Fat Free
Being assigned to a bomber crew during World War Two was basically a death sentence. To volunteer for one, meant you were either incredibly brave, or incredibly stupid. A nightly bombing raid into Nazi occupied Europe meant navigating the complex and deadly array of Nazi anti-aircraft weapons, outrunning Messerschmidt fighters, dropping your payload, and repeating that process on your way home. When a bombing crew took off on any given night, they had just a 55.6% chance of returning home.
George Mcgovern was either crazy, or stupid. He volunteered for the Army Air Corp upon the US entry into the war and spent 4 years flying in a B-14 Liberator. George Mcgovern was also incredibly lucky. During his time in action, he flew 35 missions. The odds of him pulling that off are just over one in a billion.
George made the most of his lucky chance at life. After attending school and earning a PHD in history he won election to the US house of Representatives in 1956 and later the US Senate in 1962. He became one of the pioneers of modern American liberalism and was known for his outspoken opposition the US involvement in the Vietnam War.
He also became known for his presidential run in 1972. What began as a grassroots campaign eventually picked up enough steam to land him the Democratic nomination. His campaign also split the democratic party in two and resulted in one of the most lopsided electoral defeats in US history.
His most lasting and notorious accomplishment in office came in the form of what is now referred to as the McGovern Report. While you may recognize him in name only, if you were born in the 80’s or 90’s George Mcgovern had a bigger impact on your life than Barrack Obama and Donald Trump combined.
In the 60’s and 70’s eight sitting Senators died in office of heart disease. When you have coworkers die prematurely, it serves as something of a wakeup call. George McGovern woke up. Having long been interested in agriculture since his days in war torn Italy, he had a keen interest in food and nutrition, and this interest led him to call a hearing during the summer of 1976.
To assist in his hearing, he called upon the expertise of Nathan Pritikin, a longevity guru who believed you could reverse heart disease with diet changes. To back up the claims, he called as witness a Harvard University professor who pointed the finger of blame at one culprit. Fats.
Once fats were identified as the villain of American diets, the thinking quickly became that any way Americans could get fat out of their diets would be a good thing. While the full McGovern report identifies fruits, vegetables, and complex carbohydrates as optimum replacements for dietary fat, the end result looked much different.
Rather than properly balancing their diets with complex carbs, Americans, and the corporations that fed them, simply swapped milk, cheese, and fatty meet with bread, rice, and potatoes. Since removing fat also has the adverse effect of removing most of the flavor from food, those same conglomerates looked for a way to make their food taste good again. In no time at all a fat free replacement was found. Sugar. But sugar can be a bit expensive, so not long after that, attention was quickly turned to our modern friend, high fructose corn syrup.
The fat free craze that began with the McGovern report boomed to new levels throughout the 80’s and 90’s. Food manufacturers rushed to market with fat free, high sugar alternatives. Restaurant chains pumped out alternatives like the Salad McShaker. Burgers and fries became the enemy, while Subway rapidly became the common restaurant in the world. Americans stripped every ounce of fat they could from their diets. Yet somehow… we got fatter.
Mary Flynn, a professor of medicine at Brown University sums it up best. “There have been a number of studies done, and there’s been no benefit for low-fat diets to better weight loss, and there’s no benefit for low-fat diets to lead to less disease.”
The tragedy of the whole thing is that it took us over 20 years as a country to wake up. Until the mid 2000’s classrooms across America will still proudly displaying food pyramids. Years and years of data kept piling up suggesting the low-fat diet wasn’t doing us any good, but we did nothing about it. The premise made sense. Eat less fat, and you’ll be healthier. But the result did not validate the hypothesis.
My years as a financial advisor have taught me a lot about how people treat money. One of the most important things I learned, is that everybody treats their money differently, and there is no one right way to do it. The key to success, I have found, is learning what methods of saving, spending, and investing work for you. The way you learn that, is by trying out different methods. But let the low-fat craze be a lesson to you. You don’t need to wait 20 years to decide if your methods are working.