The long reach of USAID across the globe, saving lives, making friends for America, and elevating this country’s place in the world, ended in 2025. This morning I came across a photo of a food pyramid poster I took at the health headquarters in Nampula Province in Mozambique while I was doing USAID-funded research in 2018 on childhood stunting caused by aflatoxin in mold on staples like maize and cassava.
The poster was in Portuguese and focused on a healthy diet for people with diabetes. Nutrition science has corrected its simplistic “fats are bad, carbs are good” stance since the original 1992 American pyramid from which this Mozambican one was derived, but I love the local adaptation with its beautiful cassava, maize, pineapples and papaya.
However, I am still not a fan of the pyramid shape to depict a healthy diet. All parts of the diet should be healthy and work together. No food type should be at the pinnacle.
It is both surprising and dismaying how the 1992 pyramid has not only re-emerged in America with the new, RFK, Jr. upside-down food pyramid, but that it spread so far around the globe it never really went away.
My prediction, and I feel pretty confident here: the new U.S. food pyramid will not achieve the universality of the original. First, I have to think that our global credibility in the realm of health and nutrition has been damaged enough in the last year that many other nations will no longer be ready to accept on face value the science and messaging that has poured out of our country for the last 75 years since the end of World War Two.
Second and third, the new pyramid does not make sense graphically or provide the best advice nutritionally.
Ok. Enough food pyramid talk for a while, but, in a completely different realm of pyramids, ones you can’t eat, a quick tip that if you happen to be in Austin, Denver, Chicago, DC, Edmonton, Quebec, Montreal, Lisbon, Sydney, or Utrecht, go at once to the Horizons of Khofu. This totally unique, virtual reality experience of the Giza Pyramid in Egypt is at once both realistic and surreal! I went in New York while it was there. Very, very different and very cool.
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