Such claims are pure food populism by rich white people for rich white people. It's not science, it's instead not even right enough to be wrong.
Many outside science like to feel validated by evidence, but few really can be. Historians want to believe their hot take on Xerxes at the Battle of Thermopylae is based on data but we all know they are just writing the opposite of what someone else wrote and claiming some new interpretation. In the post-COVID-19 world, epidemiologists writing diet books have taken to claiming they are just as legitimate as infectious disease experts, while MDs claim to be epideniologists and lawyers wrap themselves in the flag of reason when claiming that the CDC should be given regulatory power over rental homes.
Dinner is one of the times when the 'follow the data' fetish is not serving us well, yet a number of dietitians and nutritionists have gotten reductionist about it, claiming 'the science' is on their side, when they use no science at all. They only use correlation derived from food diaries. Yet to sound like they have empirical evidence, they will invoke chemicals and nutrients.
Dinner is not the chemicals you put into your body, yet government nutritional guidelines have increasingly acted like that is what matters. I wrote about the National Institutes of Health 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and how out of touch with consumers it was. I noted you knew you were getting a government meeting when they spent an alarming amount of time congratulating and thanking each other on their fine work preparing for the meeting. And then talking about diversity over and over, when their actual recommendations are about as diverse as the Kentucky Derby. All in the name of "Health Equity", ironically while ignoring everyone without a six-figure income and a generous food budget.
Jamie Oliver said parents who packed lunches for school with "processed" foods were committing child abuse. He can be on a government food panel because no one in the actual food industry would ever hire him. Photo Andy Butterton/PA Archive via The Conversation
No one noted you can't legitimately make population-level recommendations by averaging demographics, that is the opposite of diversity, because it ignores cultural diets and seeks to force everyone into obeying homogenous chemical inputs chosen by committee. Humans don't live that way so all it does is lead to 95 percent of the public ignoring them, which is what happens right now. I started laughing when one panelist noted the Healthy Eating Index hasn't been updated since 2015 and claimed people want to know "When is the new one coming out?" No one wants to know that except the printer who has the GSA contract to produce stuff that will get ignored on the walls in public schools. Most don't even know the Healthy Eating Index exists. By the 1990s, when the food pyramid became clearly fixed by epidemiologists with an agenda against affordable food, consumers stopped paying attention to government food panels, even though journalists do there best to promote food scaremongering at every turn.
If you have been at a few of these, you will note they are pleased by the "continuity" of their members. That is instead part of the problem. They are actually happy they have excluded anyone who ever consulted for "industry" - in other words, they are happy the top people are not allowed on these panels. Of course there will be continuity when you create standards that only insiders can meet, and the way to be an insider is to be in the second tier so no company considers you an expert and pays you for advice.
Actual experts would criticize breezy definitions of ultra-processed food. Actual experts would caution them that no papers they are claiming are science show 'risk' between beverages and type 2 diabetes. Their "strong associations" - whatever that means, risk is high or low - actually do not show any risk, they only correlate that a population of people consumed sweet beverages and some of them got type 2 diabetes. Which means they only show hazard and all admit it. For dose, some epidemiology papers even use 5 orders of magnitude, so they consider 1 candy car the same as 10,000 to declare it a hazard. Risk they cannot determine so expert panelists should not claim they do.
They do it anyway. Because these panels are stuffed with people who self-select from those with common beliefs, they are fine seeing "statistical significance" when those with critical thinking would point out they are ignoring obesity in all cause mortality, despite it being literally the strongest link.
No, it has to be UPFs are magic, calories are wiped out, when every single science study has shown calories are all that matters.
They want to go after frappuccino and aspartame and claim that's a dietary guideline. It is not, it is just a way for government to become more estranged from the people they claim they need to save from Evil Corporations and Themselves.
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