Seven Events That Made America America

by Larry Schweikart

  Beneath the surface, those at the American Heart Association and the National Heart Institute knew there was a lack of support for their hypothesis in the data. In 1968, after six researchers had received large grants to confirm the fat/heart disease link, Pete Ahrens of Rockefeller University was tasked to examine the evidence of the studies. Even in 1968—six years after the AHA had already gone on record as touting the benefits of a low-fat diet—the report concluded, “it is not known whether dietary manipulation has any effect whatsoever on coronary heart disease.”38

  At that point, the science—which was completely unsettled—became politicized by hysteria over population growth, exacerbated by the fear-mongering (and utterly wrong) book by Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (1968). Concerns about growing worldwide population, along with the flawed notion that “not cleaning your plate” somehow caused “kids in China to starve,” allowed the antimeat activists to gain a foothold in policy making. This illogical association, used at countless dinner tables, took another turn when the diet radicals linked it to the production costs of meat as opposed to vegetables and fruits. Hence, the aforementioned Jean Mayer claimed in 1974 that the “enormous appetite for animal products” had caused more grain and soybeans to go into feeding cattle and hogs, “decreasing the amounts of food directly available for direct consumption by the poor.”39 In reality, it was the opposite: the more grain and soybeans that were needed for animals, the higher the demand, which meant the more likelihood farmers would grow even more—which they did. Such free-market logic didn’t faze Mayer, who concluded we needed “a shift in consumption in developed countries toward a ‘simplified’ diet containing less animal products, and, in particular, less meat.” (Though of course he failed to acknowledge that our predecessors ate a “simple” diet as well, but theirs was full of meat.) This view fit well with the new vegan movement, as argued in Diet for a Small Planet by Frances Moore Lappé.

  One characteristic of all these works is the obsession with limits on resources, an economic zero-sum approach developed by Thomas Mun and the mercantilists, and proven wrong by two centuries’ worth of growing economies and vast new discoveries of resources. The buzzword was “small,” emphasizing the absence of a capacity for growth, only constant entropy to, presumably, a single pair of humans huddled around the last berry bush. Similarly, Appetite for Change by Warren James Belasco warned that shoppers in Indiana would affect food availability in India. The fact that the Left glommed on to the antifat/meat-kills mantra should not be surprising, nor should the notion that “Big Food” was somehow behind the fat-heavy shift in eating.

  Government had already started to insert itself into Americans’ diets long before Ike’s heart attack, but with nowhere near the same levels of intensity or control. Uncle Sam’s first foray into the regulation of food, of course, was the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. Using the enforcement powers of the FDA, one of the first products the government set its sights on was that grave threat to humankind, Coca-Cola! For many years, the FDA had pursued Coke on the grounds that it had cocaine in it, even though Asa Candler, who had taken over the manufacturing of Coke, came up with a “Secret Formula” that so diluted the coca leaf in the Coca-Cola ingredients that it virtually disappeared.40 Nevertheless, the government under the zealous Dr. Harvey Wiley continued to investigate. Upon finding no cocaine in Coke, Wiley then charged the company with “misbranding” and false advertising. The case collapsed and Coke was finally free of the strong arm of government. But the public was just beginning to see government’s hand in its dietary affairs.

  Even before the creation of the FDA, in 1894, the U.S. Department of Agriculture published dietary recommendations and in 1916 released the first food guide, Food for Young Children, written by Caroline Hunt, who came up with the “five basic food groups.” Franklin Roosevelt called a National Nutrition Conference in 1941, which came up with the recommended daily allowances (RDA) of calories for Americans to observe. These included caloric intake, nutrients, vitamins, and other guidelines, revising the original five basic food groups down to four: milk, meats, fruits and vegetables, and grains. In the 1970s, a fifth category of sweets, fats, and alcoholic beverages was added. By the 1980s, the famous “food pyramid” was established, and in 1988, a graphic was added to convey the goals of variety, proportionality, and moderation based on the sizes of the food group depicted. In 1994, the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act forced food companies to put nutritional and caloric information on cans and boxes. The impact was hardly what the government anticipated: a 1996 USDA poll found that over 40 percent of Americans thought that the information only confused them.41 Yet the information was of little use if the recommendations and guidelines were wrong to begin with. It all depended on a politicized “consensus” about what constituted acceptable levels, and all of that was determined by which of the previous studies one thought was correct. It all came down to someone in government making a decision about contested science, which meant that the decision of which side to accept was determined by politics, power, and money, not science.

