This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 15th, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Can governments give good nutrition advice or are they institutionally incapable of doing so?

Terence Keeley is a clinical biochemist and a visiting senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

He's also author of breakfast is a dangerous meal.

We spoke yesterday for a live Cato Connect program.

This is a portion of that discussion.

When did the government decide to first get into the business of issuing advice about what people eat.

And was that a surprising thing when that happened?

Well, it's been doing it for about a hundred years and for the

first 70 or so years it didn't say anything unusual or unacceptable. It said

to eat more fruit and to eat more protein it was perfectly good advice.

But in 1977 the government in the form of the Senate committee chairman George McGovern suddenly

changed all that and started telling people to eat less, particularly

to eat less fat.

And that was one level wasn't surprising because America was then going through this terrible epidemic of heart attacks around 1965, 1970 a third of all

Americans who were dying were dying of heart attacks.

It was a terrible and very worrying epidemic.

So clearly people had to address that, but the specific advice they gave of eating less fat

was terrible advice and actually only made the matter worse.

Let's start with the food plate turned food pyramid turned food plate.

I believe we have some of these images of the old food plate here.

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