This is the Cato Daily podcast for Wednesday, March 26, 2025. I'm Caleb Brown.

Late in Joe Biden's time as president, a small shift was made to how the feds do their dietary advice to Americans.

That seemingly small change governing recommendations for alcohol consumption highlights once again why the government needs to get out of handing out dietary guidance to Americans.

Reasons Eric Bame details his new cover story and reason.

He was joined by Cato's Jeff Singer, author of the new book, Your Body, Your Health Care.

We've had the food pyramid for how long, Eric?

We've had the food pyramid since the early 1990s.

It debuted, I believe, in 1992.

So, man, I'm a journalist.

I'm not great at math, but I think that's like 30 some years.

And Jeff, we've had dietary guidelines since the late 70s, early 80s.

Yeah, around 1980 or so, I think it was.

So, uh, Eric, if you don't mind, what was the nominal purpose?

I know that we might be skeptical of it, but what was the

named purpose of developing both dietary guidelines and then formulating it into a food pyramid?

Yeah, sure. So the dietary guidelines, the first, Jeff's right, the first edition was published in

1980.

It's published every five years now by the USDA and HHS.

They put it together jointly.

And the idea originally was to provide, you know, pretty simple was to provide some guidance to Americans on how to eat well. And in the 1980s, for the first time, really, there actually were government

dietary guidelines, less formalized versions that go back all the way, I believe, to like,

World War II and maybe even before that. But before that, the emphasis was on make sure you're

...