The Pritikin Program’s Influence on American Dietary Guidelines

The Following is a guest post from Travis A. Weisse, author of Health Freaks: America’s Diet Champions and the Specter of Chronic Illness, which is available now wherever books are sold.

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Occupying the unenviable liminal space between charlatanism and unserious gossip magazine fodder, diet gurus are not typically treated as serious historical figures. Yet, as my book Health Freaks shows, a fair few of these marginal figures have made significant (if unrecognized) impact on US history. 

Take the subject of my third chapter, Nathan Pritikin (1915 – 1985). Pritikin was certainly not alone among diet gurus to have claimed access to special knowledge that could single-handedly win America’s battle against chronic disease. He was unique, however, in the way his convictions about the reversibility of chronic disease resonated with medical scientists and found purchase at the highest level of US politics. Harnessing the techniques and language of medical science more successfully than his fellow diet gurus (like bitter rival Dr. Robert Atkins), Pritikin managed to persuade an impressive number of American physicians and politicians that his program could reliably undo the damage of the nation’s top killers.

Pritikin was one of thirty expert witnesses (and the only diet guru) called to submit testimony to the pivotal US Senate Subcommittee Hearing, “Diets Related to Killer Diseases” that informed the monumental 1977 report, “Dietary Goals for the United States.” The report, subsequently nicknamed the “McGovern Report” after committee chairman Sen. George McGovern (D-SD), was a major turning point in the federal government’s nutrition recommendations. 

Though McGovern’s team had originally been tasked in 1968 with investigating hunger and malnutrition in the United States (their work motivated significant revisions to the Food Stamp Program, for example), after several years they transitioned to investigating all the various nutritional problems plaguing the country, eventually focusing on overnutrition and the rising incidence of chronic illnesses like cancer, heart disease, and diabetes. Based on years of sprawling subcommittee testimony from esteemed nutrition scientists and policy experts, the McGovern Report became the first government publication to assert an explicit causal connection between poor diet and chronic disease incidence. 

Unusually, Pritikin’s dietary expertise had been personally requested by Sen. McGovern. Citing their common aims of reducing preventable death, McGovern said of Pritikin “We became friends, mutual admirers and fellow crusaders.” Though it was not within his purview as a lifestyle and longevity advocate, Pritikin attempted to use his moment in the Congressional spotlight to not only prove that diet indeed caused chronic disease, but to advertise the success of his specific approach in reversing chronic disease with therapeutic diet and exercise, and to sway national recommendations to reflect the intensive program at his Santa Monica Longevity Center as well.

Impressed with Pritikin’s account of his patients’ recoveries from heart disease and chronic immobility, in December 1975, Congressman Robert Leggett (D-CA) urged the Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)—Dr. Robert Levy—to independently investigate Pritikin and his center to see if the hype held up. 

Despite the fact that Pritikin’s studies had been designed and executed by respected medical scientists who worked in his clinics or served on the Longevity Center’s advisory boards, some of their work was difficult to disseminate through wider medical channels because the data collected from the informal, patient-centered setup of the Longevity Center chafed against the exacting requirements for experimental protocols. These and other irregularities undermined the study results in the peer review process and subsequent review committees were skeptical of the impressive results that Pritikin and his allies touted. 

McGovern’s faith in Pritikin—and his decision to ask Pritikin to testify—was motivated by concerns about the weakness of nutrition recommendations to encourage a healthy lifestyle. His worries about the clarity of nutrition experiments and government’s fealty to agribusiness have proven especially prescient. In a closing statement during one of the 1977 hearings, McGovern praised Pritikin’s unconventional approach as necessary for the health of the nation and pleaded for scientific humility in the face of a national health crisis with few clear answers: 

It is time that nutrition research receive an emphasis commensurate with its potential. We have been too timid in promoting nutrition research, both in the scale of resources invested and in the breadth of research priorities. It is important to continue the current emphases….But we also need to break out of the old research ruts we have been deepening over the last 10-15 years. We must be more imaginative and more balanced in our approach…I realize that the Pritikin hypertension data is preliminary and is subject to a number of legitimate scientific criticisms. I only use it to make a point. This committee understands there is a way to properly do scientific research in order to obtain valid results, but we don’t want to see that used as a guise to denigrate research initiatives, which for whatever reason are not being pursued by the mainstream of scientific thought—be it hypertension, diabetes, heart disease or cancer. We must not limit the great potential of nutrition research. If we had spent as much time and resources on human nutrition research as on livestock nutrition, we would be much closer to solving today’s major health problems…We are training our physicians and biomedical research scientists in a way which insufficiently emphasizes nutrition.

McGovern advanced a pragmatic view that when medical science fails to forge a clear path with the available evidence, insistence on methodological purity puts artificial limits on what we know and thereby constrains any practical and humane policy innovation. 

Years after Pritikin’s testimony for the McGovern Report hearings, George McGovern and his wife Eleanor actually enrolled themselves at Pritikin’s center in 1983 to get the senator into shape for his (ultimately disastrous) 1984 presidential run. When Pritikin died shortly thereafter, McGovern even delivered his eulogy, comparing him with other such esteemed inventors and visionaries as Louis Pasteur, Marie Curie, and Thomas Edison. Aptly, he said of Pritikin, “You show me a man who usually lives by the power of his convictions and I’ll show you a man with a reputation of a fanatic.”

His line describes other diet gurus so well it may as well have been the concluding sentence to my book.

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Travis A. Weisse is visiting assistant professor at New Mexico State University.