Category Archives: Dietary Guidelines

No, Dietary Guidelines Are Not Making Us Sick

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Frequently I see the claim that dietary guidelines are the reason we are overweight and sick. It is used to sell books, particular diet strategies, or just to inject doubt about government agencies and nutrition science. This of course rests on the assumption that people are following the recommendations. Some groups have explored the proportion of the population that meets recommendations for various food groups. A good paper is by Krebs-Smith and colleagues from 2010, who used NHANES '01-'04 data Read more [...]

Population proportion below micronutrient DRIs

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For a recent post about multivitamins on the American Society for Nutrition's blog, I used the most recent NHANES data with nutrient data available (2009-2010) along with current Dietary Reference Intake (RDA or AI) values to estimate the proportion of 4 American population groups below the DRI for 21 micronutrients (males and females, age 19-30; males and females, over 70), and the proportion of the groups below if they all took a Centrum Adults multivitamin. Here they are reproduced in a larger Read more [...]

Choose foods, not nutrients

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Last week, Yoni Freedhoff highlighted a great JAMA editorial by Dariush Mozaffarian and David Ludwig entitled "Dietary Guidelines in the 21st Century-a Time for Food." (1).  It is a short but smart commentary by 2 researchers who clearly see the big picture (and have contributed research to support it): that we should be promoting whole foods, not specific nutrients which push consumers toward processed products.  Yoni has reprinted most of it on his blog, so I will make a very short summary here: Nutritional Read more [...]