Jordan Peterson is Wrong — Again. A Scientific Analysis Of Nutritional Guidelines

Peterson has good things to offer, especially regarding an intersection of neuropsychology and comparative mythology. In many ways, he is often mischaracterized. I’ve covered some analysis and criticism of his ideas twice on Medium, here and here.

Unfortunately, he does have a tendency to be overly confident about topics he knows little about, from philosophy to social sciences and more recently, nutrition. And this has gotten worse as his popularity increased, and he is seen as an overall cultural guru, increasingly divorced from his niche in psychology and religious studies.

Peterson’s Claim

This post, however, isn’t to attack Peterson, but rather to dissect one of his recent claims from his video ‘Wicked Globalists Are Causing Starvation and Poverty Under the Guise of Environmentalism’.

There were a lot of things covered, many of them wrong. But I will focus here on the aspect of nutritional guidelines causing the obesity epidemic. This is a very popular claim. Even more so because they are very often associated with the low-fat narrative of the late 20th century, now viewed with high suspicion.

Even for people without any nutritional knowledge, it seems everyday common sense that past eating guidelines were flawed and that people are getting more and more overweight. It's important to analyze this critically, however. Were eating guidelines truly flawed, and did they actually cause the obesity epidemic?

Eating Guidelines

First, let's clarify what such eating guidelines were. Very often this is implied to assume to eat little to no dietary fat while at the same time promoting the eating of carbohydrates, the latter of which is often equated with sugar.

Here are the most relevant pieces of the guidelines from a report of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture:

• Don't consume excess calories
• Increase complex carbohydrates, which they mean fruits, vegetables and whole-grains
• Reduce fat consumption from 40% to 30% of caloric intake
• Reduce saturated fat consumption to about 10% of caloric intake

There are some more recommendations which include both cholesterol and sodium, which indeed have fallen off date. But the most crucial aspects are quite reasonable.

Fat, in particular, is quite interesting because it's still close to current guidelines. The USDA recommends getting up to 35% of your calories from fat, and the American Heart Association recommends 5% of calories be from saturated fat.

Food Pyramid

The food pyramid also gets to be brought up in this discussion, and it was mentioned by Peterson. An often-forgotten fact is that the USDA food pyramid, which popularized the concept, was only created in 1992, long after obesity rates started to rise.

Peterson also mentioned the guidelines were influenced towards grains by lobbying efforts from the agriculture industry. Yet he nor almost anyone else, when talking about lobbying ever mentions that the publication of the food pyramid was paused from objections raised by meat and dairy lobbying groups. And the graphic design of the pyramid was modified to satisfy them (Nestle, 1993).

It’s very true that there are always financial incentives that distort science and policy, but it’s easy to forget that such incentives exist from many different sides.

High-carb diets

There were definitely some things that we got wrong about fat intake in the late 20th century, but people have the idea that everything was wrong, which is inaccurate. This leads to the belief that high-carb diets are to be avoided at all costs and that high-fat diets are the way to go. However, this was simply the pendulum going too far in the other direction.

There is nothing wrong with high-carb diets (Seidelmann, 2018; Yang, 2022). Uncovering this in more depth would make this article too long, but long story short, the general picture is that macro-nutrients are very overrated for both weight management and overall health. Out of all the variables to consider, this is very close to the bottom beyond extreme cases of fad diets where a single macro-nutrient is deprived, which tends to bring problems.

Following Guidelines

It's also worth considering that nutritional guidelines don't directly change people's eating habits. They have been heavily promoting eating more vegetables since forever, and yet people still barely eat them. According to Lee et al. (2022), only 10% of adults eat enough vegetables. Krebs-Smith et al. (2010) found 80-90% of people exceed the guidelines for empty calories. There have also been studies looking into the effect of the guidelines in fat intake specifically, and they didn't change very much (Austin, 2011)

It's hard to argue that the dietary guidelines cause anything when people don't follow them in the first place. Furthermore, this is usually mentioned about high carbohydrates, but it's quite clear that people's eating habits just suck.

But what if people actually followed the guidelines? Would they do any better? It would be nice to have a study on it, right? Well, there is. Reidlinger (2015) tested if dietary guidelines were indeed effective for CVD risk. And surprise surprise: they are. Their health improves, and they tend to lose weight.

