What's bad for you is an unbalanced diet. Eating too much or too little — or indeed, too obsessively — is where the problems come in.

The proportion of bread shown on the old food pyramid implied a proportion that would definitely be "too" much, imo. Especially when we consider the white processed bread that people are prone to eating. When I was a kid I practically live on pretzels and crackers and thought I was "healthy," because the food pyramid told me so.

Why weren't vegetables at the bottom of the food pyramid? Why not a graph that shows fat/carb/prtein macro proportions? Why not a graph that distinguishes between the quality of macro and micro nutrients (omega 3, complete proteins, whole grains, etc.)?

The problem is that the old food pyramid gave people the wrong idea of what's healthy, and now there's sort of an "over-correction" going on now that we know better. People are kind of in "recalibration mode" when it comes to nutrition and wht they percieve to be health/unhealthy, and I think that the problem that OP presents is part of the growing pains that happen as a people become slightly (but not sufficiently) more knowledgeable in nutrition.