Over at Eathropology, Adele Hite has published part 1 of As the Calories Churn. In it, she gets “down and geeky … with some Dietary Guidelines backstory” since 2000 noting that some involved may have thought that “the advice to Americans to eat more carbohydrate and less fat wasn’t such a good idea.”
Interestingly, an Eathropology commenter notes that earlier efforts on our dietary guidelines had their own back stories too, linking to the story of the 1992 food pyramid. Luise Light, former USDA Director of Dietary Guidance and Nutrition Education Research and responsible for the 1992 food pyramid writes that the actual published guide was “vastly different” from what was drafted (emphasis mine):
When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. For instance, the Ag Secretary’s office altered wording to emphasize processed foods over fresh and whole foods, to downplay lean meats and low-fat dairy choices because the meat and milk lobbies believed it’d hurt sales of full-fat products; it also hugely increased the servings of wheat and other grains to make the wheat growers happy. The meat lobby got the final word on the color of the saturated fat/cholesterol guideline which was changed from red to purple because meat producers worried that using red to signify “bad” fat would be linked to red meat in consumers’ minds.
Adele would like to see a return of the Dietary Guidelines to being based on science, rather than policy, but Light seems skeptical. Writing about the development of the 2005 guidelines, she finds that:
nutrition for the government is primarily a marketing tool to fuel growth in consumer food expenditures and demand for major food commodities: meat, dairy, eggs, wheat. It’s an economics lesson that has very little to do with our health and nutrition and everything to do with making sure that food expenditures continue to rise for all interests involved in the food industry.
I remain concerned that things are going to have to get a lot worse before they get better. Remember, corporations are people.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
It is interesting that these issues are all bubbling up around me these days. I’ve been in an extended email conversation with a colleague in communications about the roles of industry and science with regard to consumer knowledge and food choices.
We did agree that the DGs didn’t start out as a tool of industry, but they seem to have become one rather quickly. Nick Mottern, who headed up the writing of the 1977 Dietary Goals, actually quit in disgust because he felt industry (in this case the beef one) influenced changes in the 1977 Goals (specifically a re-wording of “decrease meat and increase consumption of poultry and fish” was changed to “decrease consumption of animal fat, and choose meats, poultry, and fish which will reduce saturated fat intake”-a change that seems like a moot point now, since we did “decrease meat and increase consumption of poultry” and since the recommendation to limit meat had little science behind it). The group of scientists that got hammered hardest for their “industry ties” were from the IOM Food and Nutrition Board, whose moderate advice to eat a nutritionally-adequate diet and watch your weight could actually be supported by science, but that advice did not favor any particular food industry groups over others as the 1977 DGs did.
But from 1977 on, it gets very tangled. We have the scientific-academic-public health industry trying to maintain a consistent public health message. We have much of the food industry—although not all—benefiting from the opportunity to use public health messages as marketing. We have a public who either is or is not concerned about their health, depending on who you talk to, but it doesn’t seem to matter much either way, because—concerned or not—our collective health seems to be taking a nosedive.
I find the DGs to be at the root of the problem because of the use of scientific rhetoric to uphold claims that were initially simply premature and based on insufficient evidence, and now seem to be maintained despite evidence to the contrary. Does industry have something to do with this? You bet. But while arbiters of food politics like Marion Nestle are quick to point fingers at the beef and dairy industry, you don’t hear as much from her about the seedoil industry or the grain & cereal industries (as long as it is “whole grain” with plenty of fiber to “promote healthy bowel function,” it is okay by her). Why is that? See “consistent public health message” above. And so it goes—around and around.
I agree. It is a mess. We have a long way to go.
More than 50 years ago (literally), in a summer school course on contract law at the University of Virginia, I learned that corporations are people. This is not, as Adam Schiff implies in the Atlantic link, a finding of the U. S. Supreme Court in Citizens United.
Reblogged this on Health and Medical News and Resources and commented:
I’ve commented on this issue in previous blogs…