The George S. McGovern Page
McGovern,
George Stanley
bio / US Congress
George Stanley McGovern was a Trustee of the American
Health
Foundation between March 1985 and March 1987.
McGovern was Director of the Food for Peace Council before he ran
for the Senate in 1962. President Kennedy appointed Florence Mahoney to
the Council in 1961; she held a reception to help McGovern's candidacy.
Other members of the Council included her old friends Clark Clifford,
Drew Pearson, and Mary
Lasker. "Dr. Joseph T. English, a former Peace
Corps psychiatrist newly appointed to work on the Johnson anti-poverty
program in the mid-1960s, had a memorable introduction to Mahoney's
close ties with the White House. Confronted with the task of getting
appropriations from Congress for a national network of health centers,
he asked a friend, 'How do you raise money for health care?' 'It's very
simple,' she responded, 'there's a woman in Washington named Florence
Mahoney who's raised funds with Mary Lasker for all the federal health
programs. The way you raise money is talk to Florence Mahoney.' English
promptly called her up and said he would like to accept a previously
proffered invitation to dinner... English 'appeared at her table,'
whose guests included Senator Walter 'Fritz' Mondale and George
McGovern, HEW Secretary John Gardner,
and presidential domestic counsel
Harry McPherson... I started talking and that began a friendship with
John Gardner that ended bureaucratic squabbling between HEW and OEO and
began unprecedented cooperation between them. We soon had $100 million
for neighborhood health centers. It started around Florence's dinner
table." And later, when continued appropriations were held up, Mahoney
phoned Lady Bird Johnson, who proceeded to make the poverty program one
of the five most important of Johnson's administration. (From: Noble
Conspirator, Florence S. Mahoney and the Rise of the National
Institutes of Health. By Judith Robinson. The Francis Press 2001.)
The Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs
From Part 3: Science by Committee In: Nutrition. The soft science
of dietary fat. By Gary Taubes. Science
2001 Mar 30;291(5513):2536-2545.
"Like the flourishing American affinity for alternative medicine, an
antifat movement evolved independently of science in the 1960s. It was
fed by distrust of the establishment--in this case, both the medical
establishment and the food industry--and by counterculture attacks on
excessive consumption, whether manifested in gas-guzzling cars or the
classic American cuisine of bacon and eggs and marbled steaks. And
while the data on fat and health remained ambiguous and the scientific
community polarized, the deadlock was broken not by any new science,
but by politicians. It was Senator George McGovern's bipartisan,
nonlegislative Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs--and, to
be precise, a handful of McGovern's staff members--that almost
single-handedly changed nutritional policy in this country and
initiated the process of turning the dietary fat hypothesis into
dogma." [Actually, it was establishment dogma from the very beginning,
which was falsely marketed to the public as "countercultural." And the
Lasker Lobby that controlled the establishment suppressed research on
infection for 30 years. See "How the Public was
Brainwashed About Heart Disease." -cast]
"McGovern's committee was founded in 1968 with a mandate to eradicate
malnutrition in America, and it instituted a series of landmark federal
food assistance programs. As the malnutrition work began to peter out
in the mid-1970s, however, the committee didn't disband. Rather, its
general counsel, Marshall Matz, and staff director, Alan Stone, both
young lawyers, decided that the committee would address
'overnutrition,' the dietary excesses of Americans. It was a 'casual
endeavor,' says Matz. 'We really were totally naïve, a bunch of
kids, who just thought, 'Hell, we should say something on this subject
before we go out of business.' ' McGovern and his fellow senators--all
middle-aged men worried about their girth and their health--signed on;
McGovern and his wife had both gone through diet-guru Nathan Pritikin's
very low fat diet and exercise program. McGovern quit the program
early, but Pritikin remained a major influence on his thinking.
"McGovern's committee listened to 2 days of testimony on diet and
disease in July 1976. Then resident wordsmith Nick Mottern, a former
labor reporter for The Providence Journal, was assigned the task of
researching and writing the first 'Dietary Goals for the United
States.' Mottern, who had no scientific background and no experience
writing about science, nutrition, or health, believed his Dietary Goals
would launch a 'revolution in diet and agriculture in this country.' He
avoided the scientific and medical controversy by relying almost
exclusively on Harvard School of Public Health nutritionist Mark
Hegsted for input on dietary fat. Hegsted had studied fat and
cholesterol metabolism in the early 1960s, and he believed
unconditionally in the benefits of restricting fat intake, although he
says he was aware that his was an extreme opinion. With Hegsted as his
muse, Mottern saw dietary fat as the nutritional equivalent of
cigarettes, and the food industry as akin to the tobacco industry in
its willingness to suppress scientific truth in the interests of
profits. To Mottern, those scientists who spoke out against fat were
those willing to take on the industry. 'It took a certain amount of
guts,' he says, 'to speak about this because of the financial interests
involved.'
