A shocking 48% of U.S. adults are now estimated to be prediabetic or diabetic, and the prevalence of obesity grew from 31% in 2000 to 42% in 2018. A small reminder of this health disaster-in-waiting is now in motion as the coronavirus ravages those suffering from such comorbidities.
How did Americans become such an obese and disease-ridden people in the first place? Increasingly, researchers and even consumers are realizing that it’s all about the “standard American diet,” devoid of healthy fats and nutrition, replete with refined grains and sugary foods and drinks.
The blame for this belongs with the government, which, beginning in the late 1970s, began to propound the myth that low-fat eating was healthier — an idea that has never been borne out by scientific studies.
Government guidelines provide both advice for the masses (especially through their doctors) and menus for schools, prisons, and the military. What’s more, they have given corporate food manufacturers the cue to advertise health claims about their products — “lite,” “diet,” “low fat,” “low cholesterol,” etc. This shapes how consumers eat.
When the government began working to scare people away from healthy and nutritious foods such as eggs, red meat, butter, and cheese, people did indeed eat less of them, but they did not replace them by eating more spinach. Instead, they began filling their bellies with the new sugary, grain-based Frankenstein creations that food companies came up with to fit within these government guidelines. These nasties live in your grocery store’s center aisles: cheese puffs and chips steeped in disgusting vegetable oils, assorted sickly sweet cakes and cookies, sugar and honey-sweetened treats, sugary soft drinks, and the like. People have been falsely conditioned to think that bacon and eggs will kill them but that these semi-toxic concoctions are somehow safe.
The public, in other words, has become the involuntary subject of an unprecedented dietary experiment initiated by bureaucrats who lacked solid evidence for their approach from the inception. It is, therefore, probably no coincidence that the rates of obesity and diabetes have skyrocketed in the time since this experiment began.
The U.S. dietary recommendations are updated once every five years. They have slightly improved over time. For example, you may have noticed that the obnoxious “low fat” craze finally disappeared at some point (although people still fear fat because of it — the damage is done) and that the unscientific panic over dietary cholesterol was quietly phased out more recently. But things are not changing fast enough to make America healthy again. Last week’s disappointing five-year update to the guidelines demonstrates that the public cannot trust its government for health advice and must take matters into its own hands.
Given the appalling state of the nation’s health, the United States Department of Agriculture needed to act decisively in updating the guidelines, and it failed, although not completely.
One positive development is a long-overdue, modest reduction in the recommendation for added sugar — down from 10% of daily calories to no more than 6%, with a recommendation that children age 2 and younger should never be given sugar-sweetened beverages. Studies indicate that half of all 1-year-olds drink fruit juice (fruit without the healthy part, also known as sugar), and nearly two-thirds of children drink at least one sugary beverage a day. This is a significant driving factor in both childhood obesity and the development of fatty livers in children of the sort once found only in lifetime alcoholics.
Unfortunately, bad science and obvious industry lobbying are preventing further needed changes to the national nutrition guidelines. The USDA and Health and Human Services continue to ignore the overwhelming evidence and new studies showing that for both weight loss and cancer prevention, people should be eating more healthy fats and fewer, larger meals each day — not the average six small meals and snacks that most eat.
President Trump may prefer hamburgers and steaks, but the USDA continues to cower before the cult of vegetarianism. The only diet outlined other than the standard U.S.-style and Mediterranean-style diets is vegetarianism. The new document crucially excludes increasingly popular low-carbohydrate options that appear to be giving formerly obese and unhealthy people a new lease on life — ketogenic, paleolithic, and candida diets that are well-attested in terms of their effectiveness and feature in many recent studies that the new guidelines document ignores.
And despite emerging evidence indicating otherwise, the USDA still continues to treat red meat, the most nutrient-dense food many people are willing to eat, as a boogeyman, tantamount to soda and candy.
It’s good that the USDA is finally sounding the alarm on sugar, especially for children. But the rest of these new guidelines represent a lost opportunity. America has become a fat and unhealthy country in the era of the USDA guidelines, as COVID-19 reminds us. It is very likely that the government is to blame for the whole thing. These guidelines need to be deleted entirely and reformulated based only on evidence present in scientific literature. There isn’t time to wait for 2025.
