Guidelines are Only for “Healthy Americans.

Although the law states that the Dietary Guidelines should be for the “general public,” USDA officials in charge of the Guidelines have made clear that this policy is only for healthy people. The 60 percent of our population diagnosed with nutrition-related diseases — obesity, diabetes, dementia — is excluded. On this path, there’s little question that the government’s guidelines will do virtually nothing to reverse the epidemics of these diseases. Read an op-ed in the Washington Post by our Executive Director Nina Teicholz on this topic.

On saturated fats:

The DGA review of saturated fats will build on the last committee’s review, in 2015. However, the 2015 review was ad hoc, not systematic and thus not reliable. Peer-reviewed documentation of the non-systematic nature of this review is here. To be credible and trustworthy, the 2020 review on saturated fats needs to start from scratch and importantly, capture long-ignored, large clinical trials on saturated fats. For a backgrounder on the data on saturated fats, see this.

A leading expert in the field, Arne Astrup, has submitted a public comment on behalf of a large group of scientists arguing that a cap on all saturated fatty acids is not warranted . See here.

On lack of rigor in the scientific methodology:

USDA is using its “own methodology” and not complying with any international standard for reviewing the science (e.g., Cochrane, GRADE, AHRQ, etc). At the first meeting of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, USDA’s Julie Obbagy stated said that USDA would use a “modified GRADE” protocol, but at the most recent meeting, USDA backed out of this commitment. This is especially signifiant, since the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, in the first-ever outside peer-review of the DGA process, said that USDA failed to use a “state of the art” methodology and needed to upgrade its approach. The main issue we see is that the USDA makes no mention of prioritizing clinical-trial data, which can show cause-and-effect, over epidemiological studies, which rely on weak self-reported “food-frequency questionnaires” and can only show associations (usually extremely weak). Thus, USDA is falling short on up-to-date standards in a very major way. Without a rigorous systematic approach, the Guidelines will be neither reliable nor trustworthy.

Our overview of problems with the scientific protocols in the 2020 DGA is here, including comments by leading experts in the field.