Surely you’ve heard: America’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has come out with a new report and some new advice. Cholesterol and coffee are in; sugar and saturated fats are out. You’ve probably also heard that the guidelines have been getting things all wrong for years. Maybe you even read Nina Teicholz’ recent New York Times op-ed explaining that the reason why everything’s been wrong for so long is because, to paraphrase, nutritional epidemiology — the study of the impact of diet on chronic disease — is a discipline that’s almost impossible to do well. The reason it’s so challenging is that unlike captive lab animals with short lifespans, we humans are complicated, we rarely do what we’re told for very long, we’re terrible at keeping accurate records of what we’re eating and we live an awfully long time before we develop diet-relatable diseases.
As far as research goes, that’s all rather problematic, especially the part about not being able to accurately keep track of what we’re eating. How can we possibly come to any meaningful conclusions about the impact of diet on the development of chronic diseases if we can’t meaningfully account for our diets? In a paper published this past fall in the International Journal of Obesity, Nikhil Dhurandhar and colleagues (full disclosure, I was one of the members of this study’s working group), argued that sometimes something is worse than nothing, in that despite the fact that science knows we can’t trust self-reported dietary recall, the media, and public health, still latch on to outcomes from flawed self-reported dietary recall studies as if they’re valuable. As a consequence, they draw conclusions and publish guidelines based on faulty data. Not surprisingly, conclusions and guidelines based on faulty data are themselves, by definition, faulty.
There are more problems, too. There’s “white-hat bias,” whereby researchers and policy makers may consciously or unconsciously distort their interpretation of data and evidence as a means to try to further what they see as the greater good. There are more traditional conflicts of interest, whereby researchers and policy makers, consequent to dollars or relationships, consciously or unconsciously distort their interpretation of data and evidence as a means to serve a corporate partner’s interests. There’s also the fact that much of the work done on diet has been done in the name of nutrients, rather than foods, and while in many cases there may be terrific nutrient-based hypotheses being explored, that doesn’t change the fact that people tend to shop for, and eat, foods, and not nutrients, and that drilling down the benefits of specific patterns of eating to nutrients is an exercise in “best guessmanship.”
Clearly the answer to our growing diet- and weight-relatable disease woes wasn’t found in our prior low-fat, low-cholesterol era of dietary guidelines, but before you jump on the low-sugar, low-carb bandwagon, remember: It’s being built on the backs of all those very same shortcomings that fueled the past few decades of dietary guideline failures. Trading one set of assumptions built off weak data for another set of assumptions built off weak data doesn’t strike me as all that wise. We just don’t have the data to drill things down to the specifics — but the good news is, a new approach to dietary guidelines eschews the minutia and instead focuses on the broad steps that might well make a dramatic improvement to our collective health.
These revolutionarily back-to-the-basics new guidelines were recently adopted by Brazil, and rather than focus on aiming the public to less of this and more of that, they focus on the big picture and can be summarized by way of their own reported “golden rules.”
“Always prefer natural or minimally-processed foods and freshly-made dishes and meals to ultra-processed foods. In other words, opt for water, milk and fruits instead of soft drinks, dairy drinks and biscuits, do not replace freshly prepared dishes (broth, soups, salads, sauces, rice and beans, pasta, steamed vegetables, pies) with products that do not require culinary preparation (packaged soups, instant noodles, pre-prepared frozen dishes, sandwiches, cold cuts and sausages, industrialized sauces, ready-mixes for cakes), and stick to homemade desserts, avoiding industrialized ones.”
Boiling this down even further, rather than concern yourself with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s most recent set of dietary recommendations, if you ignore everything and simply focus on transforming fresh whole ingredients into meals; eating those meals at a table free from distractions; drinking alcohol at most in moderation; not smoking; getting a good night sleep; and cultivating healthy friendships and relationships, this will serve you better than getting 10 percent less or more of this, that or the other into your daily dietary life.
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American’s Dietary Guidelines Need a Brazilian originally appeared on usnews.com
