Protein, Pyramids, and Politics: The Forgotten Stories and Controversial Science Behind Government Dietary Advice

24:55And they had to put a number on that. The RDAs were a goal, but now we needed an upper limit, too. There was another problem of abundance. The RDAs were originally meant to deal with scarcity and malnutrition and the resulting diseases. But over the next few decades, things like pellagra and scurvy were no longer a big problem in America. You see that the causes of death start to shift to things that are more chronic. And so cardiovascular kidney diseases are top things early on. And so research starts to investigate that. Scientists started to point the finger at particular nutrients that they say in excess are at least partly responsible for these kinds of chronic diseases.

25:32Salt and fats and really just too many calories. The RDAs were a target to avoid malnutrition, but they didn't have anything to say about this new problem of too much food. The food itself was also different. We've talked about this a billion times on Gastropod. By the 70s, Americans were consuming more and more processed foods, and they didn't know what was in those foods, how good they were for you. You know, today's consumers, and of course that's all of us, are faced with an enormous choice of foods. And up until now, we haven't had any way to tell what kind of nutrients, things like vitamins, proteins, are in the foods we're buying.

26:06We couldn't tell how to buy the best foods nutrition-wise or money-wise. It's Dick Van Dyke, and he's confused, just like everyone else back in the 1970s. But fortunately, the government came to the rescue. In 1973, they started printing nutrition labels on the back of food packaging, showing the different nutrients as a percentage of your daily values. So now every single one of us can eat better if we use nutrition labeling to plan better balanced meals. We're going to show you how to do it. The new labels will show you how many minerals, vitamins, fats, carbohydrates, proteins, and our old friend's calories are in the foods you eat.

26:51Read the label, set a better table. This sounds really specific and certain, but as was the case for Lydia Roberts and her new RDAs in the 1940s, there was a lot of fudging going on. Originally, the RDA came in two flavors, one for a man and one for a woman. But on the new label, the daily value was just the highest of the two. And how much of a percent of your daily value that food represented was based on whatever the manufacturer thought a serving size of their product was, and whatever nutrients they guesstimated that each ingredient in the serving contained, which they mostly figured out using data gathered from rats in the 1930s.

27:27All those caveats aside, the government came up with these specific and detailed new labels, and the FDA hired Dick Van Dyke and a few backup singing vitamins and minerals for their PSA to help everyone learn how useful these new labels were. Find out more, just reach your new nutrition label. Read the label instead of that article. This is Dick Van Dyke for the Food and Drug Administration, reading the labels. Astonishingly, relying on Dick Van Dyke and nutrition labels was not enough to turn around the tide of diet-influenced chronic disease. So, after an influential report on the not-so-great state of the American diet came out in 1977, the government decided to introduce another new form of food guidance, the dietary goals.

28:22The RDAs were numbers aimed at nutrition and health professionals who would know how to interpret them. But these dietary goals were aimed at ordinary Americans. They told people in plain English to eat more carbs and cut back on fat and salt. It makes sense to me that the government would provide some kind of advice about what healthy food looks like. And the attempt to translate that from these really abstract, quantified things like vitamins to actual food also makes sense to me. Because people don't eat nutrients, they eat food. And because the government wanted to help people understand just what food they should be eating, the people in charge of this initiative came up with a now famous visualization of the ideal diet, the food pyramid.

29:04The USDA introduced the mighty food pyramid in 1992. It is extremely groovy looking, sort of three-dimensional, with little white fat and sugar dots sprinkled like stars on a black background. Bats, oils, and sweets are at the top of the pyramid to show you should consume them sparingly. And there's two big plates of pasta and a couple of loaves of bread at the bottom, plus some crackers, to show that grains should form the basis of your diet. But there was a lot of controversy around the dietary goals and that food pyramid, all of it. There were controversies about how much meat and dairy we should be eating, for instance.

