Government's dietary advisors using research 'so off base as to be scientifically useless'

Seriously? What’s this about a federal committee sending out text messages to “scold” obese citizens? Baylen J. Linnekin, executive director of the Keep Food Legal Foundation, noted in a column last year that the federal government’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a rotating group of academics who meet every five years, was considering not only privacy invading text messages but also new food taxes and municipal food bans.

Linnekin has a new column today in which he interviews University of Alabama-Birmingham researcher Edward Archer, whose new article published in “Mayo Clinic Proceedings” argues that the DGAC’s research “is so off base as to be scientifically useless.”

Federal dietary guidelines “rest on fatally flawed assumptions about unusable data.” http://t.co/xQEx9YjUun

— Stephen Fleming (@StephenFleming) June 13, 2015

@StephenFleming Actually…can't the same be said for most Federal policies?

— Брюс Вебстер (@bfwebster) June 13, 2015

Archer explains why the DGAC continues to rely on so-called “memory-based dietary assessment methods,” which rely on anecdotal data, or “whatever the participant thinks (or would like the researcher to think) he or she ate over the past day, week, and in some cases the past decade.”

The federal government has massively increased spending on nutrition and obesity research over the past few decades, and now spends over $2 billion of taxpayer’s money per year. Unfortunately, the people that control that funding are the same researchers that use these anecdotal methods, train the next generation of researchers, and control the publication of scientific papers. As such, new methods and innovative research is stifled. The same researchers are getting funded to do the same research year after year after year.

Thanks goodness the first lady and her mother and daughters leave for Europe this week to lead a delegation through the United States’ pavilion at the Milan Expo 2015, entitled “American Food 2.0: United to Feed the Planet.” We’re anxious ourselves to learn just what “American Food 2.0” is and how the federal government intends to force it on the public.