"Healthy"
FDA issued a proposed rule for foods that may be labeled as “healthy” if they are recommended by the “USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans” (DGA). Oddly, one of the things it doesn’t address is the total amount of food people are eating today.
Currently, people take in an average of 3,600 calories per day. Recommendations for sedentary adult males is between 2,000 and 2,600 calories per day and 1,600 for women. In 1970, the average caloric intake was 2,234 calories. This means there has been a 61 percent increase in 50 years. In 1970 15.7% of adults were obese, today that figure is 42 percent. It’s not just obese, 74% of adults are overweight or obese.
Of course, the way the DGA puts it, people have overweight or obesity as though it is a disease like a cold that you are just unlucky enough to catch like a cold. To me, that’s like saying I have a propensity to beat my dog or rob a bank.
And it’s getting worse every day.
There are (at least) two competing visions for eating healthy: calories in/calories out (quantitative), and eating healthy foods (qualitative). In fact, they interact as healthier foods supply more helpful nutrients per calorie.
Let’s focus on the quantitative side first. We are spending more on food away from home relative to food at home year after year and it has jumped dramatically as the pandemic ends. Take a look at this chart from the Economic Research Service in USDA.
On top of that, portion sizes in restaurants have become larger. One study found that, “Since the 1970s, the average size of foods from fast food chains, restaurants and grocery stores has increased by 138%. For example, from the mid-1980s, bagels are now twice as wide (3 to 6 inches).
When we get bigger portions in front of us, we eat more. A review of 72 studies found that, “regardless of sex, eating behavior, body weight, or susceptibility to hunger — ate more if given larger portion sizes.” In one study, when bigger sandwiches were offered, females ate 31% more and males ate 56% more. Look at the growth in portion sizes since 1970 in the chart below and let’s draw our first lesson on the quantitative issue.
Lesson One: If you are trying to lose weight, eat out less and when you do eat out, eat somewhere where the portions are smaller or throw in the napkin as soon as you are full (maybe eat half).
That’s it for the quantitative side of the question, how much we eat, how about the qualitative side – what we eat.
In the 1970s, Arnold Schwarzenegger called sugary foods including white bread, “The White Death.” More formally, a British nutritionist wrote Pure, White and Deadly: The Problems of Sugar in 1972 and was pilloried by scientists like Ancel Keyes (who said we should focus on dietary fat). Today, there is again a big emphasis on sugar consumption but, from 1970 to 2019, total added sugars increased by just 10 calories. Nevertheless, it still accounts for 300% of the recommended daily amount of added sugar. A problem but maybe not the problem.
Beyond sugar, the DGA’s note that Americans eat, on average, about 73% more saturated fat than recommended and about 92% more sodium. However, there are several problems with these numbers.
First, the data come from the NHANES database which has serious underreporting problems causing them to be “physiologically implausible and inadmissible as scientific evidence.” Second, recommendations for sodium reduction are applied to the entire U.S. population, even though it affects about half of people with high blood pressure (15 % of the population) and about 15% of the people who don’t have high blood pressure – about 30% of the population total.
Finally, there is the problem with nutrition science relating diets to diseases. Looking at 52 observational studies, researchers found that 0 (zero) out of 52 could be replicated. We should at least pause on the fact that the “law requires the Dietary Guidelines to be based on the current body of nutrition science.” How much faith can we put in that current body?
So, let’s get on to Lesson 2, the qualitative question of what you should be eating.
Lesson Two: How about eat less junk food and maybe the stuff labeled “healthy.”???
I’ll keep it short and sweet here. Given the state of nutrition science, who really knows what’s healthy.