Death By Food Pyramid: How Shoddy Science, Sketchy Politics and Shady Special Interests Have Ruined Our Health, Denise Minger
Denise Minger describes herself as “a health writer and lecturer with a reputation for aggressively challenging today’s leading voices of conventional wisdom.”
A talented writer can make a living on the basis of challenging “conventional wisdom.” Having that as a primary objective, however, is just as likely to lead away a journalist from truth as towards it, an outcome that some of Minger’s later works demonstrates. But her first book, Death by Food Pyramid, is a well-researched exposé of the serious damage that can be done by the influence of vested interests in governmental regulatory decisions.
The case in point is the set of dietary recommendations presented to the American public by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1992: The Eating Right Pyramid. The effort to develop those guidelines started out right, with a team of scientists led by Louise Light. As Minger describes it,
For months, they scoured the scientific literature for diet-disease links, pored over population studies, analyzed dietary standards from the National Academy of Sciences, and rounded up biochemists and medical experts to hash out America’s health dilemma from every angle possible. The grueling work paid off: Light emerged with a set of recommendations designed—for the first time in federal history—to mitigate chronic disease.
Had they been implemented, Louise Light’s recommendations might well have done exactly that:
Light’s guide recommended four daily tablespoons of cold-pressed fats like olive oil and flaxseed oil, in addition to other naturally occurring fats in food.
The guide kept sugar well below 10 percent of total calories and strictly limited refined carbohydrates, with white-flour products like crackers, bagels, and bread rolls shoved into the guide’s no-bueno zone alongside candy and junk food. And the kicker: grains were pruned down to a maximum of two to three servings per day, always in whole form.
Tragically, the dietary guidelines that the USDA actually released were aimed not at reducing the massive intake of sugar and refined carbs that was making America chronically ill, but rather at restricting the consumption of healthy and nutritious fats which are essential not only to smooth operation of the body’s energy management system but also to a thousand other human body functions. Not surprisingly, as a result America become even more chronically ill.
The benefits of Minger’s book to the reader are many: a better understanding of the operation of the body’s energy management system, some high-value nutrition knowledge, recognition of the necessity of applying rigorous and scientific standards of proof in developing recommendations as wide-reaching as the USDA’s dietary guidelines, and more. That last point may be the most useful lesson, since it applies to any aspect of health and all sources of health advice, given that such information sources are highly susceptible to corruption in a field as lucrative as health.
This book has very high value to anyone working in the health field and, for that matter, to anyone who has a strong interest in maintaining their own or others’ health while navigating an ocean of health misinformation.
