In 1992, the Department of Agriculture unveiled would become the most recognizable image in nutrition: the Food Pyramid. In some respects, this image—which cost taxpayers nearly $1 million—is among the most successful government initiatives in history. A decade after it was unveiled, a Gallup survey found that 82% of Americans believed the Pyramid was the key to healthy eating. Parents across the country looked to it as a guide to feeding their children.
Yet obesity rates continued to climb. So where did the Food Pyramid go wrong?
In the 1960s, Senator George McGovern spearheaded the Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to tackle America’s “hunger problem.” The original purpose was to expand food assistance programs, but in 1974, McGovern expanded the committee’s efforts to not only malnutrition, but also overeating.
Three years later, the committee published its “Dietary Goals for the United States.” At the time, obesity rates hovered around 10% among adults and 5% for children. McGovern hoped his report would help reduce these figures by encouraging low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets.
Over the next decade, even as the federal government continued promoting McGovern’s nutritional guidelines, obesity rates doubled.
This convinced Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to publish his own “Report on Nutrition and Health,” modeled after the Health Department’s 1964 study publicizing the dangers of cigarettes. The key to the anti-smoking campaign had been the agency’s marketing strategy, so Koop enlisted the Department of Agriculture to help distill McGovern’s recommendations into a simple graphic.
Unlike cigarettes, however, dietary guidelines could hardly follow the straightforward formula of telling people not to smoke, yet this is precisely what the Food Pyramid attempted to do with fat. Instead of advising people to substitute healthy unsaturated fats for unhealthy trans fats, the Pyramid grouped all fats together in the tip of the pyramid as foods to avoid.
The base of the pyramid—representing the largest portion of a healthy diet—was reserved for carb-heavy grains. Like fats, the food pyramid made no distinction between different types of carbohydrates, some of which are healthier than others.
So successful was the Food Pyramid campaign that it directly contributed to the “low fat” craze of the 1990s. Grocery stores became stuffed with “fat-free” foods, from potato chips to Devil’s Food Cakes. The 1988 report on nutrition, in fact, repeatedly encouraged food manufacturers to adopt this kind of labeling, which was added to the regulatory code in 1990.
Obesity rates have more than tripled since the McGovern Report was published, yet the government’s dietary guidelines continue to promote his basic recommendations despite mounting criticism from dieticians for omitting studies that contradict official advice. For families who want to practice healthy dietary habits, there may not be a simple formula, but the Food Pyramid serves as a testament to the follies of placing faith in the expertise of federal bureaucrats.
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