Dietary Guidelines
Dietary guidelines are evidence-based recommendations that provide guidance on healthy eating patterns and lifestyle choices to promote overall health and prevent chronic diseases. These guidelines are typically developed by government agencies or expert committees and are updated periodically based on the latest scientific research. This site heavily questions basic assumptions within the dietary guidelines and shows conflicts of interest in their creation.
Recent History
January 1, 1973
AHA: "A massive high saturated fat meal is inapppropriate at any time."
Dietary Fat Recommendations
1973:
• ≤35% calories from total fat.
• Of that 35%, ≤10% from SFA, ≤10% from PUFA, remainder from MUFA.
• “…fat calories should be distributed throughout each day…a massive high saturated fat meal is inappropriate at any time.”
January 1, 1973
Diet therapy of diabetes: an analysis of failure by Kelly M West
Kelly West rediscovers the high carbohydrate diet and Himsworth's results, and then the fear of saturated fat pushes the ADA to accept the high carb/ low fat recommendations popular at the time. Read his fascinating review of the science in 1973 which are balanced despite their support of carbohydrate.
Kelly West, among others, rediscovered the high carbohydrate diet in the 1960s. He was astonished to discover when writing up his results that ‘very similar experiments had been done by Himsworth, with the same results. Over and over again this phenomenon has been rediscovered—and subsequently forgotten or disregarded’ [29]. Even those who remained unconvinced as to the virtue of a high carbohydrate diet were persuaded of the need to reduce fat, and the new diet was greeted with particular enthusiasm by those who had rediscovered that a high fat intake might be bad for the heart. Concerns about ‘diet heart’ powered many investigations into the virtues of polyunsaturated fats and fish oils [30], and the new high carbohydrate/low fat recommendations were formally recognised by the ADA in 1971 [31].
"A review of the available evidence shows clearly the rarity with which diabetics understand and follow their diet prescriptions. The reasons for these shortcomings and their persistence are many and complex. They include the tendency of physicians to underestimate the formidability of developing, implementing, and adjusting a diet prescription that is both acceptable and effective over a long period of time. Another problem is the limited conceptual and technical knowledge of most physicians concerning dietary principles, strategies, and tactics as they apply to the various types of diabetes. Recent research confirms the important potentials of diet regulation in mitigating diabetes and its complications. But apparently much of our effort in diet counseling is ineffective and wasteful. It seems desirable, therefore, to review in some detail the reasons for this failure and then to use candid appraisals for developing more effective approaches in the diet therapy of diabetes.
January 1, 1977
Dietary Goals
The solution, he declared, was for Americans to return to the healthier, plant-based diet they once ate.
How Americans Used to Eat
Yet despite this shaky and often contradictory evidence, the idea that red meat is a principal dietary culprit has thoroughly pervaded our national conversation for decades. We have been led to believe that we’ve strayed from a more perfect, less meat-filled past. Most prominently, when Senator McGovern announced his Senate committee’s report, called Dietary Goals, at a press conference in 1977, he expressed a gloomy outlook about where the American diet was heading. “Our diets have changed radically within the past fifty years,” he explained, “with great and often harmful effects on our health.” Hegsted, standing at his side, criticized the current American diet as being excessively “rich in meat” and other sources of saturated fat and cholesterol, which were “linked to heart disease, certain forms of cancer, diabetes and obesity.” These were the “killer diseases,” said McGovern. The solution, he declared, was for Americans to return to the healthier, plant-based diet they once ate.
