Every five years, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, an independent advisory board made up of scientists and medical experts, reviews and updates the government’s nutrition guidance. These guidelines are important because they affect how school lunches and military meals are administered and how SNAP funds are allocated. Yet, these guidelines only offer one-size-fits-all advice and are largely based on dubious nutrition studies.

In this popup podcast, Center for Progress and Innovation Director Julie Gunlock talks to Dr. Richard Williams, the FDA’s former Chief Social Scientist at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. Dr. Williams is currently writing a book about the FDA and is also the Board Chair of the Center for Trust in Science, an organization that examines the intersection of law and science. Dr. Williams and Julie talk about the newly released dietary guidelines, why the field of nutrition science is dangerously flawed, why the new alcohol restrictions included in the DGAC are nonsense, and the future of innovation in food production. 

Transcript

Beverly Hallberg:

Hey everyone, it’s Beverly Hallberg. Welcome to a special pop-up episode of She Thinks, your favorite podcast from the Independent Women’s Forum, where we talk with women and sometimes men about the policy issues that impact you and the people you care about most. Enjoy.

Julie:

Hey, everyone. I’m Julie Gunlock, Director of IWF Center for Progress and Innovation. And I’m joined here today by Dr. Richard Williams. Dr. Williams is a good friend of mine. We’ve worked together over the years on a number of regulatory issues. Currently, Dr. Williams is working on a book about the Food and Drug Administration, which I’m very much looking forward to reading. He’s also serving on the Board of Trustees for the International Life Sciences Institute, the EPA Science Advisory Board, and he’s Board Chair of the Center for Trust in Science, which is a great new organization.

And doctor, you’re here with me now. I do want to talk to you a little bit about that, but before we get to that, let me finish this impressive resume up. Dr. Williams had a 27-year career at the FDA. He was the Chief Social Scientist at the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. He was also formerly the Vice President of the Mercatus Center, which does excellent work in this area, and that is at George Mason University. And he continues there as a senior affiliate scholar. Dr. Williams is a former professor of economics at Washington and Lee University, and he has been published everywhere, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune.

So, thanks for coming on, Richard. I’m really glad to be talking to you. It’s been a while.

Dr. Williams:

Yes, it has. It’s good to be here.

Julie:

So today, we’re going to be talking about an issue that I think a lot of Americans don’t really know about. First of all, they don’t know about it, but they also don’t know how fraught this issue is, and that is the dietary guidelines. So these are the people, as I like to say, who tells you how to eat and what to eat and what to avoid. They’re the nannies of the nutrition world, at least at the federal government level. These guidelines were just updated in 2020. The people who actually decide these things is what’s called the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, it’s an independent advisory board. They’re made up of scientists and medical experts and they’re appointed by two federal agencies. They’re the ones who issue these guidelines, which are renewed every five years.

So, Richard, let’s get started here. The guidelines were just passed by Congress. I think they have to be ultimately passed by Congress, but maybe you could give us a little primer on the history of the dietary guidelines, what we’ve seen in the past and maybe a quick summary of what the latest guidelines say.

Dr. Williams:

Sure. I mean, the American government giving us advice on what to eat really goes all the way back to 1894, when the USDA’s Office of Experimental Station wrote the first dietary guidelines. And since then, a number of things have happened. But the big thing that happened was Bobby Kennedy went out into the United States and went to various areas around the United States and found that people were actually hungry, were starving in America. And that caused a huge stir. That went on for about 10 years until finally, the Senate took it up. And George McGovern had a Senate select committee group put together to study basically starvation in America, but they quickly changed to talk about diet-disease relationships. And this was primarily because of a Harvard nutritionist. His name was Mark Hegsted and he’s generally considered to be the father of the dietary guidelines committee.

He was responsible for the first recommendations that came out in 1980. There were four big recommendations. The first was to decrease dietary fat, that’s total fat, all kinds of fat, to less than 30% of calories. It was also to increase carbohydrates to between 55 and 60% of calories. He asked that Americans decrease dietary cholesterol and also decrease sugar and salt. Well, most of those recommendations have persisted until today. They’re still the same recommendations with several exceptions. The first is total dietary fat. We’ve now determined that dietary fat isn’t that important. It’s really the type of fat you consider, and even that, is problematical.

