Nutrition Guidelines and the Limits of the State

Marion Nestle thinks the new food advice guidelines from the government are a step forward, but she's still got some quibbles:

They still talk about foods (fruits, vegetables, seafood, beans, nuts) when they say "eat more." But they switch to nutrient euphemisms (sodium, solid fats and added sugars) when they mean "eat less."

They say, for example: "limit the consumption of foods that contain refined grains, especially refined grain foods that contain solid fats, added sugars, and sodium."

This requires translation: eat less meat, cake, cookies, sodas, juice drinks, and salty snacks.

That's politics, for you.

These are good points, especially the last one. And while I of course think Americans should push our government to release the best possible nutrion guidelines, the fact of the matter is that one ought to temper one's expectations about the ability of a government of a major agricultural producer to get this right on a consistent basis. The good news is that this really isn't a task that requires the full weight of the federal government to be done well. The costs involved in putting together a pamphlet of nutritional advice and distributing it over the Internet are pretty small and I think maintaining up-to-date and visually appealing advice along these lines is an excellent mission for a non-profit to undertake. I think the Mayo Clinic's website is leading the way in useful application of information technology to public health.

Alternatively, we have a lot of sub-national governments here in the United States. And some of them are jurisdictions with little or no agricultural production. If the governments of the country's fifty largest cities pooled their resources to produce a National Dietary Guidelines document, they'd be well-positioned to give relatively unbiased advice. But just like Saudi Arabia's not going to tell you to use less oil and Denmark's not going to tell you to stop playing with legos, the US government is poorly-positioned to say people should eat less meat and grain.