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How Nutritional Recommendations Went Off Track

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor (1935)

🔍 Short on time? Here is the summary of this page:

  • 1967 — Harvard and the Sugar Research Foundation: a scientific review funded to whitewash sugar and blame saturated fats.

  • 1977–1980 — Institutionalisation: the McGovern committee and the first recommendations (DGUS, then DGA) set the template: “little fat, plenty of grains.”

  • An industrial model: breakfast cereals, seed oils and ultra-processed products replace butter, natural fats and traditional foods.

  • Persistent conflicts of interest: 95% of the experts on the 2020 DGAC committee had ties to industry (Nestlé, Kellogg’s, Danone, and others).

  • Health consequences: an explosion of obesity (42% of US adults), diabetes (nearly 15%), and growing dependence on medication.

✦ None of this is an accident: it is a trajectory. Reclaiming food sovereignty means rehabilitating natural fats, putting carbohydrates back in their place, and stepping out of dogma.

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Three scientists in white coats facing mounds of sugar and stacks of banknotes, a symbol of nutritional distortions and conflicts of interest in food research

How History Went Off Track and Why It Lasted So Long

In the mid-1960s, researchers raised the alarm: sugar might play a major role in heart disease. Inside the offices of the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), the decision was made to take back control of the narrative. The strategy looked simple on paper: have Harvard put its name to an “authoritative” review that whitewashed sugar and shifted the blame onto fats.

Boston, 1967. Three Harvard figures publish in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM): D. Mark Hegsted, Frederick J. Stare and Robert McGandy. Internal archives unearthed in 2016 show that John Hickson, an SRF executive, commissioned this review, paid $6,500 in 1967 (about $50,000 in 2016), suggested which studies to include, reviewed the drafts and asked for corrections. At the time, the NEJM did not require disclosure of financial interests, and the article was published with the conclusion that saturated fats should be blamed and sugar downplayed. The narrative shifted quietly, but deeply.

Very quickly, the story left the lecture halls for Washington. In 1968, the Senate created the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs (the McGovern committee). First focused on fighting hunger, it drifted toward prevention and in 1977 published the Dietary Goals for the United States (DGUS). Mark Hegsted provided technical support. Early drafts said bluntly “eat less…” (fatty meats, refined sugars, and so on); under industry pressure the wording was softened, but the backbone settled in: little fat, plenty of grains. In 1980, the state engraved that backbone into the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), updated every five years by the USDA (Department of Agriculture) and HHS (the Department of Health and Human Services). These DGA drive concrete outcomes: school cafeteria menus, major public programmes (WIC, SNAP), education messages. Once the official line was set, the whole chain fell into line.

In this new grammar, butter and natural fats were pushed aside. Their place was taken by products easy to industrialise: breakfast cereals, “low-fat” but sugary foods, and seed oils (soy, maize, rapeseed/canola, sunflower). Their advantage is not nutritional; it is industrial: mechanised crops, refining/deodorising, standardised formats, comfortable margins. The public seal “fat = danger” became a commercial springboard and entrenched an ultra-processed diet (UPF: foods rebuilt in factories from fractionated ingredients such as flours, syrups and refined oils, together with additives). In a controlled hospital setting, a crossover trial showed that a highly ultra-processed diet drives people to eat more and gain weight within days, at comparable “presented” calories. The process matters as much as the percentages.

This scenario does not stop in the 1970s. When you look at who “evaluates the science” for recent DGA, you see a revolving door. A 2022 analysis of the 2020 DGAC expert committee documents declared industry ties among 95% of the members, with well-known actors at the heart of the network: Kellogg, General Mills, Dannon/Danone, Kraft, Abbott, Mead Johnson, Nestlé and ILSI (International Life Sciences Institute). The National Academies have recommended reforming the process: transparency, stricter selection, better conflict management. When the referee wears sponsors’ colours, the rules of the game are never perfectly neutral.

An exhausted patient sitting in front of a plate of white bread and pasta, while a smiling doctor in a white coat encourages him, a satirical symbol of nutritional distortions around carbohydrates.

The World Health Organization (WHO) would eventually, in 2015, recommend sharply reducing free sugars (added sugar, syrups, honey, juices) below 10% of calories, with 5% being “even better”. That is the right direction… arriving late. For decades, the sugary “low-fat” breakfast was sold as a health norm, while grains and seed oils spread everywhere.

Official statistics can show a drop in age-adjusted cardiovascular mortality rates in some countries since the 1970s. Daily life tells another story: lives prolonged by polypharmacy, often at the cost of a degraded quality of life, with an explosion of metabolic diseases (obesity, diabetes, hypertension), rising neurocognitive disorders and a growing dependence that fuels the drug economy. The terrain, shaped by sugar of every kind, excessive grain consumption and ultra-processed products, was left without any real correction.

A broader look is enough to reveal the scale of the impact. Around the early 1960s, adult obesity in the United States sat around ten percent; it exceeded 42% in 2017–2018 and stayed close to 42% through 2020, with nearly 1 in 10 adults living with severe obesity. Diagnosed diabetes rose from about 1% in 1958 to 7% in 2014, and the most recent estimate puts it at 11.6% of the population, or nearly 15% of adults.

On the teaching and public-advice side, the lock has not come off. Today, most schools of nutrition and dietetics still teach on the basis of official guidelines (DGA, the Eatwell Guide in the United Kingdom, the Swiss food pyramid): even when sugar restriction is recommended, daily fruit, starches and limits on saturated fat remain the frame. That frame keeps carbohydrates at the centre of the plate. In the clinical field, nutrition training for doctors and nurses remains weak, even virtually nonexistent.

None of this is an accident: it is a trajectory, born of corruption in 1967, institutionalised in 1977–1980, sustained by committees affected by conflicts of interest, corrected too late by the WHO. The logical next step is to take back control: put carbohydrates back in their proper place by clearly explaining their real metabolic impact beyond the slogan “eat starches, eat fruit”; rehabilitate natural fats, distinguishing natural saturated fats (butter/ghee, tallow, coconut oil, and so on) from industrial oils (margarines, seed oils, and so on), then look in detail at gluten, grains and dairy products.

To understand is to take back power: by restoring the facts, each person can choose consciously what goes on their plate. It is through this knowledge, not through dogmas repeated for decades, that we reclaim our sovereignty.

To understand the first pillar of modern eating, discover the truth about carbohydrates

Carbohydrates

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