Why The US Dietary Guidelines Don’t Apply to 90% Of Americans And How They Can with Nina Teicholz

Dec 16, 2020

Nina Teicholz, a science journalist and author of the bestseller 'The Big Fat Surprise,' dives into the flaws of U.S. Dietary Guidelines. She argues they fail to address the 90% of Americans who are metabolically unhealthy, emphasizing the need for tailored recommendations. The conversation critiques how political and economic interests influence these guidelines, calls for a reevaluation of saturated fat's role in diets, and advocates for actionable reform to improve public health, especially for vulnerable communities.

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INSIGHT

Dietary Guidelines' Wide Reach

Dietary guidelines influence Americans through various programs like school lunches and WIC, impacting millions.
These guidelines also affect doctor recommendations, food labels, and even military meals.

INSIGHT

Mismatched Guidelines

Despite appearing irrelevant, the dietary guidelines significantly shaped American eating habits, leading to adverse health outcomes.
These guidelines, intended for healthy individuals, now apply to a largely unhealthy population.

INSIGHT

Guidelines Mismatch and Unhealthy Americans

The dietary guidelines, designed for preventing chronic diseases in healthy people, are misapplied to a majority of unhealthy Americans.
This mismatch is especially concerning for vulnerable populations receiving government food assistance.

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Why The US Dietary Guidelines Don’t Apply to 90% Of Americans And How They Can | This episode is brought to you by Tushy, Essentia, and Four Sigmatic

The dietary guidelines laid out by the government are conflicting with good health in so many ways. For one, they are recommendations that would only work for someone who is already healthy, yet close to 90% of our population in the US is metabolically unhealthy. They also don’t take ethnicity and socioeconomic status into account, among many other factors. This is a big issue. Clearly, we should be providing Americans with guidelines that will actually serve their health. And research shows that whether we like it or not, as a society we’ve followed the guidelines over several decades and suffered the consequences of worsening health.

Today’s guest has been a huge inspiration to me, as she’s challenged the conventional wisdom on nutrition and continues to expose the truth behind our guidelines and the food industry. Nina Teicholz is a science journalist and author of the New York Times bestseller, The Big Fat Surprise, which upended the conventional wisdom on dietary fat—especially saturated fat—and spurred a new conversation about whether these fats in fact cause heart disease. Named a Best Book of the Year by the Economist, Wall Street Journal, and Mother Jones, among others, it continues to be called a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the amazing story of how we came to believe fat is bad for our health—and what a better diet might look like.

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Here are more of the details from our interview:

How we are all affected by the U.S. dietary guidelines, even if we think we aren’t (7:06)

Why the guidelines don’t apply to the majority of Americans (12:01)

90% of scientific reviews that inform the U.S. dietary guidelines did not take race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status into account (17:43)

Conflicts of interest among scientists on the U.S. dietary guidelines scientific committee (21:22)

How the Office of Dietary Guidelines prohibits consideration of systematic reviews (31:21)

Why the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Committee chose not to consider research on weight loss and low-carbohydrate diets (34:32)

The ongoing confusion about saturated fat, cholesterol, and heart disease (42:05)

What can the average person do to improve the U.S. dietary guidelines? (53:28)

How to design guidelines that would help fix chronic disease (56:24)

Learn more about Nina Teicholz at https://ninateicholz.com/ and follow her on Facebook @NinaTeicholz and on Twitter @bigfatsurprise.

Learn more about The Nutrition Coalition at https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/.

Read, “Saturated Fats and Health: A Reassessment and Proposal for Food-Based Recommendations: JACC State-of-the-Art Review” here:

https://www.jacc.org/doi/full/10.1016/j.jacc.2020.05.077