29:38One of the arguments was that there just wasn't enough science around what actually caused chronic disease. This is a debate over, OK, we don't have perfect evidence. So what do you do when you don't have perfect evidence? Do you take a progressive viewpoint and make a preliminary recommendation with the hope it's going to help public health? Or do you take a more conservative recommendation and say, ah, the evidence isn't quite there yet. We're not going to make a recommendation yet. This is an ongoing tug of war today. But in the 80s and early 90s, all this controversy around the new government messaging added up to a sense of confusion.

30:09At this point in history, the government took a long, hard look at where it was in terms of nutrition recommendations, and it felt the need to reorganize. The dietary goals and the new food pyramid were not coming out of the RDAs, but the RDAs were supposed to be the official recommendations. But meanwhile, the RDAs were still about preventing deficiencies rather than dealing with chronic diseases and vitamin megadoses. The RDAs couldn't do enough of what we needed, so the government decided to come up with an entirely new system. They are essentially replaced altogether with this system of dietary reference.

30:43It's called the Dietary Reference Intakes. or DRIs. And where the RDAs were just one number to rule them all, the DRIs contained multitudes, including an RDA. But so what the DRIs do is that they move from the single value system of the RDA to a probabilistic system, assuming that not everybody needs the same amount. And so your whole goal is to estimate what the average person would need, meaning the amount of nutrients that would meet the needs of 50 % of people, but wouldn't meet the needs of 50 % of other people. Okay, so that's the base number. It's something called an EAR, an estimated average requirement.

31:22It's useful from a public health point of view, like when the government looks at the data on what Americans actually eat to assess whether on average we're doing okay, or if there are some nutrients that on average we're missing out on or eating too much of. But it doesn't work as a guideline for individuals. Like Kevin says, if everyone consumed just the EAR of a particular nutrient, then half the population would be fine, but half wouldn't be getting enough. So that's obviously not ideal. So they did some statistics on that baseline to arrive at another number, the new RDA, which like before is more than enough for most people.

31:57Which is estimated to be what would meet the needs of 97.5 % of the population. So if everybody ate the RDA, you know, 97.5 % of the population would be eating more than they need. If it sounds confusing, it's because it is confusing. And to make it even more confusing, the new DRIs include ULs, which are upper limits. This quickly becomes acronym soup. Over time, the DRIs have included these ULs, upper limits, for a number of vitamins and for sodium, though scientists don't have enough information to set an upper level for all nutrients. The idea was that this whole thing would be revised regularly, like the old RDAs, so that any new data would help inform the DRIs and the RDAs and the ULs and all those other fun acronyms to help them become more and more accurate.

32:42All of this would in turn inform what's called the DGAs, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. This is what the government thinks we should be eating. The DRIs are the scientifically agreed-upon values that are supposed to inform the DGAs, the Dietary Guidelines. The first one is about nutrients. The second is about food. But to make sure that eating food according to the guidelines will lead Americans to consume the right amount of nutrients, the government has to do something called food pattern modeling. Where it says, okay, if you're going to recommend a dietary pattern with this many servings of grains, oils, fruits, vegetables, different protein food categories, and consume a diet that an American would typically eat, what's the likelihood that you actually meet the dietary reference intakes?

33:29Let's take iron. You don't need to eat meat to get enough iron. You can get plenty from a diet that includes lots of beans, but Americans don't tend to eat a lot of beans. There's arguments that we're recommending too much red meat, but anytime you try and go lower red meat, you run into issues with iron from the food pattern modeling. Actually, this is really only an issue for menstruating women. Their iron needs are higher than men's, and so if women are eating the average American diet and they cut out all red meat, food modeling says they'd be too low. Lots of scientists want to recommend that Americans should eat less red meat to help prevent cardiovascular disease and cancer.

34:02But there's sort of a floor at which you can recommend for red meat because it's unlikely that people meet their estimated iron intakes if you were to drop it to zero, for example. The same is true for like bread made with enriched processed white flour. That white flour has been enriched with folate, which helps prevent birth defects. Women could theoretically get enough folate from lentils and beets and from dark leafy greens like kale, but most Americans don't tend to eat a lot of lentils and kale. The particular birth defects that can result from not having enough folate are things that happen very early in pregnancy, before you would even know.

