Some recent headlines have claimed that new nutritional findings present Lucky Charms cereal as healthier than steak. The stories draw on a Sept. 2022 conferenced hosted by the White House “that focused on nutrition, health and hunger in America,” according to Good Bloggers.
At this conference, new data collected over the course of 3 years was shown by the dean of the Tufts School of Nutrition, Dariush Mozaffarian. The data claimed that Lucky Charms is healthier than a variety of common proteins, including ground beef and beef steak.
Is this actually true?
Are Lucky Charms healthier than steak?
The claims made based on the new data, which comes from Tufts’ Food Compass project, have not been totally accepted as gospel due to some challenges surfacing related to the report.
Distractify reported that while seeing the new chart at first glance may make some think that Lucky Charms are healthier than steak, the more you dive into the rankings, you can see that the chart was likely affected by the same issues that led nutrition experts to stop treating the food pyramid as gospel. The food pyramid was scrapped in 2011 and never made a comeback due to its replacement with the USDA’s MyPlate.
Houston Methodist reported that the food pyramid is no longer relevant due to the simplistic nature of the pyramid that categorizes some foods as unhealthy that actually do have nutritional value and vice versa.
Who’s saying Lucky Charms are healthy?
Reuters reported that “although the project was partly funded by grants from the NHLBI, a disclaimer says that the funders had no other role in the research or the paper’s findings. Food Compass has not been endorsed or promoted by the NHLBI or the government departments responsible for developing nutrition guidelines.”
It was reported that the controversial chart was made by scientists who wanted to challenge Food Compass’ methodology.
Ty Beal, a global nutrition scientist, confirmed that Food Compass was not the publisher of the data.
A statement from Food Compass’s website details, “These graphs were created by others to show these exceptions, rather than to show the overall performance of Food Compass and the many other foods for which Food Compass works well. But, as objective scientists, we accept constructive criticism and are using this to further improve Food Compass.”