Food for Thought
How dietary guidelines reveal actuarial lessons in data, risk and communication
August 2026At the start of the 20th century, American novelist and social reformer Upton Sinclair wrote about child labor and slaughterhouses, and American industrialist Henry Ford developed his assembly lines. Against this backdrop of industry and social concern, a few individuals began laying the groundwork for shaping government policy on what we eat.
The first individual was Edward Atkinson, who used his business and fire-insurance experience, including his work with the Boston Manufacturers’ Mutual Fire Insurance Company and fire-prevention/“slow-burning construction” methods, to help develop the “Aladdin Oven,” a slow-cooking device designed to reduce fuel and food costs.
His contemporary, Wilbur Olin Atwater, an agricultural chemist and pioneer in measuring food energy, helped develop the Atwater-Rosa respiration calorimeter. Atwater was named special agent in charge of nutrition investigations for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), after Atkinson recommended food-laboratory work to Secretary of Agriculture J. Sterling Morton and urged that Atwater be involved. Following his appointment, there was an uptick in federally funded research on food composition, food consumption and human nutrition.
While the nutritional angle was undergoing examination, food safety fell to a different set of securitizing examiners. Harvey Washington Wiley served as Chief Chemist of the USDA’s Bureau of Chemistry. He was concerned about food adulteration and the use of preservatives such as borax, salicylic acid, sodium benzoate, copper sulfate, saccharin, and formaldehyde in foods like meat and milk. Beginning in 1902, Wiley organized human-subject experiments with young male volunteers (soon nicknamed the “Poison Squad”) to study the health effects of these additives. Wiley’s research and advocacy helped build public and political support for the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, which prohibited adulterated or misbranded foods and drugs in interstate commerce.
The Pure Food and Drugs Act faced opposition from industrial food producers. Wiley found important allies among women reformers and consumer advocates. Alice Lakey, a suffragist, insurance advocate, and pure-food activist, used her connections with women’s clubs and the National Consumers League to mobilize public support, including campaigns around food and milk purity. Cookbook author Fannie Farmer also became associated with the pure-food movement, lending cultural authority to concerns about adulterated foods and chemical preservatives.
Dietary and food-safety policies went through several iterations as Americans went through the World Wars and the Great Depression, then catapulted into the boom of the ’50s with the rise of fast food and TV dinners. The general trend of the guidance and recommendations fluctuated from focusing on malnutrition to mitigating obesity and disease.
Fast-forward to January 7, 2026: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and USDA release the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030, which serve as a foundation for federal nutrition policy and programs for the next five years. One notable visual change was an inverted food pyramid, replacing the MyPlate-style presentation used in the 2020–2025 guide.
Curious about the rationale behind the change, I started digging into the origins and development of the Dietary Guidelines and found several aspects that may feel familiar to practitioners of actuarial science.
IT STARTS WITH DATA
Data was fundamental even in the earliest days of federal nutrition research and dietary guidance in the U.S. In the 1890s, scientists such as Atwater studied specific measurements about the composition and energy value of food. Atwater’s work with respiration and bomb calorimeters helped establish methods for measuring food energy and human metabolism. His report, “Principles of Nutrition and Nutritive Value of Food,” included tables and charts on food composition, dietary standards for people in different circumstances, and economic comparisons showing the nutrients and energy obtainable for 10 cents. Its concluding, data-informed remarks state: “The ideal diet is that combination of foods which, while imposing the least burden on the body, supplies it with exactly sufficient material to meet its wants.”
Safety data was lacking for Wiley, whose primary concern was to address the presence of additives in food products. His experiments with the “Poison Squad” involved having volunteers consume controlled doses of additives such as borax and formaldehyde to assess their effects on digestion and health. Through this effort, baseline tolerances were discovered, and standards started to emerge.
In the U.S., following Atwater’s work, scientific inquiry continued to grow. According to the USDA, the agricultural appropriations bill of 1894 included $10,000 for food investigations. In 1992, federal support for all USDA human nutrition research totaled about $82 million. The Nutrition Evidence Systematic Review continues to look at dietary patterns. In 2022, the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health was held, with the stated goal of ending hunger in America and increasing healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases. A detailed scientific discussion of the latest guidelines is included in documents outlining the scientific foundation of the recommendations.
