You really must see it to believe it. Senator George McGovern, the gentleman from South Dakota, showed special form. He looked both outraged and concerned. A scientist had just urged caution when considering the role of dietary fat in the health of the American people, but Senator McGovern would have none of it. He pointed out that elected officials didn’t have the luxury to wait in matters of public policy. Senator McGovern then pontificated about the role of “the Guardians” of the Republic. A decision had already been made.
As I write 40 years or so after the fact, I don’t want to mislead you. Senator McGovern owned those hearings. He was wrong, immensely wrong, but he carried the day. Turns out, heart disease had been steadily become a killer of Americans. Nobody could know why that was so at the time. Now I suspect, and I’d be willing to bet my scant reputation on it, consumption of sugar had a lot to do with it. Most researchers at the time urged caution and asked for better knowledge. But an immensely bright and charismatic researcher named Ancel Keys thought he knew: he thought dietary fat was driving Americans to an early grave. And he found an ally in Senator McGovern.
Ancel Keys’ theory was simple, and very attractive to Senator McGovern: Americans ought to stop consuming animal products. This was heaven-sent to Mr. McGovern. The simple message, “stop eating fat” pleased two of his major constituencies. The farmers of his state liked the mandate to eat simple farm products; selling corn and wheat, that didn’t sound too bad. It also pleased the rising environmental lobby. Eating animals was now suspect, which would lessen the load on the environment, the way professional environmentalist saw things: eat corn, hold the veal.
The 1977 McGovern hearings left a permanent mark on public policy. That’s how the ‘food pyramid’ was born. Worse still, after the recommendations, food conglomerates started rolling off ‘low-fat’ products, based on the settled science that should never have been. It turns out we human beings are not clean slates that can be manipulated into behaving in a certain way. We are not that simple.
I won’t write about the failures of the ‘dietary guidelines’, perhaps another day. I’m pointing out, how ridiculous the whole thing was. Ancel Keys was a researcher, one among many. Senator McGovern was a dime-a-dozen demagogue. How did these flawed men dictate how we Americans ate for most of the last half century? How indeed?
