Meet the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans

On January 7, the US departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture released the eighth edition of the guidelines, a set of science-based recommendations that are revised every five years.

Essentially, the guidelines encourage healthy eating patterns, similar to a Mediterranean diet lifestyle, emphasizing more vegetables and fruits, nuts and legumes, as well as more seafood and whole grains.

The new guidelines – which recommend eating less added sugar and meat – lack the earlier 300-milligram limit, but they still contain warnings about the health risks of a high-cholesterol diet.

“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”.

In a nation that spends $245 billion on diabetes – $176 billion of it for direct medical costs – a push for Americans to go easy on sugar is a win for everyone, said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell.

“Protecting the health of the American public includes empowering them with the tools they need to make healthy choices in their daily lives”.

Eating less red meat is linked to a lower risk of heart disease and stroke, as well as a lower risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, and some types of cancer, the guidelines say.

Alcohol consumption should be moderate – one drink per day for women and two for men.

Overall the guidelines suggest that Americans move away from a diet centered around animal proteins and moving to more plant-based meals.

Using the term “shifts”, the study advocates making “small changes” with big impacts, such as limiting soda.

For the most part, the USDA guidelines stick to the script of healthy eating. This isn’t as strict as previous guidelines but likely affects most Americans, since the average person consumes 3,400 per day, mostly from processed foods. Also, the guidelines keep the advice that saturated fats – in foods such as red meat and butter – should be no more than 10 percent of calories.

While senior administration officials on Thursday denied bowing to pressure from the food industry, Kari Hamerschlag, 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.

Additionally, the guidelines recommend that sodium intake should be less than 2,300 mgs per day for those aged 14 years and older, and even less for children and adolescents younger 14 years of age.