34:36So making sure that women eating the average American diet are covered for folate does make sense. And so that means that even though whole grains have all sorts of things in them that are great for you, honestly they're way better than enriched white flour in basically every other way, the government won't say just eat all whole grains. When you do food powder modeling or you recommend all whole grains and no refined grains, you actually get pretty low folate intakes, including in those women of reproductive age that you're trying to help the most. And so that's why the recommendation is at least half your grain should be whole.

35:07But not all, despite their many benefits. These are the kinds of fun ways that nutrition science gets made into the franken-sausage of food recommendations. Then you get the process of trying to communicate those recommendations to the public, which is also always a work in progress. The food guides that they give evolve a little bit. So you have my pyramid in 92 and then an updated pyramid in 2005 to address critiques that starches ended up at the base of the first pyramid. They have a second pyramid in 2005 that has like a guy walking up the side of the pyramid. and so it's supposed to emphasize physical activity a little bit more.

35:46This is a really different and honestly pretty confusing pyramid. It looks like a rainbow of stripes going down the pyramid vertically. In the first pyramid, the smallest level, the fats and sugars you're supposed to eat the least of, they were at the tippy top. In this one, the fats are just this tiny little yellow stripe, grains are a wide orange stripe of the pyramid, and meats, fish, eggs, and beans are a narrower purple stripe, and so on. It's not the greatest visual. People didn't love that pyramid either, so we get the plate in 2011. With as much drama as the Department of Agriculture could muster, and with help from the First Lady, America today got a new symbol for good nutrition.

36:25What's more useful than a plate? What's more simple than a plate? And the plate, you know, at least conveys like what people eat off of and is a bit simple and like make half your plate fruits and vegetables. Plates, pyramids, I mean in China they use a pagoda. Our point here is that going from the best data in the DRIs, which that data is already not set in stone because there are things we still don't know, but going from that to the dietary guidelines that take into account how most people eat, and then from the guidelines to the visual imagery that's supposed to make sense to everybody, it's not an exact science.

37:00Plus, and this shouldn't come as a shock to anyone, politics also gets involved, just like it always has, like when the wheat farmers got mad at Hazel Stiebling. Take 2020. For the first time, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee recommended a food sustainability system rich in plant-based foods should be included in the federal government's nutritional guidelines. They suggested people eat more plant-based proteins like beans and cut down on meat. And of course, the meat industry was a bit peeved. Casey Gallimore was the director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the North American Meat Institute, and this was what she had to say.

37:34The superior nutrient contributions in meat and poultry products must be recognized relative to plant-based protein sources. It is inappropriate and a disservice to the public to consider beans or tofu as equivalent to meat and poultry products from a nutrition and health perspective because they're not. Casey has her biases, obviously, but the government held its ground. Until the government changed. The story of our new dietary guidelines and the return of the pyramid, new, improved, and upside down, after the break. Spring Black Friday is on at The Home Depot. Save on grills and patio sets that will be sure to bring your hosting game up a notch.

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39:19Plan B is available in all 50 U.S. states at all major retailers near you, with no ID, prescription, or age requirement needed. Together, we've got this. Follow Plan B on Insta at Plan B One Step to learn more. Use as directed. This past January, the Trump administration and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as Secretary of Health and Human Services, they released the 2025 version of the whole shebang, the DRI, the DGA, and the image to go along with it all. These new guidelines will revolutionize our nation's food culture and make America healthy again. Protein and healthy fats are essential, and we're wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines.

40:02We are ending the war on saturated fats. RFK promised a revolution. But Kevin says that's a little bit of an overstatement. Yeah, a lot of it, I keep emphasizing people, a lot of it is very similar. And so they didn't go like off the rails saying like, feed raw milk to your young children or anything or to pregnant women, which is great. But there are some pretty significant differences. They have lots of different rationale for why that is. But they changed the protein recommendations to close to double the RDA. And like RFK promised, they do sort of end the war on saturated fats. Yeah, so fat was the other big thing that they changed on, where they basically assert that fats naturally found in foods are healthy.

