How Should Americans Eat? A Timeline of USDA Advice

At the turn of the 20th century, the most pressing dietary concern for American policymakers was malnourishment. Wilbur Atwater, a USDA chemist, issued the first federal dietary guidelines in 1894, based on his belief that “the best food is that which is both most healthful and cheapest.”

“Everything was based upon scarcity,” says Jahns. “How do you feed a family with nutritious food for a specific dollar amount?”

Atwater’s landmark study, called Food and Diet, included detailed tables listing the nutritional value of dozens of foods, their prices and how many calories each ingredient packed per pound. Other sections explored “dietary standards for men at muscular work” and even “food waste.”

The first person to categorize food into different “groups” was nutritionist Caroline Hunt, who worked with Atwater in the USDA’s Bureau of Home Economics. In her 1916 guide Food for Young Children, Hunt organized a child’s recommended diet into five food groups:

Over time, the USDA expanded and contracted the number of food groups as its nutritional recommendations evolved.

From the beginning, the USDA was given two responsibilities: 1) ensuring a reliable and healthy food supply and 2) supporting American farmers. That dual mandate took on a new urgency when the U.S. entered World War I.

"The government realized that a lot of America’s fighting-age men were undernourished,” says Jahns. At the same time, the war was disrupting agricultural production and export markets. “So the USDA started thinking, we’re going to help the farmers by getting more of their agricultural products to consumers, which will also improve the health of our fighting boys.”

The wartime Food Administration, led by Herbert Hoover, coordinated with the USDA to encourage changes in public eating habits.

That was the beginning of a close relationship (a “marriage,” Jahns calls it) between the USDA’s dietary recommendations and the American agricultural industry. It’s a relationship that would spark controversies in later decades.

In a time when many American homes still didn’t have a refrigerator—iceboxes were more common—the USDA published guides for food safety and storage. Home canning was popular, but foods needed to be processed correctly to avoid contamination with deadly pathogens like botulism. Milk and meat products should be kept “in the coldest section” of the icebox, the USDA advised.

When Atwater analyzed the nutritional value of different foods in the 1890s, he could only list quantities of protein, fat and carbohydrates. But by the 1930s, scientists discovered the benefits of nutrients like calcium and phosphorus for healthy bones and teeth, and Vitamin A for vision and organ function. New discoveries in nutritional science continued to inform the USDA’s dietary recommendations.

Learning from its experience during World War I, the U.S. government emphasized the importance of food and nutrition in winning World War II. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt convened the National Nutrition Conference for Defense, which developed the first recommended dietary allowances for healthy daily eating. Americans were also asked to plant victory gardens so more U.S. agricultural products could be shipped to troops overseas.

In 1943, the USDA introduced the “Basic Seven” food groups in a pamphlet called the National Wartime Nutritional Guide. By expanding the list of food groups to seven, the USDA sought to combat wartime vitamin deficiencies by including categories for “green and yellow vegetables” (high in vitamin A) and “oranges, tomatoes and grapefruit” (sources of vitamin C). After the war, the Basic Seven was incorporated into the USDA’s National Food Guide.

In the postwar era, the USDA tried to simplify its recommendations by reducing the number of food groups to four: milk, fruits and vegetables, meat and breads and cereals. Jahns notes that most other countries don’t have a separate food group for milk, but that the U.S. dairy industry fought to keep milk as its own recommended category.

In 1958, the USDA published Food for Fitness: A Daily Food Guide, which introduced the concept of “servings.” Under each food group, the pamphlet listed a recommended number of servings each day—two or more servings of meat, for example, or four or more servings of fruits and vegetables. The USDA didn’t provide any guidance about the size of a serving, however.

"The U.S. is kind of weird, because we don't use the metric system,” says Jahns. "In other places, they said, ‘Eat 500 grams of meat.’ Here in the U.S., we said, ‘Eat one serving of meat.’ Well, what's a serving? That's a question that continues to confuse consumers.”

In the 1970s, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota chaired a congressional committee exploring the scientific links between diet and disease. In 1977, the committee issued a report recommending that Americans increase their consumption of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and fish and decrease their consumption of meat, high-fat dairy, eggs, sugar and sodium.

“That was the first time that dietary guidance in America actually suggested limiting certain foods,” says Jahns, “and the industry really didn’t like it.”

Lobbyists for American meat, dairy and egg farmers pushed back hard against the McGovern report. One representative for the Cattlemen’s Association said the term “decrease” should be considered a “bad word.”

In the end, the wording of the recommendations was changed from “Decrease consumption of meat” to “Decrease consumption of animal fat and choose meats, poultry and fish, which will reduce saturated fat intake."

“What should you eat to stay healthy?” In 1980, a task force of scientists from the USDA and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) attempted to answer that question with a 10-page pamphlet called Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Knowing that the food industry would object to language suggesting that Americans “eat less” of anything, the dietary guidelines recommended that people “avoid too much” fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sugar and sodium. It was also the first USDA publication to mention alcohol, advising: “If you drink alcohol, do so in moderation.” Pregnant women were cautioned to “limit alcohol consumption to 2 ounces or less on a single day.”

The USDA and HHS have published new Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) every five years since 1980. Over the decades, the DGA evolved from consumer-facing pamphlets to deeply researched scientific documents for policymakers.

Today, these guidelines inform the types of food served in schools, federal prisons and covered by programs like SNAP food benefits.

While very few Americans are even aware of the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans, an entire generation was shaped by the Food Pyramid. First published in 1992, the Food Pyramid was displayed on cereal boxes and taught in school assemblies. It was the product of a yearslong effort at the USDA to create a simple graphic conveying a healthy, balanced diet.

“Millions of dollars went into researching this,” says Jahns. “The USDA experimented with all different kinds of icons and interviewed tons of people. They tried a bowl. They tried a shopping cart. They tried this weird diamond shape for a while. But what people liked the best was the Food Pyramid.”

Officially called the “Food Guide Pyramid,” the familiar graphic put bread, cereal, rice and pasta on the bottom of the pyramid with a recommended 6 to 11 servings a day. Fruits and vegetables were on the next level of the pyramid, followed by fewer servings of meat and dairy. Fats, oils and sweets formed the top of the pyramid with a note to “use sparingly.”

The Food Guide Pyramid was criticized by nutritionists for placing too much emphasis on refined carbohydrates. In 2005, it was replaced with MyPyramid, which flipped the graphic on its side and included a stick figure running up the pyramid to promote physical activity.

When the abstract-looking MyPyramid graphic failed to gain traction with consumers, the USDA replaced it in 2011 with MyPlate. As its name suggests, the MyPlate icon shows a dinner plate with different colored sections for fruits, vegetables, grains and protein. The grains and vegetables sections are larger than the others. There’s also a cup next to the plate labeled “dairy.”

MyPlate is supported by a USDA website and app where consumers can get personalized dietary recommendations that fit their budget.