In addition to the composition of food, its effect on population health is a key data point that has influence on nutrition policy. There is a long history of linking food to human health. Ancient Chinese and Ayurvedic traditions connected diet, balance and healing; Egyptian medical papyri recorded numerous food-, plant- and mineral-based remedies for ailments; and Hippocratic medicine emphasized regimen, especially diet, exercise, environment, and habits, as central to maintaining health and treating disease. In our modern world, food can affect health in many ways.
First, we need food to survive. Not getting enough calories can lead to health problems. We also need a variety of nutrients. Early efforts focused on understanding minimum requirements for calories, vitamins and minerals.
Second, outbreaks of foodborne illness tend to capture the government’s and the public’s attention. Canned meat botulism outbreaks in the early 1900s, highlighted in Sinclair’s book “The Jungle,” gave rise to legislation on meatpacking. A typhoid outbreak during the Spanish-American War heightened concern about sanitation. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) at the time, some diseases, such as typhoid fever, could be prevented or reduced through improved nutrition and food-handling practices. Other outbreaks led to increased safety standards (for poultry, eggs, produce, etc.) and recalls of contaminated products. Today, monitoring is done through FoodNet, a surveillance system that tracks occurrences of foodborne diseases.
Beyond accumulating knowledge on food’s influence on health, I believe another important dimension of food policy is understanding what people eat. I have written in the past about the challenges and uncertainty involved in studying dietary habits. For example, purchased food does not always translate into consumed food. Also, a widely used U.S. dietary intake dataset is NHANES/What We Eat in America, which relies on self-reported 24-hour dietary recalls.
Nevertheless, this data has been used to help develop the Healthy Eating Index (HEI), which attempts to map Americans’ dietary experience to the Dietary Guidelines. According to the USDA, an ideal overall HEI score of 100 indicates that the reported foods align with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. In 2020, researchers tabulated the following scores:
Table 1: Healthy Eating Index (HEI) scores, 2020
| Ages 2+ Years | Ages 2–18 Years | Ages 19–59 Years | Ages 60+ Years |
| 58 | 54 | 57 | 61 |
These scores suggest that, across age groups, reported dietary patterns remained well below full alignment with the Dietary Guidelines, leaving substantial room for improvement.
There is a large universe of food-related health data, from consumption patterns to caloric content. In my own experience looking into a lot of these topics, there are often nuances, issues around data quality and completeness, potential for bias and other things that would fall under the Actuarial Standard of Practice for Data Quality (ASOP 23). This suggests that a data-based decision is stronger when paired with an explicit discussion of the data’s limitations.
MONITORING OUTCOMES AND ADAPTING TO CHANGE
In actuarial practice, the continual monitoring of experience informs assumptions on current and future business. Some of the “actual to expected” drift is organic, as assumptions are estimates, and there may be some randomness in observed outcomes. However, other external factors may create temporary or permanent shifts in the trajectory of an outcome. Think of the mortality conversations that surrounded the HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 outbreaks.
In the quest to develop dietary guidelines, I want to point out a few external influences that may have shifted the policies’ focus and goals.
Outside of these paradigm-shifting events, I’ve witnessed a steady stream of scientific discoveries and changes in human habits and preferences. This helps explain why periodic review has become part of the policy process.
The inaugural edition of “Dietary Guidelines for Americans” came out in 1980, as a follow-up to recommendations from the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs led by Senator George McGovern. This created a stir of controversy and pushback from food industry groups and the medical community. In 1983, an advisory committee was formed, which still exists today, and the 1985 edition of the report included the suggestion to review the Guidelines for scientific accuracy and appropriateness on five- to 10-year cycles. This has been the case ever since, as evidenced by the timeline below, adapted from the DHHS and the USDA.
Timeline: Developments with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans
Source: Author
Let’s take a look at the 1990 introduction of nutrition monitoring. This was an extensive effort covering dietary, nutritional, and nutrition-related health status of Americans, the relationship between diet and health, and the factors that influence dietary and nutritional status.
Other government agencies provide data on various aspects of health:
Just as the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury monitor inflation, debt ratios, and unemployment to inform fiscal and monetary policies, the FDA’s use of relevant experience shapes dietary guidance. This is both reactive and considers current and projected events that could affect the trajectory of health outcomes.
