Every five years the government issues guidelines for healthy eating, listing foods recommended for optimum nutrition for most Americans.
This year is prioritizing high-quality, nutrient-dense protein foods in every meal. This includes a variety of animal sources, including eggs, poultry, seafood, and red meat, in addition to plant-sourced protein foods such as beans, peas, lentils, legumes, nuts, seeds, and soy.
The guidance calls to “avoid highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet” and “avoid sugar-sweetened beverages, such as soda, fruit drinks, and energy drinks.”
This new guidance says, “no amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners is recommended or considered part of a healthy or nutritious diet” and calls on parents to completely avoid added sugar for children aged four and under.
The guidance calls for receiving the bulk of fat from whole food sources, such as meats, poultry, eggs, omega 3–rich seafood, nuts, seeds, full-fat dairy, olives, and avocados. When cooking with or adding fats to meals, the guidelines call for using the most nutrient-dense natural options with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil.
This guidance takes a firm stand to “prioritize fiber-rich whole grains” and “significantly reduce the consumption of highly processed, refined carbohydrates, such as white bread, ready-to-eat or packaged breakfast options, flour tortillas, and crackers.”
The guidance makes the recommendation that individuals with certain chronic diseases may experience improved health outcomes when following a lower carbohydrate diet.
Critics say that food industry groups have influenced the recommendations over the years, formerly the cereal and processed carbohydrate industry, but say this time around the meat and dairy industry were represented by members of the group involved in making the new recommendations.
See: realfood.gov and cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf
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