The USDA released a new set of dietary guidelines this week and the updated guidelines were enough to put nutritionist Marion Nestle in “shock”:

I never would have believed they could pull this off.  The new
guidelines recognize that obesity is the number one public health
nutrition problem in America and actually give good advice about what to
do about it: eat less and eat better. For the first time, the
guidelines make it clear that eating less is as priority.

She did criticize the guidelines for talking about “food” when it
came to things you needed more of (such as vegetables) and “nutrients”
when it was time to talk about cutting back (less saturated fat instead
of less meat).

But to be honest, I don’t really want to talk about the dietary
guidelines. As important as they are — they are central to school lunch
menu creation, for example — they are just guidelines and don’t
exactly have the force of law.

In fact, two recent studies suggest the causes of the obesity
epidemic are so pervasive and so deeply intertwined with our advanced
industrialized way of life, that we’ll really need to “go long” if we’re
to have any hope of addressing it.

The first study out of Oxford University, which appeared in the journal
Economics & Human Biology, suggests that the root cause of obesity can be summed thusly: “It’s the economy, stupid.”