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Comment by dekayed | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately it seems to penalize people who choose to eat more fat vs. carbs.

Indeed. Quaker chewy granola is identified (by price -- $0.15) as a good food, which may be true if you're out hiking, but as part of an urban lifestyle, granola bars are a glycemic disaster.

By contrast, someone who eats an otherwise moderately healthy diet can eat the caloric equivalent of several granola bars worth of walnuts -- identified by google as a "yellow" food -- with no ill effects, and certainly no insulin spike.

That's a problem with the entire green/yellow/red color-coding system at Google as well - the labels seem to be in line with the common belief that whole grains = always good and dietary fat = always bad.

Then again, it's not really difficult to figure out from the list of ingredients whether food is in line with your personal dietary belief system, so the color-coding system isn't really all that valuable to begin with.

"personal dietary belief system", that's how I imagine Google employees talking about food.

That problem stems from the source that Google chose to base their system off - the Harvard Pyramid. They wanted to be as least controversial as possible (aka popular conventions) so whole grains are viewed as healthy, and fatty foods aren't. That's the principle we've been hammered from the government and food associations since forever. Unfortunately, it's wrong, and just a little research reveals it. But people will always want to refute you... because they've been so used to it, and they don't want to give it up.

Unfortunately, not being controversial is also the same as being wrong in this case

I'm very very sympathetic to this view. I eat a high-fat diet, and have for over a year. But Google is probably right to act conservatively here. Don't blame Google for following the Harvard Pyramid, blame the Harvard Pyramid. They're the ones with the responsibility to update the status quo.

You should probably look at the Harvard Pyramid before making judgments based on Google's interpretation:

http://www.personal.kent.edu/~cearley/ChemWrld/foodpyramid/H...

They recommend eating lots of healthy fats such as olive, canola, and peanut oil. They also have refined carbohydrates in the "use sparingly" category.

Thanks, but I did. And I'm still not criticizing their interpretation (which seems like a good faith read of the pyramid). I just disagree that the HP is the only way to eat healthily, and I'm mixed on whether the HP is a generally healthy way to eat.

Also, you may wish to dismiss me as crazy. I eat almost exclusively from the top left triangle. :)

It's not the whole grains I'd be worried about. "Granola bars" are sugar/candy bars disguised with some granola and "healthy" labelling (usually upselling the fiber content).

No, since (as someone pointed out elsewhere in this thread), a gram of sugar has less than half of the calories in a gram of fat.

If Alice and Berta both choose to consume exactly 2000 calories a day, but Alice chooses a low-fat diet while Berta chooses a low-carb one, then Berta will pay less according to that system. So it's not really a problem that sugar costs less; low-fat diet are still cheaper.

(Duh. I meant of course "low-carb diets are still cheaper")

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