The Food Pyramid is a hoax ..says best selling author Dr. T. Colin Campbell

The Food Pyramid is More About Politics than Personal Health
by Dr. T. Colin Campbell

Now that the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has released a newly revised Food Pyramid and a variety of criticisms have been lodged, it is time to revisit the scientific and political fundamentals of this report. Although this new edition offers an attractive internet-based format, its selection of supporting scientific evidence leaves much to be desired. The evidence that is offered, in my experience, is more about corporate influence and political spin than it is about empirical science. That's a recipe for confusion.

The public needs to understand why and how our government is so adept at confusing us about diet and health issues. Promoting confusion is especially costly when disease care costs (some call it health care costs) are escalating out of sight (highest per capita costs in the world), health care quality is declining (US is ranked 37th in the world) and shorter life spans are now being projected.

Few, if any, explanations of this on-going tragedy is more important than our misunderstanding of the exceptional ability of nutrition to maintain health and prevent disease. As a result, we turn to drugs and medical gadgetry to fix needless illnesses caused by eating the wrong food and living the wrong lifestyle. But being confused about nutrition is not surprising. We just can't help it. Government funding for nutrition research and education is almost non-existent (when compared with corporate 'education' budgets); interpretation and articulation of the scientific evidence is too often superficial, reductionist and cautious; and translation of research evidence into public policy is highly politicized.

As a member of several expert panels on diet and health in the past, I have found that nowhere is confusion more encouraged than during the creation of food and health policy. USDA, the primary sponsor of the Food Pyramid committee, has repeatedly demonstrated that it is more interested in the health of the agriculture industry than in the health of the taxpaying American public. The majority of the members of a recent 'Pyramid' committee, for example, had unrevealed conflicts of interest with the dairy industry that only became known through court order. Politics matters more than personal health.

The issue is further compounded by the Food and Nutrition Board (FNB) of the National Academy of Sciences whose task is to translate the latest scientific evidence into recommended nutrient intakes, findings then used by the Pyramid Committee. In the most recent FNB deliberation, nutrient recommendations that have stood for decades were substantially revised in a way that surely pleases their corporate sponsors. Dietary levels as high as 35% protein, 35-40% fat (depending on age), and 25% added sugars were said to be consistent with "minimizing the risk of chronic disease" (cancers, heart diseases, diabetes, obesity), a bonanza for junk food recipes.

When funding from M&M Mars candy company, a consortium of soft drink companies, a behemoth dairy industry conglomerate (the Dannon Institute), and a collection of pharmaceutical companies helps to make this report user-friendly (for them, that is) and when industry-conflicted academics organize and populate the panels, can we expect anything better? The consequences are ominous. When a contemporary UN panel, for example, was examining much of the same evidence and was opting for a lower cap of 10% added sugar, the sugar industry threatened them to persuade Congress to withhold funding of the UN study unless it adopted the US cap of 25%.

Confusing the evidence, unintentional or otherwise, has undermined these reports for most of their histories. The number and size of food servings, now used for a couple decades, falsely convey a sense of scientific merit and certainty that is not deserved. Arguably instructive for institutional meal planning, this educational tool means little or nothing to most consumers. Do you know how many servings of foods, good or bad, you consume each day? Or even what size a serving is? The contents and identities of nutritionally active chemicals in a given food can vary by a staggering few hundred percent from the time the food is first harvested to the time that it is deposited in our mouths. Such variation seriously undermines both the presumed nutrient composition of food and the RDAs that depend on these numbers.

Now, the USDA committee has personalized the Pyramid into multiple parts that adds, in my view, still more confusion. We know well that our need for food varies as a function of age, gender, physical activity and other lifestyle practices. But this does not mean a smorgasbord of substantially different diets that are assumed to have the same healthful effects, especially when these diets are framed within the wide ranges of new nutrient intakes now promulgated by the FNB. This only serves food companies an exceptionally wide berth to promote their products, no matter their nutritional value.

There is a need to understand nutrition as a complex and dynamic biological system that is far more than the sum of its parts. For too long, research, policy development and public understanding has dwelt on the details, oftentimes taken out of context to support (and confuse) positions and products of special interest groups. When the right foods are consumed and the right lifestyle conditions are met, the resulting biological symphony of reactions, events and outcomes has exceptional power to maintain health and prevent disease. This needs to be the discourse of the day, not the politically motivated messages that have infected our entire system of understanding this marvelous science.