There’s some consideration now that we’re eating too many carbohydrates, but we’ve also said dietary cholesterol, as opposed to the cholesterol in your body, is not important. So there’s been a number of reversals over the years, but then it’s also the foods and this is what confuses most Americans. You go back in time and for a while, back in the eighties, eggs were considered to be horrible. They were a source of dietary cholesterol. The egg industry was just about destroyed over this. Now they’re considered to be a superfood.

Julie:

Yeah, Richard, I don’t mean to interrupt here, but I have to tell you that my father is so angry about that for roughly 20 or so years. I’ve written about this, about my poor father. My Dad loves breakfast and he loves omelets in particular. And when I told him that the dietary guidelines committee had said… and talk about the understatement of all time, cholesterol is no longer a nutrient of concern. And this sudden, I would say, the renaissance of the egg, the egg getting its reputation back, my Dad is still angry that he used to suffer through those egg white omelets, and all those products that were supposed to mimic eggs. I just have to give a shout out to my Dad. Because there really are, I mean, you said that it almost destroyed the egg industry. You had a lot of miserable people for years avoiding eggs. Eggs are so great, and they’re so cheap, and they’re so convenient and they’re so nutrient-dense that I just want to pause a little bit because if we’re talking about dietary guideline gaffes, I would say that’s just about the biggest one.

Dr. Williams:

Yeah, that one was huge. And there are so many other ones, nuts were the same way. They were considered terrible, now they’re considered power foods, superfoods. And then, of course, one of the big ones was, when they went after animal fats. And that’s not just the dietary guidelines, that’s also the consumer activists who said, “Oh, animal fats are bad,” then we got trans fatty acids, which were much, much worse. So yeah, it goes on, and these controversies are with us today, and there are reasons why. Even in the first 1980 committee, the Senate just said, “We don’t think you have the science behind this to make these recommendations.” That is true today as well.

Julie:

Well, this is the thing, this is where we are today. And again, just reaching back into history, I call myself, I say that I’m part of the SnackWell generation and I didn’t make that up. I don’t think I did, I think I’ve heard that before. In high school and even before that, and I mentioned my Dad not eating eggs, it was like trying to cut the fat, cut the fat. And so you saw that suddenly in the marketplace where there were SnackWell’s, which were these hideous, sorry, I shouldn’t be too mean, but I actually think they’re still sold. I don’t know for sure. And what you would do is, you would sit down, I can still remember sitting down with my roommates in college, and we would eat sleeves of these things, it was like Girl Scout cookies. They came in these sleeves and I’d eat like 15 SnackWell’s and not really thinking. I thought, “Oh, well, it’s a health food,” essentially because they were lower in fat. You were still getting calories. We were still getting a whole bunch of stuff you shouldn’t be eating.

So, I really love this subject because I feel like I have been a victim of bad information. And obviously, before that, I grew up with the pyramid where you had certain things on top and then the biggest category was carbohydrates. And now, how many people are on the keto diet trying to cut carbohydrates altogether. And frankly, I’m not here to… I’ve tried keto. I did lose a significant amount of weight on it. And I’m not trying to boost that, but I’m saying, it’s amazing, I’ve been alive for 40 some years and I’m a personal example, an actual real-world example of someone who it’s impacted. It’s impacted me and it’s impacted a lot of Americans. It’s impacted people worldwide. But I’d like to ask you what these 2020 guidelines, you mentioned the problems persist.

Julie:

I always feel like when the dietary guidelines come out, it’s like one of those fashion magazines where it’s like, “This is in this year and this is out this year.” So tell me, what the latest 2020 guidelines, what are the big ins and what are the big outs, or was there not much change at all?

Dr. Williams:

Well, certainly, going back to SnackWell’s, there were women waiting on trucks. They didn’t even want to wait until they got in the supermarket, they were so afraid they wouldn’t get them. And that is a problem. I think people are realizing, that what happened was the fact that Mark Hegsted and others recommended back in 1980 that you cut back fat and now it’s mostly focused on saturated fat, which was replaced by sugar. And I don’t know that it can be proved, but it might be a reason why 77% of Americans now are either obese or overweight and why we’ve had diabetes go through the roof. Almost half of the country now either has pre-diabetes or diabetes. So we can blame that, I think the dietary guidelines has to take some responsibility for that.

