The American diet, as a whole, changes at a glacial pace. Most individuals eat more or less the same thing, week in, week out, adding new staples and retiring old favorites only on very rare occasions. And zooming out to a scale of hundreds of millions, these individual shifts mostly cancel each other out. (One family might stop buying sour cream because they want to cut back on calories the same day that another family starts buying sour cream after tasting Paula Deen's recipe for spinach-artichoke dip.)
But of course, glaciers move — their pace may be slow, but it's not stasis. Over the course of thousands of years, the movement of glaciers carved out the Great Lakes. And so it is with changes in the American diet. If you step back and look at progress over many years, you see real change.
That's the basic message of the latest installment of "The Changing American Diet," a series of reports by the Center for Science in the Public Interest which uses data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to grade the healthfulness of U.S. eaters. This latest report card doesn't look so different from the recent ones issued by the CSPI. It's equally dismal, with an (unweighted) GPA of just 2.42.
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