Source: Radio New Zealand
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveils the department’s new dietary guidelines food chart during a policy announcement event. ANNA MONEYMAKER/ Getty Images via AFP
New dietary guidelines from the US have upended the traditional food pyramid, moving protein into the spotlight – but some of the maths doesn’t add up
When the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans were released in January, it was the graphic on the front – a food pyramid that’s been turned upside down – that grabbed attention.
But the health sector has turned its focus to the finer details; not just what’s actually in the guidelines, but who’s behind it.
“The process for the dietary guidelines in America is pretty rigourous and it actually takes years and years,” says long-time food and health journalist Niki Bezzant.
She says the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee puts together a report with recommendations for the guidelines – this takes years.
But this time, about half of those recommendations were rejected, and a new committee was formed to write new recommendations.
“That was written by some hand-picked people who were all, as it turns out, aligned with beef, dairy, protein supplement industry interests, and it’s unclear exactly how they got to where they got to with the guidelines.
“They claim to focus on gold-standard science, but actually their justifications are lacking, at least according to nutrition experts and certainly nutrition bodies around the world.”
Bezzant points to articles from the Center for Science in the Public Interest, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
In today’s episode of The Detail, Bezzant and dietician Caryn Zinn look at what’s changed, and the process behind those changes, as well as how this trickles down to New Zealand, and whether we can trust science coming out of the White House.
“That’s the biggest problem – people are going to look at these guidelines and go ‘oh gosh it’s part of that group which is all nutters so it’s meaningless,’ and that’s problematic,” says Zinn.
These guidelines put protein, dairy, healthy fats, vegetables and fruits at the top of the pyramid – which is now the wide part of the triangle. Whole grains are at the bottom. Sugars have disappeared altogether. The visual itself takes a few minutes to unpick.
“I don’t think they’ve done themself a service by flipping it … [my colleagues and my] philosophy was we need to flip the food pyramid in our philosophical thinking about what’s at the bottom and what’s at the top … they’ve actually visually flipped it which has added a little bit of the confusion.”
But Zinn believes the changes themselves are largely positive.
Among the positives for her: an emphasis on whole, real food over ultra-processed foods; a strong message that no amount of added sugar is considered nutritious; the prioritisation of protein, including a boost in the recommended daily intake and focus on animal proteins as opposed to plant-based; and a reduction in the recommended daily servings of grains.
Fat is also in – the guide talks about butter, olive oil and beef tallow, and recommends full-fat dairy and animal proteins without removing fat.
Zinn says this has brought controversy, because of the relationship between saturated fat and heart disease (which she says is a hotly debated topic).
The guidelines suggest keeping saturated fats under 10 percent of total calories – but Zinn says it’s “highly unlikely” that someone could eat fatty meats, oils and butter as suggested and still keep their saturated fat intake at that level.
But how much do these guidelines matter in America, let alone here?
In the US, they’re used to guide policy and food programmes in places like schools and rest homes. But here, they may still trickle through to the way people think about food – for better or worse.
“It might certainly affect people’s attitudes and eating behaviours, because we are all consuming the same content. This stuff is out there everywhere on social media,” says Bezzant.
“The irony is that most people, and this probably is true around the world, don’t follow official guidelines anyway, and certainly in America they do not.
“It’s true in New Zealand as well – we know that less than 10 percent of us eat the recommended servings of vegetables a day, five to six servings.”
“I think the danger is probably that people take the simple messages away, right, and the simple message out of this American guideline is that image [of the inverted pyramid], and it’s just ‘hey eat more steak, and butter, woohoo’.
“And if people go away and do that and they keep on eating their refined grains and their high fat diet and their high sugar and their high salt, no one’s getting healthier from that.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand