The world, technology, and the pace of our lives seems to move faster and faster each year.  Your life not that long ago is different in so many ways from the one you’re living today.  But what about the food you eat?  Has that changed?  To any casual social media observer, dietary advice and what you’re supposed to eat seems to change every day.

And yet, dietary advice has barely budged in the last 40 years!  Starting in 1980, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) have encouraged Americans to limit saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, alcohol, and yes, excess sugar.

In today’s episode, The Nutrition Grouch talks about how the low-carbohydrate advocates rail against the DGAs as being too carbohydrate based, yet their wish to make the DGAs more fat and protein based are historically, environmentally, health, and budgetarily impractical.

Overly reductionist scientific factoids and tidbits are great for producing unlimited social media content but lack the big picture programming, interconnectedness, and nuance, housed Ato Z in one location, required for successful lifestyle change and optimal wellness.

And finally, the Grouch wishes we could burn all of health & wellness down and start over, beginning anew with only those who meet a minimum bar of competence.  But he knows that won’t happen because marketing, persuasion, and entertainment are what drives nutrition, not cold hard facts and science. 

Weight loss advice in 2035 will probably look a lot like it looks in 2025.  The 5 Universal Laws of Weight Loss, Your Behavioral Obesity Risk Score (BORS), The 3 and Only 3 Ways to Cut Calories, and Nutrition Rules and Decision Fatigue will remain pillars of any good lifestyle management plan.  There are no magic cures, quick fixes, or even science (outside of GLP-1s) coming to save us. 

Some of the topics in today’s episode include: 

• 1980: the first edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) (3:27)
• The 7 dietary guidelines of 1980 (3:50)
• The 4 dietary guidelines of 2020 – 2025 (4:13)
• The DGAs have NEVER promoted eating sugar (5:28)
• It’s easier to reduce saturated fat than it is to reduce carbohydrate (8:12)
• It’s completely impractical for everyone to eat low carb (8:54)
• Food labeling is so deceptive (and yet within the rules) (10:58)
• When fad diets become part of your personal identity (14:01)
• Mainstream, regular diet advice is BORING! (16:34)
• Why are we obese? Occam’s razor: too many calories (17:24)
• Keeping the nutrition waters muddy is advantageous to most (22:27)
• Why social media cannot and will never work for nutrition education (23:24)
• People are ok with being lied to if it makes them feel safe/ok (28:32)
• In dieting, nothing is ever new, everything is just recycled (30:09)
• All of nutrition can be viewed through one of two lenses/camps (32:45)
• Exercising cells in a flask is not exercise (36:48)
• I hate supplements, especially in grocery stores (40:10)
• An endless amount of overly reductionist nutrition advice (42:18)
• Who is best at giving nutrition advice? (43:52)
• Timeless nutrition advice (49:32)
• Blow up health & wellness and start over from scratch (54:22)
• Marketing and entertainment will always dominate nutrition (56:17)
• The ENORMOUS DANGER of non expert persuasive speech (58:55)