PRESCRIPTIONS VS. PRINCIPLES AND STRATIFICATIONS
In some of the iterations of the guidance, the advice was prescriptive. As an example from 1958, the serving size was quantified (with size varying by age), and the number of servings per day was recommended.
Other metrics emerged over the evolution of food policy, including these three:
- Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) were developed during World War II to establish minimum standards to stave off deficiency.
- Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs). As the lack of specific nutrients became less concerning, and more science emerged about the benefits of certain minerals and vitamins in affecting health outcomes, DRIs emerged to target optimal levels.
- Percent of Daily Value is informed by the RDA and DRI and used for consumer awareness in food labeling based on an “average” person eating 2,000 calories per day.
Alongside the quantitative measurements are categorical stratifications. Food has gone through several reshufflings in the course of dietary guidance.
No matter how the foods were grouped, Atwater and others often stratified their studies by different populations. These would include separating analysis and recommendations along many dimensions, including income level, occupation, ethnicity, gender and age.
While having a trove of information at different levels of granularity was helpful for the medical field and policymakers, the struggle to simplify and distill it into singular, simple targets for consumers ultimately led to a different kind of guidance approach.
The first edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans had “7 principles of a healthful diet.” This was directional guidance like “eat a variety of foods” and “avoid too much sugar.” Pushback from the food industry reshaped the language in subsequent editions, “avoid” became “use in moderation.” Subsequent editions expanded the guidance, elaborating on different eating patterns and population-specific recommendations. The current guidance continues a principles-oriented approach with the tagline “eat real food” and such guidance terminology as, “prioritize,” “limit” and “focus.”
Even with a principles-based approach, quantitative guidance (servings, % of daily values) still exists to provide more specifics behind the overarching theme.
Food guidance influences a lot of different aspects of society: school lunches, food assistance programs, medical advice and consumer protection, to name a few. The framework to relay information and influence behavior has continually evaluated trade-offs between complexity and clarity.
DATA VISUALIZATION AND COMMUNICATION
I watch a lot of competitive cooking shows. A winning dish usually has quality ingredients (data) and solid technique (process), but it also needs an emphasis on presentation.
The Food Pyramid is probably the most iconic and recognizable pictorial presentation of dietary guidance. It conveys a hierarchy of importance, a portion-size reference, and the elements within each tier. The MyPyramid and MyPlate variations were other attempts to more clearly indicate the proportion of intake.
Other countries provided different pictorial guidance:
As noted in the introductory remarks, the latest US variation “inverts” the pyramid, reflecting increased focus on protein and healthy fat sources, combined with fruits and vegetables, and a decreased emphasis on grains.
Still thinking about food?
Access the “Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030.”
Access the SOA Research Institute podcast and report, “Obesity Trends and the Impact on Morbidity and Mortality Costs,” at SOA.org.
Accompanying the Pyramid and other visual guides are more nuanced discussions that offer caveats, cautions and specialized guidance. Each layer deeper, including the scientific report backing the guidance, adds even more context to the content. This is a good example of layering information, generating different levels of granularity for different audiences.
Finally, there are also concerns with awareness and misinformation. In the early days of food advocacy, Wiley’s concerns about additives were amplified by Farmer and Lakey. During the World Wars, U.S. campaigns around Victory Gardens and canning helped support nutritional needs and food safety. From an awareness standpoint, a 2022 U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services study revealed only 25% of surveyed adults were aware of MyPlate, as outlined in the Guidelines.
In closing
The revised guidance appears to place more emphasis on “real food,” prioritize protein, and urge avoiding highly processed foods to stem unfavorable trends in obesity and chronic disease. Like an actuarial process, the recommendations are based on data analysis, subject to periodic review, and their usefulness depends partly on how clearly they are communicated to key stakeholders. The ultimate impacts on morbidity and mortality may play out over a long time horizon, be demographic-specific and be subject to unforeseen positive or negative externalities.
Taken together, the long journey from calorimeters to the current inverted pyramid reminds us that crafting policy, like cooking, depends on understanding the ingredients, respecting the process and tasting as you go.
Statements of fact and opinions expressed herein are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily those of the Society of Actuaries or the respective authors’ employers.
Copyright © 2026 by the Society of Actuaries, Chicago, Illinois.