Tag Archives: DGAC

‘Stop feeding us lies’ say protesters as Dietary Guidelines Committee unbelievably doubles down against animal fat, protein

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Dietary Guidelines have most negatively impacted children and youth.

Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee holds final meeting. Draft recommendations include: Reductions in total protein; Less protein from animals, more from plants; Dairy emphasis still low-fat, non-fat; Implementation recommendations include food supply leverage

By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, October 25, 2024

WASHINGTON, D.C. – This week is National School Lunch Week, and on Oct. 22 while USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack kicked off the so-called “largest federal-led summit in support of healthy school meals” in Las Vegas, the 2025-30 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) met publicly by zoom to gamble away the nutrients children need for the development of their brains, bodies and long-term health.

This was the seventh and final meeting of the DGAC after 22 months of subcommittee meetings and periodic full committee meetings, yielding a draft “scientific report” that is increasingly vegetarian.

Its recommendations to USDA and HHS are to develop 2025-30 Guidelines that significantly decrease the role of nutrient dense animal foods, even though they spent the first hour of the 12-hour, two-day virtual meeting puzzling over how to solve the nutrient deficiencies in their analysis.

The recommendations merge the three current DGA patterns (Vegetarian, Mediterranean and Healthy U.S.) into one dietary pattern with a draft name of “Healthy Flex U.S. Diet.” The flexibility part, according to the DGAC discussion, is the ‘how much’ and ‘how to’, which relies on ‘food pattern modeling’ and more specific strategies on how to replace animal based foods with plant based foods. 

The DGAC aims to improve its poor performance on the under-consumed nutrients by “including more nutrient-dense plant-based meal and dietary recommendation options” in its advice for 2025-30 Dietary Guidelines. 

The draft advice aims to continue to “emphasize consumption of low-fat or non-fat dairy and unsaturated fats; limit consumption of red or processed meats and foods high in saturated fat; and limit foods like sweetened beverages.”

Some committee members raised the concern that further addressing one problem (fat, salt, and sugar) leads to other problems in other areas (under-consumption of key nutrients, over-consumption of carbohydrates, and impacts on metabolic health). 

In fact, a week before the DGAC met, the first ever Change the Dietary Guidelines protest drew hundreds of people to the nation’s capitol — with Nina Teicholz, author of Big Fat Surprise, as emcee. It was organized by Metabolic Revolution with the mission of asking the Administration to “STOP FEEDING US LIES.”

Nutrition Coalition photo

Meanwhile, in the DGAC meeting, at least one member at the end of the first day noted how animal foods, specifically mentioning dairy, have all of these essential nutrients and that the bioavailability of the nutrients is important.

This didn’t make much difference. On the question of saturated fat restrictions, the 2025-30 DGAC doubled-down. These restrictions began with the first edition in 1980, and the quantitative recommendation of “limit saturated fat intake to less than 10% of calories per day starting at age 2 and replacing it with unsaturated fat, particularly poly-unsaturated” began in 2005.

The Committee’s biggest justification was that, “This has been confirmed by several previous DGACs based on the relationship between saturated fat intake and cardiovascular disease risk.” Basically saying it has been previously decided, and “we’re sticking with it.” Essentially, all evidence to the contrary was again ignored.

The Committee stated that only 1 in 5 Americans implement this limitation; so, food replacement strategies, cultural diet pathways, and diet simulations were recommended to show how to get more nutrient density from plant sources. Pre-packaged and pre-portioned implementation strategies and plated combinations of plant-based meals are suggested as ways to ensure nutrients without the fat.

This high-level academic exercise means very little to everyday Americans making choices about food, but it could fundamentally change what is available to choose from — if the “systems science, implementation science, and behavioral science” the DGAC is also recommending pushes diets even more toward highly processed, pre-packaged, pre-portioned options designed by global food giants.

Bottomline: the DGAC will recommend to the USDA and HHS to further reduce animal-based protein consumption and to further increase plant-sourced consumption in the 2025-30 Guidelines, while continuing to limit dairy to non-fat and low-fat options.

