The advice you get there is a political consensus, not a scientific one. Have a look at http://www.choosemyplate.gov/, linked directly from health.gov: You will have a hard time finding a recommendation against any food product. The non-obvious trick used to appease the food industry is basing the recommendations on nutrients and ingredients, allowing the industry to push their "Any food product can be part of a balanced diet" myth, and reengineer the processed food so that they can put whatever nutrient or ingredient is considered healthy right now on the labels.
Yes, it's not fashionable to follow the updated HHS guidelines for healthy eating, but they are rooted in well-tested science. The USDA and HHS invest quite a bit into getting these guidelines right continuing to improve them as science advances. I have not seen a dietary platform as rigorously studied as the one provided by HHS.
Would that be the same "well-tested" science that said "fat" is "bad for you"? Because, it turns out, it's a little more complicated than that, and that products marketed as "low-fat" are, in fact, even worse for you.
It did say that, once upon a time. But if we can never forgive science for being wrong, we'd still be holding a grudge in astrophysics over the whole "sun revolves around the earth" thing.
This is the summary from the 2010 guidelines:
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010, released on January 31, 2011, emphasize three major goals for Americans:
- Balance calories with physical activity to manage weight
- Consume more of certain foods and nutrients such as fruits, vegetables, whole grains, fat-free and low-fat dairy products, and seafood
- Consume fewer foods with sodium (salt), saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol, added sugars, and refined grains
Notice they do not advise avoiding fats altogether- only full-fat dairy, and saturated & trans fats.
Also notice it specifically recommends the very things we are discussing here- omitting added sugar & refined grains.
The rise of the lipid hypothesis wasn't the general scientific consensus being wrong, it was the US government cherry picking science based on lobbyist pressure. So while I fully trust science to advance, I don't trust the US government to build science-based, non-biased dietary guidelines based on scientific findings.
Even the recommendation against full-fat dairy may be wrong. Recent research suggests that children given low-fat or skim milk tend to be obese more than children given full-fat dairy products.
That may be, but I don't think anyone is saying they are right because they are the government, I think we are saying this a reasonable compendium of the best knowledge we have. You can make choices based on recent research that suggests things if you like, but I completely understand why documents published in 2011 don't recommend breaking research from 2013.
Anyway, my key point was that they have clearly been adjusting recommendations with the times, and being wrong in the past doesn't mean they should never be trusted again- that isn't how science works. (This is food science)
I think one of the key points about food science is that you should always be skeptical of it.
In general, it is very difficult to do controlled, large population studies over a human life span. Instead, lots of studies rely on self-reported surveys, measurements of various indicators that are believed to correlate with poor heath effects over a very short period, and so on.
Mapping from "we know that if you eat X, the Y level in your blood rises over the next 24 hours, and in a separate study we have shown that Y is correlated with chronic disease Z" is actually a pretty poor argument for "X causes Z", and even more of a poor argument for "thus, you should eliminate X from your diet", and telling people to eliminate "X" from their diet doesn't necessarily always lead to simply the desired effect of eliminating "X", but may lead to them replacing it with "W" which is even worse.
Human bodies and human behavior are quite complex. The actual effects of a particular recommendation are not well understood. By making recommendations and policy from science that was not well enough understood, we may have increased the rate of growth of the obesity epidemic over the past 30 years or so. This has happened, in part, by over-emphasizing "low fat" which encouraged people to replace fat with sugars.
So, food policy recommendation are not food science. They may be influenced by science, but they are different. And I generally take them with a very large grain of salt.
Instead, we can find strategies that, at least anecdotally, seem to work better than adhering to the latest fad diet or the government recommendations. Eat real food; plants and animals that have been minimally processed before getting to you. The more processing that has been done, the more the foods have likely been optimized for something other than nutritional value and flavor (shelf life, profits, etc). Don't eat too much; whatever you do, if you want to lose weight, eating less across the board will likely achieve that. Food that is decadent is likely good to have only in small quantities; if it's sweet or greasy, it's probably good to limit to lower quantities. Get exercise daily; walk, or bike somewhere, hit the gym, do an outdoor activity, or something, don't go from bed to car to chair to car to couch to bed.
Following these kinds of recommendations may not seem as official or authoritative as the government or some author selling a new diet book. But anecdotally, they work pretty well, and they aren't likely to be skewed by various parties monetary interests or simply bad interpretation and over-generalization of good scientific data.
They have recommended a carbohydrate rich diet for years and it has gotten us what? Appeal to government authority is not compelling when it comes to dietary advice, especially when you consider the power of the food lobby and the well understood impact of lobbyists in American politics.
Well, considering they now recommend things like eating more fish & whole grains, if we are implicitly never trusting what the government says about food you better start eating more red meant, refined grains & processed sugar. Stick it to the man!
The other go-to on why the USDA guidelines are faulty is Gary Taubes and his book Good Calories, Bad Calories which also covers the history of the so-called lipid hypothesis (that saturated fats are bad for you). I cook with only ghee, bacon grease and coconut oil. Some articles by Taubes:
A government in thrall to the "big food" lobby is the last place I'd go for dietary advice.
I'm not just talking about the US government here - but almost all western governments have got it wrong on nutrition for the last half century or so. It seems that Sweden is the first to buck the trend - I hope others catch on before they cost us more billions in health care spending trying to fix the symptoms of what they have caused.
It looks like that's all in regards to the 2015 guidelines which have not been written/finalized yet. I'm betting this works kind of like the Census, so look here for now:
in my experience contrarianism and seeking fame and attention cause as much bias as lobbying.
I particularly trust the FDA because there is no clear direction that lobbying would bias them in. All industries want their food to be called "healthy", and all of these industries are fairly organized or centralized. So I don't see any reason to think the FDA is biased toward a particular food or industry.
