Life is short. Try and enjoy it while you can.

1966:General Recommendations: National nutrition panels assumed that a nutritionally adequate diet would consist of roughly 45% to 50% of daily calories from carbohydrates.

The U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend carbohydrates make up 45% to 65% of your total daily calories (e.g., 900–1,300 calories on a 2,000-calorie diet). However, official guidelines now explicitly advise sourcing these from fiber-rich whole foods while strictly limiting refined grains, added sugars, and heavily processed packaged snacks

Mine is that there was a lot of bullshit in the old suggested amounts of food types in the old nutrition guides, this assigned the problems to fat, not sugar

By the late 1960s, UN agencies had identified a “protein gap,” and remarked on the nutritional differences among nations. However, in the early 1970s, nutrition experts realized that kwashiorkor patients consumed diets low in many important nutrients, and that protein deficiency was an oversimplified explanation of the causes of kwashiorkor and ill health in poor populations (Johnson, 2008). The “world protein gap” and “protein deficiency paradigm” thereby became the “great protein fiasco” (McLaren, 1974), and the emphasis on protein deficiency decreased in international discussions of nutrition (Semba, 2016: 79-88). Whereas previous studies have seen the protein debate as part of a scientific or medical discussion, in this article, the ongoing protein debate represented the transformation of developmental frameworks from a state to a market orientation, interacting with changing ecological ideas about nature, land, population, and society.5)

In 1966, the primary dietary advice to the public was the American Heart Association guidelines to restrict overall fat intake to 30% to 35% of total calories. Saturated fats were heavily targeted to make up no more than 10% of calories, with polyunsaturated fats making up an additional 10%

In 1996, major health organizations—such as the American Heart Association (AHA)—recommended that adults limit total fat intake to 30% or less of their total daily calories.

The updated 2026 U.S. Dietary Guidelines recommend that total fat intake should make up 20% to 35% of your total daily calories, but advise that saturated fat must be kept below 10% of total calories (about 20 grams per day on a 2,000-calorie diet)

In 1956, the U.S. National Research Council (NRC) recommended a daily dietary allowance of 70 grams of protein for a standard 70 kg (154 lb) adult male. Health authorities at the time encouraged an enthusiastic intake of protein-rich foods, heavily focusing on animal products to avoid deficiencies and support what was then believed to be an optimal diet

In 1976, the U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance (RDA) for protein was defined by the National Academy of Sciences' Food and Nutrition Board as 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day.

The Recommended Dietary Allowance of protein for a healthy adult with minimal physical activity is currently 0.8 g protein per kg body weight (BW) per day (2016)

The 2026 US Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend a daily protein intake of 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight.

You don't need direct causation to know that if coffee was taking years off people's lives, it would have shown up in the demographics data as a statistical anomaly.

Nutritional needs of humans haven't changed much since we became humans.

But those nutritionists who preached moderation and a balanced diet were considered stuck in old school,