The Original Pyramid Scheme

Saturated Lies

If you’re reading this right now, you probably already know that a great rule of thumb is to never blindly follow advice, especially regarding one’s health (*cough cough* COVID vaccine), from the government or its proxies.

While many more people are waking up to this fact in today’s time, this wasn’t the general consensus a few decades ago, specifically in 1992, when the USDA released the original food pyramid. Despite the pyramid being released in the 1990s, the story starts all the way back in 1913.

This was the year that scientist Nikolai Anitschkow released his research on the “lipid hypothesis,” in which he asserted that saturated fat is detrimental to people’s health due to its ability to clog arteries. How was this hypothesis derived, you might ask? Anitschkow fed rabbits lard egg yolks or pure cholesterol dissolved in sunflower oil, and after observing an increase in the rabbits’ blood cholesterol levels, he assumed the same conclusion could be reached for humans. This is quite the assumption to derive given the drastic differences between rabbits and humans, specifically regarding their diets.

Fast forward to the postwar 1950s and Anitschkow’s findings began to become more relevant. There was a dramatic uptick in cardiovascular disease and scientists were eager to get to the bottom of it. Smoking rates were rapidly increasing, but the consensus was that it couldn’t possibly have played a role given that some doctors were still promoting smoking as a way of releasing stress.

The urgency to get to the bottom of the “heart question” peaked in 1955 when President Dwight Eisenhower suffered a heart attack in 1955. The whispers of saturated fats being the root cause began to get louder and louder as everyone calmly shrugged away the four packs of cigarettes he was smoking a day.

And at this point in the story enters one of the main characters of the saturated fats movement: Ancel Keys.

The Keys to American Health

While Ancel Keys was a well respected American physiologist who made positive contributions like the 1950 The Biology of Human Starvation paper, he was well known for his tendency to do whatever it took to ensure his hypotheses would be proven correct. Whether it was going out of his way to shut down dissenting viewpoints or intimidating other scientists that tried to publish research contradictory to his, he wasn’t exactly your most ethical researcher.

Keys gained particular notoriety after constructing a graph with the proportion of saturated fat as a percentage of total calories and deaths per 1000 as the variables, using six countries: Japan, Italy, Australia, Canada, USA, and England/Wales. After the graph showed a strong correlation between the two variables, the public was all but convinced. It was later learned that data from 22 countries was available, but let’s just say it wouldn’t have been convenient for him to include all of them.

By 1958, all of his “exceptional” findings and research resulted in Keys being named the head of the American Heart Association. He had continually demonized saturated fats and boldly asserted that smoking had little to with cardiovascular disease. I’m sure that his stance that saturated fats are poison definitely had nothing to do with his financial ties to Procter & Gamble and the ensuing uptick in demand for their vegetable oil brand Crisco…

At some point, Keys probably realized that this measly graph wasn’t enough and decided to be one of two principal investigators in a large randomized control trial done in 1978 to put the saturated fat debate to sleep once and for all. Unsurprisingly, the study showed that saturated fats were not only unharmful, but seed oils were actually more likely to cause premature death.

If you had to guess, do you think this study was released? Yep, you’re right, it was swept under the rug and in fact not released until 1989. Not only was it buried for more than a decade, but when it was released, only certain data points were released to make the results seem more enigmatic. The entire report was not released until 2016, when the British Medical Journal published the research in its entirety. But by then, the damage had already been done.

Building the Pyramids

In 1977, Senator George McGovern was put in charge to run the U.S. Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs. The committee echoed a similar sentiment to Keys and Anitschkow by vilifying saturated fats, as well as increasing the recommended amount of carbohydrates to be consumed.

Luise Light, a reputable nutritionist and researcher, was put in charge of the team within the USDA to craft dietary guidelines and initially recommended 3 to 4 servings of carbs per day. However, by the time it made it through the bureaucratic blob of the USDA, it mysteriously was increased to 6-11. How in the world did that happen?

What Luise Light didn’t know was the USDA had purposefully increased the amount of carbs recommended to deal with a grain surplus that had accumulated due to slowing demand from the Soviet Union. During Nixon’s presidency, poor growing seasons had led to a spike in the prices of grain and the Soviet Union was in dire need due to poor central planning (stupid communism) and was willing to put ideological differences aside to strike a deal with the US.

Given the high prices of grain, the deal was especially lucrative for America and, in order to significantly ramp up production, Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz heavily deregulated the agriculture industry and encouraged the consolidation and conversion of family farms to massive corporate industrial farms. When demand from the Soviets eventually slowed, the country faced a massive surplus and someone had to eat all of this grain. So what’s the solution to the problem? Propaganda, obviously.

The propaganda machine went into overdrive to convince people loading up on carbs was the only way ensure good health. Whether it was government officials visiting schools to lecture children to load up on bread or endless commercials with kids snapping up the latest cereal brand, Operation CARBS was in full swing. More importantly, no major health official or organization bothered to even differentiate between simple carbs and complex carbs.

The official dietary goals of the United States, in tandem with the “food wheel,” was released in 1980, which served as the precedent for the food pyramid. 12 years later, we received the infamous one and only food pyramid.

Mo’ Carbs, Mo’ Cash

Unsurprisingly, as the anti-fat and pro-carbs movement took off, so did the variety of products pushed by Big Food corporations that perfectly matched the public sentiment. All of the biggest food companies now produced loads of low fat and fat free products and it eventually grew to a $35B market. To ensure that the food was still tasty, extra carbs, sugars, and additives like high fructose corn syrup were thrown into these supposedly “healthy” foods.

As suspected, it was a bit more than just “riding the wave.” Big Food was sure to utilize their connections within the USDA, as of 11 members of the USDA panel in charge of creating both the food wheel and pyramid, six had documented financial relationships with companies like Kraft, Nestle, Dannon, General Mills, Kellogg’s, and more. After seeing her work completely hijacked, Luise Light put it simply: “the food pyramid was sold to the highest bidder.”

After a disastrous tenure in which the obesity rates continually increased, the food pyramid was officially scrapped in 2011, as it was replaced by “MyPlate,” which was less of a change in dietary recommendations and more of a necessary rebrand.

Looking back, it was fairly obvious that saturated fats were not the main driver of the increased cardiovascular diagnoses but was rather chosen as the scapegoat. It has been in our diet for thousands of years, so to blame an ancient food source for a very modern problem should have signaled some red flags.

At the end of the day, whenever there is a particular narrative within the realm of science and opposing viewpoints are purposefully silenced and the herd is told to blindly follow “the science” and put your faith into inconspicuous researchers and Microsoft Excel models, it’s probably a good idea to do your own research and trust your gut.

It’s almost like I could be talking about something else here…

But that’s for a later day.

Thanks for reading and until next time.