New dietary guidelines: lean meat OK, cut the added sugars 

Some Americans may not have to cut back on eggs and salt as much as they once thought and eating lean meat is still OK. But watch the added sugars, especially the sugary drinks.
The Obama administration's new dietary guidelines, released Thursday, back off the strictest sodium rules included in the last version, while still asserting that Americans consume too much salt. The guidelines reverse previous guidance on the dangers of dietary cholesterol and add strict new advice on sugars.

08 jan 2015--After a backlash from the meat industry and Congress, the administration ignored several suggestions from a February report by an advisory committee of doctors and nutrition experts. That panel suggested calling for an environmentally friendly diet lower in red and processed meats and de-emphasized lean meats in its list of proteins that are part of a healthy diet.
But, as in the previous years, the government still says lean meats are part of a healthy eating pattern.
Released every five years, the guidelines are intended to help Americans prevent disease and obesity. They inform everything from food package labels to subsidized school lunches to your doctor's advice. And the main message hasn't changed much over the years: Eat your fruits and vegetables. Whole grains and seafood, too. And keep sugar, fats and salt in moderation.
This year, one message the government wants to send is that people should figure out what type of healthy eating style works for them, while still hewing to the main recommendations. The Agriculture Department, which released the guidelines along with the Department of Health and Human Services, is also releasing a tweaked version of its healthy "My Plate" icon to include a new slogan: "My Wins."
"Small changes can add up to big differences," said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
One new recommendation is that added sugar should be 10 percent of daily calories. That's about 200 calories a day, or about the amount in one 16-ounce sugary drink. The recommendation is part of a larger push to help consumers isolate added sugars from naturally occurring ones like those in fruit and milk. Added sugars generally add empty calories to the diet.
Sugar-sweetened beverages make up a large portion of those empty calories. According to the guidelines, sugary drinks comprise 47 percent of the added sugars that Americans eat every day.
Americans also need to lower salt intake, the government says. New figures from the Centers for Disease for Disease Control and Prevention show that around 90 percent of people eat too much. The average person eats 3,400 milligrams of sodium a day, and the guidelines say everyone should lower that amount to 2,300, or about a teaspoon.
Lowering sodium intake was the major push of the 2010 guidelines, and that document recommended that those most at risk of heart disease, or about half the population, lower their intake to 1,500. The new guidelines drop that lower amount as part of the top recommendations. Still, advice buried deeper in the guidelines says that those with high blood pressure and prehypertension could benefit from a steeper reduction.
After years of doctors saying that Americans shouldn't eat too many eggs, recommendations for cholesterol have also shifted. The 2010 guidelines made a key recommendation that Americans consume less than 300 mg a day of dietary cholesterol, or about two eggs. That recommendation is gone, following increasing medical research showing the amount of cholesterol in your bloodstream is more complicated than once thought. Some more recent studies have shown little relationship between heart disease and how much dietary cholesterol one eats.
Still, egg lovers aren't completely off the hook. Discussion of cholesterol deeper into the document says "individuals should eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible while consuming a healthy eating pattern."
As in previous years, the report advises limiting saturated fats to 10 percent of total calories. And while lean meats are promoted, the government does suggest certain populations, such as teen boys and adult men, should reduce their meat intake and eat more vegetables. Data included in the report shows that males ages 14 to 70 consume more than recommended amounts of meat, eggs and poultry, while women are more in line with advised amounts.
While the guidelines always have been subject to intense lobbying by food industries, this year's version set off unprecedented political debate, fueled by Republicans' claims the Obama administration has gone too far in telling people what to eat.
Congress got involved, encouraging the administration to drop the recommendations based on environmental impact and at one point proposing to set new standards for the science the guidelines can use. That language did not become law, however. A year-end spending bill simply said the guidelines must be "based on significant scientific agreement" and "limited in scope to nutritional and dietary information."

U.S. Dietary Guidelines Recommend Lower Salt Intake

New guidelines advise reducing salt and saturated fat intake, avoiding sugary beverages

01 feb 2011-- The seventh edition of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Dietary Guidelines for Americans was released today, and it calls for Americans to limit their daily sodium intake to less than 2,300 mg, with individuals 51 years of age and older, all blacks, and those with high blood pressure, diabetes, or chronic kidney disease advised to limit their sodium intake to 1,500 mg or less.

The guidelines also recommend that no more than 10 percent of calories should come from saturated fat, which should be replaced with monounsaturated fats or polyunsaturated fatty acids. The guidelines also state that Americans should eat more lean meats and poultry, legumes, nuts, and seeds, as well as fat-free or 1 percent milk. In addition, Americans should avoid added sugars, refined grains, and solid fats as well as consume less than 300 mg per day of cholesterol, according to the guidelines.

Americans are advised to avoid trans fatty acids and consume alcohol in moderation, which means one alcoholic beverage or less for women per day and two drinks for men. Individuals should also drink water instead of sugary sodas or other sweetened beverages. Also, according to the guidelines, nutrients should come from eating nutritious food rather than taking nutritional supplements and Americans should consume more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains to get more needed nutrients.