  The government/science/advocacy link was greatly strengthened in 1977 with the McGovern Committee’s release of Dietary Goals for the United States.42 That the government should be involved in telling people what to eat spoke volumes about how far from the Founders’ vision the United States had strayed. When Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety,” he likely meant tyranny from the British—not the food police—but the principle was the same. Adams agreed: “Liberty once lost”—even to eat as one chooses—“is lost forever.” Formed in 1968 as a part of the War on Poverty and the drive to end hunger, the committee had originally supervised food-assistance programs. Like all good Washington committees, though, rather than go out of business, the members looked for more work. George McGovern himself was a low-fat believer—having attended the Pritikin Longevity Research Institute in Santa Barbara—but most of the staff were shallow in their knowledge and, according to Gary Taubes, thought “relevant nutritional and social issues were simple and obvious.”43 Having gained most of their knowledge about the subject from newspapers (as one admitted), it was no surprise that they had the viewpoint of The New York Times, which is to say, the viewpoint of Jane Brody, who was already in the antifat/antimeat camp. After hearings in which the committee members heard testimony about how the American diet had changed to a higher intake of meat and fat since the turn of the century, the results were predictable. The first goal the committee listed was to increase carbohydrate consumption and decrease fat consumption, all on the assumption that this would help Americans lose weight. Buried inside Dietary Goals was the admission that the evidence was not clear or compelling. Many of the witnesses had testified that the recommendations were either premature or flat-out harmful.

  Empowered by the McGovern Committee, administrators at the Department of Agriculture, particularly Carol Foreman, the assistant secretary under Jimmy Carter, used the agency to turn the guidelines into policy. Foreman believed “people were getting sick and dying because they ate too much,” and worked with the surgeon general to support more dietary guidelines.44 Immediately, the science behind the war on meat began to “support” the guidelines, as researchers who failed to support the new government position found their work suddenly unfunded. The peer-review system intended to ensure quality scholarship instead excluded any dissenters. 45 Another researcher admitted, “If you say what the government says, then it’s okay. If you say something that isn’t what the government says . . . that makes you suspect.”46 Nor did the government note that one of its chief sources of the diet-heart interpretation, Jeremiah Stamler, was a consultant for the radical Center for Science in the Public Interest—the organization that would later attempt to ban buttered popcorn and attack ice cream as a “liquid heart attack.” Yet the more research that came in, the less solid the fat/cholesterol/heart links looked. A massive Multi
ple Risk Factor Intervention Trial, which followed twelve thousand middle-aged men with high cholesterol for a seven-year period, discovered that there was a higher death rate among men who had quit smoking and eaten a lower-cholesterol diet than among those who hadn’t. The Wall Street Journal summarized the stunning results in 1982 with the headline “Heart Attacks: A Test Collapses.” 47 That did not dissuade Time magazine, however, from touting the evils of cholesterol on its March 1984 cover with a “frownie face” made up of two eggs and bacon.48

  By the mid-1980s, when the National Institutes of Health joined in with its Cholesterol Education Program, then supported by Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, it seemed clear that Americans should “cut out the fat.” Foods high in fat, warned the surgeon general, could account for two-thirds of U.S. deaths in 1988.49 Upon closer examination, however, the incest of the whole process revealed that the recommendations had come from the same people who had produced the questionable science in the first place. J. Michael McGinnis, for example, oversaw the surgeon general’s report, yet he had been Mark Hegsted’s liaison to the Surgeon General’s Office when the original Dietary Goals were issued. In 1977, Hegsted had headed the drafting of the first dietary guidelines, relying on a report from the American Society of Clinical Nutrition that instructed “not to draw up a set of recommendations” based on the findings.50 All these “new” reports relied heavily on researchers who had been involved in the dietary-fat controversy earlier and shared the same viewpoint as one another. In a stunning foreshadowing of the global warming debate, once the new guidelines came out, antimeat advocacy groups, such as the Center for Science in the Public Interest, drove the public discussion so as to eliminate all skeptical reports by dismissing any research that contradicted theirs as an irrelevant anomaly to the “broad scientific consensus.” What followed was predictable: now that the “science was settled,” all subsequent research challenging the fat-equals-heart-attack thesis was not just questioned, it was blocked altogether. When Warren Browner conducted a study at the University of California, San Francisco, and found minor benefits to cutting out all fats during a lifetime, McGinnis tried to block publication.51

  Indeed, what was becoming obvious to everyone was just how difficult it was to come to any conclusions about the relationship of fat, cholesterol, diet, exercise, and heart health. A significant problem with any diet study is that because of the taste and texture of food, it is impossible to substitute one food for another. The calories might match up, but the person might eat more fruit instead of a donut, seeking to replace the sensation and “fillingness” of fat, for example. As a result, the participant might ingest more sugar and less fat but would still be credited with a shift from “junk food” to fruit. Conducting long-term, double-blind, placebo-controlled diet research was nearly impossible (as admitted in a study touted by USA Today in 2009, whose fine print pointed out that as the period of time analyzed increased, the researchers found that the benefits of the diets declined sharply).52

  Worse still, the playing field steadily shifted. Recall the sequence of events that started it all: Ike had a heart attack and people became concerned that cholesterol influenced heart health; then they started demonizing fat as a high-cholesterol food; and finally they began to blame heart disease on meat. By the 1970s, however, even Ancel Keys admitted there was “no basis” for the claim that there was a heart attack “epidemic” in the first place, and by 1987, he further admitted that “cholesterol is not as important as we used to think it was.”53

