There’s a principle I’ve noticed in politics, and one that I think applies to all areas of life, which is that our worldviews tend to become frozen at a certain point in time. I often think back to former state senator Chuck Winder’s exit interview with the Idaho Statesman, which revealed that his idea of what a conservative Republican should be was shaped in the 1970s and 1980s. By the 2020s, he could no longer recognize what the Republican Party had become.
This happens to all of us, and it takes persistent, deliberate effort to stay current. We lament that they don’t make movies like they used to, complain that the country’s gone downhill as we’ve gotten older, and maintain that whatever we listened to on the radio as teenagers is the best music ever made.
Nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the field of nutrition. Beginning in the 1950s with Ancel Keys’ studies and culminating in the McGovern Report of 1977, the idea that saturated fats cause heart disease and metabolic dysfunction became permanently etched into the American consciousness. That belief led to second-order effects such as McDonald’s swapping beef tallow for vegetable oil in its fries and synthetic fats like Olestra were created in the 1990s.
Generations of Americans trusted the government to deliver nutrition advice based on science and truth. But that advice was often shaped by political considerations. In 1966, for example, with inflation driving up egg prices (nothing new under the sun), President Lyndon Johnson directed the surgeon general to issue a warning about cholesterol in eggs. That political move demonized a food long understood to be among the healthiest on the planet and helped replace eggs at the breakfast table with high-carbohydrate, sugar-laden cereals for generations of children.
It’s no coincidence that the Food Guide Pyramid issued by the Department of Agriculture recommended Americans base their diets on foods produced by massive conglomerates—industries that deploy billions in campaign donations and lobbying, and whose products are already subsidized by taxpayers.
Today, a new generation of scientists, nutritionists, and independent thinkers is challenging those old assumptions—and they’re backed by modern science. Nina Teicholz, Gary Taubes, Robert Lustig, P.D. Mangan, and many others argue that the real threat to our health is not meat or eggs, but sugar and ultra-processed foods.
Even so, old beliefs are hard to dislodge. No matter how often outdated studies are debunked or new research contradicts conventional wisdom, ideas entrenched in our formative years tend to stick. That may be why physicist Max Planck remarked that science advances one funeral at a time. Scientists, like everyone else, are human beings, and as such can become unshakably attached to the ideas they learned when they were young.
You might have noticed a trend in media over the past decade: a subtle campaign to demonize health and fitness. Consider this 2017 VICE article: “Gym Bros More Likely to be Right-Wing Assholes, Science Confirms.” At the same time, those same media outlets push the idea that people can be “healthy at any size,” and that wanting to lose weight or gain strength is “fatphobic.” It’s almost as if they want us to stay unhealthy.
News media is often the last to embrace new ideas, with reporters preferring to dogpile anyone who challenges the status quo. But as the saying goes, the proof in the pudding is in the eating. Compare billionaire Bill Gates, who’s treated as a scientific authority by “respectable” outlets, with a maverick like P.D. Mangan, who actually applies cutting-edge science to his own life.
We saw another example of new ideas being dismissed by old experts just last week, when Congressman Mike Simpson mocked Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over his stance on water fluoridation. Simpson, a former dentist first elected to Congress in 1998, suggested we’d need more dentists if fluoride were removed from municipal water supplies:
Secretary Kennedy—despite his age—seems more attuned to emerging science than Congressman Simpson. He questioned whether adding a chemical to the water supply comes with only upsides and no risks. Simpson, armed with credentials and years of experience, ridiculed him. The exchange reminded me of Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian doctor who proposed handwashing to prevent disease in hospitals. He too was ridiculed by the medical establishment of his time.
Obviously we should not completely dismiss everything we were ever taught; that road leads to absurdities such as believing the earth is flat. But we should use our God-given minds to critically evaluate the world around us.
I suspect that future generations will view the switch from beef tallow to vegetable oil, and the fluoridation of our water supplies, the way we now view lobotomies and bloodletting: as ignorant and barbaric. We’ll wonder how anyone could have believed those were good ideas. Yet the proponents of such measures were seen as the wisest men of their era, while critics were dismissed as rubes. The history of science should humble us all. What else do we take for granted today that will seem laughable tomorrow?
When it comes to public health policy, officials should recall the Hippocratic Oath: first, do no harm. Human beings were eating, exercising, and thriving for millennia before government started telling us we were doing it wrong. But government advice inevitably bends toward political pressures, and thus public health was sacrificed for the bottom line.
To make America healthy again, we must unlearn much of what we’ve been taught and break through the calcified layers of so-called conventional wisdom.
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About Brian Almon
Brian Almon is the Editor of the Gem State Chronicle. He also serves as Chairman of the District 14 Republican Party and is a trustee of the Eagle Public Library Board. He lives with his wife and five children in Eagle.