Now this one, I think the big thing that has come out of this is where, in 1980, they said that sugar should be less than 15% of calories, it’s now down to 6%. And I think most Americans are not doing that at all. I mean, they’re way, way above that. So I think that’s one of the big ones. Really, for me, the alcohol one was almost humorous that was so bad, but that’s another one. And other than that, I think they haven’t changed that much.

Julie:

Okay. Well, let’s talk a little bit about that alcohol recommendation. I actually wrote an op-ed on this. It was in Real Clear Science in October, or I’m sorry, Real Clear Health in October. And I talked about, there are 2020 recommendations actually really make, well, I shouldn’t even say, I shouldn’t qualify that, they make no distinction between a man and a woman. So tell me, I’m sure you know about it, and I’ll let you answer this, but tell me about the new guidance on alcohol consumption. This is part of the 2020 guidelines.

Dr. Williams:

Well, I mean, one problem is the process. A couple of people, what they do on the Dietary Guidelines Committee is, they break it up by particular subjects. And then they put several people on each subject to go back and do research. Well, in this case, it was four people. Two of them pretty much had a history of anti-alcohol activism, which is not what you want on the Dietary Guidelines Committee. You want people who are maybe knowledgeable, but at least indifferent. So they ended up saying that, actually for women, it was half a drink a day or men one drink, and they rounded it up for women so they could have a whole drink. Meaning if you have more than a drink, I guess, then you’re an alcoholic, I suppose, to these people. But as we talked about, look, there are so many problems with this.

Men obviously weigh a lot more on average than women, but in fact, men have wildly different weights themselves as do women. So it’s really based, one part of it is on weight and not only that, people’s tolerance is different even if you have the same weight. But a big thing, and this is a problem with all of the dietary guidelines, not just alcohol. Alcohol is just a bigger problem, is that when people report how much they eat and drink, they don’t tell the truth.

Julie:

They lie, right, right, right. Right.

Dr. Williams:

Well, they lie or they can’t remember. But for food, 60% of people don’t report eating enough food to stay alive. And so the researchers will just fill in the blanks and go, “Well, they must have eaten something else,” which means, and this is data that’s used for four out of five studies, which means all of these diet-disease studies are really bad. Now think about alcohol. If you lie about how much food you eat and you’re talking to a researcher and they ask you how much you drink a day, you’re going to lie a whole lot more about that. Nobody wants to say, “Well, you know, I went out and had five martinis last night.” They’re going to say, “One martini.” So all the studies on alcohol are going to basically be based on a much higher alcohol content than actually was consumed.

Julie:

Yeah. Yeah. And that’s part of the problem with these self-reported studies. Tell me a little bit about what is, I mean, you’re edging around it here, but you’re talking about nutrition studies, and I mean, that’s a really unreliable field, correct?

Dr. Williams:

Well, I go back to, I was in a meeting with the obesity working group and the commissioner at the time was Les Crawford. And we started talking about nutrition and he just stopped and looked at everybody and he said, “Nutrition, that’s what some people call non-science, but I just shortened it to nonsense.” And of course, the nutritionists were furious over that, but I think he was onto something.

Julie:

You’re right. I go to my doctor and I don’t want to talk. It’s funny. It’s like, I tend to be someone who wants to please people and I don’t want to tell my doctor that I had some Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups over the holiday, whatever. We can’t lock people in rooms, we’re not rats. I know there are some studies where people literally shut themselves in a room and they need to… but they can’t do that for four years. And so for these long-term studies, they rely on self-reporting and you’re talking about that, that self-reporting is just inherently unreliable.

Dr. Williams:

It pretty much gets down to junk science. You can’t control for all the confounders, the other things that people ate or they did, you simply don’t know. So a lot of what you get are correlational studies, meaning something seems to track with something else, but it may not have anything to do with whether or not it caused the problem. And there are so many studies, for example, this is one I find, this is not just nutrition epidemiology, but mostly. In the science field, if you find something doesn’t cause something, for example, if I came out and I said that potatoes do not cause problems with obesity, which is another issue, that’s called either a negative study, if I find that they actually cause you not to be obese or a null study. You can’t get those printed because journalists don’t want them. It doesn’t garner them any news.

