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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

There is no scientific evidence that publishing US federal government dietary guidelines has ever done anything to improve public health. This is a total boondoggle and waste of taxpayer money. The FDA and Congress should cancel the entire program.

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These dietary guidelines are not published by the FDA, whose goal is to protect public health, but by the USDA, whose goal is to protect farmers.

Compare their "about us" pages:

FDA:

"The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for protecting the public health by ensuring the safety, efficacy, and security of human and veterinary drugs, biological products, and medical devices; and by ensuring the safety of our nation's food supply, cosmetics, and products that emit radiation."

USDA:

"We have a vision to provide economic opportunity through innovation, helping rural America to thrive; to promote agriculture production that better nourishes Americans while also helping feed others throughout the world; and to preserve our Nation's natural resources through conservation, restored forests, improved watersheds, and healthy private working lands."

https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/what-we-do

https://www.usda.gov/our-agency/about-usda

The problem in this case is actually the USDA, whose mission has always been to promote and safeguard the interests of suppliers: livestock and farm. This mission is directly in conflict with human health, consumer interests, and animal welfare.

It's another government agency that does not serve the greater good.

This podcast enlightens many of our current ag policies: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/farms-race/

“It's another government agency that does not serve the greater good.”

It’s pretty clear that the prevailing ideology of most people in leadership is that whatever is good for companies is the greater good.

"The greater good" (hot fuzz ;)

School meals are designed around the US dietary guidelines, so they are important.

Dear god... have people read the packages on food they feed kids at school?

I counted 120 grams of added sugar a day in the school lunch of my son. Non-fat chocolate milk and sugar laden starches. Juice counts as a serving of fruit (and our pediatrician didn’t see a problem with that)

But hey... they’ve got a bag of 4 carrots so that will balance it out right?

It never dawned on me as a child, but a couple things jump out at me now as to what I was fed in elementary school.

1. Your drink choice was milk or chocolate milk. Both had artificial sweeteners. Apparently, we had no lactose intolerant kids in the whole school.

2. We were fed lots of bread and potatoes. Even the main dish was often pizza or similar, which contains bread.

3. Green vegetables were exceedingly rare.

4. A kid in Kindergarten and a 6th grader got the same lunch.

In retrospect my lunch diet was atrocious due to this as a kid. You don't need to feed kids sweetened crap all the time. It's especially hard to justify given that all the public schools had complete kitchens that were used every day.

Basically, public school was just state sponsored day care where I grew up. Not only that, it was awful quality day care.

The tomato paste on a pizza was recently ruled a vegetable too, depending on its volume. [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/11/15/142360146/pi...

> The tomato paste on a pizza was recently ruled a vegetable too, depending on its volume.

This has been going on for just about 40 years now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable

That is outrageous. Of course it's not a vegetable, tomato is a fruit.

Pizza == Vegetable

This has been a running joke / outrage in our house.

To be fair, in the specific case of tomatoes, the more it's cooked/reduced, the more bioavailable many of its nutrients are. Tomato paste is just tomatoes. Usually these kinds of pizzas have tons of sugar in the sauce, though.

My mother worked in school food service and used dietary guidelines to help implement salad bars at a number of schools. Your results obviously differ and you should address the issue since it brings you so much concern.

Have you tried intervening, together with some other similarly thinking parents?

You might find this story from a couple of years ago interesting:

https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/school-lunch...

We had different lunches in the 70s. Cooking on site, no fast food boxes brought in.

I’m sure they were still too much carbs, but they had protein and real vegetables, though usually canned.

I have worked as a contract employee at both the FDA and the US Dept of Agriculture. Rule 1: Trust neither. The DofA wants you to eat dairy, meat, and grain products - thats their area of expertise. The FDA ... want you to buy drugs. Thats their business. Neither is objective, and both use "science" that suits their needs.

Analyzing blinded experiments with control groups is at least a little bit of science.

And it seems like I have access to more medicines and medical data than my grandparents did.

You may not remember VIOXX. I was working at FDA when this scandal broke. Politics and money got this drug approved. A whistleblower got it exposed. A workflow system I worked on there was had features designed to hide information from certain doctors/researchers.

I can agree that corruption exists at the FDA (and every other organization). I don't agree that it has been completely useless or even had a net negative effect for the quality of life for most Americans.

More transparency would be nice, more data from more frequent experiments would be nice. But the point is, they are using scientific principles (over the long term, I can't say for specific administrations).

Science is an excellent way to guide policy. But must every policy have found its way via scientific evidence?

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