The problem started with government bureaucracy. The solution is not more government.

“Newly stationed at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, Light and her team of nutritionists set off to develop the foundation for the nation’s next food guide. For months, they scoured the scientific literature for diet-disease links, pored over population studies, analyzed dietary standards from the National Academy of Sciences, and rounded up biochemists and medical experts to hash out America’s health dilemma from every angle possible.2 The grueling work paid off: Light emerged with a set of recommendations designed—for the first time in federal history—to mitigate chronic disease.

Unlike previous food guides, Light’s version cracked down ruthlessly on empty calories and health-depleting junk food. The new guide’s base was a safari through the produce department—five to nine servings of fresh fruits and vegetables each day. “Protein foods” like meat, eggs, nuts, and beans came in at five to seven ounces daily; for dairy, two to three servings were advised.

Instead of promoting what would soon become a nationwide fat-phobia, Light’s guide recommended four daily tablespoons of cold-pressed fats like olive oil and flaxseed oil, in addition to other naturally occurring fats in food.

“The guide kept sugar well below 10 percent of total calories and strictly limited refined carbohydrates, with white-flour products like crackers, bagels, and bread rolls shoved into the guide’s no-bueno zone alongside candy and junk food. And the kicker: grains were pruned down to a maximum of two to three servings per day, always in whole form.3 (The lower end of that range was for most women and less-active men, for whom a single sandwich would fill the daily grain quota.)”

“Satisfied that their recommendations were scientifically sound and economically feasible, Light’s team shipped the new food guide off to the Secretary of Agriculture’s office for review. And that’s when the trouble began.”

“The guide Light and her team worked so hard to assemble came back a mangled, lopsided perversion of its former self. The recommended grain servings had nearly quadrupled, exploding to form America’s dietary centerpiece: six to eleven servings of grains per day replaced Light’s recommended two to three. Gone was the advisory to eat only whole grains, leaving ultra-processed wheat and corn products implicitly back on the menu. Dairy mysteriously gained an extra serving. The cold-pressed fats Light’s team embraced were now obsolete. Vegetables and fruits, intended to form the core of the new food guide, were initially slashed down to a mere two-to-three servings a day total—and it was only from the urging of the National Cancer Institute that the USDA doubled that number later on.4 And rather than aggressively lowering sugar consumption as Light’s team strived to do, the new guidelines told Americans to choose a diet “moderate in sugar,” with no explanation of what that hazy phrase actually meant.5 (Three slices of cake after a salad is moderate, right?)

“With her science-based food guide looking like it had just been rearranged by Picasso, Light was horrified. She predicted—in fervent protests to her supervisor—that these “adjustments” would turn America’s health into an inevitable train wreck. Her opinion of the grain-centric recommendations was that “no one needs that much bread and cereal in a day unless they are longshoremen or football players,” and that giving Americans a free starch-gorging pass would unleash an unprecedented epidemic of obesity and diabetes.6”

“But despite her concerns, Light was the lone wolf howling at the untouchable moon that is public policy. The only justification she’d been given was that the changes would help curb the cost of the food stamp program: fruits and vegetables were expensive, the head of Light’s division explained—and from a nutritional standpoint, the USDA considered them somewhat interchangeable with grains. Emphasizing the latter in the American diet would help food assistance programs stay within budget without causing deficiency.”

Excerpt From: Denise Minger. “Death by Food Pyramid.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/ndQeV.l