40:45And they list off, you know, salmon, nuts and olives and avocado that we all might think about. But then they also say that like, meat, eggs and dairy are also full of healthy fats. So what's guiding these changes, you might ask? Well, according to the administration, it's that they're using the very most accurate science available. These new guidelines are informed by the best and most reliable research on health and nutrition, particularly as it relates to the role of our diets and the prevalence of chronic disease in the country. These guidelines replace corporate driven assumptions with common sense goals and gold standard scientific integrity.

41:23Kevin has read the entire 90 page scientific report and also the 418-page appendix, which is probably more than most people outside the people who wrote it ever will. And he says it goes into depth about the weaknesses built into a lot of the kinds of evidence that's used to decide whether a food is healthy or not. You'll remember some of these issues from our episode Nutrition Advice Decoded, where we explored how scientists try and sometimes struggle to figure this all out. Today, most nutrition research is done by looking at what people eat and measuring what's in that food, and maybe looking at things like blood pressure or fat in the blood that might be the precursor of a disease, and trying to figure out if eating a particular food would lead to that disease.

42:06But food is a lot more complex than just one nutrient, and precursors are not the disease itself, and lots of other things contribute to chronic disease. So this is actually quite difficult to tease out. And all of this makes nutrition science very different from pharmaceutical testing. Drug companies have a drug, they can either give it to you or not in a randomized, blind, controlled way. And then they can see whether it makes a difference or not to a specific health outcome. And that like, sounds great. Like we would all love to have that standard. RFK and his colleagues promised that the new dietary guidelines would basically meet the standards of the pharmaceutical industry.

42:41That's the gold standard. But actually, for all the reasons we just said, combined with the fact that we don't really fund good nutrition research, that's not possible. That evidence just doesn't exist. Kevin says if you only issued guidelines based on that standard, you would basically have no guidelines related to chronic disease risk at all. So it's like it's listed early on in the DGA. Scientific document is like a aspiration. But then they go on to cite all different types of data, strung together in various ways to kind of come up with their conclusions. For protein, remember, they doubled the old RDA.

43:16But when you look at the evidence they cite for this, Kevin says not only is it not the gold standard, but on top of that, it's cherry-picked from the research we do have. It largely pulls weight loss studies as well as studies that used resistance exercise training at the same time. The point here is that the studies they relied on for their protein conclusion were for people who were particularly trying to lose weight or were particularly trying to gain muscle. These are not just everyone eating their normal diet. These cherry-picked studies did show a correlation between higher protein consumption and then lower body weight and increased muscle mass, which, by the way, neither of which are clearly connected to chronic disease.

43:55Meanwhile, there are a whole bunch of other studies out there looking at protein intake that the new dietary goals ignored. Like they didn't do a systematic review on all of the data, the observational data looking at higher versus lower protein intakes and cardiovascular disease, for example, or even a systematic review of shorter term trials looking at protein, total protein amounts and sources and blood cholesterol, for example. So they just look at this very narrow slice of the totality of the evidence focused on weight and body composition outcomes and then make a recommendation broadly to increase the protein intake reasonably substantially.

44:32But even the cherry pick data, the studies the team used to come up with the new protein guidelines, it's not so straightforward. For losing weight, the evidence that consuming more protein helps is really weak. for people who are actively trying to build muscle, and this is only true if you're lifting weights, eating more protein does seem to help with muscle gain up to a point. But most people aren't bodybuilders. So basically, for most people, there's no benefit to increasing protein, and there is also good evidence that eating more meat could be harmful. And the whole point of the DGAs is that they're supposed to apply to everyone.

45:07This new protein goal doesn't do that. So that's a fail for the new DGAs when it comes to following the best available science, at least on protein. With saturated fat, the issue is more that the advice doesn't add up. The language and all that they use is quite confused because they say all fats are good as long as they're natural and then use olive oil, butter and beef tallow. But then they keep, OK, eat less than 10 percent of your calories from saturated fats. This 10 % number for saturated fats was introduced in the early 90s, and it's not changed in the most recent report. Scientists say we're not supposed to eat too much saturated fat.