"Mottern's report suggested that Americans cut their total fat intake
to 30% of the calories they consume and saturated fat intake to 10%, in
accord with AHA recommendations for men at high risk of heart disease.
The report acknowledged the existence of controversy but insisted
Americans had nothing to lose by following its advice. 'The question to
be asked is not why should we change our diet but why not?' wrote
Hegsted in the introduction. 'There are [no risks] that can be
identified and important benefits can be expected.' This was an
optimistic but still debatable position, and when Dietary Goals was
released in January 1977, 'all hell broke loose,' recalls Hegsted.
'Practically nobody was in favor of the McGovern recommendations. Damn
few people.'
"McGovern responded with three follow-up hearings, which aptly
foreshadowed the next 7 years of controversy. Among those testifying,
for instance, was NHLBI director Robert Levy,
who explained that no one knew if eating less fat or lowering blood
cholesterol levels would prevent heart attacks, which was why NHLBI was
spending $300 million to study the question. Levy's position was
awkward, he recalls, because 'the good senators came out with the
guidelines and then called us in to get advice.' He was joined by
prominent scientists, including Ahrens, who testified that advising
Americans to eat less fat on the strength of such marginal evidence was
equivalent to conducting a nutritional experiment with the American
public as subjects. Even the American Medical Association protested,
suggesting that the diet proposed by the guidelines raised the
'potential for harmful effects.' But as these scientists testified, so
did representatives from the dairy, egg, and cattle industries, who
also vigorously opposed the guidelines for obvious reasons. This
juxtaposition served to taint the scientific criticisms: Any scientists
arguing against the committee's guidelines appeared to be either
hopelessly behind the paradigm, which was Hegsted's view, or industry
apologists, which was Mottern's, if not both.
"Although the committee published a revised edition of the Dietary
Goals later in the year, the thrust of the recommendations remained
unchanged. It did give in to industry pressure by softening the
suggestion that Americans eat less meat. Mottern says he considered
even that a 'disservice to the public,' refused to do the revisions,
and quit the committee. (Mottern became a vegetarian while writing the
Dietary Goals and now runs a food co-op in Peekskill, New York.)
"The guidelines might have then died a quiet death when McGovern's
committee came to an end in late 1977 if two federal agencies had not
felt it imperative to respond. Although they took contradictory points
of view, one message--with media assistance--won out.
"The first was the USDA, where consumer-activist Carol Tucker Foreman had
recently been appointed an assistant secretary. Foreman believed it was
incumbent on USDA to turn McGovern's recommendations into official
policy, and, like Mottern, she was not deterred by the existence of
scientific controversy. 'Tell us what you know and tell us it's not the
final answer,' she would tell scientists. 'I have to eat and feed my
children three times a day, and I want you to tell me what your best
sense of the data is right now.'
"Of course, given the controversy, the 'best sense of the data' would
depend on which scientists were asked. The Food and Nutrition Board of
the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), which decides the Recommended
Dietary Allowances, would have been a natural choice, but NAS president
Philip Handler, an expert on metabolism, had told Foreman that
Mottern's Dietary Goals were 'nonsense.' Foreman then turned to
McGovern's staffers for advice and they recommended she hire Hegsted,
which she did. Hegsted, in turn, relied on a state-of-the-science
report published by an expert but very divergent committee of the
American Society for Clinical Nutrition. 'They were nowhere near
unanimous on anything,' says Hegsted, 'but the majority supported
something like the McGovern committee report.'
"The resulting document became the first edition of 'Using the Dietary
Guidelines for Americans.' Although it acknowledged the existence of
controversy and suggested that a single dietary recommendation might
not suit an entire diverse population, the advice to avoid fat and
saturated fat was, indeed, virtually identical to McGovern's Dietary
Goals.
