a blog by lucas, human person

The new dietary guidelines are, simply put, dumb.

They both cautiously and nervously cling to historic dietary recommendations for dietary components (think limiting cholesterol and saturated fat) and, without squaring the illogicality, recommend contradicting whole food consumption.

It’s really just a ploy to put out iterative dietary guidelines that shift closer to an ideological world view held by modern conservatives: we r men. we r strong. we eat meat. meat makes us strong. 

It exists to validate their beliefs on gender traditionalism: black and white, no shades of grey. A return to 1960s americana. 

The problem with the new dietary guidelines is not that they nakedly promote meat and dairy consumption (which I’m sure an already massive red meat and dairy industry is both appreciative of and heavily involved in).

The dietary guidelines aren’t what we say they are. We say they are a set of recommendations for the average american citizen to make healthy dietary choices. 

Quick history lesson. 

We got the dietary guidelines in the 1980s. But US government dietary guidance has been provided since the early 20th century. We just got what we now recognize at the dietary guidelines in the 1980s, along with the food pyramid: the first real cultural imagery of a healthy diet.

They’ve changed over time. The pyramid got replaced with MyPlate. Scientists learned more about diet and health relationships and recommended more plant based meals. Yet, the whole time, industry fought to make sure they were represented. The dairy industry managed to ensure that, even in the 21st century, milk somehow remained a staple of the US diet. Red meat industries ensured that their products were lambasted at the artery clogging monstrosities that research institutions were beginning to believe that they were.

The dietary guidelines are supposed to be the culmination of an exhaustive literature review of all nutrition and dietary research, to synthesize and determine the most healthful dietary recommendations for the average american, based solely on empirical evidence.

It never has been. Even if it starts there, industry ensures that it doesn’t end there. 

If it was solely based on the research, we wouldn’t recommend meat and dairy products at all.

We get a version of healthy, so far as it doesn’t threaten monied interests. 

And so everyone is up in arms now about the fact that the new guidelines revert to a pyramid visual (albeit flipped) and promote meat and dairy consumption.

Yet, most of the recommendations don’t stray far from the bland, widely known, and often overly rehearsed talking points of nutrition science: eat more fiber, eat whole grains, eat more fruits and vegetables. 

Notably they leave out the seed oils that the right wing has been so conspiracy minded about. Funny if that indicates that they do know the levels of their ideology that are capable of being accepted mainstream and those that are too fringe to impose. Points for self-awareness? Probably not. Not if I’m grading their work.

Whatever the recommendations are, i don’t really care. We are decades into their contemporary publication. No one is changing their diets based on the US dietary guidelines for americans. 

Do you? Do you read them? Do you take their advice seriously? I doubt it. I doubt anyone really does.

Our diets are driven by our social engagement, by our personal ideologies, by our physical environment, by our families, by our tastes, not by what the US government recommends to us.

Most people probably don’t know where to find them.

So yeah, some will see the headlines and RFK Jr. and Mehmet Oz’s statements and make a big deal out of it. 

But in the end, those who eat a lot of meat and drink a lot of milk (probably raw, you sickos), are going to keep doing so. Those of us who don’t eat meat certainly aren’t going to start because the US Federal government said they thought it was a good idea and designed a modern website say it.

The actual evil of the new dietary guidelines is much more below the surface, much deeper than what it recommends that individuals do. 

The dietary guidelines are supposed to be, in their theoretical purity, an extensive synthesis of the entirety of the science produced by the field of nutrition. It is weighed, critiqued, analyzed, curated, and presented as empirical fact, accumulated through rigorous research without personal, corporate, or government influence, expressing to the US population what we know to be true regarding dietary choices and health outcomes with the end goal of ensuring the prosperity of our national public health.

Again, it has never been. But, this is the first time that the guidelines are driven overwhelmingly by a political ideology based on health misinformation.

The dietary guidelines recommend eating more meat and dairy. They encourage salting and cooking meat in butter. They also hold the old line of reducing saturated fat and sodium intake. 

These contradict.

They do so because the latter recommendation is based on decades of scientific research. The former based on political ideology: it is american (and masculine) to eat meat. It is part of our national identity. 

It is the manipulation of science and insertion of political ideology. 

It is policy flowing downward from ideology, manipulated for political ends.

It is nutritional lysenkoism.

In 1948, soviet biological and agricultural policy was redirected. Trofim Lysenko took the helm. He rejected mendelian genetics in favor of a biological policy that paralleled communist ideology. Vast quantities of seeds were placed in a single bed, planted deep, and exposed to harsh elements. It was believed that, like the communist worker, the seeds would sacrifice for the common good, leading to stronger, more resilient crops. 

Ask any farmer. This is nuts. 

The outcome? Crops failed. Duh. 

Downstream? Widespread famine in the soviet union. 

Lysenkosim severely set back scientific understanding and created long term damage to trust in scientific institutions. 

And now we do the same. We drive nutrition policy through manipulated science and isolated ideological political pursuits. 

The problem is that, while most Americans won’t read the dietary guidelines, they are the foundation that informs our nutrition and food assistance policy. 

SNAP benefits, determined by the Thrifty Food Plan, rely on the dietary guidelines. In fact, these programs, and all after US federal and many state nutrition and food assistance programs, are mandated to follow their dietary guidelines. Our nutrition education programs are mandated to follow the dietary guidelines. They create the boundaries by which we must govern our public health and nutrition programming, research investigations, clinical training, all of it. 

It will create a national public health and nutrition system built on political ideology, not empirical fact, one based on the belief in a form of fantasy post war american exceptionalism, of 1950s white flight suburbanism, of might is right, of masculine domination and imposition of will, with a following by an  overwhelming force of weak, directionless men cosplaying as propagandized characters from their grandfathers war stories.

We might not starve, but we are certainly doomed to suffer.