The McGovern Report- Special Interest and The Suppression of Science

The battle for human lives and control and profit is real, but it is waged behind the scenes.

What most people are aware of is just propaganda. Doctors are good, they have to pledge a Hippocratic oath, there are there to heal you and help you, and of course one day medicine is going to deliver us from all diseases. In reality, it is completely opposite and sometimes completely in your face that it is pathetic.

For the majority of people that are not familiar with the history of nutritional science, this might come as a surprise that government itself has a network for suppressing the science and that individual men’s interest is not its primary goal. We can just remember the examples like “McGovern Report.”

In 1977 the “McGovern Report” came out. George McGovern was a former Democratic Senator from South Dakota who in 1972 suffered a presidential defeat to Richard Nixon, but he also was in the head of the committee that released the first Dietary Guidelines in the US. Before that, it was as it is now. Meat and sugar.

In 1977 most of the science you will find referenced in GoVeganWay articles was known to some extent. Even before that. Diseases of affluence like heart disease or cancer were beginning to skyrocket even at the beginning of the 20^th century in the U.S. and some others developed countries. Meat consumption went up because personal wealth went up and people started to spend more on food. This will happen everywhere where the standard of living goes up. For example in rural China and India people mostly live on a starch-based vegan diet dominated by rice just because of poverty. But when those people move to cities to work in some newly constructed factory they will have more money to spend on food and this is exactly what happened in the U.S.

As a consequence diseases of affluence skyrocketed. After WW2 nutrition as science had begun to investigate this in a more professional and scientific manner. The research had been done and it took a couple of decades but the scientific consensus had been made.

The consensus was that it is not just saturated animal fat as believed in the 1950s or it was not just cholesterol it was an unnatural animal product-dominated diet as a whole. That type of diet was different from the starch-based vegan diet people eat just a hundred years ago. Scientific consensus at that time was and this is in the 1970s that humans as a species are primates and not true anatomical omnivores. The consensus was that government-backed by all of the nutritional research should change its animal product-dominated food pyramid model and that Dietary Guidelines should be more in line with human evolution. The report was made but even that report had to be “watered down”, but still. The push for changing the accepted Dietary Guidelines was made and introduced to Congress.

It was the McGovern Report.

What was so evil about this report? It basically stated that we should eat more whole grains, more fruits, more vegetables, less meat, less dairy, at least less whole-fat dairy, sugar, and so on. It still was a form of compromise and did not advocate a fully vegan diet, but it was a step in a similar direction. These new guidelines on eating were expected to have similar health-changing effects as the 1964 Surgeon General’s Report on Smoking.

This is a quote from the report itself:

“There is a great deal of evidence, and it continues to accumulate, which strongly implicates and, in some instances, proves that the major causes of death and disability in the United States are related to the diet we eat. I (Dr. Hegsted of Harvard School of Public Health) include coronary artery disease, which accounts for nearly half the deaths in the United States, several of the most important forms of cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and obesity as well as other chronic diseases.”

Industry and a big chunk of senators called report big conspiracy theory and that McGovern Committee believes in depriving people of what they like.

This was from an official record of the committee hearing, and later the same story was pushed in mainstream media. If you don’t believe conspiracy theories and watch mainstream media here is one example of the mindset of industry people.

At that time The Salt institute warned that:

“If people eat healthier, we would have more old people to take care of“…, “simultaneously increasing the cost of care of old people which comes under the category of healthcare expenditures.”

“Rulers” people don’t like old ones because they do not produce and just suck off the resources that rulers want for themselves. It is better for them and the economy when people die at 60 just before pension, and it is even better when they spend their entire savings on heart surgery and chemotherapy before they die. It would not be cost-effective for “rulers” to have masses of people regularly living to 90. This planet in their mindset is already overpopulated.

The other industries also went ballistic, especially meat and egg.

They warn that:

“If Dietary Goals are mowed forward and promoted as a present norm the entire sectors of the food industry –meat, dairy, sugar, and others may be so severely damaged that when it is realized that Dietary Goals are ill-advised, as surely will be the discovery, production recovery may be out of reach.”

However, the food industry did not stop this report. This report was eventually stopped at the highest political level. The level that sees people as a resource.

The full report, pdf: (download)

References:

Passages selected from a book: Pokimica, Milos. Go Vegan? Review of Science Part 2. Kindle ed., Amazon, 2018.

1. “Diet Related to Killer Diseases, III : Hearings Before the Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs of the United States Senate, Ninety-fifth Congress, …” HathiTrust, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.a0000416073;view=1up;seq=1.
2. Oppenheimer GM, Benrubi ID. McGovern’s Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs versus the meat industry on the diet-heart question (1976-1977). Am J Public Health. 2014 Jan;104(1):59-69. doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2013.301464. Epub 2013 Nov 14. PMID: 24228658; PMCID: PMC3910043.