"Three months later, the NAS Food and Nutrition Board released its own
guidelines: 'Toward Healthful Diets.' The board, consisting of a dozen
nutrition experts, concluded that the only reliable advice for healthy
Americans was to watch their weight; everything else, dietary fat
included, would take care of itself. The advice was not taken kindly,
however, at least not by the media. The first reports--'rather
incredulously,' said Handler at the time--criticized the NAS advice for
conflicting with the USDA's and McGovern's and thus somehow being
irresponsible. Follow-up reports suggested that the board members, in
the words of Jane Brody, who covered the story for The New York Times,
were 'all in the pocket of the industries being hurt.' To be precise,
the board chair and one of its members consulted for food industries,
and funding for the board itself came from industry donations. These
industry connections were leaked to the press from the USDA.
"Hegsted now defends the NAS board, although he didn't at the time, and
calls this kind of conflict of interest 'a hell of an issue.'
'Everybody used to complain that industry didn't do anything on
nutrition,' he told Science, 'yet anybody who got involved was
blackballed because their positions were presumably influenced by the
industry.' (In 1981, Hegsted returned to Harvard, where his research
was funded by Frito-Lay.) The press had mixed feelings, claiming that
the connections 'soiled' the academy's reputation 'for tendering
careful scientific advice' (The Washington Post), demonstrated that the
board's 'objectivity and aptitude are in doubt' (The New York Times),
or represented in the board's guidelines a 'blow against the food
faddists who hold the public in thrall' (Science). In any case, the NAS
board had been publicly discredited. Hegsted's Dietary Guidelines for
Americans became the official U.S. policy on dietary fat: Eat less fat.
Live longer.
Part
3: Science By Committee, Taubes / National Association of Science
Writers
Stenographic Transcript of Hearings Before the Select Committee on
Nutrition and Human Needs of the US Senate; Volume II, Diet Related to
Killer Diseases, July 28, 1976. Sen. George McGovern was the Chairman,
and witnesses included Dr. Gio Gori of the National Cancer Institute,
and Dr. Ernst L. Wynder of the American Health
Foundation.
Select
Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, 1976 / tobacco document
McGovern
Opening Statement, July 28, 1976 / tobacco document
"The connection between diet and health in the United States is
under scrutiny as never before both by government and private
groups.... A recent article in the Journal of the American Medical
Association by Dr. Lester Breslow of the
Center for Health Science,
University of California School of Public Health, reflects an important
trend in the issue. He calls for a 'positive strategy for the nation's
health'.... Last month the National Cancer Institute presented Senator
George McGovern's Nutrition Subcommittee five 'interim principles' for
reducing cancer risk through changes in eating and drinking habits...."
Breslow was on the Board of Scientific Consultants of the AHF circa
1971, and NCI Director Arthur Upton became a
Trustee of the AHF between
1984 and 1986. (Growing Attention to Diet-Cancer Link Spurs New Look At
Nutrition Policy," DECA Memorandum [Division of Environmental and
Consumer Affairs of Hill & Knowlton], Nov. 27, 1979).
DECA Memorandum,
1979 / tobacco document
"In 1976, President Gerald Ford named McGovern a United Nations
delegate to the General Assembly, and, in 1978, President Jimmy Carter
named him a United Nations delegate for the Special Session on
Disarmament.... he served as president of the Middle East Policy
Council from 1991 to 1998, when President Clinton appointed him
ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization in
Rome. In 2001 he was appointed the first United Nations global
ambassador on hunger." (George McGovern, Son of Wesleyan, Citizen of
the World. Dakota Wesleyan University.)
George McGovern bio
/
Dakota Wesleyan University
McGovern's editorials feigning opposition to health fascism are
merely an example of how Lasker Syndicate stooges and their media
accomplices frame the issue to their benefit (Whose Life Is It? By
George McGovern. The New York Times 1997 Aug. 14; and: The Wrong Smoke
Screen, by George McGovern and Norman E. Brinker. The Washington Times
1998 March 31). The health fascists are criminals, not nannies. They
are guilty of massive and systematic conspiracy, fraud, and
racketeering, and anyone who portrays them as a mere annoyance is
whitewashing their crimes.
Whose
Life Is It? 1997 / New York City CLASH
The Wrong Smoke
Screen, 1998 / Junkscience.com
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cast 04-09-06