This coming year, if all goes as planned, we’ll be treated to the 10th edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs), courtesy of the Depar

Uncertainty Principles

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2024-12-29 18:30:06

This coming year, if all goes as planned, we’ll be treated to the 10th edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs), courtesy of the Departments of Agriculture and of Health and Human Services .

Their purpose, from the very first edition published in 1980, has always been to “promote health and prevent chronic disease.”

The driving force behind the idea that the USDA owed it to Americans to tell them how to eat healthy was a consumer advocate named Carol Tucker Foreman. In March 1976, newly elected President Jimmy Carter appointed Foreman, then executive director of the Consumer Federation of America, to be an assistant secretary of agriculture.

Foreman believed (as she told me in an interview 20-odd years later), that Americans “were getting sick and dying because we ate too much.” And she believed it was incumbent on the USDA to fix that problem (Dare I say it, to make Americans healthy again?) and that nutrition researchers had an obligation to make their best guess about the diet-disease relationship. Then the public could decide whether to take it or not.

“Tell us what you know and tell us it’s not the final answer,” Foreman would tell nutrition researchers. “I have to eat three times a day and feed my children three times a day and I want you to tell me what your best sense of the data is right now.”