The Origins of our Terrible Public Health Advice

Nutrition seems like a topic that is resolute. However, public nutrition policy it is rife with bad science, special interests and conflicting information. Which could explain the trend of why we keep getting similar nutrition advice over the years while our obesity levels continue to skyrocket. Here are some examples:

USDA MyPlate

Recommendations support higher carbohydrate, lower fat diets. It's worth mentioning the committee that creates the MyPlate guidelines every 5 years was found to have major conflicts of interest for 2020: "Our analysis found that 95% of the committee members had COI with the food, and/or pharmaceutical industries and that particular actors, including Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson, General Mills, Dannon, and the International Life Sciences had connections with multiple members. Research funding and membership of an advisory/executive board jointly accounted for more than 60% of the total number of COI documented.” 

Study conclusions: Trustworthy dietary guidelines result from a transparent, objective, and science-based, process. Our analysis has shown that the significant and widespread COI on the committee prevent the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans from achieving the recommended standard for transparency without mechanisms in place to make this information publicly available.

Prior to this study, there were NO public disclosures of the committee's COI, despite a 2017 recommendation by the National Academies of Sciences. What is the primary interest of these committee members? I suspect to keep you eating their processed primarily carbohydrate-based foods and to get you on their medications or medical devices. 

The American Heart Association

The American Heart Association is a leading authority for promoting a “heart healthy diet.” Their advice is based on the diet-heart hypothesis (hypothesis = guess) created nearly 70 years ago. This hypothesis postulates that reducing dietary saturated fat reduces serum cholesterol, thereby reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. This hypothesis continues to show that it’s too simplistic and reductionist in nature - we will cover the science in a future newsletter. 

AMA recommendations are similar to USDA MyPlate which center on anti-red meat/saturated fat, pro-vegetable oil and higher carbohydrate intake. If you spend time on their website, they share that they use only observational studies (lower quality studies: Cohort, Case-Control & Cross-sectional studies) to make their far-reaching recommendations. These are primarily the Nurses’ Health Study, NHANES data and meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies.

Scientists understand that observational studies can help make connections and help develop hypotheses for future interventional studies, but shouldn’t be used to draw conclusions. For example: in the US it is often observed that unhealthier people eat more red meat (because we’ve been told it’s bad for us for decades) and they also tend to be more likely to eat fast food, added sugar and smoke. In other countries where there isn’t such an anti-red meat/saturated fat campaign, populations who eat these foods are as healthy and in some places healthier then vegetarians (Hong Kong and Icelandic groups for example). 

Despite the hard dietary stance they’ve held about lowering cholesterol and minimizing saturated fat, if you do lots of digging in their annual report, you will find very interesting information: "NHANES data and meta-analyses of prospective cohort studies show that higher intakes of total fat, polyunsaturated fatty acids, and monounsaturated fatty acids are associated with lower total mortality. However, the evidence for saturated fatty acid intake as a risk or protective factor for total and CVD mortality remains controversial." Eating higher fat and even saturated fats may not be that bad after all, even based off of observational studies, but their advice remains the same.

Our belief is to focus on eating whole foods, foods we have eaten for thousands of years that have essentially made us the humans we are today (meat, dairy, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, some grains) to help our clients thrive.