{"id":48,"date":"2016-01-26T16:13:40","date_gmt":"2016-01-26T16:13:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.willclower.com\/Medwell_blog\/?p=48"},"modified":"2017-10-25T16:16:44","modified_gmt":"2017-10-25T16:16:44","slug":"the-nutritional-price-is-right-wheel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/?p=48","title":{"rendered":"The Nutritional Price Is Right Wheel"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n

\"\"Are the\u00a0official dietary guidelines<\/a>\u00a0useful to average Americans? I\u2019m not so sure.<\/p>\n

Every five years, numerous dietary experts are tasked with putting together a summary of the most up-to-date nutritional science. Their end product is intended to be a series of dietary recommendations that will help public-health agencies, health-care providers, and educational institutions create federal nutrition policy, health programs and disease-prevention initiatives.<\/p>\n

This past February, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans advisory panel issued\u00a0a 571-page report<\/a>\u00a0that upended a lot of conventional thinking. After reviewing all the data, they eased restrictions on cholesterol and urged us to eat less sugar and meat. But they also introduced concepts of sustainability and \u201cdietary patterns\u201d\u2014which include\u00a0how much and how frequently we should eat different foods\u2014into the conversation. The official recommendations were\u00a0released<\/a>\u00a0Jan. 7.<\/p>\n

The new recommendations felt odd and a bit touchy-feely compared to the previous, more stern editions that had us go low-fat, avoid eggs, and micromanage the molecules of our\u00a0meals.\u00a0Regardless of\u00a0whether the\u00a0suggestions\u00a0are\u00a0ultimately right or wrong,\u00a0there are two main issues that make them\u00a0just north of useless.<\/p>\n

1. The advice changes all the time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It seems like there\u2019s a giant\u00a0Price Is Right<\/em>\u00a0wheel, but for nutrition advice. Every five years, we\u00a0give it a spin, and up comes the dietary guidelines.<\/p>\n

For example, all that cholesterol that we were supposed to watch is \u201cno longer a nutrient of concern<\/a>.\u201d So have an egg with your shrimp scampi and don\u2019t worry as much about counting up the grams of fat in your dinner. Remember the added sugars in the low-fat products we ate before? Eat less of those. But wait, there\u2019s more: you can have coffee again!<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no wonder that\u00a0a recent survey<\/a>\u00a0by the International Food Information Council found that more than half of Americans said it\u2019s easier to do their taxes than to figure out a healthful diet. And 76% stated that all the constant changes to nutritional guidance make it harder to know what to believe.<\/p>\n

We used to visualize dietary guidelines as\u00a0food groups in a square<\/a>.\u00a0That\u00a0changed into a\u00a0pyramid<\/a>\u00a0that focused on low-fat eating and drinking eight 8-ounce glasses of water every day. Now it’s a\u00a0plate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As the rubric changed, so did the specific foods that we could or couldn\u2019t eat: eggs, no eggs; nuts, no nuts; cholesterol, no cholesterol; don\u2019t drink wine, now you can.<\/p>\n

With this level of change and outright reversal of opinion, there\u2019s never any guarantee that this year\u2019s advice will be next year\u2019s advice. This undermines the impact of the\u00a0guidelines.<\/p>\n

2. There’s too much nutritional\u00a0noise.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The ink on the\u00a0Dietary Guidelines for Americans\u00a0wasn\u2019t dry before the vegan Physicians Committee For Responsible Medicine was suing the government.\u00a0The committee, which has sued over the guidelines in the past,\u00a0disagreed with the\u00a0conclusion that dietary cholesterol is not as bad as we thought, worried that the egg and meat industries\u00a0unduly influenced the recommendations, and didn\u2019t like that the guidelines neglected to tell people to eat less meat.<\/p>\n

Some of the criticism has merit: The cattle industry did not like the government telling people about data indicating that red meat (particularly processed meats) can contribute to heart disease and cancer, so its\u00a0lobbying group\u00a0convinced a government agency<\/a>\u00a0to keep out language stating that you should eat less meat. Congress\u00a0used the appropriations process<\/a>\u00a0to set limits on what the guidelines could even say.<\/p>\n

For ordinary Americans, the reversals of recommendations, the lawsuits and the Congressional conflicts of interest all create noise, which sews doubt about the validity of the guidelines. The combination of these influences makes the dietary guidelines mostly useless for most Americans most of the time.<\/p>\n

In the midst of all the cacophony, we need dietary principles that we can rely upon. To do this, we might start by looking at the habits of healthy eating practiced in the Mediterranean. This would involve returning to meals at the family table; eating real food (mostly vegetables); and do that in control. That\u2019s a three-step healthy prescription that will remain as true today as it will be when the next\u00a0dietary guidelines\u00a0come out five years from now.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Are the\u00a0official dietary guidelines\u00a0useful to average Americans? I\u2019m not so sure. Every five years, numerous dietary experts are tasked with putting together a summary…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":49,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nutrition"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Price-Is-Right-Wheel.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9kBci-M","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":50,"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/50"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/49"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/Medwell_blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}