USDA releases new dietary guidelines

“Now excess sugars have always been discouraged but this year the guidelines took it a step further and they actually put an upper limit on how much excess sugar we should have, which is less than 10 percent of our daily calories”. “Maybe tonight I’ll eat some more vegetables”.

“Protecting the health of the American public includes empowering them with the tools they need to make healthy choices in their daily lives”, said Sylvia Burwell, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.

The new dietary guidelines promote a healthy eating pattern and encourage a diet high in vegetables, whole fruits and grains.

“By omitting specific diet recommendations, such as eating less red and processed meat, these guidelines miss a critical and significant opportunity to reduce suffering and death from cancer”, Wender said.

The previous guidelines recommended limiting cholesterol intake to 300mg per day, while the 2015 version removes that set limit and simply advocates eating as little dietary cholesterol as possible. Also included are seafood, lean meats and poultry, legumes (beans and peas), and soy products, along with nuts and seeds.

But government officials now recommend that Americans eat only about half that: about 12 teaspoons of sugar per day on a 2,000-calorie diet.

The government, for the first time, has limited the average American’s sugar intake to only 10 percent of the daily calorie intake. The guidelines are advocating for healthy eating patterns that depend on a person’s tastes, needs and budget. They’ll also play a part in determining the foods America produces, buys, and eats.

Although many individual consumers may not give the guidelines much thought, the recommendations have the potential to influence the diets of millions of Americans. Main aim of the latest United States guidelines is to reduce rates of obesity, heart disease, type-2-diabetes and other health complications.

In February, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) – an independent committee made up of experts in nutrition, health, and medicine that helped inform the new guidelines – announced that dietary cholesterol was “not a nutrient of concern“, and has no relation to levels of cholesterol in blood.

The dietary guidelines recommends to consume just enough amounts of lean meat, but strongly recommends against piling up on added sugars.

While senior administration officials on Thursday denied bowing to pressure from the food industry, Kari Hamerschlag, the senior program manager with the advocacy group Friends of the Earth, said in a statement that the new guidelines ignored strong scientific evidence on the need to eat less meat for health, food security and environmental reasons.