Dietary Guidelines

How Americans Used to Eat

Yet despite this shaky and often contradictory evidence, the idea that red meat is a principal dietary culprit has thoroughly pervaded our national conversation for decades. We have been led to believe that we’ve strayed from a more perfect, less meat-filled past. Most prominently, when Senator McGovern announced his Senate committee’s report, called Dietary Goals, at a press conference in 1977, he expressed a gloomy outlook about where the American diet was heading. “Our diets have changed radically within the past fifty years,” he explained, “with great and often harmful effects on our health.” Hegsted, standing at his side, criticized the current American diet as being excessively “rich in meat” and other sources of saturated fat and cholesterol, which were “linked to heart disease, certain forms of cancer, diabetes and obesity.” These were the “killer diseases,” said McGovern. The solution, he declared, was for Americans to return to the healthier, plant-based diet they once ate.

“We Cannot Afford to Wait”

In the late 1970s in America, the idea that a plant-based diet might be the best for health as well as the most historically authentic was just entering the popular consciousness. Active efforts to demonize saturated fat had been underway for more than fifteen years by that time, and we’ve seen how the McGovern committee’s staff were in short order persuaded by these ideas. Even so, the draft report that Mottern wrote for the McGovern committee sparked an uproar—predictably—from the meat, dairy, and egg producers. They sent representatives to McGovern’s office and insisted that he hold additional hearings. Under pressure from these lobbies, McGovern’s staff carved out an exception for lean meats, which Americans could be advised to eat. Thus, Dietary Goals recommended that Americans increase poultry and fish while cutting back on red meat, butterfat, eggs, and whole milk. In the language of macronutrients, this meant advising Americans to reduce total fat, saturated fat, dietary cholesterol, sugar, and salt while increasing carbohydrate consumption to between 55 percent and 60 percent of daily calories.

While Mottern would have liked the final report to advise against meat altogether, some of the senators on the committee were not so unequivocally confident about their ability to weigh in on matters of nutritional science. The ranking minority member, Charles H. Percy from Illinois, wrote in the final Dietary Goals report that he and two other senators had “serious reservations” about the “divergence of scientific opinion on whether dietary change can help the heart.” They described the “polarity” of views among well-known scientists such as Jerry Stamler and Pete Ahrens and noted that leaders in government, including no less than the head of the NHLBI as well as the undersecretary of health, Theodore Cooper, had urged restraint before making recommendations to the general public.

Yet this hesitation turned out to be too little too late to stop the momentum that Mottern’s report had set in motion. Dietary Goals revived the same argument that Keys and Stamler had used before: that now was the time to take action on an urgent public health problem. “We cannot afford to await the ultimate proof before correcting trends we believe to be detrimental,” said the Senate report.

So it was that Dietary Goals, compiled by one interested layperson, Mottern, without any formal review, became arguably the most influential document in the history of diet and disease. Following publication of Dietary Goals by the highest elective body in the land, an entire government and then a nation swiveled into gear behind its dietary advice. “It has stood the test of time, and I feel very proud of it, as does McGovern,” Marshall Matz, general counsel of the McGovern committee, told me thirty years later.

Dietary Fat Recommendations

1978:

• 30-35% of calories from total fat.

• <10% from SFA, ≤10% from PUFA, remainder from MUFA.

It was Hegsted’s and Foreman’s role to figure out how to implement the Dietary Goals. And this task required at the very least some imagination, because by September 1978, the only thing USDA staffers had published on the subject was a suggested menu of thirteen slices of bread each day in order to meet the report’s recommended amount of carbohydrates. Could no one even come up with some palatable menu suggestions, asked a dietician quoted in the Washington Post.

Well, no, because although Congress had decided upon the components of a healthy diet, scientists were still quarreling over the basic evidence supporting those choices. Hegsted tried to put together an authoritative report on the matter at the USDA, but his effort fell apart amid bureaucratic infighting. Meanwhile, the esteemed American Society for Nutrition, which was also concerned about the need for a stronger scientific consensus before moving ahead with advice for the entire American population, had set up a formal task force to take another look at the diet and disease data and evaluate their strength. Hegsted decided to let his USDA recommendation be guided by the work of that task force. After all, the USDA’s efforts could only be made more credible by having expert support, since it remained true that no group of nutrition scientists other than the AHA nutrition committee (dominated by Keys and Stamler) had ever formally been convened to review the evidence on diet and disease to date. Hegsted knew that he was “taking a big chance . . . since Pete Ahrens of Rockefeller University was co-chairing the committee and was known to oppose general dietary recommendations.” Yet despite that risk, Hegsted agreed to abide by the panel’s decision.

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