Picture this: you’re a vegetarian physician running a health spa in Michigan at the turn of the 20th century, convinced that meat consumption leads to sexual degeneracy and moral decay. You’ve already invented cornflakes as a cure for masturbation. Now you need to spread your gospel nationwide, and preferably for generations to come. What do you do? Simple. Train hundreds of dietitians in your belief system, then have one of them establish the professional organisation that will dictate nutritional standards for the entire country.
Welcome to the birth of the American Dietetic Association, and the tone that would be set for nutritional science as we NOW know it.
In 1917, while most Americans were preoccupied with the minor inconvenience of World War I, Lenna Frances Cooper co-founded what would become the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the largest organisation of food and nutrition professionals in the United States. This might seem like a footnote in history, except for one rather significant detail: Cooper was a protégé of John Harvey Kellogg, the superintendent and medical director of the Seventh Day Adventist Battle Creek Sanitarium.
Cooper wasn’t just any dietitian. She was the Chief Dietitian of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, trained directly under Kellogg, where she learned to view meat as a dangerous substance that needed to be replaced with grains, nuts, and vegetable proteins. More than 500 dietitians graduated from Battle Creek during her tenure, each one thoroughly indoctrinated in the Adventist view that animal products were to be minimised or avoided entirely.
This wasn’t medical science. It was religious evangelism disguised as healthcare.
Cooper’s first book, The New Cookery, featured “innovative nut-, wheat gluten-, and legume-based meat substitutes” served at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Sound familiar? The modern plant-based movement didn’t invent this playbook. They just rebranded it with better marketing and Instagram influencers.
But Cooper didn’t stop at writing cookbooks. She became the first Supervising Dietitian for the U.S. Army during World War I, created the Department of Dietetics at the National Institutes of Health, and served as senior author of Nutrition in Health and Disease, a textbook used for 30 years in dietetic and nursing programs around the world. Her vegetarian bias wasn’t a footnote in her career. It was the foundation of modern dietetics.
By the 1980s, an Adventist became president of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. In 1988, they delivered their first position statement on vegetarian diets, with five of the nine authors and reviewers being Adventist vegetarians. They continued delivering vegetarian position statements roughly every five years. In 2015, they had to retract their position paper because of “inaccuracies and omissions.” Embarrassing, but not surprising when religious ideology masquerades as scientific consensus.
The influence didn’t stop at professional organisations. The Seventh Day Adventist Church owns 853 radio stations, 441 television stations, produces 70,000 podcasts annually, operates 62 publishing houses printing materials in nearly 380 languages, and employs 25,000 “literature evangelists” distributing their health message door-to-door worldwide. They’ve set up processed food companies around the globe, built their own hospitals and universities, and established themselves as one of the most influential forces in nutrition policy worldwide.
All of this stemming from a 19th-century religious sect that believed vegetarianism would cure chronic masturbation.
PROCTER & GAMBLE BUYS THE AMERICAN HEART:
While religious zealots were busy establishing the foundational infrastructure of American dietetics, corporate interests were eyeing even bigger opportunities. Enter Procter & Gamble, the makers of Crisco, which was essentially cottonseed oil that had been chemically altered through hydrogenation to resemble lard.
Before Crisco, cottonseed oil was considered toxic waste. It had been used for lighting until petroleum displaced it, leaving P&G with enormous quantities of unwanted oil. But rather than dispose of it properly, they decided to market it as food. In 1911, they launched Crisco with aggressive advertising, complete with a cookbook titled The Story of Crisco. Sales skyrocketed more than 40 times in just four years.
But there was a problem. Americans had been cooking with animal fats for millennia. Butter, lard, tallow, these were the traditional fats that made food taste good and kept people satiated. Crisco needed legitimacy. It needed medical endorsement. It needed the imprimatur of science.
In 1948, Procter & Gamble made a donation of $1.7 million to the American Heart Association, equivalent to about $20 million in today’s dollars. This wasn’t a charitable gesture. This was a strategic investment.
The AHA was a small organisation at the time, struggling for relevance. The P&G funds were, as the organisation’s own history describes it, the “bang of big bucks” that “launched” the group into a nationwide powerhouse. By 1960, the AHA had more than 300 chapters across America and was bringing in $30 million annually.
And what did the AHA do with their newfound wealth and influence?
In 1961, the AHA released their first dietary recommendations, instructing Americans to limit saturated fat and replace traditional fats with polyunsaturated vegetable oils like, well, Crisco. This advice would become “arguably the single-most influential nutrition policy ever published,” adopted first by the U.S. government as official policy in 1980, and then by governments worldwide, along with the World Health Organization.
The conflict of interest was staggering. The organisation tasked with protecting Americans’ heart health was being funded by the very company that stood to profit most from demonising traditional fats. And the medical establishment went along with it, because prestigious organisations don’t get questioned, especially when they’re draped in the authority of science and awash in corporate funding.
