SIX EAT RIGHT, GET FATTER
In fact, we did change our eating habits in the wake of the new guidelines, endeavoring to replace the evil fats at the top of the food pyramid with the good carbs spread out at the bottom. The whole of the industrial food supply was reformulated to reflect the new nutritional wisdom, giving us low-fat pork, low-fat Snackwell’s, and all the low-fat pasta and high-fructose (yet low-fat!) corn syrup we could consume. Which turned out to be quite a lot. Oddly, Americans got really fat on their new low-fat diet—indeed, many date the current epidemic of obesity and diabetes to the late 1970s, when Americans began bingeing on carbohydrates, ostensibly as a way to avoid the evils of fat.
But the story is slightly more complicated than that. For while it is true that Americans post–1977 did shift the balance in their diets from fats to carbs so that fat as a percentage of total calories in the diet declined (from 42 percent in 1977 to 34 percent in 1995), we never did in fact cut down on our total consumption of fat; we just ate more of other things. We did reduce our consumption of saturated fats, replacing them, as directed, with polyunsaturated fats and trans fats. Meat consumption actually held steady, though we did, again as instructed, shift from red meat to white to reduce our saturated fat intake. Basically what we did was heap a bunch more carbs onto our plate, obscuring but by no means replacing the expanding chunk of (now skinless white) animal protein still sitting there in the middle.
How did that happen? I would submit that the ideology of nutritionism deserves as much of the blame as the carbohydrates themselves do—that and human nature. By framing dietary advice in terms of good and bad nutrients, and by burying the recommendation that we should eat less of any particular actual food, it was easy for the take-home message of the 1977 and 1982 dietary guidelines to be simplified as follows: Eat more low-fat foods. And that is precisely what we did. We’re always happy to receive a dispensation to eat more of something (with the possible exception of oat bran), and one of the things nutritionism reliably gives us is some such dispensation: low-fat cookies then, low-carb beer now. It’s hard to imagine the low-fat/ high-carb craze taking off as it did or our collective health deteriorating to the extent that it has if McGovern’s original food-based recommendation had stood: Eat less meat and fewer dairy products. For how do you get from that stark counsel to the idea that another carton of Snackwell’s is just what the doctor ordered?
You begin to see how attractive nutritionism is for all parties concerned, consumers as well as producers, not to mention the nutrition scientists and journalists it renders indispensable. The ideology offers a respectable rationale for creating and marketing all manner of new processed foods and permission for people to eat them. Plus, every course correction in nutritionist advice gives reason to write new diet books and articles, manufacture a new line of products, and eat a whole bunch of even more healthy new food products. And if a product is healthy by design and official sanction, then eating lots of it must be healthy too—maybe even more so.
Nutritionism might be the best thing ever to happen to the food industry, which historically has labored under the limits to growth imposed by a population of eaters that isn’t expanding nearly as fast as the food makers need it to if they are to satisfy the expectations of Wall Street. Nutritionism solves the problem of the fixed stomach, as it used to be called in the business: the fact that compared to other consumer products, demand for food has in the past been fairly inelastic. People could eat only so much, and because tradition and habit ruled their choices, they tended to eat the same old things. Not anymore! Not only does nutritionism favor ever more novel kinds of highly processed foods (which are by far the most profitable kind to make), it actually enlists the medical establishment and the government in the promotion of those products. Play your cards right and you can even get the American Heart Association to endorse your new breakfast cereal as “heart healthy.” As I write, the FDA has just signed off on a new health claim for Frito-Lay chips on the grounds that eating chips fried in polyunsaturated fats can help you reduce your consumption of saturated fats, thereby conferring blessings on your cardiovascular system. So can a notorious junk food pass through the needle eye of nutritionist logic and come out the other side looking like a health food.