This was the first time that any government institution (as opposed to private groups like the AHA) had told Americans they could improve their health by eating less fat. In so doing, Dietary Goals sparked a chain reaction of dietary advice from government agencies and the press that reverberates still, and the document itself became gospel. It is hard to overstate its impact. Dietary Goals took a grab bag of ambiguous studies and speculation, acknowledged that the claims were scientifically contentious, and then officially bestowed on one interpretation the aura of established fact. “Premature or not,” as Jane Brody of the New York Times wrote in 1981, “the Dietary Goals are beginning to reshape the nutritional philosophy of America, if not yet the eating habits of most Americans.”

The document was the product of McGovern’s Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, a bipartisan nonlegislative committee that had been formed in 1968 with a mandate to wipe out malnutrition in America. Over the next five years, McGovern and his colleagues—among them, many of the most prominent politicians in the country, including Ted Kennedy, Charles Percy, Bob Dole, and Hubert Humphrey—instituted a series of landmark federal food-assistance programs. Buoyed by their success fighting malnutrition, the committee members turned to the link between diet and chronic disease.

The operative force at work, however, was the committee staff, composed of lawyers and ex-journalists. “We really were totally naïve,” said the staff director Marshall Matz, “a bunch of kids, who just thought, Hell, we should say something on this subject before we go out of business.”*13 McGovern had attended Nathan Pritikin’s four-week diet-and-exercise program at Pritikin’s Longevity Research Institute in Santa Barbara, California. He said that he lasted only a few days on Pritikin’s very low-fat diet, but that Pritikin’s philosophy, an extreme version of the AHA’s, had profoundly influenced his thinking.

McGovern’s staff were virtually unaware of the existence of any scientific controversy. They knew that the AHA advocated low-fat diets, and that the dairy, meat, and egg industries had been fighting back. Matz and his fellow staff members described their level of familiarity with the subject as that of interested laymen who read the newspapers. They believed that the relevant nutritional and social issues were simple and obvious. Moreover, they wanted to make a difference, none more so than Nick Mottern, who would draft the Dietary Goals almost single-handedly. A former labor reporter, Mottern was working as a researcher for a consumer-products newsletter in 1974 when he watched a television documentary about famine in Africa, decided to do something meaningful with his life, and was hired to fill a vacant writing job on McGovern’s committee.