From the 1980s to the early 2000s, “experts” told us to get the majority of calories (60+%) from grains. A quarter of a century later, they began drifting away from that – their original guidelines likely led to obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Now they’ve reversed those claims.
“Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the USDA treated fat as the primary harm in the American diet,” says Nestle. Along with its anti-fat stance—a stance researchers say was never grounded in science—the guidelines also encouraged Americans to eat hefty amounts of carbohydrates. The 1995 edition made bread, cereal, and pasta the foundation of its “Food Guide Pyramid,” and advised people to eat between six and 11 servings of grains every day, compared to just three to five servings of vegetables and two to four servings of fruit. Fat was to be eaten “sparingly.”
“This advice to eat more carbs and avoid fat is exactly backwards if you want to improve health and lower body weight,” says Dr. Robert Lustig, a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco. He and other nutrition researchers say the popularity of anti-fat, pro-carb guidelines helped fuel a rise in diet-related health problems.
Food Industry Lobbying and U.S. 2015 Dietary Guidelines | TIME
Decades later, some began to notice the other fatal flaw – not taking individual needs into consideration:
Lee Holmes, a qualified clinical nutritionist from Sydney, told FEMAIL the plate model – the successor of the food pyramid – is only useful as a very general guideline for what to eat.
‘It may not be the ideal approach for all Australians… we need to consider individual needs and food intolerances,’ she said.
We ended up eating a lot more sugars and refined grains:
We ended up eating more grains, sugar and more fats – and 23% more calories per day than in 1970.
How America’s diet has changed over time
Some of the nutrition quacks still defend the 1980s “fat hypothesis”: Research criticising 1980s fat guidelines misguided, say scientists | Diets and dieting | The Guardian. At the time the “eat no fat” mantra was pushed upon us, there was no good evidence to back it up.
As of 2025, we are now told that the “concerns over saturated fats were exaggerated” and “The cholesterol hypothesis was oversold”.
When us peons are confused by dueling experts, WE are the ones at fault, not the dueling experts whose recommendations proved wrong, inconsistent, contradictory and often incoherent. It’s “our fault” that their recommendations did not work out.
Considering what I personally witnessed from nutrition quacks, and what ultimately happened to me, I’d be happy if the entire community of nutrition scientists and promoters were taken out back and hung from the gallows for commission of crimes against humanity. They had choices to make in the past, and they chose poorly, succumbing to lobbying and politics – as ALL government bodies do.
The nutrition science community is made up of arrogant, reckless and dangerous people considering the damage they did to at least two generations of population.
If the government and fake nutrition scientists stayed out of this from the beginning – and let us eat as our mothers and grandmothers suggested – eat balanced meals in moderation – we would have been better off.
(I am quite upset about the idiocy of nutrition science – as I have said before, in my easily influenced 20s, I sat in company meetings where nutritionists told us to avoid all fats, if possible, but sugar was okay – and to eat more “healthy grains” (60+% of calories). They were 100% wrong and condemned entire generations to poor health. I don’t know how to reconcile my anger over the harms committed by nutrition assholes. Few of them apologized for their reckless and dangerous past recommendations. If you did not live through the 1980s, you did not experience the barrage of propaganda they forced upon us – you have no idea how intensive their messaging was and how receptive we were to their agenda at that point in life – and it was 100% wrong and caused actual harm. Why should anyone listen to them in 2025?)
