Better cut down on sugar, especially those 16-ounce drinks, and limit your salt. Here’s what you need to know.
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The 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans released Friday, while recommending people strive to get their nutrients through food, recognize dietary supplements as “useful in providing one or more nutrients that otherwise may be consumed in less than recommended amounts or that are of particular concern for specific population groups”.
While the proposed guidelines recommend limiting the intake of added sugars, Nutrition and Supplement Facts labels on food and beverages now do not list added sugars.
The guidelines also regulate how school feeding programs (don’t forget, that’s breakfast, lunch and dinner now!) are managed and how our military men and women eat at home and overseas. The report recommends eating two and a half cups of vegetables a day. Toss the white bread, rice and pasta, and replace with whole wheat bread, whole grain pasta, brown or wild rice and oatmeal. And keep sugar, fats and salt in moderation.
This comes from too many nutrient-void, calorie-rich foods like sugary drinks, refined sugary grain products like cakes, cookies and pies and high sodium processed foods, said Rachel Johnson, PhD, RD, professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont in Burlington. Nutrition expert Frank Hu, who served on the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee-which made recommendations on what should be included in the guidelines-assesses the new advice on how the nation should eat.
For the first time, the government put a limit on sugar-no more than 10 percent of your daily calories. Therefore, the guideline does not apply to naturally occurring sugars, such as those in fruits and milk. New figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show around 90 percent of people eat too much.
Flavored carbonated water is also starting to take the place of soda in many people’s diets.
Still, there were positive diet recommendations in the Dietary Guidelines, Willett and others agree.
In the future, added transparency and public pressure could help remove industry influence from the guidelines, says Salvador. The 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans do not contain any provisions that should drive federal, institutional or consumer shifts away from meat as the major protein source in diets, and they do not include extraneous matters, such as requiring food producers to meet sustainability standards or taxing certain foods as a way to reduce their consumption.
Recommendations about cholesterol have changed. The latter group argues that the link between high-cholesterol diets and heart disease is far from proven.
Still, egg lovers aren’t completely off the hook.
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In an earlier op-ed in the Huffington Post, Koch and Taparia noted that, while big food companies aggressively fought the new dietary guidelines in proposal form, consumers were already abandoning food products with unhealthy ingredients. The Guidelines provide valuable insight into what nutrition trends and science the agencies now support and are expected to have a wide impact on food sales and food consumption in the country-some estimates suggest that the Guidelines affect one in every four meals consumed.
