Government Nutritional Guidelines, aka Pure Bunk
By Monica @ 8:02 AM   
Here at FA/RM our mission statement says, "The group, Free Agriculture - Restore Markets (FA/RM), advocates agricultural and health policies based solely on the principles of individual rights."
What is meant by that? What are "health policies based in individual rights"?
So far I've mostly discussed farming on the FA/RM blog, not health policies. In part, that is because there are already excellent advocacy groups fighting for individual rights in medicine, such as FIRM. Yet the government does have health policies -- more specifically, nutritional policies -- that are intertwined with the government's agricultural policies, and most Americans are following them to a greater extent than they realize, because these policies have been adopted by most medical professional organizations and thus, medical professionals. These nutritional policies are outlined in the USDA food pyramid and include the avoidance of saturated fat, the adoption of vegetable oils such as canola oil as "heart healthy", an increase in lean meats, fruits, vegetables, and whole grain consumption, and a substitution of skim milk for whole milk. The existence of nutritional guidelines from the USDA would appear to be a conflict of interest. Why does a government agency dictating farm policy dictate nutrition as well? Unfortunately, nutritional guidelines and programs are now over 60% of the USDA Farm Bill Budget. Grain subsidies? Roughly 33%. Talk about a conflict of interest.
First, let's get one thing straight. Here are FA/RM we believe people should be able to freely consume whatever they so choose. If that means a certain individual's reliance on deep fried Twinkies for 90% of his or her daily sustenance, we would support that individual's decision -- while advocating at the same time that that must pay for his or her own healthcare and pay for the true cost of these foods (and that is too often not the case today).
In principle, even if the government guidelines were 100% accurate, we wouldn't support them being forced on the American public by the coerced taking of all of our money (i.e. taxation). It is not the government's job to foster a healthy population, grow an abundance of food, turn most of America's farmers into other types of laborers, or any other such nonsense. It is the government's job to protect individual rights. Individuals must decide, based on their own unique circumstances, what is good for them to eat. This diet might differ radically depending on whether one is a long-distance runner, a body builder, or has terminal cancer with less than three weeks to live. Diet is also simply not a matter of health in many instances. It is a matter of a balance short term interests, such as pleasure, and the long term interests of vibrant health and longevity. No government bureaucrat has the right to interfere with an individual's decision-making process or value hierarchy. If a person decides to eat trans fats or smoke cigarettes -- both with documented health risks -- they should have the right to do so. Such decisions violate no one else's rights in a free market in which certain foods are not subsidized and in which healthcare is paid for by the recipient.
But leaving the principle of individual rights aside for a moment, and recognizing that it is the most crucial principle in determining what we should eat, let's turn to those nutritional guidelines and consider the simple question, "Are these guidelines scientific? Are they making Americans healthier?" This is an issue of fundamental importance to all Americans, to the extent that they wittingly or unwittingly follow these guidelines. It's also become a crucial matter of health oversees as subsidized grains are dumped onto the world market, putting farmers in other countries out of business, and making eating across the globe potentially less healthful.
The USDA guidelines, which have been in place in one form or another since the mid-1970s, are government policies that determine how 1/6 of the American population is fed daily: the recipients of Food Stamps, schoolchildren in public schools eating the School Lunch Program's foods, and members of our military. These are also the guidelines adopted by practically every doctor, researcher, and spokesman for the Food and Drug Administration, the American Medical Association, the American Dietetic Association, the American Diabetic Association, the National Institutes of Health, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institutes, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Cancer Society, and the American Heart Association. These guidelines call for the majority of calories to be ingested as carbohydrate -- particularly from whole grains, fruits, and vegetables which all collectively form the base of the pyramid -- with limited meat and dairy. A limited amount of oils are to be used, but these should be the "heart healthy" vegetable oils, not the "heart unhealthy" saturated fats such as lard, butter, or coconut oil.
What has been the result of the implementation of these guidelines? Were they followed? Either consciously or not, the answer is a resounding "yes." While Americans are eating more calories per day, more of those calories are coming from carbohydrate and less of them are coming from fats and saturated fats. There has been an increase, not a decrease, in vegetable and fruit consumption, an increase in lean meat consumption and a decline in red meat consumption, an increase in grain, high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and industrial vegetable oil consumption, and a decrease in whole milk consumption. Apart from the intake of HFCS, Americans in greater and greater numbers are doing exactly as the government recommends.
What has been the result of more Americans following these guidelines? Almost immediately as the guidelines went into effect, more Americans got fatter. There has been an enormous increase in obesity and overweight since the 1970s, at the same time that self-reported physical activity has increased. This should lead us to seriously question whether exercise alone is sufficient at reducing weight. Indeed, Gary Taubes shows in his epic work of investigative journalism of the peer-reviewed literature, Good Calories, Bad Calories, that this belief is completely unscientific.
