Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes Read Free Book Online

coronary disease is increasing in this country.” This is the second myth essential to the dietary-fat hypothesis—the changing-American-diet story. In 1977, when Senator George McGovern announced publication of the first Dietary Goals for the United States, this is the reasoning he evoked: “The simple fact is that our diets have changed radical y within the last fifty years, with great and often very harmful effects on our health.” Michael Jacobson, director of the influential Center for Science in the Public Interest, enshrined this logic in a 1978 pamphlet entitled The Changing American Diet, and Jane Brody of the New York Times employed it in her best-sel ing 1985 Good Food Book. “Within this century,” Brody wrote, “the diet of the average American has undergone a radical shift away from plant-based foods such as grains, beans and peas, nuts, potatoes, and other vegetables and fruits and toward foods derived from animals—meat, fish, poultry, eggs, and dairy products.” That this changing American diet went along with the appearance of a great American heart-disease epidemic underpinned the argument that meat, dairy products, and other sources of animal fats had to be minimized in a healthy diet.
    The changing-American-diet story envisions the turn of the century as an idyl ic era free of chronic disease, and then portrays Americans as brought low by the inexorable spread of fat and meat into the American diet. It has been repeated so often that it has taken on the semblance of indisputable truth
    —but this conclusion is based on remarkably insubstantial and contradictory evidence.
    Keys formulated the argument initial y based on Department of Agriculture statistics suggesting that Americans at the turn of the century were eating 25
    percent more starches and cereals, 25 percent less fats, and 20 percent less meat than they would be in the 1950s and later. Thus, the heart-disease
    “epidemic” was blamed on the apparently concurrent increase in meat and fat in the American diet and the relative decrease in starches and cereals. In 1977, McGovern’s Dietary Goals for the United States would set out to return starches and cereal grains to their rightful primacy in the American diet.
    The USDA statistics, however, were based on guesses, not reliable evidence. These statistics, known as “food disappearance data” and published yearly, estimate how much we consume each year of any particular food, by calculating how much is produced nationwide, adding imports, deducting exports, and adjusting or estimating for waste. The resulting numbers for per-capita consumption are acknowledged to be, at best, rough estimates.
    The changing-American-diet story relies on food disappearance statistics dating back to 1909, but the USDA began compiling these data only in the early 1920s. The reports remained sporadic and limited to specific food groups until 1940. Only with World War I looming did USDA researchers estimate what Americans had been eating back to 1909, on the basis of the limited data available. These are the numbers on which the changing-American-diet argument is constructed. In 1942, the USDA actual y began publishing regular quarterly and annual estimates of food disappearance. Until then, the data were particularly sketchy for any foods that could be grown in a garden or eaten straight off the farm, such as animals slaughtered for local consumption rather than shipped to regional slaughterhouses. The same is true for eggs, milk, poultry, and fish. “Until World War I , the data are lousy, and you can prove anything you want to prove,” says David Cal , a former dean of the Cornel University Col ege of Agriculture and Life Sciences, who made a career studying American food and nutrition programs.
    Historians of American dietary habits have inevitably observed that Americans, like the British, were traditional y a nation of meat-eaters, suspicious of vegetables and expecting meat three to four times a