"Helping Americans incorporate these guidelines into their everyday lives is important to improving the overall health of the American people," Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement. "The new Dietary Guidelines provide concrete action steps to help people live healthier, more physically active and longer lives."

More Information

Dietary Guidelines May Have a Downside

By Judith Groch
NEW YORK, Jan. 22 -- With their weak standards of evidence, national dietary guidelines might actually do more harm than good, said researchers here.
Using guidelines against dietary fat promulgated in the late 1970s as a case in point, Paul R. Marantz, M.D., of Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and colleagues, noted that people may have been led to believe that limiting dietary fat gave them a green light to eat their fill of carbohydrates.
This association, they wrote online in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, may have contributed to the current epidemic of obesity and overweight in the U.S.
National dietary guidelines have been promulgated based on scientific reasoning and indirect evidence, the researchers said.
In general, they said, weak evidentiary support has been accepted as adequate justification for the guidelines.
"This low standard of evidence is based on several misconceptions, most importantly the belief that such guidelines could not cause harm."
But, the researchers noted, in 2000, the Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee reversed the earlier 1995 recommendation to lower fat intake, saying that it might have been ill-advised and might actually have some potential for harm.
They quoted the 2000 committee statement that "an increasing prevalence of obesity in the United States has corresponded roughly with an absolute increase in carbohydrate consumption."
This increase may also have been influenced by marketing trends for low-fat foods, which although not entirely driven by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, may have used an apparent governmental "seal of approval" for products such as fat-free cookies.
From 1971 through 2001, the researchers noted, absolute fat intake decreased by only 5% in men while fat as a percent of total calorie intake declined by 11%. In women, they said, "the difference was even starker: absolute fat intake actually increased by 11% while relative fat intake declined by 9%."
The temporal association between the recommendations and the increase in total calorie consumption does not prove causation, the researchers were careful to point out, but it raises the possibility of a net harmful effect of seemingly innocuous dietary advice, they said.
The researchers also pointed to advice on salt intake as another example of unintended consequences of a seemingly sensible recommendation, noting, however, that a blood pressure benefit may be trumped by harmful effects on plasma renin, insulin resistance, sympathetic nerve activity, and aldosterone levels.
A recent finding of no difference in total mortality between randomized sodium-intake groups has left the value of sodium reduction an open question, they said.
The trans fat issue, they said, provides another example. Although there is good evidence linking dietary trans fats to cardiovascular disease, though not with obesity, the net effect of the campaign against trans fats is that these fats will be replaced by "something else (unclear what)," they wrote.
Furthermore, as the vilification of dietary trans fats continues and marketing of other high-calorie foods with "0 grams trans fats" takes off, it should not be forgotten that trans fat consumption increased dramatically as margarine was promoted as the healthy alternative to butter.
To avoid possible unanticipated and adverse effects, specific and transparent classification of the quality of the evidence should attend guideline development and promulgation, the researchers said.
"When adequate evidence [for a guideline recommendation] is not available," they wrote, "the best option may be to issue no guideline."
In an accompanying comment, Steven Woolf, M.D., of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and Marion Nestle, Ph.D., of New York University, differed with the investigators, maintaining that the dietary guidelines are not the culprit in the obesity epidemic.
"The larger concerns," they said, "are poverty and an environment that promotes overeating and inactivity."
"Although we agree with many of the themes described by the authors of this study," Drs. Woolf and Nestle wrote, "we strongly disagree with their depiction of how the guidelines were developed, their characterization of the evidence on which the guidelines were based, and their indictment of public health guidance in general."
Nutrition research has had its share of "flip-flops" and is challenging perhaps more so than in other areas of public health or medicine, they wrote. For example, the time needed to measure health outcomes is so long that studies must often rely on surrogate measures, and every study is complicated by the enigma of whether foods or some combination or interactions of their nutrients are responsible for the outcomes.
It is true that messages about fat must be accompanied by messages about caloric balance and deal with other complex issues. But the solution is "not to abandon the enterprise but to reshape the message," they wrote.
A guideline cannot single-handedly change a nation's eating habits. Food preferences, portion sizes, and physical activity levels are products of advertising, the environment, and a milieu of other obesogenic influences, "not the consequence of a poorly distributed federal publication," they wrote.
"To scapegoat guidelines is to oversimplify the complex and to obfuscate the necessary -- albeit difficult -- task of confronting these larger determinants of obesity," Drs. Woolf and Nestle concluded.
No financial disclosures were reported by the authors of the paper or by the authors of the comment.
Primary source: American Journal of Preventive MedicineSource reference:Marantz P, et al "A call for higher standards of evidence for dietary guidelines" Am J Prev Med 2008: DOI: 1016/j.amepre.2007.11.017. Additional source: American Journal of Preventive MedicineSource reference: Woolf S, Nestle M, "Do dietary guidelines explain the obesity epidemic? Am J Prev Med 2008; DOI: 1016/j.amepre.2007.12.002.