Progressive Era Origins of Calorie Counting and Dietary Guidelines
The Progressive Era (1897–1920) was as much about public health as economic reforms. Progressives believed science could reshape modern economies and the people in them. New antitrust laws could break up anticompetitive trusts and open the economy for smaller firms. The new Federal Reserve System (1913) could guide and stabilize banking, smoothing out the business booms and busts. And the Interstate Commerce Commission (1887) would protect farmers and small businesses from exploitation by the railroads. The reality of these state and federal interventions is far different from the stories many textbooks offer.
For a brief and critical overview of the Progressive Era, I recommend this Independent Review of Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era (2016)
A parallel Progressive Era project was public health, from passage of the Biologics Control Act (1902), to the Pure Food and Drugs Act (1906, becoming the Food and Drug Administration in 1930), plus the Public Health Service (1912, later becoming the National Institutes of Health “In 1930, the Ransdell Act changed the name of the Hygienic Laboratory to National Institute (singular) of Health (NIH)”).
Progressive Era public health projects focused on reducing societies’ disease burden from infectious diseases like cholera, smallpox, malaria, diphtheria, tuberculosis and others.
Public organizations and agencies were formed to employ newly discovered interventions against health threats. As scientific knowledge grew, public authorities expanded to take on new tasks, including sanitation, immunization, regulation, health education, and personal health care. (Chave, 1984; Fee, 1987) Source: 3. A History of the Public Health System in The Future of Public Health, 1988.)
A great many infectious diseases spread through contaminated water, so public health research and investments worked to improve sewage systems and reduce water pollution. However, the traditional step to kill microbes in water was with alcohol. Beer, wine, and hard liquor reduced disease from unclean water, but added a significant degree of intoxication which progressives and public health authorities opposed.
The core of reconstruction was built around the reformation of laws, retribution, and bettering the country. This gave way to a progressive movement throughout the early twentieth century. The progressive movement strongly advocated the prohibition of alcohol in order to improve the well-being of the country. … \
…The “religious” argument in favor of prohibition was strongly influenced by Protestant religious. Protestants did not believe in drinking alcohol in moderation “nor with legal restriction.”[1] The consumption of alcohol tore families apart and prevented men (primarily) from being good husbands and fathers. Often times, men would go to a saloon immediately after work, get drunk, and take out their stress on their families. In addition, Protestants were not entirely fond of capitalism in the United States. According to Walter Rauschenbusch, who was a popular Christian writer, capitalism was “unchristian because of selfishness, greed, and irresponsibility” and big businesses were taking advantage.[2] During the late nineteenth century, multiple studies came out about the relationship between alcohol and childhood disease, and the results were ugly. In a study pinning non-drinking parents against parents who drank, studies showed that eighty-two percent of the children of parents who drank were defective, leaving only about eighteen percent normal. [study source: James H. Timberlake. Prohibition and the Progressive Movement. 45] … (Source: Prohibition and Organized Crime, Washington State University.)
Progressive Pubic Health, from banning alcohol to counting calories
Again, the Progressive Era (1890-1920), popularized and passed much new economic legislation, from anti-trust laws to the federal income tax (1913) and Federal Reserve Bank (1913), and the Federal Trade Act (1914). The Progressive Era also expanded public health concerns and legislation, including the Pure Food and Drug Act (1906) and Prohibition (1920).
Cholera and Yellow Fever outbreaks in American cities led to improved plumbing, sewers, and trash collection. After cleaning up New Orleans, the Regenerators headed to Columbia to tackle disease and make overland routes safe for the U.S. mail service (capturing federal mail subsidies in the process).
These progressive era movements where led by articles and novels from muckrakers like Ida Tarbell (on Standard Oil), Upton Sinclair (The Jungle), Sinclair Lewis (Arrowsmith), and Edward Bellamy (Looking Backward).
Another Progressive Era adventure to reshape society and the people it was dieting:
At the turn of the twentieth-century—roughly 1890 to 1914—Americans across the nation were theorizing about diet; what diets were best, what diets could lead to individual and national degeneration, which diets could solidify white American superiority, and how the eating habits of individuals reflected the character of America more broadly.
HUNGRY FOR REASSURANCE: TURN-OF-THE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY CULTURAL ANXIETIES AND THE DIET DEBATE, 1890-1914 Erin R. Mulligan, 2016 (link to pdf of 2016 Masters Thesis)
The wealthy looked to reshape society (and themselves) by counting calories:
Although the scientific origins of the calorie date back to the 1820s, calorie counting for weight loss only became popular in the late 1910s and 1920s. Placing this development in the broader context of the Progressive Era, this article considers how calorie counting and the reconstitution of food as calories reflected the period's fixation with science, rationalization, and quantification. This article also situates calorie counting within shifting bodily ideals among white women in the 1920s, and the ways in which class and race informed the promotion of the slender body as the feminine ideal. …
[Dr. Lulu Hunt] Peters's best-known book, Diet and Health with Key to the Calories, sold two million copies and has been described as America's first best-selling diet guide. Footnote6 Peters's book was just the beginning. By 1929, the New York Times observed that,
“as a nation, Americans had almost become calory [sic] conscious.”Footnote7 Even some schoolchildren became familiar with calorie counting. …The Progressive Era Body Project: Calorie-Counting and “Disciplining the Stomach” in 1920s America (The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, 2018).
But like other progressive era economic enthusiasms, calorie counting doesn’t quite. Not for long-term weight loss, nor for improving health. My Goodman Institute brief Did the Government Make Us Fat? (2020) reviews the competing theories why in recent decades so many have gained so much weight: the energy balance theory (calorie counting) vs the carbohydrate-insulin model. Most overweight people are “carbohydrate intolerant.” Their body’s metabolic system can’t process the excess carbohydrates, which are promoted by public health authorities and the nutrition establishment. (following the misguided Food Pyramid, now Food Plate, with it’s high-carbohydrate, low fat diet recommendations).
Previous Normal Nutrition posts have cited scholars and research documenting the many ways federal nutrition and dietary policies are misguided (and see Nutrition Coalition pages). State and federal public health agencies advocate high-carbohydrate and low-fat foods: low in saturated fats and higher in (industrialized) polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs). Called vegetable oils by supporters and “industrial seed oils” by critics, PUFA are now blamed for a host of chronic health conditions, but still recommended by public health institutions as key to reducing saturated fats.
I’m reading and recommend Catherine Shanahan’s Dark Calories: How Vegetable Oils Destroy Our Health and How We Can Get It Back. Dr. Shanahan dives deep into nutritional biochemistry to explain why PUFAs are inflammatory and over time damage the natural energy metabolism of our fat cells, leading to difficulty maintaining stable blood glucose levels.
