The New Prohibitionists

ANTI-ALCOHOL ACTIVISTS ARE IGNORING EVIDENCE AND HIJACKING FEDERAL DIETARY GUIDELINES.

- ERIC BOEHM

THE SAME FEDERAL guidelines that once told Americans to eat 11 servings of carbs every day might soon advise against consuming any alcohol.

If so, the new recommendation should be taken just as seriously as the old one.

Those new federal dietary guidelines, set to be published later this year, could be the culmination of a yearslong effort by anti-alcohol activists and public health officials. To get this far, they’ve worked to shut out competing points of view and promulgate an official opinion that breaks with the prevailing scientific consensus about alcohol.

Whether that effort succeeds or fails, and whether Americans take the new advice seriously or ignore it while pouring another round, the attempt to make America dry again illustrates what today’s public health leaders value—and what they don’t.

THE PYRAMID

THE FEDERAL DIETARY guidelines have been published every five years since 1980, but the thing you’re almost certainly picturing in your head right now is from the 1990 edition: A black triangle composed of six building blocks containing brightly colored edibles. Those images represented the proportions in which federal wise men recommended we consume those foods.

Yes, the “food pyramid.”

As government-backed public health marketing goes, the food pyramid was genius. For kids growing up in the 1990s, like me, it was a ubiquitous reminder to eat healthy—or what the federal government then mistakenly believed was healthy—plastered on school cafeteria walls and the backs of cereal boxes. The pyramid was based on recommendations from a World Health Organization (WHO) study group originally published in the late 1980s. Soon after, it was adopted, in a slightly modified version, by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which collaborate on the dietary guidelines.

It was also quite inaccurate.