Protein, Pyramids, and Politics: The Forgotten Stories and Controversial Science Behind Government Dietary Advice

ICYMI, our old friend the food pyramid has been flipped on its head. The Trump administration recently issued new dietary guidelines that it says will "revolutionize our nation's food culture." It's a bold claim—but since when has the government been in the business of telling us what to eat in the first place? How does it know how much of each nutrient will keep us healthy, and why are all the different forms of this advice—the Recommended Daily Allowances or RDAs, those Daily Values on food packaging nutrition labels, and the ever-shifting food pyramid—so confusing, and even contradictory? This episode, we're going back to the beginning to make sense of it all, with some help from pioneering women scientists, horses in obstacle courses, and, of course, Dick Van Dyke. Grab your climbing gear and join us to scale the food pyramid, wade through the swamp of alphabet soup acronyms, and, finally, figure out what this all has to do with what ends up on your plate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can listen to Protein, Pyramids, and Politics: The Forgotten Stories and Controversial Science Behind Government Dietary Advice online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Protein, Pyramids, and Politics: The Forgotten Stories and Controversial Science Behind Government Dietary Advice is an episode from Gastropod by Cynthia Graber and Nicola Twilley.

This episode is 55:00 long.

This episode was published on Apr 7, 2026.

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