Guiding principles: How US dietary guidelines contribute to obesity

Perhaps we'll look back at the deterioration of the American diet as the greatest self-inflicted error of the past 50 years. But it wasn't an accident. The dietary guidelines have been heavily influenced by agribusiness. This been catastrophic for health outcomes and quality of life.

There's way more to the story than dietary guidelines, and there isn't complete consensus on what caused the onset of the obesity epidemic, but the dietary guidelines are at the very least an embarrassing artifact of the problem.

In the mid 20th century the typical Japanese person got 6.9% of their calories from fat and 12.4% from protein, which means 80.7% from carbohydrates. Since then both fat and protein have gone up (due to Western influence?). It was 26.5% from fat and 15.9% from protein by 2000 [1], which means 57.6% from carbohydrates.

I'm skeptical of any article that tries to pin American health problems on carbohydrates that does not at least mention Japan and try to explain why Japan was fine with a much higher percentage of carbohydrates than Americans eat.

Clearly humans can in fact do fine on a very high carbohydrate diet, so if carbohydrates are a problem in America it has to be something about the particular kinds of carbohydrates we use or how we process or prepare them, not the mere fact that we use a lot of them.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

Takes a long while to get to any points..

> Chronic high carbohydrate consumption — especially of refined grains and added sugars — drives obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other metabolic disorders

Also, the article mentions saturated fats are over vilified.

> Today, over 70 percent of American adults and one-fifth of the children are overweight or obese,

Today I learned that 70% of Americans are obese. Never been to america but I'm truly baffled how people and the government could let this happen.

I know that in America the government is supposed not to interfere with people choice but here it's not just some people being lazy and camping at McDonald's.

Same in Europe. The obesity itself is just part of the problem. Negative effects on cognition, willpower, stress hormone levels, "fatigue" and so on.

It gets people into moods, the blood sugar levels and the stress hormone levels. Makes it easier to sell your product and your story. More stress at work, at school and then at home. Less peace equals striving for compensation and submitting yourself to something that gives you that compensation. It's a brutal story.

A tiny deviation from baseline levels is enough and that's exactly what the dietary guidelines resulted in. It was an "unintended" side effect for some time. Then there were patterns.

> Since the first guidelines were published in 1980, we’ve been told to fear fat and instead consume about half of all calories as carbohydrates. The current guidelines recommend up to 10 percent of calories as added sugar and six servings of grains daily, including three as refined grains.

The guidelines don’t say you should eat sugar and refined grains. They say, if you eat them, you should really limit them to 10% of calories and half your grains at most.

They also don’t say to “fear fat”; that’s just completely made up. They do say to limit saturated fat but this is evidence-based, as are benefits of whole grains.

Maybe this is the issue: 95% of the 2020 DGAC was found by an analysis to have at least one tie with a food or pharmaceutical company, and 50% had 30 such ties or more. (https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/usda-fails-to-fully-i...)

Here are the guidelines so HN readers can judge for themselves: https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2021-0...

I'd love to see a comparison of countries that looked at how much of the average diet was made up of simple carbohydrates and average weights.

I might be wrong, but I suspect that US diets include a greater percentage of simple carbohydrates than most.

A concrete manifestation of this my family runs into all the time is when trying to buy Greek yogurt.

There are fat-free versions galore, all either loaded with sugar or artificial sweeteners. Full-fat Greek yogurt is plenty sweet without any additives, and my understanding of the science is that it's much healthier for you, but it's sometimes tricky to find it because there's little demand.

Greek yogurt is bought by people who nominally care about nutrition—its main selling point is higher protein—but because of these guidelines the demand is for the high-protein high-sugar versions and not the naturally sweet full-fat.

I find it hard to believe that only the grain and sugar industries have powerful lobbyists, and the poor red meat industry has none.

I remember seeing a brief documentary on Youtube, detailing how school lunches were made in Japan. They just followed the lunch production for a single day, but it was enlightening. The menu that day was teriyaki yellowtail tuna, with roasted burdock root, apple slices, tonjiru miso soup with pork, tofu, wok-fried vegetables and dashi, with Koshikihari rice from the Nagano province.

Everything was prepared fresh in the morning, placed into bento boxes, and delivered by lunch for consumption. The per-student cost of all of this was ~$35 American -- edit -- $35 for the entire month. Roughly $1.70 a day to feed a student an amazing meal.

I was frankly dumbfounded at how delicious everything looked, and especially for how cheaply everything had been prepared. I would have been delighted to pay $15 or more for this meal.

For guidelines that came out in 2020, the people involved had financial and career history ties to the food industry. The chair had ties to the dairy industry. I mean industry (business) rather than the topic area.

On a technical note, I'd love to see more data-driven approaches to nutritional science. Maybe we could leverage machine learning and big data to better understand the long-term effects of different diets?

Everyone wants some boogeyman to blame. In reality, it's probably just that food is really cheap these days, and America is really rich these days.

We in Russia has the very same problem [1], with the local flavor of Stalin's totalitarism.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

I can't take this article seriously.

> Americans have increased grain calories by 28 percent since 1970, while reducing red meat intake equally. Butter and egg consumption dropped as vegetable oil use surged 87 percent. We’ve engineered a dietary disaster, swapping wholesome, satiating foods for processed carbohydrates that leave us hungry and sick.

In one sentence the author says total caloric intake has significantly increased. In the next she says vegetable oil consumption significantly increased, somehow displacing eggs. And finally, she concludes carbohydrates are to blame for obesity. What?

It's hard not to be fat in the US when 90% of the time people are sitting down doing nothing. Car centric culture and infrastructure, along with unregulated highly addictive packaged food. What could possibly go wrong?

Good thing the medical care is affordable and excellent /s

And the US dietary guidelines are seen by many countries as the golden standard and replicated to their own countries.

Consumption of animals have been steeply falling for the last 70 years, while seed oils consumption have grown. If you search for the graph you'll be amazed, it is so clear what is causing this.