New federal dietary guidelines give food industry heartburn

Last week, while students across the country picked at their calorie-adjusted, reduced-sodium school lunches and consumers fretted about whether to buy skim or whole milk, the House Agriculture Committee held a public hearing to review recommendations made by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC). The government updates the national guidelines every five years.

More than 500 pages of government nutrition recommendations may sound like a good antidote for insomnia, but in reality the final guidelines will affect the life of every American. They will be used to determine school lunch programs and adjust benefits for food stamps and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC). The recommendations will influence what ingredients food manufacturers include in their products, what foods the nursing home will serve grandma, and for what food choices doctors will admonish their patients.

The guidelines can have a powerful impact on certain industries. For example, when people changed their eating habits in response to government warnings about the dangers of cholesterol, per capita egg consumption dropped by 30 percent—a difficult blow for egg farmers.

The latest report stirred a good deal of controversy at the House hearing. Rep. Michael Conaway, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, suggested the DGAC overstepped its bounds when it expanded its nutritional advice to include advise on tax policy and issues such as the environmental impact of food production. Conaway also voiced his suspicion the DGAC chose scientific studies to support its own predetermined recommendations, rather than basing them on reliable, objective science.

“As chairman of the House Committee on Agriculture, a consumer, and a father, it is important that guidance that come out of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans report is based on sound, consistent, irrefutable science,” he wrote in U.S. News & World Report.

Lawmakers aren’t the only ones concerned about the guidelines.

The DGAC received 29,000 comments on the recommendations, mostly from food industry members raising concerns about issues such as how to meet future sodium targets. Very few members of the general public responded, noted Rep. Collin Peterson, D-Minn. He believes the public isn’t paying much attention because people have grown skeptical of the whole process and have lost confidence in the guidelines.

“People were told butter and eggs are bad for you, and now I guess they are okay,” he said. “According to The Washington Post this morning they were wrong on milk as well. I don’t know how much government-subsidized powder we bought because of it.”

The DGAC is still developing the new guidelines and many recommendations will remain unchanged from 2010. But the committee is changing advice the federal government has issued for the past 40 years regarding dietary cholesterol. High cholesterol foods, long considered an enemy to good nutrition, are no longer a “nutrient of concern.” The DGAC changed that guidance in response to recent studies that indicate the level of cholesterol in the blood really has very little to do with how much cholesterol people consume. New studies also show dietary cholesterol may not increase the risk of heart disease.

The Health and Human Services Department and the Department of Agriculture will jointly release the 2015 dietary guidelines in December.