And it doesn’t help the researchers either because they need positive studies to get funding and to get promotions. So if you have a bunch of studies and it says, “Well, I think this causes that,” but then there’s an equal number or more studies that say, “No, it doesn’t.” You’ll never hear about, “No it doesn’t.” So then you try to put all these studies together and you’re missing all these negative and null studies, which then leads us to this problem where you see scientists just disagreeing vehemently about nutrition. And it’s because a lot of it is, there’s a lot of data, a lot of studies, that is just missing. They don’t have them.

Julie:

Yes. And what’s so sad though is that these studies… you just mentioned how you can’t get those printed because they don’t care. But what does get printed is the one, and I wrote a blog a couple, I think it was in October, about this new study that comes out and says that you shouldn’t even sniff coffee if you’re pregnant. Well, it turns out that this guy is a note, he has a thing about caffeine. And he’s literally known as an anti-caffeine activist. So he publishes this study in this journal, and then a group, I thought this was wonderful. Something like 20 female medical professionals wrote a joint letter to the journal because it was reputable, it wasn’t one of these predatory journals, it was actually a reputable journal that printed this. And they wrote to the journal and said, “This should be retracted or you should be more cautious about the things that you publish.”

Because this is an anti-caffeine activist and he’s publishing things that are going to scare an already very vulnerable population. But meanwhile, and that’s all great, there was hardly any news coverage of those women writing that article or read that letter, but there were about a thousand headlines. The Daily Mail had a different headline for 10 days straight about how caffeine’s killing babies and women, pregnant women. That’s also a problem is the hunger for these scary stories, scary studies from the media, which whether or not it’s true, it does affect people. It does make people maybe change their habits, and not always for the better.

So, what is a better direction? What do you suggest? I know if nutrition studies aren’t reliable, if the entire field of nutrition that science, nutrition science, isn’t really reliable, what is a better direction?

Dr. Williams:

Well, so this is one of the things, this will be pretty much how my book will finish, talking about what are better directions. First of all, let me just start with the Dietary Guidelines Committee. These are people who are trying to give recommendations for every American. Believe it or not, there’s a move afoot now to get dietary recommendations for everyone in the world if you can imagine how silly that is. So I’m not sure that the Dietary Guidelines Committee is something that we need to go forward with. I think there’s a number of things happening in which are very, very exciting. And some of which I think probably makes people nervous. We are creating better foods through genetic engineering, not genetic modification, genetic engineering. We’re creating new foods. And I think a lot of people now have tried the Impossible Burger, but most people don’t realize that the technology that creates that, which is called precision fermentation, can create any food, any existing food.

In fact, it could create new foods that have never existed. So I think, these new foods out, we can manipulate them, they’ll be safe, the better for the environment, but we can actually create them in such a way that whatever the nutritional profile we desire ultimately, that’s what we’ll have. So this is all new. And I think it’s exciting for people. I think the other thing is, we can’t rely on people trying to enforce them to learn nutrition and to understand the ridiculously impossible food labels. So what we’re seeing now is, we’re seeing that people are developing new devices that are going to personalize nutrition for you, and it’s going to look at everything and basically put it all together. So if you think about what affects your health, besides what you eat, it’s your microbiome, it’s your health status, it’s the drugs that you take, the dietary supplements, how much you exercise, what your age is, what your sex, your stress level, your epigenetics, most importantly probably, is your preferences.

If you put all that together, and this is what a lot of people are trying to do, people aren’t going to have to read labels anymore, their smartwatch or whatever, is going to say, “Here’s what I suggest you eat for lunch. And here’s how much you should eat.” And that is going to change everything, I think. And that leads to where I think the future is, and it’s precision nutrition, meaning nutrition for you. So when you eat your family meal, maybe you’ll make it with a 3D printer, I don’t know. But it’s really about things that will work for you, for your weight and for your particular health conditions. And to me, this is very, very exciting news.

