a blog by lucas, human person

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.