Meanwhile, heart disease kept rising in near-perfect correlation with seed oil consumption. But that inconvenient fact was easily buried under mountains of epidemiological studies showing that vegetable oils lowered cholesterol, which was assumed to mean they prevented heart disease. The assumption was wrong, as later trials would prove, but by then the momentum was unstoppable.
AGRICULTURAL SUBSIDIES: PAYING FARMERS TO MAKE US SICK:
While religious organisations and vegetable oil manufacturers were busy corrupting nutrition policy from the top down, the U.S. government was ensuring their success from the bottom up through agricultural subsidies.
Since 1995, the U.S. government has paid more than $116 billion in subsidies for corn, $48.4 billion for wheat, and $44.9 billion for soybeans. Together, corn, soy, and wheat account for more than 70 percent of farm subsidy outlays. These aren’t foods that feature prominently in any honest assessment of human nutritional needs. They’re foods that can be cheaply mass-produced and profitably transformed into industrial ingredients.
Corn becomes high-fructose corn syrup, cornstarch, corn oil, and cheap feed for industrial livestock operations. Soybeans become soybean oil, soy protein isolate, and more livestock feed. Wheat becomes the foundation of every processed food product lining supermarket shelves. These crops don’t exist to nourish humans. They exist to generate profit for food manufacturers.
Meanwhile, only 4 percent of federal farm subsidies support production of fruits and vegetables, despite the government recommending that Americans fill 50 percent of their plates with produce. The USDA tells citizens to “limit intake of sodium and saturated fats coming from processed meat and poultry” while simultaneously funnelling millions toward meatpacking monopolies that benefit from cheap corn and soy feed.
This isn’t accidental contradiction. This is policy by design.
The USDA is not a public health organisation. It’s a governmental body tasked with supporting and promoting American agriculture. That means protecting the profitability of crops like corn, wheat, and soy, which now make up the majority of the processed food supply. When the USDA took control of national dietary guidelines, it brought with it a conflict of interest too massive to ignore.
Dr. Luise Light, a nutrition expert who led the team that made the original recommendations for the food pyramid, described herself as “shocked” by the changes that were made to her team’s work. They had recommended lots of vegetables, lean sources of protein like fish and nuts, and less dairy and processed foods. Her team placed fruits and vegetables at the base of the pyramid and whole-grain breads further up.
The final version flipped everything. Carbohydrates went to the base. Processed foods like crackers and cornflakes were moved down. Meat was pushed to the top as something to be minimised. The pyramid didn’t reflect what nourishes a human body. It reflected what keeps an agricultural system profitable.
The result? Half of Americans’ caloric intake now comes from ultra-processed foods made with starches and sugars derived from subsidised corn and soybeans. Nearly one in five American children are obese. About 70 percent of chronic health conditions relate directly to diet. Americans are killing themselves with food, motivated in many cases by what’s most affordable.
And what’s most affordable is whatever the government subsidises.
ANCEL KEYS: THE AMBITIOUS PHYSIOLOGIST WHO SHAPED A CENTURY:
No discussion of corrupted dietary guidelines would be complete without addressing Ancel Keys, the man whose political acumen rivalled his scientific abilities.
Keys wasn’t entirely wrong in his observations. Heart disease rates had indeed exploded in mid-20th century America, and diet likely played a role. His mistake, or perhaps his strategic choice, was in deciding that saturated fat was the villain before conducting the research to prove it.
In 1953, Keys presented a graph at a World Health Organization conference showing a striking correlation between fat intake and heart disease deaths across six countries. The graph became famous. It also became controversial, because Keys had data from 22 countries available, and when other researchers plotted all 22, the correlation largely vanished.
This graph is often confused with the later Seven Countries Study, which Keys launched in 1958 with funding from the U.S. Public Health Service. The Seven Countries Study was more rigorous, following 12,770 men aged 40 to 59 across 16 cohorts in seven countries. But even this study had problems.
Henry Blackburn, one of the key researchers involved, acknowledged that “the study has been criticized for the method in which populations were selected for the study.” Keys chose countries and regions where he already knew the data would support his hypothesis. He’d been collaborating with researchers in Finland, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Japan before the study even began. It was a “mates working together” study, not one designed to rigorously test an uncertain hypothesis.
Worse still, one of the weeks Keys visited Crete to collect data was during Lent, when the Christian Orthodox population abstained from meat and dairy. Keys noted this fact had “little effect on the outcome,” which is rather like conducting a study on British drinking habits by surveying people during Dry January and concluding the British don’t drink much.
But Keys wasn’t just a researcher. He was a political operator with connections throughout the medical establishment. He was a close friend of Paul Dudley White, one of the founders of the American Heart Association and the physician who treated President Eisenhower after his heart attack. Keys joined the AHA Nutrition Committee in 1961, shortly before they released their first guidelines recommending Americans replace traditional fats with vegetable oils.
This timing was no coincidence. Keys was both researcher and advocate, scientist and salesman. He appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1961, warning Americans that their diet was killing them. His hypothesis became gospel, not because the evidence was overwhelming, but because he was exceptionally good at promoting it.
