Little-known health industry advocates appointed by the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services quietly inserted provisions in new federal dietary guidelines to tax foods they deem unhealthy and to authorize official “interventions” to change what Americans eat.
One of the provisions called for dietary health “interventionists” to visit people in their communities and even at their workplaces in an effort to “restructure” society and “facilitate” healthier habits.
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a panel of 14 USDA and HHS-appointed experts convened in 2013 to write the report that will inform the official nutrition guidelines the two departments will co-author later this year, rankled congressional Republicans and officials of the cattle industry when it steered the government toward recommending a plant-based diet out of concern for the environment, not nutrition.
Despite a congressional mandate that the committee ground its dietary proposals solely in nutrition science, the report advocated policies like increasing taxes and community organizing under the aegis of “comprehensive lifestyle interventions.”
The chairman of the advisory committee acknowledged the radical content of the report.
“Drawing on what we found with the interventions at the individual and community level, we talked about really trying to affect a shift in paradigm in healthcare and public health on prevention. That’s where the interventionists come in,” Dr. Barbara Millen told the Washington Examiner.
Millen said the government should be “highly influential” in managing the implementation of the various kinds of health “interventions,” from nutrition to lifestyle counseling.
“The federal health system would have a major role to play, since it’s really defining the law and the regulations around our healthcare and what might be covered under healthcare,” she said. The ideal outcome would be covering the “interventions” under Obamacare.
“When we talk about creating cultures of health, this is the kind of thing that’s not easy to mandate,” Millen said. “But we hope that employers embrace the notion that a healthier workforce is a more productive workforce.”
The “interventionists” could draw on a mix of funding from the government and the private sector, Millen said, but employers would be left to decide whether they wanted the health officials visiting their offices and counseling their workers.
She said whether the practice of bringing the lifestyle “interventions” to the workplace would be mandatory, like job-site safety inspections by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, was an issue “outside the purview of the committee.”
But the committee’s report didn’t limit the new regulations to the workplace.
The recommendations also sought to expand the influence of government nutrition standards on public schools.
Children begin learning the familiar food group pyramid, which is derived from the guidelines, early in their schooling years.
“At the federal, state and local levels, policies are needed that create strong nutrition and physical activity standards and guidelines in child care settings,” the report said. “Successful strategies” in the report included “outreach engagement to parents about making positive changes in the home” and “curricular enhancements” to health education at the early child care level.
For adults, the same goal of “changing behavior” applied to the committee’s suggestions for a variety of settings, from doctor’s offices to the community at large.
“Given the complexity of dietary behavior change,” the report said, people will need “intervention programs” to adhere to the new rules.
Dr. Steven Clinton, another member of the committee, said the “government needs to play a role” in people’s health.
“This is done by insuring kids in school get healthy food and daily exercise,” Clinton told the Examiner. “This is done by building towns/cities with sidewalks/bikepaths/bike lanes, etc.”
“I personally feel that we need to re-invent the American healthcare system with a priority on disease prevention,” he said.
The interventionists envisioned in the report would have no authority to force people to adhere to nutrition guidelines.
“This is really a vague recommendation to have healthcare workers get out into the community setting and give helpful information or start educational programs in willing industry or business,” Clinton said. “This is not a ‘law.’
“We cannot penalize a person for not eating five servings of fruit and vegetables a day, or consuming only five grams of fiber instead of 20. I think the real meaning of this is to give people the education and mentoring so that a willing person can try to help themselves.”
Clinton stressed, however, that “personally, I think we need to do much more to see good outcomes.”
Critics of the report warn that it strays too far from its mission by injecting divisive, unresolved environmental issues into what should be a nonpartisan discussion.
Jeff Stier, senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, said the underlying concept of expanding the government’s involvement in individual nutrition is already evident in Obama administration policies.
He cited as an example a taxpayer-funded study of programs that would send text messages to people’s phones to remind them to eat less as an example.
The report’s reliance on environmental sustainability as its compass instead of traditional nutrition concerns could lead to official dietary guidelines aimed at reducing or eliminating the consumption of red meat, Stier noted.
“It’s creating the scientific basis for interventions to advance that approach even though it’s outside the scope of what Congress authorized,” he said.
While the panel’s report itself carries no authority, the government will use it to inform the nutrition guidelines it authors every five years — and those have “tremendous power,” Stier warned.
“It sounds as if the guidelines are just guidelines and don’t have teeth, but in fact, the dietary guidelines are used to affect federal budgets,” he said.
For example, the official guidelines affect food stamp policy, school breakfast and lunch programs, and the meals available to military families, Stier said.
Go here to read the full committee report.
