The Corrupt History Of The Dietary Guidelines
Picture this: you’re a vegetarian physician running a health spa in Michigan at the turn of the 20th century, convinced that meat consumption leads to sexual degeneracy and moral decay.
You’ve already invented cornflakes as a cure for masturbation. Now you need to spread your gospel nationwide, and preferably for generations to come. What do you do? Simple. Train hundreds of dietitians in your belief system, then have one of them establish the professional organisation that will dictate nutritional standards for the entire country.
Welcome to the birth of the American Dietetic Association, and the tone that will be set for nutritional science as we now know it.
In 1917, while most Americans were preoccupied with the minor inconvenience of World War I, Lenna Frances Cooper co-founded what would become the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the largest organisation of food and nutrition professionals in the United States.
This might seem like a footnote in history, except for one rather significant detail: Cooper was a protégé of John Harvey Kellogg, the superintendent and medical director of the Seventh Day Adventist Battle Creek Sanitarium.
Cooper wasn’t just any dietitian. She was the Chief Dietitian of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, trained directly under Kellogg, where she learned to view meat as a dangerous substance that needed to be replaced with grains, nuts, and vegetable proteins. More than 500 dietitians graduated from Battle Creek during her tenure, each one thoroughly indoctrinated in the Adventist view that animal products were to be minimised or avoided entirely.
This wasn’t medical science. It was religious evangelism disguised as healthcare.
Cooper’s first book, The New Cookery, featured “innovative nut-, wheat gluten-, and legume-based meat substitutes” served at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Sound familiar? The modern plant-based movement didn’t invent this playbook. They just rebranded it with better marketing and Instagram influencers.
But Cooper didn’t stop at writing cookbooks. She became the first Supervising Dietitian for the U.S. Army during World War I, created the Department of Dietetics at the National Institutes of Health, and served as senior author of Nutrition in Health and Disease, a textbook used for 30 years in dietetic and nursing programs around the world. Her vegetarian bias wasn’t a footnote in her career. It was the foundation of modern dietetics.
By the 1980s, an Adventist became president of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. In 1988, they delivered their first position statement on vegetarian diets, with five of the nine authors and reviewers being Adventist vegetarians. They continued delivering vegetarian position statements roughly every five years. In 2015, they had to retract their position paper because of “inaccuracies and omissions.” Embarrassing, but not surprising when religious ideology masquerades as scientific consensus.
The influence didn’t stop at professional organisations. The Seventh Day Adventist Church owns 853 radio stations, 441 television stations, produces 70,000 podcasts annually, operates 62 publishing houses printing materials in nearly 380 languages, and employs 25,000 “literature evangelists” distributing their health message door-to-door worldwide. They’ve set up processed food companies around the globe, built their own hospitals and universities, and established themselves as one of the most influential forces in nutrition policy worldwide.
All of this stemming from a 19th-century religious sect that believed vegetarianism would cure chronic masturbation.
Procter & Gamble Buys the American Heart Association
While religious zealots were busy establishing the foundational infrastructure of American dietetics, corporate interests were eyeing even bigger opportunities. Enter Procter & Gamble, the makers of Crisco, which was essentially cottonseed oil that had been chemically altered through hydrogenation to resemble lard.
Before Crisco, cottonseed oil was considered toxic waste. It had been used for lighting until petroleum displaced it, leaving P&G with enormous quantities of unwanted oil. But rather than dispose of it properly, they decided to market it as food. In 1911, they launched Crisco with aggressive advertising, complete with a cookbook titled The Story of Crisco. Sales skyrocketed more than 40 times in just four years.
But there was a problem. Americans had been cooking with animal fats for millennia. Butter, lard, tallow, these were the traditional fats that made food taste good and kept people satiated. Crisco needed legitimacy. It needed medical endorsement. It needed the imprimatur of science.
In 1948, Procter & Gamble made a donation of $1.7 million to the American Heart Association, equivalent to about $20 million in today’s dollars. This wasn’t a charitable gesture. This was a strategic investment.
The AHA was a small organisation at the time, struggling for relevance. The P&G funds were, as the organisation’s own history describes it, the “bang of big bucks” that “launched” the group into a nationwide powerhouse. By 1960, the AHA had more than 300 chapters across America and was bringing in $30 million annually.
And what did the AHA do with their newfound wealth and influence?
In 1961, the AHA released their first dietary recommendations, instructing Americans to limit saturated fat and replace traditional fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oils like, well, Crisco. This advice would become “arguably the single-most influential nutrition policy ever published,” adopted first by the U.S. government as official policy in 1980, and then by governments worldwide, along with the World Health Organization.
The conflict of interest was staggering. The organisation tasked with protecting Americans’ heart health was being funded by the very company that stood to profit most from demonising traditional fats. And the medical establishment went along with it, because prestigious organisations don’t get questioned, especially when they’re draped in the authority of science and awash in corporate funding.
Meanwhile, heart disease kept rising in near-perfect correlation with seed oil consumption. But that inconvenient fact was easily buried under mountains of epidemiological studies showing that vegetable oils lowered cholesterol, which was assumed to mean they prevented heart disease. The assumption was wrong, as later trials would prove, but by then the momentum was unstoppable.
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