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Doing what politicians do best, the SSCON caved. The clear and direct “reduce consumption of meat” became, “Choose meats, poultry and fish that will reduce saturated-fat intake.” To ensure that no other senators got any funny ideas about making Americans skinny, the meat and dairy industries spent millions to ensure McGovern’s ass got kicked to the curb in the very next election. American waistlines continued expanding, life spans continued shrinking, and nobody even dreamed of pissing off cattle ranchers ever again.

2. GETTING EIGHT HOURS OF SLEEP EVERY NIGHT

If there’s one lie that’s ingrained into America’s youth even earlier than “drinking milk turns you into a muscle-bound shit wrecker,” it’s the idea that you need eight hours of sleep each night. The bedtimes of children and the schedules of adults are structured around this one easy-to-remember bodily mandate. For years, it’s been dividing weekdays into three convenient eight-hour chunks of work, relaxation, and sleep.

Dr. Daniel Kripke of the University of California, San Diego, conducted a sleep study that tracked adults from the time they were old enough to set their own bedtime to the time they took a permanent nap in the dirt. The study found that seven hours of sleep seems to be the “golden time” for maximum health. Those who got less than seven hours saw slight decreases in life span. The ones who got the magic number of eight hours? They were, on average, even worse off. Despite what your parents told you, Kripke found that eight hours is the duration at which sleep turns from “healthy and relaxing” to “slowest form of suicide imaginable.”

Before you start petitioning your local representative to draft laws banning comfortable beds, smooth jazz, and the writing of Immanuel Kant (for the children!), the studies didn’t show that seven hours is the perfect length of sleep for everyone. Like anything involving the human brain, sleep is way too complicated for blanket rules. The problem, according to Kripke, is that people who naturally sleep less than eight hours a night think they’re not getting enough sleep. That’s why sleeping pills do such a robust business despite health risks that he puts on level with smoking cigarettes. People who need less than eight hours think they have to force their bodies across an arbitrary finish line their parents invented.

So the next time you’re lying awake in bed, worried that you’re now seven hours and forty-eight minutes away from the alarm, just remember, eight hours is just something your parents made up because they wanted some alone time to have filthy sex on the couch where you grew up watching TV.

Or maybe just count sheep.

1. THE GODDAMN FOOD PYRAMID

In 1992, the government decided to take another run at America’s rampant ass jigglery, this time designing an official info graphic that showed how many servings of different food groups you should get in a day. Just as the four food groups had improved on 1943’s Basic Seven, which actually included butter as its own group, the food pyramid took a few steps in the right direction. For instance, it separated fruits and vegetables into their own categories and suggested that both were more essential than the cheese and burger groups. The USDA even created a villain, the tiny tip of the pyramid, fats and oils, which Americans were advised to use sparingly. Having outlined its complex nutritional morality play, the USDA dusted off its hands, sat back, and watched childhood obesity rise every year since.

Again, the government had suffered from a crisis of testicular fortitude. Rather than suggesting that anyone eat less of anything, which could hurt the $500 billion food industry, the pyramid suggested that you eat bad foods less frequently relative to how many good foods you eat. It also followed the SSCON’s tradition of blaming the word fats rather than anything you might recognize from your grocery list. Food manufacturers responded by flooding the market with chips and cookies chemically engineered