Interestingly, the Seven Countries Study itself rejected the idea that total fat was related to heart disease. The correlation was specifically with saturated fat. But by the time this nuance emerged, the narrative had solidified: fat was bad, carbohydrates were good, and anyone who questioned this was a crank.
THE DEPRESSING STATE OF NUTRITIONAL SCIENCE:
Step back and survey the landscape. The foundational organisation of American dietetics was established by a Seventh Day Adventist protégé who believed meat caused moral decay. The American Heart Association was launched into prominence by a vegetable oil manufacturer with billions to gain from demonising traditional fats. The food pyramid was designed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to support commodity crop subsidies, not human health. And the scientific justification for all of it came from a researcher who selected data and collaborators to support his predetermined conclusion.
This isn’t science. This is institutional corruption dressed up in lab coats and peer-reviewed papers.
Analysis of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines:
Advisory Committee found numerous intellectual, financial, and religious conflicts of interest among members. One member had chaired five vegetarian conferences. Another had received funds from seven soy and tree nut industry groups. A third was part of a vegetarian activist group. Many committee members had spent their entire careers attempting to prove that fat and saturated fats are harmful, which creates a rather obvious bias against ever admitting they might have been wrong.
The system is designed to perpetuate itself. Researchers who built their reputations on the lipid hypothesis can’t suddenly announce it was all nonsense without destroying their life’s work. Professional organisations can’t reverse decades of guidance without admitting they harmed millions of people. Government agencies can’t abandon agricultural subsidies without collapsing the industries they’ve propped up for generations.
So the machine grinds forward, producing more guidelines, more position statements, more recommendations that are about as scientifically sound as medieval bloodletting, but considerably more profitable for food manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and medical systems treating the chronic diseases that result from following the advice.
THE EVOLUTIONARY ARGUMENT THEY DON’T WANT YOU HEARING:
Here’s what gets conveniently ignored in all the epidemiological studies, position statements, and dietary guidelines: humans evolved eating animals.
For the vast majority of human evolutionary history, we were persistence hunters and scavengers, obtaining the majority of our calories from animal sources. Our brains tripled in size once we started cooking meat. Our digestive systems shortened because we no longer needed the massive fermentation chambers required to break down plant cellulose. We lost the ability to synthesise numerous vitamins and nutrients because they were abundant in the animal foods we consumed.
Fatty red meat provided everything our ancestors needed: complete protein with all essential amino acids, highly bioavailable heme iron, vitamin B12 found exclusively in animal products, vitamin A in its active retinol form, superior zinc, creatine, taurine, and omega-3 fatty acids in the form our bodies can actually use. Plant foods were supplementary, consumed when animal foods were scarce or unavailable.
This evolutionary reality is far stronger evidence than any observational study showing correlations between saturated fat intake and heart disease in populations that also consume massive amounts of sugar, seed oils, refined carbohydrates, and industrial chemicals. We’re not suffering from too much animal fat. We’re suffering from abandoning the diet we evolved to eat in favour of one designed by religious zealots and corporate profiteers.
The fact that this argument is dismissed as “appeal to nature fallacy” rather than engaged with honestly tells you everything you need to know about the state of nutritional science. When the evolutionary biology argument is stronger than the epidemiology, but the epidemiology determines policy because it serves financial interests, you’re not dealing with science anymore. You’re dealing with propaganda.
THE VERDICT ON DIETARY GUIDELINES:
The dietary guidelines weren’t created to stop chronic disease. They were created to serve the financial interests of grain producers, seed oil manufacturers, and food processing companies, all wrapped in the moral superiority of religious vegetarianism and sold to the public as cutting-edge science.
A patient cured is a customer lost, as the saying goes. The healthcare system profits from managing chronic disease, not preventing it. The food industry profits from addiction-engineered processed foods made from subsidised crops. The pharmaceutical industry profits from selling drugs to manage the metabolic consequences of following the guidelines.
Everyone wins except the people following the advice.
Meanwhile, the evidence that humans thrive on animal-based diets continues mounting, conducted by researchers without institutional backing or corporate funding, published in obscure journals when it’s published at all, and dismissed by the very organisations whose existence depends on maintaining the status quo.
The corruption isn’t subtle. It’s hiding in plain sight, documented in publicly available funding disclosures, conflicted committee memberships, and the historical record of how these guidelines came to be. But acknowledging it would require admitting that generations of nutritional advice were worse than useless. It would require accepting that we’ve been making people sick while telling them it’s for their own good.
The dietary guidelines are a monument to institutional failure, a case study in how financial incentives corrupt scientific truth, and a cautionary tale about trusting authorities whose survival depends on you remaining confused, sick, and dependent on their expertise.
Your great-grandparents knew what to eat: real food, prepared simply, emphasizing the animal products that built human civilisation. They didn’t need guidelines written by committees of conflicted experts funded by companies selling processed garbage.
Neither do you