The Dietary Guidelines Are Not About What You Should or Shouldn’t Eat

The federal Dietary Guidelines, updated roughly every five years, are not personal dietary advice for Americans. The document, as the version released last week makes clear, “is designed for professionals to help all individuals ages 2 years and older and their families consume a healthy, nutritionally adequate diet.” Furthermore, the guidelines are “used in developing federal food, nutrition, and health policies and programs” and can influence nutrition-related decisions made by food manufacturers—and many heavily lobby to influence the final guidelines.

This reality leads to the push-and-pull balancing act embodied by the guidelines and the recommendations they’re based on. While close, informed reading of the recommendations for what Americans should and shouldn’t be eating may reveal changing attitudes toward soda, red meat consumption, and other foods that nutritionists would like to see branded with a scarlet letter, it takes a fair bit of parsing to get there. That has made David Katz, director of the Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, believe we should leave the Dietary Guidelines behind—if only in name.

“The DGs represent a disgraceful replacement of specific guidance with the vaguest possible language,” he wrote in a petition addressed to the USDA posted on Change.org. Instead of calling the federal guidance the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, Katz says the name should be changed to Food Policy Guidelines for America.

It may seem like a bureaucratic suggestion, but it belies a more biting criticism of the new guidelines and the process that created them.

“Specific advice about what to eat more of, and especially what to eat less of, has been replaced with the vaguest possible language about food groups, nutrient-dense foods, and the idea that everything is OK provided a few nutrient thresholds are minded,” Katz wrote in an op-ed for Huffington Post on the day the guidelines were released. “The DGs include the topic of ‘shifts,’ allegedly how to trade up by replacing foods in our diets with better choices, but here, remarkably, the language itself ‘shifts’ again from food to nutrients, so we have no hope of knowing what we shouldn’t eat.”

Members of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, who wrote the report that the final guidelines are based on, are more or less OK with how their work was interpreted, Politico reports. But for the most part, responses from public health and food policy advocacy groups have been more in line with Katz.

“The current system opens the guidelines up to lobbying and manipulation of data,” Walter Willett, who chairs the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, told Time about the process of paring down the DGAC report to the final guidelines. “The USDA’s primary stakeholders are major food producers and manufacturers.”

The USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services, which are jointly responsible for the guidelines, say they are based on the latest science. But many experts are cynical, at best, about that official line.

Changing the name wouldn’t mean sustainability was factored into dietary recommendations. It wouldn’t mean that soda and red meat, which a wealth of nutrition research says we should consume less of, would be addressed by name. But it would make it clear that the government isn’t saying what the healthiest diet for all Americans is, but something else altogether.