For dairy, the DGAC is also recommending that USDA update nutrition composition and dairy reference guides to reflect what they say are ‘improved’ plant-milks, and to use ‘diet simulators’ to show Americans how to be more ‘flexible’ in replacing animal foods with plant foods.

The DGAC also changed the wording of its 2025-30 mission to “reduce the focus on chronic disease risk reduction, to instead focus more on promoting growth and development and improving the healthspan.”

These are key takeaways despite the Committee spending the first hour of the first day stupefied by the analysis showing — uniformly across all socio-economic and cultural demographics — children ages 5-19 had the nutritionally poorest diets in terms of under-consuming key nutrients at this most critical lifestage.

Even when they picked up their Health Equity Lens to look at the data, it was uniformly bad.

The DGAC could not understand why the healthy eating index showed such uniformly poor performance in the under-consumption of key nutrients, especially among children ages 5 to 19 across all populations. (Simple. It’s because the anti-fat DGAs are enforced at school meals twice a day, five days a week, most of the year for this life stage. Kids do not get to choose; adults do.) Oct. 21 screenshot DGAC meeting 

Their interpretation? I will paraphrase: Parents need help understanding how to feed their children.

My interpretation? The Dietary Guidelines are, themselves, the problem because they are used rigidly to formulate the meals that the age 5 to 19 lifestage (kids) are presented with twice a day, five days a week, nine to 12 months of the year – at school! The body will keep snacking until it gets the nutrients it seeks. 

“Obesity is a major public health issue, impacting 36% of children ages 2 through 19 years and 41% of adults ages 20 and older,” according to the DGAC.

However, by the end of the two days, the DGAC showed it would stay on the anti-fat path and give USDA and HHS the “expert” advice to double-down on saturated fat restrictions that have prevailed over the years while Americans become less healthy, more obese, with more chronic disease, at ever younger ages. Do they not wonder why this was not the situation pre-Guidelines? So much valuable research on saturated fat and health was again left off the table.

One of many draft advice slides for 2025-30 Dietary Guidelines emphasizing non-fat and low-fat dairy and unsaturated fats; addressing nutrient density by increasing plant-based meal options and decreasing animal-based. Oct. 21 DGAC meeting 

Impacts of the DGAC draft report on Dairy:

1) Dairy’s ‘place’ in the diet remains somewhat intact, but the committee advises things like not referring to soy milk as an “alternative” because it is part of the dairy grouping. They also are questioning if ‘Dairy’ is the right term for the Dairy group. The DGAC also will advise USDA to update nutrient composition and daily reference amounts to reflect the current state of nutrition art in “plant-milks” and to use diet simulations to show Americans how to be more flexible in replacing animal-based with plant-based.

2) Nonfat and low-fat dairy will continue to be the recommendation (3 milk cup equivalents), although they mentioned that there was not enough evidence to make this a strong conclusion for ages 2 through 5. Perhaps this leaves a door open for daycares and WIC to expand to 2% and whole fat milk up to age 5 instead of the current age 2, but schoolchildren are still out of luck. Dairy fat and butter were mentioned as being consumed mostly in processed foods.

3) The Protein category has been flipped on its lid. The DGAC moved beans, peas and lentils from the vegetable category to the protein category and increased the daily quantities for beans, peas, lentils, seeds, soy, nuts, and fish, while reducing the allowance for meat, poultry and eggs. In fact, they will represent this visually by listing first in the protein category the plant sources, followed by fish, then eggs, then poultry, and lastly, red meat. The DGAC pointed to the dairy group as a source of protein that is not in the protein group, so protein level importance in plant-based comparisons can be reduced. (Several Committee members indicated their belief that Americans consume too much protein, so they wanted to show these crossovers differently.)

4) The additional considerations chapter is of particular concern for the future, advising USDA and HHS to: a) Encourage shifts to nutrient-dense plant-based meals; b) Put stricter limits on foods and beverages high in added sugars, sodium, and saturated fat; c) Use sugar limitations to exclude foods from the dietary pattern (with implications for flavored milk and dairy products); d) Make sodium reduction targets mandatory not voluntary (may impact the cheesemaking process for schools and other institutional feeding); e) Avoid referring to soy milk as “alternative”; Research name change for Protein group and determine if ‘Dairy’ is the right term for the Dairy group.

