Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, who specializes in obesity medicine at Mass General Health in Boston, has been appointed to the Biden’s Administration’s USDA panel which determines diet guidelines.
USDA announced the appointment of 20 nationally recognized scientists to serve on the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (the Committee).
According to the release, “The Committee will be tasked with reviewing the current body of science on key nutrition topics and developing a scientific report that includes its independent assessment of the evidence and recommendations for HHS and USDA as they develop the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The Committee’s review, public comments, and input from other federal nutrition experts will help inform HHS and USDA as the Departments develop the 10th edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”
“The Dietary Guidelines serve as the foundation for national nutrition programs, standards, and education. In addition, they provide health professionals with guidance and resources to assist the public in choosing an overall healthy diet that works for them.”
The release continues, “The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee will examine the relationship between diet and health across all life stages and will use a health equity lens throughout its evidence review to ensure factors such as socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and culture are described and considered to the greatest extent possible based on the information provided in the scientific literature and data.”
But according to Dr. Stanford, obesity is “a brain disease” that has little to do with willpower.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” Stanford claimed, “It’s a brain disease. And the brain tells us how much to eat and how much to store.”
And when it comes to willpower, “we should throw that out the window.”
“The number one cause of obesity is genetics,” Stanford told CBS’ Lesley Stahl.
“That means that, if you were born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50 to 85% likelihood of having the disease yourself even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management,” she added.
Stanford elaborated during the interview to claim that an overwhelming majority of U.S. doctors hold a bias toward obese patients.
Her comments coincide an uptick in the disease in recent years, with the CDC reporting that the percentage of obese Americans shifted up to 41.9% in 2020 from 30.5% in 2017.
Even more concerning statistics from Harvard University’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health indicate 43 million preschool-aged children were obese in 2010 worldwide and the numbers have been on a steady incline since the 1990s.
“If nothing is done to reverse the epidemic, more than 1 billion adults are projected to be obese by 2030,” the page reads.
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee consists of 20 “nationally-recognized” physicians, according to the USDA, and was announced by the agency’s Secretary Tom Vilsack as well as the Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra last Thursday.