Obesity Causes

None of this is surprising because we know exactly what causes obesity: excess energy intake. The macronutrient distribution is not relevant, as shown over and over again in research (Schwartz et al., 2017). Low-carb diets can work for weight loss. So can low-fat diets, and more or less everything else as long as it causes an energy deficit and people can adhere to the diet.

This does not mean that ending the obesity epidemic is easy. The factors that cause that excess obesity are complex, including sedentary lifestyles from modern jobs and transportation, hyper-palatable foods, cheap food prices, food convenience, mental health problems, and more. Trying to address these problems and being able to induce the needed behavioral changes for people to adhere to healthier habits is very difficult. But at the end of the day, it's still about calories, even if the internet and the world at large still want a macro-nutrient or food group scapegoat.

Nail in the Coffin

Many other lines of evidence go against this narrative of food guidelines causing obesity. For instance, when low-fat diets are implemented, people lose weight (Ebbeling, 2007). However, my favourite is regarding sugar intake. While carbohydrates in general, is usually the target, it's almost universally agreed that sugar, in specific, is the worse of all. If carbohydrates in general, aren't causing obesity, then at least sugar surely is. Right? Well, no. Here is how the levels of obesity and sugar intake have changed in recent years:

Conclusion

This isn't meant to say that high-fat diets are evil, nor that one should follow a high-carb diet. This is simply addressing the claim that dietary recommendations caused the obesity epidemic, which is factually wrong.

Addressing the obesity epidemic is incredibly difficult, but it's exponentially more difficult if we are trying to fix made-up causes.

References

Lee, S. H., Moore, L. V., Park, S., Harris, D. M., & Blanck, H. M. (2022). Adults Meeting Fruit and Vegetable Intake Recommendations - United States, 2019. MMWR. Morbidity and mortality weekly report, 71(1), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7101a1

Reidlinger, D. P., Darzi, J., Hall, W. L., Seed, P. T., Chowienczyk, P. J., Sanders, T. A., & Cardiovascular disease risk REduction Study (CRESSIDA) investigators (2015). How effective are current dietary guidelines for cardiovascular disease prevention in healthy middle-aged and older men and women? A randomized controlled trial. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 101(5), 922–930. https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.114.097352

Schwartz, M. W., Seeley, R. J., Zeltser, L. M., Drewnowski, A., Ravussin, E., Redman, L. M., & Leibel, R. L. (2017). Obesity Pathogenesis: An Endocrine Society Scientific Statement. Endocrine reviews, 38(4), 267–296. https://doi.org/10.1210/er.2017-00111

Austin, G. L., Ogden, L. G., & Hill, J. O. (2011). Trends in carbohydrate, fat, and protein intakes and association with energy intake in normal-weight, overweight, and obese individuals: 1971-2006. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 93(4), 836–843. https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.110.000141

Ebbeling, C. B., Leidig, M. M., Feldman, H. A., Lovesky, M. M., & Ludwig, D. S. (2007). Effects of a low-glycemic load vs low-fat diet in obese young adults: a randomized trial. JAMA, 297(19), 2092–2102. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.297.19.2092

Nestle M. (1993). Food lobbies, the food pyramid, and U.S. nutrition policy. International journal of health services : planning, administration, evaluation, 23(3), 483–496. https://doi.org/10.2190/32F2-2PFB-MEG7-8HPU

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Department of Agriculture. 2015 – 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. 8th Edition. December 2015. Available at https://health.gov/our-work/food-nutrition/previous-dietary-guidelines/2015.

Yang, Q., Lang, X., Li, W., & Liang, Y. (2022). The effects of low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets vs. low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets on weight, blood pressure, serum liquids and blood glucose: a systematic review and meta-analysis. European journal of clinical nutrition, 76(1), 16–27. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-021-00927-0

Seidelmann, S. B., Claggett, B., Cheng, S., Henglin, M., Shah, A., Steffen, L. M., Folsom, A. R., Rimm, E. B., Willett, W. C., & Solomon, S. D. (2018). Dietary carbohydrate intake and mortality: a prospective cohort study and meta-analysis. The Lancet. Public health, 3(9), e419–e428. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(18)30135-X