If you haven’t yet read my recent On Nutrition column, “The new dietary guidelines: The good, the bad and the ugly,” please check it out. I don’t know how many individuals will take it upon themselves to shape their eating habits based on what the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends, but they do shape food policy as well as decisions made by industries and organizations that may be feeding you at one point or another, so they do matter.
I reined myself in a bit when I wrote this column, because quite frankly I’m a lot more pissed off about than I let on about the political process that eroded the recommendations of the nutrition scientists that make up the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC). If you had heard me talking about it with a dietitian friend over beer one evening last week, you would have known how I really felt!
No, the column was a toned down, but still sincere, rendition of my take on the new guidelines. If you would like to read more on the topic, here are some links:
- How agriculture controls nutrition guidelines (from the October issue of The Atlantic)
- New science on cholesterol, eggs and vegetarian diets (the column I wrote last year on the DGAC recommendations)
- Food politics run amuk? (My lengthy blog post from a few months later about how the process was already getting out of hand)
