Jey - that makes sense - couldn't tell for sure if it was '40's or 50's, although the way it says "US needs us strong" made me think it was probably during WWII, but perhaps a decade later. What info I found didn't say when or why.

I know there were campaigns to get people to eat more bread during the 20's when the country was producing more grain than they could use. (then the dust bowl hit in the 30's and they could have really used all that excess grain if they'd kept it in storage - but then lack of sufficient storage to hold all the excess grain was part of the problem in the 20's.

I saw that about the potatoes on some version of My Plate the other day - I think the only time that showed up though was a version specifically for seniors, just to remind them that you can't just load up on potatoes and call those your veggies for the day.


Cotonpal - we always had potatoes and/or bread (rarely had rice or pasta of any kind) when growing up in the 50's and 60's, but didn't have a truly green veggie, except for green beans (spinach was a rarity, and we never had green salads), because our other "green" veggies were peas and immature lima beans. Apparently the logic was that they were green, so they counted as green veggies. When we had corn or carrots, they were both just considered to be veggies too - neither were counted as starchy in place of potatoes or bread. (if they had been, maybe my blood sugar wouldn't have been such a mess) I recall when I was in elementary school that we'd have tomatoes from the garden, which should have been a very healthy vegetable. But we would eat them with a big spoonful of sugar on each slice. Fruit was usually canned. Mom would only buy the fruit that had "light syrup". I think it's almost as high in sugars as the fruit in "heavy syrup" though.

This was a doctor approved, healthy diet at the time.

When I was put on a lower carb diet for hypoglycemia (which was actually a diabetic diet - the Dr said it was the same diet for hypoglycemics) in the early 70's, the written diet wasn't terribly LC. I calculated the carbs a couple of years ago from that diet, and it would have been about 120 g/day, since they were allowing 1/2 cup potato AND 1 slice of bread for dinner, 4 oz juice AND 1 slice toast at breakfast. Gravy was forbidden. I can't recall exactly what the lunch menu said I could eat, but I vaguely recall something about open faced sandwiches, so I'm sure it had about 30-40 g carbs just like dinner and breakfast. The green and orange/yellow veggie selection was pretty much the same as we were already eating. Of course added sugars were not allowed.

I was the one who decided that for me 1/2 cup of potatoes and 1 slice of bread simply weren't worth bothering with, since at the time I couldn't comprehend eating less than 1 cup of potatoes (especially if I wasn't allowed to have gravy on the potatoes - heresy!) or only one slice of bread for a sandwich - might as well not bother with them at all. I'm sure it worked out a lot better blood sugar wise.

(There was no explanation of carbs vs proteins or fats with that diet - It was a long time before I started to pick up on what they were doing, aside from cutting way down on my favorite foods)