Julie:

It is very exciting news. And I have said for years, well, not for years, I’ve said it my whole life. I swear, the minute I could start talking, I started complaining about the carbs in things. How can they put a man on the moon and not remove carbs from pasta? I do not understand this. This is something that I will never understand. And I hope, and that is why I’m so excited about innovation in food because I do see a future where obesity and losing weight through sheer will, which for those that are listening, that have ever tried to lose weight, it is hard. It is not easy, and sometimes it’s nearly impossible because of what you mentioned, because of other issues. Your genetics, your body makeup, there are other things that impact those issues. And so I really am thrilled to hear about these innovations coming out. And I really look forward to reading your book. Do you have a title for your book yet?

Dr. Williams:

I don’t. I’ve tried several titles out and you know what, if there’s anybody listening, I can just tell you the general tenor of the book is about my history at FDA and how FDA makes decisions about food safety and nutrition, and how those decisions really haven’t been working. Most people know that we’re going in the wrong direction on nutrition. Very few people know that we’ve made no progress in the last 40 years on food safety. So I’m coming hopefully with some positive suggestions for how we can improve on that.

Julie:

Well, I do look forward to the book. Before I leave, I do want to ask you one more question. And this is about this new center. You are the Chairman of the Board, you’re the Board Chair of the Center for Trust in Science. And I’ve been following them, I’m really excited about this new center. Tell me a little bit about it.

Dr. Williams:

Sure. This is a new area for me, but as you know, one of the ways that we regulate compounds, other than regulation, is through court cases. And so there have been a number of court cases where the science is extremely weak. And I think, for me, probably the most current one, the one most people know about, is glyphosate, which is otherwise known as Roundup. And the EPA, the FDA, all sorts of federal agencies said, “This is not a carcinogen.” But then there was one organization IARC, who you know, is part of the World Health Organization said, “Well, we think it’s a probable carcinogen.” Well, they don’t look at how much people are exposed to. So that’s the problem.

The other problem is, in this country, we have 94 federal district courts. And so if you find one or two with juries that are sympathetic, you get a big payout. And eventually, companies say, “You know what? I can’t fight this. We’re just going to settle.” But I’m not here to say I know whether Roundup is or isn’t a carcinogen, I just know that something’s gone wrong if that’s the way we’re making the decision. And so what the Center for Truth in Science is, we are completely apolitical. We don’t care. But what we want to do is find a way to get the best possible science into the courtrooms. So that’s the goal.

Julie:

This is such an important issue. We follow this quite a bit, the talc issue, Johnson & Johnson settled recently as well. And you do have some sympathy for the… again, just like Bayer which bought Monsanto, which manufactures glyphosate, which again, is Roundup. It also settled, and you have some sympathy with these companies because they’re looking at insane billions and billions of dollars in payouts, again, based on dubious science. So you have some sympathy with them, but again, the trade-off is consumers who just, I mean, part of me says, “Fight, fight, fight, because you’ve got to stand up for your product, your safe product, for the consumers that have trusted you for so long.”

But again, they have to weigh this. It’s ultimately their business and it’s a business decision, but the person who loses in all of this is the consumer who says, “Oh, no, I’m afraid of talc,” or, “I’m afraid of…,” this. I mean, I have a kid in sports and we use talc all the time. And mothers have used talc on their babies for years and years or decades and generations. And so it’s really sad to see this type of thing. So I think this is excellent, I’m so glad to hear about the Center for Trust in Science, given the problems we have in science today. So I think that’s a great organization. I’m thrilled to hear you’re a part of it as well, Richard. The last question is, where can people find you?

Dr. Williams:

Well, I have a website, richardawilliams.com, that’s probably the easiest way. I’m also on LinkedIn and Twitter, but the website I think is a start. And hopefully, within the next month or two, I’ll be putting more information out about my book.

Julie:

Well, you’ll have to come back on when your book comes out. We actually have a book chat series where we interview authors of newly released books. So we’ll have to book you on that as our sort of Oprah’s favorite book club kind of thing. So we’ll have to book you on that when your book comes out.

Dr. Williams:

Well, that’ll be great. And at that point in time, I guess I can start to tell the stories about what actually happens inside FDA.

Julie:

Yes, you can, after you go into the witness protection program, of course. But yes, we look forward to that, that sinister insider look, I’m only kidding, it’s probably not that sinister. But we look forward to that.

Julie:

Thanks for coming on, Richard.

Dr. Williams:

Okay, Julie. Thank you.

Julie:

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