Every five years, the U.S. Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee (the folks who brought you the Food Pyramid) release updated guidelines for how we're supposed to be eating. Although the quinquennial reports are always brought out with a lot of
fanfare, the rules really haven't changed all that much since they were first
proposed in 1977:
Grains are still promoted as the foundation of a healthy diet
Saturated fat and cholesterol are to be avoided
Low-fat diets are recommended for disease prevention and weight control.
Although Americans have dutifully and steadily reduced their intake of fat and cholesterol and increased their consumption of grains, obesity and other diet-related diseases have steadily increased.
What if the dietary guidelines are wrong?
In this month's Nutrition Journal,
a consortium of scientists and nutrition researchers make the case for
abandoning both the guidelines and the process by which they are
generated. Instead of hide-bound conventional wisdom, they say, it's time to starting basing these recommendations on the evidence.
The stakes are high
These guidelines have enormous influence on health and nutrition
policies. They inform what we feed our kids in school lunch programs to
what we teach them in health class. They shape health care policy and
standards of care. They affect what gets reported in the media and
what gets researched in universities. They appear to be failing us.
Rather than gather the same group of agency insiders to polish the
chrome on this Edsel every five years, the authors suggest "an
impartial panel of...biochemists, anthropologists, geneticists,
physicists,
etc., who are not directly tied to nutritional
policy....Recommendations issued by this group would be more likely to
be...[based] on a complete and accurate
assessment of available science rather than a narrow perspective of
accepted nutritional practice."
I suspect that many readers of the Nutrition Data Blog abandoned the
Dietary Guidelines long ago. But I agree with my colleagues: It's time
to bring our national nutrition policy into the 21st century.
As I'm sure you've noticed, fat is no longer the bad guy. Now, everyone from the American Dietetic Association to the American Cancer Institute to the American Heart Association agrees that sugar is the prime mover in obesity and disease.
Getting Americans to cut back on added sugars is now job #1 for public health experts and educators and there are all kinds of new guidelines on how much sugar is OK. Frankly, calculating how many grams of added (versus natural) sugar is in every food you eat is a pain in the neck. But when you look at where the added sugars in the typical American diet are coming from, it gets a whole lot simpler.
According to the most recent data, almost half (46%) of the added sugars we consume come from sodas, sports drinks and other sweetened beverages.
Most Americans are eating about twice as much sugar as they should. Simply giving up sweetened beverages would almost solve the problem in a single stroke. How easy is that?
What's that? You don't drink sweetened beverages? In that case, baked
goods like cakes and cookies are likely to be the next biggest sources
of sugar in your diet. But don't overlook cereal as a stealth source
of sugar. Ready-to-eat cereals account for almost as much sugar as
candy in the American diet!
Even "healthy" choices can contain more sugar than you might realize.
Each of these seemingly wholesome cereals contains enough added sugars
to blow more than half of your budget for the entire day:
These days, it may not seem like a big deal to have a drink before dinner and a couple of glasses of wine with dinner. Yet, according to the National Institutes of Health, consuming that amount of alcohol puts you in a high risk category.
Rethinking Drinking, a website run by the NIH, can help you assess the risks and/or benefits of your drinking habits.You might be surprised to see how just low the threshold
for "low-risk" drinking is, especially when you consider the size of a
"standard" drink is just 1.5 ounces of hard liquor. The newly (or once
again) popular martini drinks usually contain the equivalent of 2 to 4
servings of alcohol.
What do you think? Is this too heavy-handed an approach? Are we
American's showing our latent puritanism here? Are the risks of
moderate drinking being overstated?
Tip: See SELF Magazine's Guide to a Healthy Happy Hour
For those who are motivated to make a change in
their drinking habits, the site offers tools and strategies that are consistent with the proven approach developed
by James Prochaska and outlined in his excellent book Changing for Good.
See also: Fitting Alcohol into Your Weight Loss Program
Comments (0) 
Every five years, the U.S. Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee (the folks who brought you the Food Pyramid) release updated guidelines for how we're supposed to be eating. Although the quinquennial reports are always brought out with a lot of
fanfare, the rules really haven't changed all that much since they were first
proposed in 1977:
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As I'm sure you've noticed, fat is no longer the bad guy. Now, everyone from the American Dietetic Association to the American Cancer Institute to the American Heart Association agrees that sugar is the prime mover in obesity and disease.
Most Americans are eating about twice as much sugar as they should. Simply giving up sweetened beverages would almost solve the problem in a single stroke. How easy is that?
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