This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, July 10th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The federal government jumped into the world of dietary advice in the late 1970s.

Even at the time, those issuing the advice didn't know if it was sound.

We now know federal dietary guidelines have contributed to high levels of obesity, diabetes

and other health problems. Terence Keeley is author of the new Cato paper,

Why does the federal government issue damaging dietary guidelines?

It's available today at Cato.org.

What does Thomas Jefferson have to tell us about dietary guidelines?

That was sort of a surprising piece of your paper that you just put out.

Well, what he said in his notes on the state of Virginia in 1787, his exact words where

was the government to prescribe to us our diet, our bodies would be in such keeping as our souls are now. Now actually he didn't mean

that really is an attack on the idea that governments would give us dietary advice is so ridiculous and he was

using that in terms of another argument. What we now have is a situation however when governments

most certainly do give us dietary advice and it's gone as badly as Thomas

Jefferson had anticipated it would. All right so when did the government step in and say,

this is the kind of diet you ought to have?

I know, I mean, the 1964 Surgeon General's report

said, hey, dummy, stop smoking.

Yeah.

In those days, in 1964, in fact, until 1977,

the government was telling people what they should eat more of.

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