There is now very strong evidence that the dietary guidelines for the United States are making Americans more ill by the decade. Is the government reversing course? Not a chance.
I know that this sounds like a conspiracy theory. But it's not a conspiracy. It's simply a matter of fact that these guidelines were politically motivated, and that once a government behemoth sets forth at full speed ahead with the "public service" announcements, the tenor of those announcements have a great deal of inertia. In part, this is intentional since any drastic changes in recommendation undermine the agency's authority. Most of our government officials, and sorry to say, medical professionals doling out nutritional advice, have never been to the primary, peer-reviewed literature to investigate the government's claims of what is a healthy diet. Most of them would be shocked and dismayed to find that there is practically no evidence for most of the USDA nutritional guidelines. Practically everything Americans have been taught about nutrition has no basis in science whatsoever: the healthiness of whole grains and vegetable oils, the avoidance of red meat and full fat dairy, and an increase in fruits and vegetables as a necessary (rather than optional) part of the human diet. The avoidance of saturated fat in particular is based solely in Ancel Keys' 1950s research, which has now been completely discredited. And when viewed through the lens of evolution -- in which many primitive, completely carnivorous cultures such as the Inuit and Maasai that have been documented to attain spectacular health and a lack of heart disease on a diet of almost pure red meat,without any vegetables or grains in their diet whatsoever -- the USDA food pyramid makes even less sense.
However, before we jump on the vegetarian-bashing bandwagon, let's consider some crucial points that are sometimes not considered in the "low carb" community. Apparently there are some very healthy primitive groups that get a majority of their caloric intake from carbohydrates from tubers and fruits -- the Kuna and the Kitavans, for instance. So we must seriously question whether it's just carbohydrates that are making Americans ill -- giving them diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and so on (and there is some spectacular evidence for this in Taubes' review of the literature) -- or whether it is a specific type of carbohydrate. Indeed, Gary Taubes calls for such controlled studies of the carbohydrate hypothesis at the conclusion of his book. At the same time, we must recognize that the Kuna are not vegetarian, that they have significant saturated fat intake from coconut oil, and that they eat 8 oz fish per day. What are the main differences in the diet of the Kuna as compared with a standard American diet? A lack of grains, refined sugars, and vegetable oils high in omega 6 fatty acids. With the exception of refined sugar, these are things that Americans are told to eat more of, not less of.
Let's also consider the McDougall diet, which is a vegan diet. It has been very successful at eliminating inflammation for some people. While I personally believe that a 100% vegan diet (and even the standard American diet including meat) is often deficient in vitamins A, D, and K2, I do believe it is possible with vitamin supplementation made possible by modern technology and/or the right genetic makeup and/or dental health services (which are simply proved to be almost completely unnecessary with the proper diet) that such a diet could work for some people. What does the McDougall diet have in common with the diet of the Kuna, also in direct contrast to the standard American diet? The McDougall diet also lacks grains and refined sugar. (I'm not familiar with Dr. McDougall's stance on vegetable oils, but I suspect due to his avoidance of grains that perhaps there are also strong differences in vegetable oil consumption with the standard American diet as well.) Correction: the McDougall diet only sometimes lacks grains and avoids refined vegetable oils -- see the comments.
Whatever the differences between the "low carbers", the "paleo" dieters, the Weston A Price followers, and the McDougall-style vegans (and there are many differences between all of these diets!), all of these groups have very significant departures from the grain-based Food Pyramid (and far more science behind them to boot). They either do not eat grains or they eat them sprouted and soaked. (Notably, none of the 14 cultures documented by Weston A Price as achieving optimum health ate wheat. Only two of these 14 cultures ate grains -- oatmeal or rye, always sprouted and always with significant amounts of animal products.) They do not eat refined sugar. They also do not rely heavily on omega-6 heavy vegetable oils. All of these foods have dramatic effects on the biochemistry of the human system. I understand some of them, I'm understanding more of them, but I'm not going to delve into them in this post. Click on the links, buy the books, and read about it yourself.
What is even more insidious is that at almost the same time that the McGovern committee outlined these grain-based dietary guidelines for the good of the American public on scanty and now thoroughly discredited evidence, American agriculture was shifting in the same direction. The mainstream nutritional community was working hand in glove with mainstream agriculture. During the time when Earl Butz was Secretary of Agriculture, the stated goal of American agriculture became to produce as much food as cheaply as possible, but more specifically, certain types of food were to be promoted. Farmers were encouraged to plant fencerow to fencerow of grains. This era of subsidies for so-called "commodity crops", which continues to this day, spurred an era of a glut of grain products on American and foreign markets. What was to be done with all this extra product? Feed it to cattle and pigs. (The grain-based Food Pyramid being foisted on Americans as "heart healthy" is nearly identical to the diet used to rapidly fatten animals in a feedlot. A coincidence?)
