If you’re inclined to be suspicious about Uncle Sam’s involvement in choosing what you eat, you’re on pretty solid ground.

Reason Magazine recently interviewed the author of a paper showing that none of the federal nutrition guidelines are based on reliable or useful data. The problem is that the data come from self-reporting of people’s diets over long periods they could not have possibly remembered. Frequently, study subjects reported living on diets that no human could survive on. To draw conclusions from such flawed memories is a fool’s errand.