip new website: MySpace, which was abandoned by everyone hip, about five years ago; and is now populated by pathetic unknown bands, and creepy old pedophiles, soliciting cops posing as teenagers. (Perhaps the original title from the contemporarily-challenged USDA was “You’ve Got Meals.”) I imagine in ten years or so, the USDA will announce their new guidelines, called Platebook.

This reversion cost the taxpayers only two million dollars, just a little more than the original Food Pyramid which has been around since 1992, and cost the taxpayers 1.4 million inflation-adjusted dollars. The USDA has been telling Americans what they should be eating since 1923 when the Bureau of Home Economics established the 12 basic food groups at the height of the Prohibition Era, when obesity was a luxury.

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