Something else had to be done with the rest of the grains, though -- and the soy. Such intensive agriculture -- in which maximum production was pushed at the cost of the American taxpayer -- depleted the soil, necessitating subsidization, through various conservation incentives, of letting soil lie fallow. Letting soil lie fallow was something farmers across the globe have known to be necessary for millenia, but since the government had been paying them not to do it they now had to be paid to do it. A rotation of soy to restore soil nitrogen (rather than other legumes like vetch) also became commonplace.
What was to be done with this excess of corn and soy? What could not be fed to animals or the third world would now be made into tofu, high fructose corn syrup and vegetable oil (particularly corn, soy, and canola oils) and then marketed by the government and industries as healthy. Prior to the 1970s, high fructose corn syrup was practically unheard of in any American food. Today it is increasingly under attack and there is a massive marketing campaign, directed at the public and at doctors, to convince Americans that HFCS is healthy. Same for corn oil and soy oil, though Americans are more willing to buy into the marketing propaganda of these products. Canola, an even more recent invention, has had spectacular success, however. It was not granted "generally recognized as safe" food status in the United States until the 1980s, when it had been bred for low erucic acid content in Canada and then imported and grown here. Here is how those modern, "heart healthy" vegetable oils, including canola, are made:
You've eaten corn, so you know it's not an oily seed. Same with soybeans. So how to they get the oil out of them? They use a combination of heat and petroleum solvents. Then, they chemically bleach and deodorize the oil, and sometimes partially hydrogenate it to make it more shelf-stable. Hungry yet? This is true of all the common colorless oils, and anything labeled "vegetable oil".
HFCS and industrial vegetable oils are foods with literally NO evolutionary history in the human diet, and yet they are being touted by health authorities as healthy. Of course, something without any evolutionary basis could be healthy with the proper evidence, but there is none. (Grains also have little evolutionary history with humans, but they have been around significantly longer that HFCS and vegetable oils, depending on one's genetic background. Despite that, wheat in particular is generally very destructive to human health.) Companies have a right to try to sell whatever they want to the American public, but not at the public's expense through subsidies and taxation. It's especially insidious that these products are harming taxpayer health in addition to being paid for with our coerced tax dollars.
Strong evidence is emerging that vegetables oils are quite bad for our health as well. In a series of well-researched and erudite posts, Stephan of the continually enlightening Whole Health Source outlines the case against vegetable oils for us. Take heed: vegetable oils might just make you dumber, fatter, and sicker. Don't expect the government to tell you that, though, while it is busy subsidizing the vegetable oil industry with billions yearly and telling medical organizations to tell their doctors to tell their patients to eat more of it.
I've learned over the past year or so that diet is a very inflammatory subject. I can honestly say that a year ago I was literally steeped in the low-fat, grain-based, vegetable oil dictates of the Food Pyramid. Most people have strong ideas about what constitutes a healthy diet, and often react violently when someone challenges their assumptions (I certainly did). If you have not thought critically about what constitutes a healthy diet, or if you believe that a healthy diet consists of eating a little bit of "everything in moderation", you owe it to yourself to investigate the issue more deeply and re-examine your long-held assumptions. It is not an exaggeration to say that the length and quality of your life may depend on it.
I don't harp on the issue of diet because I want to force my values on others. I do it because I believe an issue so important and fundamental to the mental and physical health and well-being of all humans deserves careful consideration by all, because it is an outrage that people should have to become experts in molecular biology and physiology to figure out what is healthy for them to eat, and because I believe there has been no greater health scam in the entire history of humanity than this grain-based nutritional nonsense.
A reading of Good Calories, Bad Calories and Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (together they are the "Atlas Shrugged" of nutrition) clearly illustrates the major problems with America's Dietary Guidelines. These guidelines, coupled with the lack of critical thinking and often blind acceptance of industry- and government-based nutritional information on the part of the medical profession, have led us to where we are today: record amounts of cancer, diabetes, and obesity. What is even more infuriating is that the case against refined grains, refined sugars, and industrial vegetable oils are not recent revelations. Price's book, which implicates all in the degeneration of health, was published in 1939.
