If you find this topic interesting, I would highly recommend Gary Taubes "Good Calories, Bad Calories" -- it's excellent.

This book documents quite a few fascinating studies and is transformative reading. One of the things that fascinates me is that McDonald's was founded in 1955. The U.S. obesity epidemic became an issue many years later. Lack of sleep, compromised breathing -- both contribute significantly -- more significantly than we imagine. Both up regulate sympathetic nervous response, and set off a cascade of less than optimal hormone responses. The book is a gem and it's a quick read.

Wikipedia says the US produces about $36 per hour worked. The DOL says there's like ~150m in the labor force. If we were productive for all 500 of those extra hours, that's like $2.7T in GDP, or about 20% of the total. If my arith is wrong, please cut me some slack, my insomnia is so bad I've had to cut caffeine from my diet.

I'm not saying its the *right* choice, or that I'd rather have a flat screen tv than a long healthy life, but it is a tradeoff, we do get something out of all this not-sleeping. Unfortunately it may be mostly $24,000 CT scans.

Agreed on sleep and there's lots of evidence for health problems/lack of sleep... but food-pyramid-as-being-determinative-thing is malarky. Does anyone actually look at the food pyramid? Do you know a single person who chooses to eat x, y, or z based on the government food pyramid.

R-- yeah, poor people. The food guide pyramid is what the government uses to determine reasonable meal plans for people on public assistance, so those that get money get a list of recipes that show how the meager allowance they get can feed a family of four along food-pyramid lines with sufficient calories, and those that get vouchers get vouchers for a calorie breakdown proportional to the food guide. Even if they don't look at it, the people who are designing what the government says they can eat do.

Yes, R, and the meals in public schools -- the National School Lunch Program -- are also planned from the Food Pyramid. It starts in preschool, from the NSLP site: "What are the nutritional requirements for school lunches? In general, meals should be planned based on the Food Guide Pyramid ..."

Beyond the pyramid, the FDA's Daily Allowances, familiar to us through the Nutritional information labels on all packaged food, also dictates a low fat, high carb diet.

Athlete studies unanimously conclude that genetics and activity level absolutely crush other factors, including diet (given sufficient calories) and sleep (above a threshold around 45 hours/week).

I've also read several accounts claiming that most of our reduced sleep time is due to electric light, which seems plausible.

I have a nutritionist friend who was on the committee working on the last revision of the Canada Food Guide (similar to the US pyramid) and she said the committee endorsed dropping dairy as it's own food group and putting it in with the rest of the protein group. It never happened, of course, once the dairy lobby got wind of it. And those colourful food guide pamphlets that are handed out in schools and public health sites are all courtesy of the Canadian Dairy Farmers Association.

Pollan's "In Defense of Food" gives an almost blow-by-blow account of how the food pyramid came to be, and how it came to be so bad. Generally an excellent read on the danger of scientific reductionism as political tool, the focus on food is almost of 2ndary interest compared to the case study of basically good people making really terrible mistakes.