This draft report ends the DGAC’s work. In the coming days, it will be edited to reflect the discussion for submission as final recommendations to USDA and HHS.

A joint team of staff from both Departments will prepare this DGAC Scientific Report for posting at DietaryGuidelines.gov, along with data analysis, food pattern modeling and other supplemental documents. 

USDA and HHS will then open a new public comment period.

In 2025, the Secretaries of USDA and HHS (whoever they end up being), along with their joint team, will review the DGAC scientific report and the public comments to develop the actual 2025-30 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Expect these DGAs to continue most negatively impacting America’s schoolchildren and elderly in senior centers where meals must follow them.

However, it will have some impact on all of us if the Departments use the DGAC recommendation to implement food system science at the food supply level. We can already see what happens to choices for consumers and markets for farmers when the middlemen decide what can be put on grocery store shelves or in the dairy or meat case.

Not only did we not see a serious effort to address the need for more nutrient dense foods in the dietary pattern, the new pattern will double-down against saturated fat, along with salt and added sugar, and erode protein levels, while continuing to search for the missing nutrition profile of its increasingly vegetarian recommendations. 

None of this passes the smell test, and likely not the taste test. Kids eat food not data. Nutrients must pass the tongue to reach the belly. Look for more on that in terms of action next week from the Grassroots Pennsylvania Dairy Advisory Committee and 97 Milk.

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Additional information:

In its report, The Nutrition Coalition notes: “The collective shift toward emphasizing more plant-based foods has lowered the quality and quantity of protein in our diets. It is time to pause and question whether these changes are endangering health in the U.S., especially among children and the elderly. Still, with plant-based advocates dominating the public comments, plant-based industries and interests lobbying the USDA, and plant-based proponents on the expert committee itself, we may see further reductions of this important macronutrient in the 2025 Dietary Guidelines.”

Nina Teicholz, Ph.D. explains that these draft recommendations “fly in the face of our knowledge that plant proteins are of lower quality than animal proteins. With the exception of soy, all plant proteins lack all the necessary amino acids to make muscle tissue (as well as perform other critical functions in the human body). Reducing the total amount of protein and replacing animal proteins with plant proteins are both harmful changes. These alterations will mean that anyone receiving USDA-funded meals, such as kids consuming school lunches, the women and infant children on the WIC program, and the elderly will receive fewer complete proteins. Also, reductions in meat, dairy and eggs are sure to exacerbate nutritional deficiencies in the guidelines, which currently fail to meet basic targets iron, vitamin D, vitamin E, choline, and folate. The Dietary Guidelines are already deficient in complete proteins. The erosion of protein in the guidelines has been happening for decades, as we wrote about in this post.”

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One-sided bias evident as DGAC edges fat ‘caps’ lower, even our toddlers aren’t safe

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Over 500 pages, 250,000 reports screened-out, nutrient deficiencies ignored, and now toddler food patterns included

IMG-8568By Sherry Bunting, Farmshine, June 19, 2020 edition

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The big news from the final Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) meeting in which they presented their 500-plus page report Wednesday, June 17, is that the current saturated fat caps — at less than 10% of calories — will stand. But at the same time, the saturated fat subcommittee detailed its true recommendations, pegging saturated fat levels to be at 7 to 8% of calories, and these charts are the ones that will likely be forced on schools and daycares and nursing homes and military diets. (More detail on this to come.)

After 7 hours of subcomittee presentations, in an online virtual format, covering all facets of the 2020-25 DGAC ‘expert’ report, it was hard to choose which of the many eyebrow-raising moments was most concerning. In fact, DGAC comments were at times actually humorous, if this was not such a serious matter.

Perhaps it was the moment when the subcommittee handling the saturated fat questions decided to go backwards from 2015. Not only are they edging the saturated fat caps lower in their forward-looking recommendations, they want to bring cholesterol caps back into the mix. That’s right folks, we’re going back to cholesterol caps “because humans have no need for dietary cholesterol,” they declared matter of factly.