While it's critical to avoid nationalizing our healthcare industry for all kinds of practical reasons (in addition to the most important reason, which is that it would violate individual rights), the nutritional aspect is perhaps one of the strongest, if not the strongest practical evidence against "universal" healthcare. Today, the government and the medical profession are together advocating nutritional guidelines that are killing people with cancer, heart disease and diabetes -- diseases of civilization unknown to many pre-industrial cultures. I know how difficult this is to swallow -- as trained as we are to believe that everything we have in a post-industrialized world must be superior -- but it is true. Investigate it for yourself. Now medical professionals are attempting to "fix" these problems with a high level of technology, without understanding their source. If we nationalized healthcare, we would universalize the same pseudoscientific nutritional guidelines that cause these diseases, and the only difference is that government would then attempt to fix these problems with less abundant, more costly, inferior technology -- rather than the high level of abundant, superior, and cheap technology that we would have had if medicine had remained free.
We must fight tooth and nail against the government's nutritional dictations being nationalized through universal "healthcare". This advice, unquestioningly adopted by most medical professionals across the country for the past 40 years, is literally killing millions of people. There are a great many wonderful things that technology has brought us, including much medical technology. While it is tempting to defend the agricultural technology that has brought us an abundance of cheap food, there is little evidence that most of this food is healthier for us than what our pre-agricultural ancestors ate: fibrous vegetables, grass-fed meats or seafoods with appropriate ratios of omega fatty acids, full fat dairy, nuts and berries. We are living longer lives despite what we are eating, not because of it -- and Americans deserve to know it. We need to redirect agricultural and nutritional policies in America toward what is best for the consumer, and it needs to be redirected by the consumer dollar as uninfluenced by the government's pseudoscientific guidelines. This is very crucial today, as local and regional slaughterhouses shut down under government financial pressure, as farmers continue ecologically unsound farming practices which pollute our environment and food and deplete our soils, as more and more farmers grow more and more corn for biofuels at the direction of government, and as the grain-based vegetarian "diet for a healthy planet" ideas gain more traction in our culture -- with an already unfortunately and firm basis in the USDA Food Pyramid, unlikely to change anytime soon. It is not a diet for a healthy planet. It's a diet for an unhealthy environment and for many unhealthy humans, as I've written before.
The government needs to get out of the business of medicine, and the business of farming and nutrition as well. Our lives really do depend on it.Labels: Conventional Wisdom, Government Idiocy, Nutritional Guidelines, Why the USDA is Not Your Friend
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10 Comments:
> "Let's also consider the McDougall diet, which is a vegan diet."
I would like to offer a few comments based on my four years of experience with a narrow subset of the McDougall Program (which includes a general diet, exercise, and stress reduction).
The McDougall Program diet is indeed "vegan," in a single word. But it is important to keep in mind that Dr. McDougall (and the nutritionist, Jeff Novick, who works with him) is focused on what his patients do 95% of the time. He has said that it is what most people do 95% of the time that matters.
You can see this in his own choices. He eats turkey, for example, at Thanksgiving. You can also see it in his descriptions of his patients he offers as general models. They slip sometimes. No big deal as long as they are following the diet 95% of the time. (The number, of course, is not an exact calculation but a way of saying "almost always" for people who like to numericize.)
For psychological reasons, I suspect, he may tell patients in his clinic (for obesity and heart disease) to make no exceptions whatsoever. That is what I do for my particular concerns (which are not heart disease or obesity). However, many people hear "95%" and take that as a license to eat anything in front of them.
If someone really needs citations to McDougall or Novick's writings on his website, I might invest the time in looking them up.
Thank you for the article!
I agree that the 95% figure is important, which is why I'm not a complete purist about any food I consider bad for me. I'm sure I will eat sugar, grain and vegetable oil at some point in the future.
Burgess, I'm curious as to what McDougall's stance is on vegetable oils. Do you know? I suspect canola is accepted as it's not a grain. What about the other oils?
I think most of these diets are more significant in what they leave out than what they include... and I think that they all excluded grains and refined sugar is enormously significant in the health benefits that people achieve while on them.
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1. GRAINS> "The McDougall diet also lacks grains and refined sugar."
The McDougall Program diet is a very low fat, low protein, starch-centered, whole plant foods diet. That means intact, coarse starch is the main source of nutrition, but alongside large portions of vegetables and some fruit.
For many of his patients, grains are the major source of coarse (intact) starch. But others on the McDougall Program, as in my case, eat no grains whatsoever.
Other sources of coarse starch include roots, tubers, bulbs, and gourds: e.g., potatoes, yams, celery root, and pumpkin (or other winter squash). On the program, the choice of starch is optional. Some people seem to thrive on grains, and others do poorly. I eat about 25 lbs. of potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, celery root, and rutabagas per week. I must add avocadoes and olives and hazelnuts to keep my weight up.
