November 21, 2024
On government health recommendations...
Scintillating as that subheading is, government health recommendations are incredibly important. Anyone who doubts that can think back fewer than twenty years to the Food Pyramid, which wasn’t just ubiquitous but also misguided. It suggested adults consume six to eleven servings of “bread, cereal, rice, and pasta” a day. Eleven servings of bread was more than the maximum recommendations of fruits and vegetables combined. So was ten. Only if you limited yourself to nine servings of rice and pasta could your fruits and vegetables catch up. It was madness, and I say that as someone with no willpower and a fugue state inducing love of baked goods. But it was also the Department of Agriculture’s recommendation, so who was I the layman to argue? (To be fair, the Department did update the pyramid in 2005 with new, comically inadequate suggestions — 27% of an adult’s diet should be grains, 23% vegetables, 15% fruits, etc. — then abandoned the whole thing altogether for MyPlate in 2011. But for 19 years, we were told grains should make up the plurality of our diet.)
Now, does this mean the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services and the FDA and the whole of our federal government need rebuilding? It does not. Does it mean they need — and God help me, I hate this word — disruptors in leadership? Again, no. It means they need leaders in leadership. Women and men with a lot of vision who can stay on message and guide their agencies toward necessary, if incremental, change. Any distractions and baggage (i.e. bizarre COVID theories and sex diaries) threaten to derail that change.
And the stakes are high. As today’s link explains, the average American’s health is not great, nor is it getting better. That’s not government’s fault. But it’s not not government’s fault either. I won’t say I sign on to all of the author’s recommendations (she has no idea how butter wrecks my skin), but her overall point is well worth considering. Something needs fixing. Hopefully we get the leaders to fix it.
P.S. My thanks to a great friend — and great doctor — who shared today’s link with me.