  The stage was thus set for Dr. Robert Atkins to spark a firestorm with his book Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, published in 1992. He noted that the human diet had changed dramatically beginning in the last decades of the 1800s, when white flour and refined sugar were introduced on a regular basis to the kitchens and dinner tables of average people. Sugar intake, which “averaged 12 pounds a year per person in 1828, was nearly ten times that in 1928,” he noted. Between 1910 and 1970, “the intake of animal fat and butter dropped . . . [while] the intake of refined carbohydrates (mainly sugar, corn syrup and white flour) escalated by sixty percent.”54 Between 1975 and 1999, the average American increased his consumption of sugar and corn syrup by 34 pounds annually (750 calories a day from sugar increases alone!).55 That amount constituted one-third of all calories an adult put into his body per day, and alone should have been cause for deep concern about its connections to diabetes and hyperinsulinism. The French, by comparison, until very recent years lived on a high-fat diet that contained an average of four times the butter of Americans, but they suffered 60 percent less heart disease because they consumed five times less sugar than those in the United States. Since high-sugar and heavy-flour fast foods have become more common overseas, however, the French have begun to catch up with us.

  Atkins relied on plenty of research that was largely disregarded by the fat-is-evil community, including a study at the Oakland Naval Hospital by Frederick Benoit and others who found that a low-carb diet actually caused subjects to lose weight twice as fast as when they ate nothing!56 Since Atkins published his high-fat, meat-heavy, low-carb diet, numerous other studies have confirmed his observations. A conclusive study in the New England Journal of Medicine that evaluated data on over 82,000 women found “diets lower in carbohydrate and higher in protein and fat are not associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease in women . . . [and] may moderately reduce the risk of coronary heart disease.”57 The study failed to include any kind of control-group alternative with the high-carb diets, however—but the conclusions were impressive nonetheless. In July 2008, a study pitting the “Mediterranean diet” of high fiber against a low-carb diet once again found the low-carb diet superior for losing weight, as well as having the most favorable effects on lipids.58 Another study of 447 individuals agreed that the low-carb group lost more weight than low-fat groups, but claimed there could be “unfavorable changes in low-density lipoprotein cholesterol values.”59 (We will turn in a moment to the cholesterol values.) Then there was the study at the University of Pennsylvania of 63 obese men and women who were randomly assigned to a high-fat/low-carb diet or a low-calorie/ high-carb diet. Once again, the results were predictable:The low-carbohydrate diet produced a greater weight loss (absolute difference, approximately 4 percent) than did the conventional diet for the first six months, but the differences were not significant at one year. The low-carbohydrate diet was associated with a greater improvement in some risk factors for coronary heart disease.60

  During the 1990s, new studies in France and Italy confirmed (and ignored) earlier evidence from Japan. Both France and Italy showed declining death rates from stroke and heart disease (with Spain only slightly behind) despite a substantial increase in meat consumption.61 These findings were labeled “paradoxes,” the name alone implying that the science was set, as it would not be a paradox unless it was thought odd or counterintuitive. One would see the same lunacy attached to global warming amid overwhelming evidence of plunging temperatures, wherein even cooling was ascribed to global warming. As would be the case with global warming, once purely scientific but now highly politicized journals such as Science weighed in on policy, warning that obesity had become an “epidemic” resulting from “improved prosperity.”62

  With each new offensive against fats and meat—and in favor of “healthy” carbohydrates—Americans continued to get fatter and to have more diabetes and heart disease. Just thirty years ago, American women ate 42 percent of their diet in fats, the same as men. By 1995, however, both men and women only consumed 32 percent of their diet in fats, even though obesity was skyrocketing. Meanwhile, women carbed up, as per the advice of the heart specialists and media, increasing the percentage of diet made up of carbohydrates from 42 percent to 62 percent, with men only slightly behind at 59 percent.63 Meanwhile, a quiet group of researchers was debunking the fat-cholesterol-heart-disease model. Famed heart surgeon Michael DeBakey in 1964 reported in a test of 1,700 patients that he had negative correlat
ions for cholesterol and heart problems; and researchers had already shown that the cholesterol consumed has little relevance to the amount of cholesterol in the blood.64

  The fact that government—through its very public-health agenda—might be more responsible for the rapid rise in obesity apparently never crossed the mind of the dietary fat-equals-heart-disease crowd. Yale’s Kelly Brownell, who headed the school’s center for weight disorders, complained that American culture “encourages overeating and physical inactivity.”65 He never considered that Americans’ work—largely relegated to the office instead of the field—was becoming more sedentary. At the same time, the Centers for Disease Control offered evidence that Americans were “no less active at the end of the 1990s than they were at the beginning of that decade. . . .”66 More than 40 million Americans belonged to health clubs (which had revenues of some $16 billion by 2005), and as early as 1977 The New York Times noted an “exercise explosion” and three years later The Washington Post proclaimed a “fitness revolution.”67 Sporting goods sales in America topped $52 billion. Nor was it the case that Americans had “supersized” everything: from 1971 to 2000, average caloric intake only rose by 150 in the United States, while men’s intake of fat decreased and women’s intake increased only slightly.68 What had changed was the nature of the foods consumed, not their caloric count.