Mike: Hello everyone, this is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger. I'm here with Ben Kage, and we're going to have a discussion and Q&A session about the Honest Food Guide. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it is available for free downloading at HonestFoodGuide.org. You can download it, and take a look at and learn quite a bit about nutrition and food recommendations from various sources. So thanks for joining me today, Ben.

Ben: Thanks for joining me too.

Mike: This is the first time you've seen the guide yourself, and I understand that you have some questions?

Ben: Yes. This is the first time I've seen the guide. I didn't necessarily follow the original food pyramid when it was out there, but I always had a basic idea of what it was. I've noticed that lately the USDA has come out with its own new food pyramid. So, with this new food pyramid out, why would anyone need to follow the Honest Food Guide or even look at it?

Mike: Excellent question. The first part of that answer is that this is a replacement chart for the USDA's official food guide pyramid, and as most people know, in the spring of 2005, the USDA came out with a new food guide to replace the old food groups/food guide pyramid that had been around for decades. But what most people don't know is that the USDA paid $2.5 million to a PR/marketing group to help design this new food guide pyramid, and that group is best know for doing work for the dairy industry. By some amazing coincidence, taxpayer dollars have gone to create a guide that basically says everybody should drink a lot more milk. It's all about milk. In fact, historically, the food guide pyramids that the USDA has created have always been about eating more food, drinking more milk and basically consuming larger and larger quantities of everything that the American food industry has produced.

Now, if you study the history of the USDA and where it came from, it's quite fascinating. In the post World War II era, say the 1950s for example, this message from the USDA was quite useful to the population. Most of the diseases in those days were based on malnutrition. People didn't have enough calories; they didn't have enough fat. People were physically smaller than they are today, even though they have virtually the same gene pool that we have. They were smaller, and people suffered diseases of malnutrition -- things like rickets, lack of Vitamin D and so on. So the message from the USDA at that time was very much aligned with the message of all the food producers. The grain farmers were happy because the USDA said, "Eat more corn and wheat and rice." The beef industry was happy because it said, "Eat more beef." And, of course, the milk industry was happy because everybody said, "Eat more butter, drink more milk." The message basically was, open your mouth and stuff as much as you can down that throat. That was the government position.

Ben: Which was fine for it's time.

Mike: Absolutely. It served a purpose. Now, fast forward to the 1980s, and especially into the 1990s, and now you have a population that is not suffering from malnutrition.

Ben: On the contrary.

Mike: We have plenty of food and plenty of calories, but what we have are empty calories. We have a lack of nutrition even while we are suffering from over-consumption. We have too much food and too little nutrition. We see a lot of chronic disease in this environment -- diabetes, cancer, heart disease, you name it. Unfortunately, these diseases are very often associated with the over-consumption of nutritionally depleted foods. If you take corn or wheat out of the field and refine it, you strip away all the good nutrition. You're left with this empty carbohydrate, and it still fits the food guide pyramid to say, "Eat more grains."

Ben: What makes a company do this? What is the motivation to strip away those healthy nutrients?

Mike: There are a couple of reasons.

Ben: Does it taste better?

Mike: Oh, it does taste better. When the fiber, essential oils, proteins and so on are stripped away, it does taste better because it has a higher glycemic index, so that carbohydrate turns into sugar very quickly -- beginning in your mouth. Your saliva starts to digest this, and you start feeling the effects of it right away. So it is taste, but more than that it is shelf life. Food companies want ingredients that will sit on the shelf for six months or a year without going bad. The only way to do that is you have to take the essential oils out of the grains. You see, when something comes out of nature, it's healthy. You mess with it, you refine it, you process it, and suddenly it's a disease-promoting ingredient.

But getting back to the USDA, its message today is really founded in the past. Its message continues to be, "Eat more of everything." It does not have the courage to stand up and say, "Eat less of a few things." It won't even say, "Eat less sugar." Why? It's because of the corrupt influence of the big sugar industry. It won't say, "Eat less red meat or eat less saturated animal fat." It's utterly ridiculous that it won't take that position because we know -- it's not even debated -- that high, frequent consumption of saturate animal fats is strongly correlated with heart disease and nervous system deterioration, accelerated aging and even obesity and weight gain. It's well established, but the USDA won't say, "Eat less meat."

Essentially what has happened is that the USDA has become a government-approved industry lackey. The agency has no courage. It has no political will to actually tell anybody the truth about nutrition anymore. It can only say, "Eat more of everything." It can never say, "Eat less of some things."