2. SUGAR. Dr. McDougall recommends using sugar and salt in what I consider the most sensible way: use them, but only just enough to make healthy foods taste even better--making oneself more likely to eat the healthy foods. For sugars he recommends using only small amounts of the coarsest (least processed/refined) natural sugars: honey, cane sugar, and so forth. In other words, sugar, he suggests, should be a spice, not a main course.
3. FATS> "(I'm not familiar with Dr. McDougall's stance on vegetable oils, but I suspect . . . that perhaps there are also strong differences in vegetable oil consumption with the standard American diet as well.)"
Dr. McDougall's standard recommendation is no added fats/oils whatsoever. He recommends eating whole foods (olives, nuts, avocadoes) as sources of essential fats.
Finding the right diet is an adventure, and everyone gets to follow his own trail!
Monica, I think you are on target in noting a commonality among some seemingly diverse diets: they eschew refined products--junk food--and emphasize natural foods.
The Pritikin Program diet (omnivorous, less than 10% fat, emphasizing coarse starches, vegs, and fruits, but with various animal products) saved me from heart disease at age 30 (35 years ago).
A very narrow subset, which I designed, of the McDougall Program regular diet--a strictly plant-foods diet--saved me from 40 years of inflammation problems.
Yet, I have noticed that some people thrive on at least certain forms of a "paleolithic" diet (as it has been described to me).
Each of us must choose, experiment, adjust, learn, and adjust again based on what we know.
Happy eating, at any time of the year!
Thanks for correcting me on the grains -- I wasn't aware that those are a significant source of calories for anyone on the McDougall program. It's no surprise to me that many people don't do well on them, though. I suspect the extent to which many people tolerate them depends on their ancestry, which is difficult for mutts like me. I've certainly lost a good deal of weight cutting them out.
The fact that no added oils are called for is interesting as well. From what I've read recently, omega 6 oils can be very inflammatory. So I suspect anyone with an inflammatory condition (heart disease, obesity included) would do well without them.
Hi Monica,
Great article, and thanks for the links! I'm becoming more conscious of how many of our problems are intertwined with the subsidy system. Health, economic, environmental, social and ethical issues are all profoundly affected.
Another big problem is the National Cholesterol Education Program. Their panel that releases official government cholesterol guidelines is so in bed with statin manufacturers it's ridiculous. They don't even try to hide it; it's right on their website! I posted their conflict of interest statement on my blog a while back, it reads like a pharma honor roll.
I haven't written much about subsidy issues on the blog (perhaps because others like you do it better), but I have been getting involved in Seattle with the group Community Alliance for Global Justice that works on it. Everyone technically has the right to choose what they put in their mouths, but when you have cheap industrial food in your face all the time that the government tells you is healthy, it's not exactly a free will choice at that point.
Thanks for writing about this stuff.
Good points, Stephan. Another of my biggest peeves with the subsidy system is that it dumps cheap grains into third world countries and puts their unsubsidized farmers out of business, further increasing their reliance on the west. And as they move further toward the American grain-based diet they're going to experience the same health problems as we are. It's really sad.
Just out of curiosity (this is not really related to this post) -- is there any such thing as an essential saturated fat? I know we need to get EPA and DHA from our food, but are there any other essential fats? My guess is no, since our livers will just make saturated fats from carbohydrates. Right? Also, is it possible to get EPA and DHA purely from plant products? Is there some reason meat would be a preferable source (besides the whole insulin issue)? (I know I should know this and it's technically not an issue as I eat a lot of meat and organs, but I am curious...)
Hi Monica,
There is no such thing as an essential saturated fat; as you said, we are capable of making it ourselves. Our livers churn it out readily if dietary fat is kept low.
We can actually make EPA and DHA as well, as long as there is omega-3 alpha-linolenic acid in the diet. But our ability to elongate to EPA and DHA seems to be very limited, at least in the context of a modern lifestyle. Algae is the only non-animal source of DHA I'm aware of. I don't think it's a good source by itself but you can get supplements where they concentrate it.
My feeling is you can take vegetarian DHA, B-12 supplements etc. and try to get everything you would get from animal foods in a vegetarian diet, but you will never get the complete package unless you eat the whole food. Still, it might be beneficial for vegans to take algal DHA, particularly if they're pregnant or nursing.
Thanks -- that's what I suspected.
Nutrition seems to be such a young science that I wonder if our understanding isn't in very early stages yet. (Case in point being vitamin K2 as its identity was only recently truly discovered.) In other words, I wonder if there might be some essential things that the human body needs that are not yet known to science.
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