45:43For one, it seems to be connected to health problems, including higher levels of cholesterol, which are tied to heart disease. The government's argument is that if you go over 10 % of your calories from saturated fat, you likely won't be eating other good stuff you need, like fiber. The 10 % number is one of the government's recommendations. It's the science-y one to do with nutrients. The government is supposed to use that to then make its recommendations for what foods you should eat, and then use those recommendations for the visual guide. But in this case, the nutrient number says one thing, and the pyramid and food guidelines say something else.

46:19So if you're following the new pyramid and the guidelines to eat more animal fats, you'll end up eating way too much saturated fat. So it's extremely unlikely that you're going to say under 10 % of calories if you're getting three glasses of whole milk per day and then choosing some fattier cuts of meat and maybe cooking in butter for one meal a day. Another big shift is to recommend eating fewer grains and making all of them whole grains. Like we said, we are on team whole grain. They're better in almost every way than refined grains. But if Americans actually follow that recommendation and don't also make sure to eat a lot more lentils and dark leafy greens, you're risking women giving birth to babies with spina bifida.

46:57The only other substantive difference in terms of guidelines was a new thing, a recommendation to cut down on, quote, highly processed food. Kevin says without a legal definition of what food counts as highly processed, which doesn't exist, this is essentially just so much hot air. And if you have a new term with no strong definition of which foods fit that criteria and which foods don't, it might gain you some points with the public for saying don't eat highly processed foods. But when you actually go to school lunch and try and decide, OK, well, can I feed this to kids or not? Is it highly processed or not?

47:33It's really not clear. And then, of course, they created a new visual for the public. They've gone back to the pyramid. The plate was from the Obama era, and we all know how the current administration feels about the Obamas. And you can see the food pyramid here. It's upside down, a lot of you will say. But it was actually upside down before, and we just righted it. For those of you who haven't seen the new pyramid, it is sort of a head-scratcher. It is indeed what most people would consider upside down. The smallest piece, the pinnacle, is at the bottom. And that's also the part where the whole grains live.

48:07Based on basically all nutrition science today, whole grains should be a major part of people's diets, but onward. At the top, at the widest part, which tells me you're supposed to eat the most of it, there's a whole chicken, a giant steak, a major hunk of cheese, a head of broccoli, and a bunch of carrots. In the middle, there's a block of butter, a couple of disturbingly large shrimp, an avocado, two walnuts, and an almond, etc. Kevin was as confused as we were. We have all the animal foods, like supersized, huge portions, and then like a couple single types of nuts, and a little thing of beans on top of white rice, which you're not supposed to eat per their guidelines on whole grains.

48:46It just becomes like the picture doesn't convey what the text says. The science behind the new recommendations is out of whack and the new image for our ideal diet is out of whack. But then the big question is, how much will either have an impact on what people are actually eating? I think for an average consumer, they might be like, they're going to interpret it however they're going to interpret it. I think most people are going to be like, like red meat is back on the table, whole milk is back on the table, and probably clear that 10 % sat fat guidance. In other words, it's not going to help people eat more healthily, and it will just add to the existing confusion about what is healthy.

49:21Where it is going to cause issues is for people who have to follow the guidelines. That's like food providers in prisons, on the battlefield, in schools. Kevin expects everyone trying to create the meals to meet these new guidelines to struggle with them. The other place Kevin says dietary guidelines really make a difference is when it comes to how food is advertised. This has always been the case. When the first dietary goals came out in the late 1970s saying eat less fat, it was really the food industry that took note. So everything got labeled as low fat, and low fat was implied as sort of a wink-wink, it's good for you.

