Nina Teicholz Interview

NT: “The USDA food pyramid, now my plate graphic, that’s a 60% carbohydrate diet and that’s what’s been recommended to Americans who have dutifully increased their fruits and vegetables and carbohydrates and their grains over the last 30 years and just look a lot sicker for it.” … RW: “For the first time in American history the average and maximum heights of our population are on the decline.”NT: “Right. And you know when that started?”RB: “Just about the time we cracked all this stuff up.”NT: “It began pretty much just about when we began that first advice to stop eating meat, cheese, butter, dairy, eggs in 1961 and the US government on board with that in the late 1970s. The late 1970s is also when Americans stopped getting taller.” RW: “That was right at the time that we started intensifying our food production subsidizing — up until the 1970s virtually all of our dairy and meat was also primarily grass-fed because economically it didn’t make sense to grain feed this stuff. And you can only really make that [our current] system work with the subsidies, and as a spin off of that we also had all of this corn and wheat and rice and all these subsidize foods that would either go bad or you had to figure out some long shelflife kind of option for it, and this is where I think the story gets really interesting. … Potato chips and snack chips and SnackWells which also used to wear an American Heart Association endorsement because it was zero fat but almost pure sugar, we started producing en masse these hyperpalatable, long-shelflife, highly-refined carbohydrate foods, and then so long as there was a very low fat content it was kinda like “hey, you know, knock yourself out, you’re good to go.” And so with that, that’s where I see all of these stories starting to dovetail together, and also in thinking about how to undo this you kind of have to root it out of at the source. Like a lot of these issues with the bad food, high fructose corn syrup, and all the rest of that stuff, it looks comparatively cheap because it’s subsidized, so maybe we should get in and change farm subsidies and maybe gut some of that stuff.” … NT: “The changes that have come about in order for the entire country to get behind the low-fat diet is vast beyond imagining. … So much of our food production system is meant to meet those low fat targets. I mean there is a story that I tell in my book about how — how much the — you know, there’s so much bad press out there now about, you know, about how the evil big food industry — and, you know, I’m not saying they’re angels or anything, of course — but they are *slaves* to the dietary guidelines. Everybody is a slave to the US dietary guidelines.”