A nutritional experiment with the American public as subjects

An excellent example of the dilemma of utopian totalitarians who want to tell everyone else what to do. From The Food Cops and Their Ever-Changing Menu of Taboos by David A. McCarron.

The dilemma is that you should not use the coercive power of government unless there is a clear benefit that is endorsed by the majority of the electorate. There are two problems with this approach. It is hard to attain a stable convincing majority around any issue and it is hard to be certain about future benefits.

Undertaking actions and policies where either or both these conditions are unfilled can lead to dramatically bad outcomes. But if you wait till the evidence is clear and the majority support the policy, there is no longer any real need for the government to take action. Hence the dilemma - wait for compelling evidence and majority support but risk being irrelevant by the time that happens, or take action early (without support or evidence) and risk dramatic failure. As long as the negative consequences fall on someone else, utopian totalitarians always prefer to undertake faith-based initiatives early rather than wait for compelling evidence and majority support.

From McCarron's article.

With the release of the eighth edition of the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines expected by year’s end, it seems reasonable to consider—with the “obesity plague” upon us and Americans arguably less healthy than ever before—whether the guidelines are to be trusted and even whether they have done more harm than good.

Many Americans have lost trust in the science behind the guidelines since they seem to change dramatically every five years. In February, for example, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee declared that certain fats and eggs are no longer the enemy and that cholesterol is “not considered a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” This, after decades of advising Americans to “watch their cholesterol.”

Such controversy is nothing new. U.S. Dietary Guidelines were first released by the Agriculture Department and the Department of Health and Human Services in 1980. One nutrition expert at the time, Edward “Pete” Ahrens, a groundbreaking researcher on fat and cholesterol metabolism, called the guidelines “a nutritional experiment with the American public as subjects . . . treating them like a homogeneous group of Sprague-Dawley rats.”

The original goals were to: 1) increase Americans’ carbohydrate consumption to 55%-60% of caloric intake; 2) reduce fat consumption to less than 30% from 40% of caloric intake; 3) reduce saturated fat to 10% of calories and increase poly- and monounsaturated fats each to 10% of calories; 4) reduce cholesterol intake to less than 300 milligrams a day; 5) reduce sugar intake by 40%; and 6) reduce salt consumption by 50%-80%.

These six goals, viewed in the context of what we know today, could hardly be more misdirected. That assessment starts with the guideline’s emphasis on increasing carbohydrates and reducing fat consumption, a strategy that research has documented is more likely to add excess weight than to improve health. Most recently, a study published in April in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that “lowering the fat content of dairy or other foods may simply lead to increased carbohydrates consumption and explain . . . associations with weight gain.”

McCarron goes on to shed light on all the other early well intended assumptions that have proven to be mistaken.

When asked in the hearing if the Dietary Guidelines had failed, Ms. Burwell suggested that Americans’ waistlines might well have been greater without them—an opinion not a fact. Mr. Vilsack’s reply to the same question was closer to the truth: “This is really about well-informed opinion,” he said. “I wish there were scientific facts. But the reality is stuff changes, right? Stuff changes.”

McCarron concludes

A reasonable argument can be made that the only perspective of the original guidelines that proved correct was that they represented, as Ahrens stated, “a nutritional experiment” on the American public. By any reasonable standard of science, that experiment has failed.

For utopian totalitarians there are two consequences. 1) The American public has worth nutritional health from following the guidelines. They likely do not care about this outcome except to the extent that it justifies further government policies to address the self-created "obesity epidemic." 2) The public lose faith in both the trustworthiness and the effectiveness of the government.

This latter is easily demonstrated in the polls and in the actions of Americans but it is a system wide corrosive outcome that should be as alarming to conservatives as to liberals. The schadenfreude of seeing Progressive arrogance laid low is likely near irresistible to the run-of-the-mill conservative. However, while they might disagree on the appropriate breadth and depth of government role in the life of a free people, both conservatives and progressive share (to some degree) a respect for the rule of law. Perhaps conservatives more than progressives but there is some common bond in that area.

To the extent that people see the government as untrustworthy, ineffective and corrupt, then the rule of law is undermined.