49:55And you saw reformulations of products, it's a snack well. So their impact on the diet at a population scale is arguably probably minimal compared to the marketing of the industry around them. To be fair, the guidelines from the government aren't the only message that people are getting about what to eat. Low-fat diets were trending at the time that had to do with a lot of things in the culture, not just government recommendations. And the protein trend started long before the government recommendations this past January. But so having the government weigh in on it, that people should eat more protein, it might make people eat more meat, but mostly it'll just give industry more fodder to advertise protein everything.

50:34Starbucks going all in on protein. New protein lattes and protein cold foam. A new announcement from Bluebell. Ice cream is already stirring up a lot of buzz online, even between us right now. The company said it's launching Bluebell Pro. It's a new line of high-protein frozen dairy dessert. 15 grams of protein, no sugar. And it tastes great. Check. Protein 2.0 Refreshing, delicious protein water How is this possible? I mean, if washing your protein-supplemented ice cream down with protein-supplemented water or a protein-supplemented latte isn't the definition of healthy, I don't know what is.

51:14Especially when the super-high protein numbers can be, and sometimes are, artificially inflated by including collagen as a form of protein, despite the fact that our bodies don't treat collagen as protein when we eat it. But details like that are not going to stop the food industry from cashing in on government-endorsed protein mania. At this point, you might be thinking, why do we even have these government recommendations, given all the politics and the challenging science and the way they're used and abused? But they are actually important. School systems do need some kind of guidance for what to feed their students, for example.

51:47Kevin says, overall, they're a good thing. They have all these different uses, and I think there's, you know, at a high level, when you look at it, We don't have very many nutritional deficiencies, at least as far as we can tell within the population. It's not like frank nutrient deficiencies. We can argue about people have suboptimal intakes, particularly when it relates to chronic disease. But the DRI framework, I think, is generally considered mostly successful. Even assembling the research to update the DRIs is important because it helps show where the gaps still are. For example, there are nutrients that scientists know we need, but they still don't know how much.

52:24That's important, basic information about human health. So that's research we need to fund and do. But even though they're useful on a larger scale, these numbers can't serve as a literal guide for every single person who reads a label. You can't look at a glass of orange juice from a container and say, oh, I've had this much vitamin C. I need this much more by the end of the day. They're not meant to be specific to each individual like that. They also have pretty much zero effect on the food supply, what's available and what it costs. So expecting them to single-handedly change people's diets is unrealistic.

52:57Also, the guidelines are part of the general ether out there. All the science and all the things in the culture and all the trends, all of which is contributing to what people think they should be eating. Yeah, I think this is something I always try and recenter people on. Even 10 years ago, I used to joke, the Dietary Guidelines can say whatever they want. The next Netflix documentary that comes out is still going to influence consumer behavior probably more than the DGA as well. As we've said, though, the whole process does have value. It is still important. Putting a number on the nutrients we need, especially, that does matter.

53:29It's worth doing, but it's also sort of misleading because it makes it seem fixed and certain. And like, if we only hit that number, then we will somehow have achieved perfect health. Hannah says that's the eternal paradox of the RDAs. this idea that you can quantify everything. Even though the people who are doing the quantifying know that there are so many variables at play, it's not actually possible to come up with a single standard that's going to work for everyone. That your own dietary history, your metabolism, your individual needs, all of that is going to change what your particular requirements are.

54:07But also this idea, I think, that permeates this, that we could get it right in the sense of we can create optimal nutrition for everyone. And I think because in part, it's so hard to measure what that means. There's this constant hope that new sort of heights of human potential will be unlocked if only, and then whatever it is, right? If only we, you know, had adequate vitamins or if everyone was eating according to the RDAs. And so I think there's also that temptation that That is really part of this project and part of the fact that that optimum nutrition can never really be measured. It's always sort of out there.

54:52Thanks this episode to Kevin Klatt and Hannah LeBlanc. We'll have links to their research on our website, gastropod.com. And for our special supporters, we'll have a newsletter filled with the visuals of what the ideal diet should look like over time and from around the world. Plus, what's up with collagen? You can get that newsletter and help keep the show on the air by signing up to support the show at gastropod.com support. Thanks, as always, to all our supporters and also to our awesome producer, Claudia Geib. Till next time.