Good Calories, Bad Calories

The “best sense of the data,” however, depends on whom you ask. The obvious candidate in this case was the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences, which determines Recommended Dietary Allowances, the minimal amount of vitamins and minerals required in a healthy diet, and was established in 1940 to advise the government on nutrition issues. The NAS and USDA drafted a contract for the Food and Nutrition Board to evaluate the recommendations in the Dietary Goals, according to Science, but Foreman and her USDA colleagues “got wind” of a speech that Food and Nutrition Board Chairman Gilbert Leveille had made to the American Farm Bureau Federation and pulled back. “The American diet,” Leveille had said, “has been referred to as…‘disastrous’…. I submit that such a conclusion is erroneous and misleading. The American diet today is, in my opinion, better than ever before and is one of the best, if not the best, in the world today.” NAS President Philip Handler, an expert on human and animal metabolism, had also told Foreman that McGovern’s Dietary Goals were “nonsense,” and so Foreman turned instead to the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration, but the relevant administrators rejected her overtures. They considered the Dietary Goals a “political document rather than a scientific document,” Foreman recalled; NIH Director Donald Fredrickson told her “we shouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole; we should let the crazies on the hill say what they wanted.”

Finally, it was agreed that the USDA and the Surgeon General’s Office would draft official dietary guidelines. The USDA would be represented by Mark Hegsted, whom Foreman had hired to be the first head of the USDA’s Human Nutrition Center and to shepherd its dietary guidelines into existence.

Hegsted and J. Michael McGinnis from the Surgeon General’s Office relied almost exclusively on a report by a committee of the American Society of Clinical Nutrition that had assessed the state of the relevant science, although with the expressed charge “not to draw up a set of recommendations.” Pete Ahrens chaired the committee, along with William Connors of the University of Oregon Health Sciences Center, and it included nine scientists covering a “full range of convictions” in the various dietary controversies. The ASCN committee concluded that saturated-fat consumption was probably related to the formation of atherosclerotic plaques, but the evidence that disease could be prevented by dietary modification was still unconvincing.^*15 The report described the spread of opinions on these issues as “considerable.” “But the clear majority supported something like the McGovern committee report,” according to Hegsted. On that basis, Hegsted and McGinnis produced the USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which was released to the public in February 1980.

The Dietary Guidelines also acknowledged the existence of a controversy, suggesting that a single dietary recommendation might not be appropriate for an entire diverse population. But it still declared in bold letters on its cover that Americans should “Avoid Too Much Fat, Saturated Fat, and Cholesterol.” (The Dietary Guidelines did not define what was meant by “too much.”)