Andrea Wiley
Indiana University
The 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) were finally released on January 7 2016 to the Secretaries of the U.S. Departments of Health and Human Services (HHS) and Agriculture (USDA). The long delay between the DGA Advisory Committee Scientific Report completion (February 2015), the end of the public comment period (May 2015), and the announcement of the 2015 DGAs in January 2016 suggests a protracted period of lobbying by various food industries that ultimately produced particularly vague and timid DGAs that state that American diets need only be “nudged” by small “shifts.” Most of the press has been appropriately cynical about these, and there is no need to belabor the role of food industry lobbyists and their insidious negative impact on the process of developing useful guidance and related policies that could actually enhance the health of Americans. Most notably, the Scientific Report had highlighted sustainability as an important consideration for dietary guidance for the first time, and it specifically recommended that Americans reduce their consumption of red and processed meats. Neither made it into the DGAs.
Instead, the 5 key messages of the 2015 DGAs are:
- Follow a healthy eating pattern across the life span.
- Focus on variety, nutrient density, and amount.
- Limit calories from added sugars and saturated fats and reduce sodium intake.
- Shift to healthier food and beverage choices.
- Support healthy eating patterns for all.
What is one to make of such a set of bullet points? The only one that seems even remotely more than sloganeering is the third, and there is a curiously large gap between limits on nutrients and the overall DGA emphasis on whole eating patterns. The third bullet point requires some knowledge of where items might be found, since nutrients, rather than foods, are its focus. What are the main sources of added sugars? Sodas! Saturated fats? Red meat and cheese! Sodium? Virtually all processed foods!
Marion Nestle has already pointed out that “eat less” messages in the DGAs are couched in terms of nutrients, while “eat more” messages encourage foods (e.g. lean meats). The 
MyPlate translation of this guideline is: “Drink and eat less sodium, saturated fat, and added sugars”. These are not obvious items to avoid on grocery store shelves, nor do their food sources come with bold messages: High in Added Sugar! High in Sodium!
But an additional area of obfuscation in the DGAs specifically and nutrition labeling more generally, is quantification. The first two should make up<10% of total calories (a unit most of us struggle to comprehend), and sodium should be <2300 mg. Given American’s longstanding rejection of the metric system, it’s curious that nutrients are listed on food labels or referenced in the DGAs in metric units. In science, these are standards, but from the perspective of metric-illiterate American consumers, they are utterly useless. For example, a 12 ounce can of soda (note use of the U.S. customary weight measure for food) has 33 grams of sugar. How much is 33 grams? A gram seems like such a tiny unit, so this must be a minuscule amount. Measured in more familiar units, 33 grams of sugar is over 6 teaspoons (2 tablespoons or 1/8th of a cup). In contrast, 2300 mg of salt seems like a lot, but it is in fact only 1 teaspoon (or 2.3 grams, which makes it seem like very little!). The teaspoon unit appears only once in the DGAs, in the recommendation for oils (to replace solid fats).
There is much more to say about the 2015 DGAs as a lost opportunity to take a strong stance on diet in relation to Americans’ high risk of diet-related chronic diseases and the long term viability of our food supply. As it stands, it continues a long history of vague dietary guidance that will have little impact on American dietary patterns.
FoodAnthropology 