'Less Idiotic' Guidelines? That's Debatable
Thursday, January 15, 2026
Francis Menton of The Manhattan Contrarian recently took a look at the latest federal diet guidelines and concluded that they are "somewhat less idiotic" than the ones that had been on the books before.
While I think Menton shares my contempt for federal dietary guidelines, I don't share all his convictions about nutrition, and I want to state up front that, in my opinion, the only reason to consider anything Bobby Kennedy says is for the purpose of arming oneself against the latest round of dishonest pronouncements from this man, whom Donald Trump and his cowardly lackeys in the Republican Party have granted an undeserved bully pulpit.
When Bobby Kennedy isn't lying, he's making things up -- to the extent that I'd look up for myself if he told me the sky is blue.
That out of the way, whatever motivated Menton to look through the guidance, my summary would be that (1) some of it might resemble an improvement in dietary advice in the same way a clock stuck at 12:00 will appear to be right twice a day; (2) lots of it (e.g., "Eat real food.") is meaningless, but will sound good to people with poor intellectual hygiene; and (3) lots of it is exactly the kind of nonsense that, until five minutes ago, conservatives appeared to know was exactly the kind of stupidity one might expect from an anti-vaxxer hippie.
Regarding the first, Menton notes that even the apparent improvements might not really be:
[I]t is not clear at all that the war on saturated fats has actually been ended. On the first page of the new Guidelines, we find straightforward recommendations to "consume meat" and to "consume dairy." That's a pretty good start. But then on page 3, we come to this:And as for the second and third:
In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories.
[T]hey just can't stop themselves from going off into pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo. Start at the top of the introductory message from the Secretaries:Thank you, Mr. Menton, for helping me know that I'm not the only person on earth who knows that cooking is a form of processing, that not all processing is bad, and that food is made of chemicals -- including water.
The message is simple: eat real food.
What does that even mean? Elsewhere in the document they bounce from "real food" over to "whole food," another meaningless term as far as I can tell. Yet another term that appears a few times is "nutrient dense." What does that one mean? Sounds like pure mumbo jumbo to me.
As you would expect from Kennedy, there is much criticism of "highly processed" foods (e.g., "Avoid highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet.") Well, the term "highly processed" sure sounds bad. But does "processed" include, for example, cooking? Why isn't that OK? Where is the line drawn? There's also a recommendation to avoid "chemicals." OK, how about vitamins? Aren't vitamins chemicals? Is it OK to add them? If vitamins are OK, how about preservatives?
The more of this you read, the more you realize that they don't know what they are talking about...
Menton's closing take is far more charitable than mine, which is that Kennedy should never have been nominated or confirmed, and that he should be impeached and removed from office. (See South Carolina or the recent changes to child vaccination schedules for starters.)
The government has no business being in charge of science or medicine, but so long as it is, it should take pains to seek out and follow the best scientific advice out there. And no, that does not mean "gold standard science" as defined by a dishonest attorney who wants to sue vaccine makers.
-- CAV
2 comments:
The problem with federal dietary guidelines is the problem with all federal guidelines: They assume a one-size-fits-all solution is possible. We have THE food pyramid, which is supposed to guide all diets for everyone everywhere, forever and ever, amen.
From an anthropological standpoint this is flagrantly stupid. Not the food pyramid itself--ANY attempt to make one, the very idea AS SUCH is stupid.
After humans left Africa our species encountered a huge range of environments with a huge range of foods and adapted accordingly. Different cultures processed foods differently at the molecular level. Europeans retain the ability to digest milk into adulthood, for example, while Asians tend not to. Asians and Native Americans also process alcohol in different ways from Europeans. There are also more subtle variances, such as my wife's issues digesting carbs vs my body's need for them--a diet that's well-suited to one of us would kill the other (makes home life fun). We can eat nearly anything--you can eat an entire Christmas tree if you try hard enough--and, historically speaking, we have eaten everything. Individuals can handle some things better than others, though.
There's also the fact that humans have at least three morphologies--endo/meso/ectomorph. If I were as stocky as a cousin of mine I'd have a heart attack, and when he was as skinny as me (thanks to a moron doctor's advice) he nearly ended up in a hospital. Obviously food needs are going to be different when there's a 75 lb difference in healthy body weight.
There's also historic diets. If modern dieticians were correct, the human species would have died out sometime around the agricultural revolution. 80-90% of all humans ate grains for the VAST majority of their diets right up to WWI. According to modern dietary theory, all of them should have died before they reproduced. A contradiction that extreme shouldn't sound alarm bells, but sirens. (As an aside, advice on sleep is similar--according to sleep doctors, every parent of every newborn should be dead.)
From an anthropological standpoint the best advice possible is "Limit junk food, but after that find a diet that works for you and stick with it." Humans are simply too diverse for any one-size-fits-all solution to have any justification, much less validity or authority.
Yes. Humans are unspecialized omnivores, some of whom are better adapted to certain foods or diets than others.
It drives me crazy to see the sort of blanket recommendations that fly directly in the face of things ordinary people know being touted as "scientific" and being rammed down our throats by little dictators.
It is things like this that give surface credibility to populism -- by making educational accomplishment/expertise look like myopic rationalism.
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