Basically, before the 1990s, when pregnant women were shamed into believing if they had a glass of wine their child would have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (but only US babies - European pregnant women are fine without Puritan mullahs) and that they needed to stay home and breast feed for two years and then only feed their infant USDA Organic, Non-GMO, Shaman-Blessed bland purees of 'nutritious' vegetables.
Well, even those are now considered "ultra-processed" foods by the new generation of epidemiologists who need to promote their narratives about Miracle Foods, Wellness. and Food Is Medicine books. It never ends, unless wealthy elites and the journalists they read say it should end. Enter The New Yorker.
Do you believe in magic? Then you believe BPA, with 1/20,000th the estrogen-binding of the natural estrogen in women, can harm infants. This was just one of many nonsensical anti-science things activists successfully promoted using corporate journalists who masked it as 'anti-corporate not anti-science.'
There was no science behind any of those food claims, there was only epidemiology. EXPLORATORY means it is not science, but when journalists controlled public information, and their editors had a mandate to shock the public into viewing their advertising delivery systems, ridiculous epidemiology claims like that pickle juice and aloe vera and weedkillers were "linked to" cancer became the norm.
It always had a subtext of Mommy Shaming. Women who couldn't breast feed or who went back to work or simply did not want to for a whole year were hit with glib commentary about how their kids would have lower IQs. Because the claims were only epidemiology, the perfect became the enemy of the good, and food choices became more narrow. When President Biden wrecked the American baby formula industry by attacking a manufacturing mosquito issue with a government machine gun, parents suddenly wondered if government-funded statistics fetishists in universities like Columbia and Harvard and in agencies like the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences were not using food surveys to just promote an agenda.
It wasn't just NIEHS inside government, USDA nutrition guidelines stopped being guidelines and became merely aspirational. The guidelines are so out of sync with the wealth and behavior of the public that only 3% of Americans are obsessive enough to obey. Then we got vegetarian lunch mandates for poor school children.
All using no science at all. None.
Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker says the real origin is not the 1970s, or the 1990s, or even the truly bizarre 2010s world of infant feeding, but rather pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt's 1894 “The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses” - he was to bland baby food what Doctor Spock was to making sure Baby Boomers needed mental health therapy later in life.
So why are nutrition influencers still peddling it? In 1897 progressive journalists claimed that too many books were making children intellectually lazy. A generation later journalists claimed radio was ruining American minds - and then those kids beat progressive eugenicists and won World War II. in 2000 social authoritations claimed vaccines caused autism and GMOs caused cancer.
It's easy to understand why Whole Foods shoppers believe 1897 was better, Roundup didn't exist and white people ruled society, but there is no reason others with any critical thinking still fall for such epidemiology claims. They are not science. They are not even good statistics. They are just lazy abuse of food surveys, and have been that way for 40 years.
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