Good Calories, Bad Calories

Three months later, Philip Handler’s Food and Nutrition Board released its own version of the guidelines—Toward Healthful Diets. It concluded that the only reliable dietary advice that could be given to healthy Americans was to watch their weight and that everything else, dietary fat included, would take care of itself. The Food and Nutrition Board promptly got “excoriated in the press,” as one board member described it. The first criticisms attacked the board for publishing recommendations that ran counter to those of the USDA, McGovern’s committee, and the American Heart Association, and so were seen to be irresponsible. They were followed by suggestions that the board members, in the words of Jane Brody, who covered the story for the New York Times, “were all in the pocket of the industries being hurt.” The board director, Alfred Harper, chairman of the University of Wisconsin nutrition department, consulted for the meat industry. The Washington University nutritionist Robert Olson, who had worked on fat and cholesterol metabolism since the 1940s, consulted for the Egg Board, which itself was a USDA creation to sponsor research, among other things, on the nutritional consequences of eating eggs. Funding for the Food and Nutrition Board came from industry donations to the National Academy of Sciences. These industry connections were first leaked to the press from the USDA, where Hegsted and Foreman suddenly found themselves vigorously defending their own report to their superiors, and from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer-advocacy group run by Michael Jacobson that was now dedicated to reducing the fat and sugar content of the American diet. (As the Los Angeles Times later observed, the CSPI “embraced a low-fat diet as if it was a holy writ.”)

The House Agriculture Subcommittee on Domestic Marketing promptly held hearings in which Henry Waxman, chairman of the Health Subcommittee, described Toward Healthful Diets as “inaccurate and potentially biased” as well as “quite dangerous.” Hegsted was among those who testified, saying “he failed to see how the Food and Nutrition Board had reached its conclusions.”

Philip Handler testified as well, summarizing the situation memorably. When the hearings were concluded, he said, the committee members might find themselves confronted by a dilemma. They might conclude, “as some have,” that there exists a “thinly linked, if questionable, chain of observations” connecting fat and cholesterol in the diet to cholesterol levels in the blood to heart disease:

However tenuous that linkage, however disappointing the various intervention trials, it still seems prudent to propose to the American public that we not only maintain reasonable weights for our height, body structure and age, but also reduce our dietary fat intakes significantly, and keep cholesterol intake to a minimum. And, conceivably, you might conclude that it is proper for the federal government to so recommend.

On the other hand, you may instead argue: What right has the federal government to propose that the American people conduct a vast nutritional experiment, with themselves as subjects, on the strength of so very little evidence that it will do them any good?

Mr. Chairman, resolution of this dilemma turns on a value judgment. The dilemma so posed is not a scientific question; it is a question of ethics, morals, politics. Those who argue either position strongly are expressing their values; they are not making scientific judgments.

Though the conflict-of-interest accusations served to discredit the advice proffered in Toward Healthful Diets, the issue was not nearly as simple as the media made it out to be and often still do. Since the 1940s, nutritionists in academia had been encouraged to work closely with industry. In the 1960s, this collaborative relationship deteriorated, at least in public perception, into what Ralph Nader and other advocacy groups would consider an “unholy alliance.” It wasn’t always.

As Robert Olson explained at the time, he had received over the course of his career perhaps $10 million in grants from the USDA and NIH, and $250,000 from industry. He had also been on the American Heart Association Research Committee for two decades. But when he now disagreed with the AHA recommendations publicly, he was accused of being bought. “If people are going to say Olson’s corrupted by industry, they’d have far more reason to call me a tool of government,” he said. “I think university professors should be talking to people beyond the university. I believe, also, that money is contaminated by the user rather than the source. All scientists need funds.”