That’s the mentality. No need for cholesterol, which is essential for every single cell in the body and especially important in hormone synthesis, not to mention brain function. But, then again, the DGAC never was happy about giving up those cholesterol caps in 2015, especially since the anti-animal agenda of noted DGAC vegetarian leanings have found they need more than saturated fat caps to hang their hats on — especially since the 2020 DGAC included toddler food patterns in their report for the first time.

That discussion was also perplexing. No less than a full hour was spent going through every diet formulation the subcommittee could conjure up in order to get toddler food patterns closer to a “healthy vegetarian diet”, the one of three currently government-approved dietary patterns favored by the DGAC, now being recommended for children UNDER 2 years of age.

Each combination of foods they walked through (because the new way of presenting these patterns is to have actual foods listed to avoid) had them facing a big dilemma. Within the amount of calories a toddler will consume, there was no way to deliver the nutrients they need for life without more animal protein foods. In each case, the toddler patterns did not provide all the essential nutrients needed for brain development, growth, and health.

Iron was just one of them. When it was pointed out by one DGAC member that animal protein delivers absorbable iron — critical for toddlers — unlike a handy-dandy supplement pill, vegan-leaning Linda Van Horn from the saturated fat committee chimed in with a bizarre comment. She said it was not a concern because research she couldn’t put her fingers on at that moment suggests vegetarian adults have the ability to absorb more iron from supplements and other foods, so, she said, “kids of vegetarian parents could have this ‘accelerated absorption’ capability from their parents.”

Inherited vegetarian genetics? Eye-roll.

Another committee member politely suggested that, yes, there is research showing vegetarians absorb more iron from supplements and other food sources “because they are deficient in iron in the first place.”

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DGAC says healthy vegetarian pattern for toddlers is good to go even though it doesn’t meet their needs for essential nutrients for life. No solution was given by DGAC for this problem. Sadly, in fact, children in schools and daycares were referenced as a group that can “adhere” to the diets  due to government p.

Unfazed, the committee ignored any attempt at logic on the many questions of these diets missing quite a few “nutrients of concern.” They simply moved on… next slide.

Throughout the discussions of dietary patterns, saturated fat caps, and such, the “nutrients of concern” not being met in the food patterns — mainly fat soluble vitamins like D and A found naturally and more absorbable in whole milk vs. fat free and low fat dairy, for example — they just kept moving on in their direction away from animal foods, comforted by their cherry-picked research.  It wasn’t just vitamins D and A and iron, but also iodine, choline, B12 (in adults), potassium, and more. Throughout the daylong presentations, this problem with nutrients not being met kept cropping up for each “life stage” the DGAC was addressing. What was new this time was the addition of food patterns for pregnant and lactating women and children from birth to 24 months of age.

In a more detailed look at the report next week, a few ‘good news’ points for dairy as a food category can be shared, but this underlying avoidance of saturated fat put all things dairy squarely in the fat-free and low-fat zone, and the new and stricter recommendations for added sugars and beverage calories were another concern for children and the dairy sector. Yep, you guessed it. Coke and Pepsico will be happy as their high fructose corn syrup mixed with artificial sweetener concoctions will be looked upon favorably vs. nutrient-dense chocolate milk. (More on that next week.)

Other mentally exhausting moments occurred when subcommittees made recommendations based on limited evidence, or conversely, graded evidence as strong when it was based purely on observational studies. When these concerns were brought up, the answer was to point at the work of the 2015 DGAC that considered “so many more studies” and that the DGAC had decided at the outset to “build on the 2015 report” — more or less picking up where they left off — when it came to the question of dietary fats.

That was the ‘magic wand’ applied throughout the day.

In fact, as Nina Teicholz, author of Big Fat Surprise and founder of the Nutrition Coalition, pointed out in her blow-by-blow twitter feed throughout the day, the movement to subtly edge saturated fat caps lower happened on the very day that a major new review was published on saturated fats to the contrary. The authors of that report — unconsidered by the DGAC of course — included the chair and another member of the former 2005 DGAC.

