"The history of nutrition science in the US suggests that the Make America Healthy Again movement would make more sense without the ‘A.’"

In the early years of the 20th century, American doctors recommended three heavy meals a day, laden with meat — steaks, roasts, bacon and ham. ... experts were still concerned with malnutrition and thought it was safest to eat a high-protein, meat-intensive diet.

Given all these uncertainties, and the long history of accidental nutritional misdirection, the MAHA movement is right to be skeptical of mainstream nutritional advice — but not because science isn’t progressing. Scientists discovered safe and effective vaccines that have vastly improved our health. Scientists have allowed us to almost eliminate vitamin deficiencies. Americans are healthier today than they’ve been since the country was founded, even if there’s plenty of room for improvement. Science is not broken; it’s just slow, subject to temporary setbacks and often abused by politicians and advertisers. Nutrition is complex, personal and profitable — a perfect combination for misinformation and mistrust. It’s reasonable to want to remain vigilant. But our collective quest to be healthy is a matter of pressing forward, not romanticizing the past.

...But the influencers of the day took a contrarian view: They advocated lighter eating or vegetarianism, sometimes flaunting their own physical fitness to bolster their case.

there is no past era in which we were paragons of health, no Eden to which we can return. A journey into history shows that public-health officials have long scared people about malnutrition, overnutrition, fat, cholesterol, germs, spices and most new foods introduced by immigrants — often claiming to follow the science.

Under all the fads and waves of fear, science has continued to progress toward a better understanding of the human body and the way food affects our health. But progress has taken some wrong turns, and food companies have repeatedly latched onto weak or distorted scientific evidence to influence consumers.

"History shows nutrition experts have steered us wrong before."

Among the misguided convictions: The experts thought spicy Mexican food caused alcoholism, criminal behavior and revolutionary tendencies.

Corn flakes and the many cereals that followed got an even bigger health halo in the 1950s thanks to a health scare over fat that is still playing out between MAHA contrarians and the mainstream.

This discovery turned the American attitude toward diet upside down. “Beef was transformed from the pride of the American table into a one-way ticket to the cardiac ward,” Levenstein writes. Anything with cheese, butter or cream was seen as a heart attack on a plate

It’s not obvious why the government and the public latched onto saturated fat as the prime suspect, considering it had been a major part of the human diet for thousands of years.

By the 1990s, evidence was growing that public health leaders had made a terrible mistake. Margarine and Crisco contain a form of fat, called trans fat, that differs from what we get from natural sources.

Saving all those children has turned out to be a much easier task than reforming our diet to prevent chronic disease. The causes of those childhood deaths were more clearly understood; by contrast, scientists are still struggling to understand the root causes of heart disease or why its prevalence rose so steeply between 1900 and 1950.

In sum, a worthy read