Good Calories, Bad Calories

The operative force at work, however, was the committee staff, composed of lawyers and ex-journalists. “We really were totally naïve,” said the staff director Marshall Matz, “a bunch of kids, who just thought, Hell, we should say something on this subject before we go out of business.”^*13 McGovern had attended Nathan Pritikin’s four-week diet-and-exercise program at Pritikin’s Longevity Research Institute in Santa Barbara, California. He said that he lasted only a few days on Pritikin’s very low-fat diet, but that Pritikin’s philosophy, an extreme version of the AHA’s, had profoundly influenced his thinking.

McGovern’s staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy. They knew that the AHA advocated low-fat diets, and that the dairy, meat, and egg industries had been fighting back. Matz and his fellow staff members described their level of familiarity with the subject as that of interested laymen who read the newspapers. They believed that the relevant nutritional and social issues were simple and obvious. Moreover, they wanted to make a difference, none more so than Nick Mottern, who would draft the Dietary Goals almost single-handedly. A former labor reporter, Mottern was working as a researcher for a consumer-products newsletter in 1974 when he watched a television documentary about famine in Africa, decided to do something meaningful with his life, and was hired to fill a vacant writing job on McGovern’s committee.

In July 1976, McGovern’s committee listened to two days of testimony on “Diet and Killer Diseases.” Mottern then spent three months researching the subject and two months writing. The most compelling evidence, Mottern believed, was the changing-American-diet story, and this became the underlying foundation of the committee’s recommendations: we should readjust our national diet to match that of the turn of the century, at least as the Department of Agriculture had guessed it to be. The less controversial recommendations of the Dietary Goals included eating less sugar and salt, and more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

Fat and cholesterol would be the contentious points. Here Mottern avoided the inherent ambiguities of the evidence by relying for his expertise almost exclusively on a single Harvard nutritionist, Mark Hegsted, who by his own admission was an extremist on the dietary-fat issue. Hegsted had studied the effect of fat on cholesterol levels in the early 1960s, first with animals and then, like Keys, with schizophrenic patients at a mental hospital. Hegsted had come to believe unconditionally that eating less fat would prevent heart disease, although he was aware that this conviction was not shared by other investigators working in the field. With Hegsted as his guide, Mottern perceived the dietary-fat controversy as analogous to the specious industry-sponsored “controversy” over cigarettes and lung cancer, and he equated his Dietary Goals to the surgeon general’s legendary 1964 report on smoking and health. To Mottern, the food industry was no different from the tobacco industry in its willingness to suppress scientific truth in the interests of greater profits. He believed that those scientists who lobbied actively against dietary fat, like Hegsted, Keys, and Stamler, were heroes.

Dietary Goals was couched as a plan for the nation, but these goals obviously pertained to individual diets as well. Goal number one was to raise the consumption of carbohydrates until they constituted 55–60 percent of the calories consumed. Goal number two was to decrease fat consumption from approximately 40 percent, then the national average, to 30 percent of all calories, of which no more than a third should come from saturated fats. The report acknowledged that no evidence existed to suggest that reducing the total fat content of the diet would lower blood-cholesterol levels, but it justified its recommendation on the basis that, the lower the percentage of dense fat calories in the diet, the less likely people would be to gain weight,^*14 and because other health associations—most notably the American Heart Association—were recommending 30 percent fat in diets. To achieve this low-fat goal, according to the Dietary Goals, Americans would have to eat considerably less meat and dairy products.

Though the Dietary Goals admitted the existence of a scientific controversy, it also insisted that Americans had nothing to lose by following the advice. “The question to be asked is not why should we change our diet but why not?” explained Hegsted at a press conference to announce publication of the document. “There are [no risks] that can be identified and important benefits can be expected.” But this was still a hugely debatable position among researchers. After the press conference, as Hegsted recalled, “all hell broke loose…. Practically nobody was in favor of the McGovern recommendations.”