Yesterday, Radley Balko linked to a City Journal piece on the government's nutrition guidelines explaining how researchers sometimes get things wrong and recommend eating practices that ultimately prove harmful.
One assumes this should be taken as a lesson to ignore public-health advice going forward.
The larger point, however, is that we tend to overreact or act too quickly after new science about nutrition emerges. The City Journal author, Steven Malanga, points to the example of eggs. Not long ago there was a big push to get us to eat fewer eggs because we thought cholesterol was bad, but it turns out they're nearly a perfect food, packed with protein and good cholesterol that cost us relatively little in calorie consumption.
Malanga's other point is that, a few years ago, the government altered its food pyramid to recommend eating relatively less meat and relatively more carbohydrates; Americans dutifully complied, and now we're fat. But I don't know how much people pay attention to the recommended daily servings of various types of food, and that's probably part of the obesity and general bad health problems. For starters, Americans eat the same amount of meat we've eaten for some time, about half a pound a day -- more than twice the recommended amount. And carbohydrates as a whole aren't the problem, but foods like white rice and white bread are. I haven't seen many nutritionists recommend eating white bread; they're constantly recommending whole grains.
What I have seen is big companies distorting the science to push their products -- for instance, cereal companies arguing that their foods are heart healthy and diet producers pushing all-carb diets. None of those things are what the science recommends. And, incidentally, the push in New York City to get companies to lower salt -- Malanga quotes someone calling it a big public-health experiment -- isn't as radical as the author wants us to believe. We do need salt in our diets, but the evidence that it's risky to have too much is strong. What the Bloomberg administration wants to do is lower the amount of salt in prepackaged foods, which in no way impedes consumers from eating enough salt overall. I'm sympathetic to the argument that Americans don't particularly have a smart approach to new nutritional information as it leaks out, but getting the government out of the business of public health, as Malanga intimates we should do, isn't the answer.
-- Monica Potts