“Their findings are quite opposite of those by the current one-sided 2020 DGAC,” wrote Teicholz.

Another eyebrow-raising moment came when the committee debated how to “harmonize” the food listings on their charts taken from studies where they had different meanings or included different foods.

Dairy was one example. Whole milk bad, fat-free good, and yet ‘milk’ as an entity showed up with so many positive influences in combined research charts (including cardiovascular disease, all cause mortality, obesity, type 2 diabetes, immune status and more). But the committee didn’t know which milk was in the study, and that distinction is important!

Similarly, they lumped red meat and processed meat together on one chart (the negatives), and then on another chart showing positives, they listed ‘lean meat’ but said they didn’t know if that category included lean red meat or just poultry and fish — even though the same chart had separated poultry and fish into their own categories!

It all seemed like nonsense the DGAC should have taken time to figure out before rushing their report to print.

Even though a letter signed by nearly 300 doctors and medical professionals, letters from dietician groups, letters from members of Congress and others had requested a delay, the DGAC was in a hurry to do the June 17 presentation. In fact, when registering to participate in the presentation online, a note was sent back stating that “this is only a draft and it will have a comment period.”

Trouble is, the expert report is now out, and it’s going to be difficult to put that jack back in the box with a 30-day or 60-day comment period after USDA and HHS formalize it — because so much science was excluded from the beginning. A do-over with a new committee is needed.

This committee took time Wednesday to explain the litany of poor reasons why favorable fat studies were excluded from their cadre. The federal staff that screened for each subcommittee went through a total of 270,000 reports and whittled it down to 1500 on all pertinent questions for this DGAC cycle. That is a story in itself because rigorous evidence was ignored in favor of “associated” studies.

Another concerning moment came early in the day’s presentations when committee members talked about promoting federal diet-tracking, biomarkers and monitoring. Americans will love that kind of intrusion. And in the course of the behavioral recommendations they made, the schoolchildren were their go-to for such monitoring. A captive group of guinea pigs!

But perhaps it was the concluding remarks Wednesday evening at 7:30 p.m. as the daylong meeting came to a close that really stood out. Chairwoman Barbara Schneeman, Ph.D. talked about the enormous task the DGAC had completed over the past 15 months. She said the committee would put its report in final form over the next two weeks, present it to USDA and HHS by the end of June and then USDA and HHS would “formulate it” into recommendations that can be posted for public comment by July 15 and they would be a done deal for implementation by the end of 2020 for the next five years.

Schneeman also went on to talk about how the government nutrition programs needed to be working on how to get more Americans “adhering to these diets”, with emphasis on restricting fat, added sugars and salt while still maintaining positive energy balance and meeting nutrient needs even though the DGAC had not even the slightest answer for the dilemma of meeting nutritient targets with these patterns and recommendations, especially for children.

The clincher. Schneeman pointed out how the COVID-19 pandemic shows just how much the current state of chronic dietary-related diseases put certain populations in the most vulnerable position for infectious diseases like Coronavirus.

But that’s okay, the reason we have an obesity and diabetes epidemic as well as other chronic conditions is because, she said “Americans have never followed our dietary guidelines.”

Begging to differ with their federal statistics, the record is clear that per-capita consumption has declined among the foods DGAC set out over the years to have Americans increasingly avoid. These chronic conditions have worsened with each 5-year cycle moving us further in the fat-free and low-fat direction. So much so, that many of us don’t even realize how we are impacted, and especially how our children are impacted. Now, even the toddlers won’t be safe.

Get involved by sending or phoning a comment to YOUR members of Congress and the Secretaries of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) at this link https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/take-action/

Look for more details in part two.

Past articles on this blog about the DGAC process are listed below

Dietary Guidelines Committee must be stopped… 

Call to action: Feds ignore science on saturated fats… 

Dairy advisory committee formed… 

There is a war to win for our farmers and our children… 

Nutrition politics: Kids and cattle caught in crossfire…