What To Eat
The Evolution of the USDA's Food Guidelines

What causes obesity? Some research suggests that, like cancer and heart disease, obesity is at least partly caused by unfortunate genetic predisposition. Others claim it is just the result of laziness and lack of self-control. Still others blame the food conglomerates that sell consumers food stuffed with fat, sugar, and partially hydrogenated soybean oils. While the nation remains divided on the exact causality, no one can dispute that obesity is a serious threat to health. Obese individuals face higher risks of chronic illnesses like diabetes and heart disease and have lower life expectancies. While the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has long been concerned about the costly effects of the obesity epidemic, it has failed to stem the tide. Obesity rates have continued to increase throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century.

History of American Dietary Guidelines

Published in the early twentieth century, the USDA's earliest dietary guidelines sought to prevent nutritional deficiency from food shortages during the two world wars and the Great Depression. The first USDA guideline of 1917 did not recommend specific foods or food combinations but instead encouraged Americans to eat more from the full range of the USDA's designated food categories: fruits and vegetables, meat, cereals, sugar, and fat. The USDA had by then discovered that foods from these five categories contained the newly discovered macronutrients, vitamins and minerals, in widely varying amounts. Still, however, the department promoted all foods as good sources of vitamins and minerals. In fact, the USDA's encouragement to eat equally from all five groups was also to support food producers who would otherwise be unequally affected by specific dietary recommendations.

By the 1950s, it had become clear that despite dietary guidelines, certain groups of Americans continued to consume nutrient deficient diets. It was then that the USDA included the first serving and portion size recommendations in their guidelines. It was only in the 1970s that the country began facing the negative consequences of the "eat more" approach. While food scarcity was no longer a problem for most Americans, many suffered from malnutrition due to chronic over-consumption. In 1977, the Senate released Dietary Goals for the United States which stated for the first time that Americans should consume less fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sugar, and salt to ensure a healthy diet. The report's recommendation implied less consumption of foods like meat, eggs, and sugar. Not surprisingly, food producers whose commercial interests were affected by the recommendations strongly protested the Dietary Goals. The furor was enough for the Senate to issue a revised version that same year. Chief among the second version's edits was to replace the suggestion to "reduce consumption of meat" with the suggestion to "choose meats, poultry, and fish which will reduce saturated fat intake."

Food producers continued to find fault with federal dietary guidelines through the following years. Between 1978 and 1980, meat producers ended reprints of reports by the Surgeon General, the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW), and the USDA. These reports were the last federal guidelines to include direct phrases like "consume less" and "cut down." To avoid further conflict with food producers, subsequent reports included neutral terms like "choose lean" or "use sparingly."

Following the storm over the Senate's Dietary Goals for the United States, the 1977 Farm Bill reassigned dietary research and advice to the USDA, so that in 1980, the department published its first dietary guideline, Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Carefully worded, the Dietary Guidelines was well-received and continued to exist in much the same form until 1990. The Dietary Guidelines's innocuousness ensured the department would continue in its role in advising the public on diet. The department had thus successfully predicted that influence over dietary guidelines could potentially be used to benefit domestic agricultural interests. That the department found itself in a compromised position between its loyalties towards agricultural producers and its responsibility to provide the public with impartial dietary advice seemed of little concern.

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