Let’s help shape the new Food Pyramid coming next year
Sometimes you can feel so powerless when you see such an influential governmental body like the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) continuing to do the same thing over and over again when it comes to the dietary guidelines they issue every five years. While they will hail the “changes” that happen to what has been commonly referred to as The Food Pyramid for the past few decades every time it is updated, the fact of the matter is it still relies too heavily on bread, pasta, and those so-called healthy whole grains and not enough on the truly healthy foods like beef, eggs, and butter. There’s certainly a disconnect between nutritional reality based on solid science and this fantasy world that members of the dietary guidelines committee over the years live in.
In November 2008, I blogged about my concern that not one member of the 13 chosen to serve on the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee were from the low-carb research community. Not a single member! Several capable and highly-qualified ones were nominated, but all of them were rejected by the Bush administration’s Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer and Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt. We can only hope that President-Elect Barack Obama’s choices for those posts–Tom Vilsack and Tom Daschle, respectively–will be more open to the low-carb message for the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Committee.
But what about 2010? Is all hope lost yet again for low-carbers again to be disgusted with yet more conventional wisdom that isn’t gonna make a hill of beans difference about obesity and disease? Well, maybe not. I have some daring ideas about how we can influence the 2010 USDA Dietary Guidelines with the low-carb science if I can get a few dedicated supporters of the carbohydrate-restricted message who want to be world changers in 2009. It’s not gonna be easy, but what I’m about to share is worth a shot if we want to make a real difference in our country.
The next meeting of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is scheduled for Thursday, January 29 and Friday, January 30, 2009 at the Jefferson Auditorium at the USDA’s South Building from 8:00am to 5:00pm. The following are just a few daring ideas for you to ponder and decide which ones you believe will be most effective at bringing about the real change in dietary public policy that the United States so sorely needs:
1. SUBMIT YOUR COMMENTS ELECTRONICALLY
The USDA has set up a public comments database on their Dietary Guidelines web site (you’ll see a big blue button in the middle of the page that states “SUBMIT Comments”). You’ll notice from the comments that have already been shared that very few bring up the lack of attention on carbohydrate-restriction, saturated fat, and other important nutritional concepts. Although many of the comments are from vegetarian/vegan proponents (note low-fat doctorJohn McDougall and the founder and president of the PETA front group Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine Neal Barnard to name a couple of notable ones), a couple of low-carb ones are in there, too (see the ones from Cynthia Moore and Angel Baugher). You can add YOUR voice to the conversation for consideration by the Committee.
This database was developed as a way to create a way for the public to provide insight to the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in a public and transparent way and the comments are supposedly reviewed by the Committee on a periodic basis. Research articles or other forms of information can be submitted as an attachment to your comment. This will probably make a stronger argument to the Committee than any anecdotal stories of personal weight loss and health success. Key articles that would be of most interest are ones focused on a general
population as well as published data showing the advantages of low-carb vs. low-fat vs. calorie counting.
All published research submitted to the site would be forwarded directly to the Nutrition Evidence Library and kept on file to see if they are relevant to the criteria set for answering an evidence-based research question, as determined by the Committee. If so, then the paper would be extracted from the Library for the Committee to consider.Otherwise, it will be saved on this electronic library until needed.
While this idea is perfect for those who don’t have a lot of time to commit to impacting the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, I personally doubt this will make a huge difference in and of itself on the final version of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines. Let’s move on to my second daring idea.
2. OFFER PUBLIC ORAL TESTIMONY IN WASHINGTON
If you care about this issue so much that you literally want your voice to be heard, then why not travel to Washington, DC later this month and offer your own public oral testimony. The Committee will allow these testimonies to be presented at the Friday meeting and individuals will each have three minutes to state their case. While that may not be a lot of time to plead your case about livin’ la vida low-carb, it’s certainly a golden opportunity to share what you have found in your research of this way of eating to be the biggest benefits to following a controlled-carb nutritional approach with a captive audience.
But you do have to sign up if you want to speak to the Committee. You can do this by registering to attend the meeting that day in Washington, DC. An outline of your oral testimony must be submitted electronically so that copies can be made available to the Committee and to the public on the day you present them. You will submit the testimony you would like to present through DietaryGuidelines.gov.
While this one certainly has promise and it would be great to have a large contingency of low-carb proponents embarking on Washington, DC to appear before this Committee and let them know how much low-carb has changed our lives for the better through weight loss and health improvements, there may be one more daring idea that could be even bigger than the first two combined.
3. HOLD A LOW-CARB RALLY IN WASHINGTON
Sometimes when you need to make a point, you have to get the attention of those who are refusing to listen to you. With this in mind, why not organize a low-carb rally in Washington, DC the same week that the USDA has their meeting? We could get some prominent names with credentials in the low-carb research world (several of whom have already confirmed they are ready to do this if my readers like the idea) to share the latest science behind low-carbohydrate diets and saturated fat as a counter-meeting. We’d invite the media to come out and hear what we are doing and a strong presence of a few hundred people would certainly make a strong statement that will be difficult for the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee to ignore.
Is this daring? You bet it is. But if change is what we want and need in the way we go about recommending what is best for diet and health in America, then isn’t something like this worth doing? I really want to hear your feedback on this because it’s only a few weeks away and we need to plan something this week if it’s gonna happen. I’ve got a team of people ready to help organize this and would love to know what you think about it. Worth doing or just a big waste of time? SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS!
I just posted a lengthy comment. Will see if it gets posted. If others post comments and see them posted, make mention of it here. Here is my post:
After reading “Good Calories, Bad Calories” by Gary Taubes, and “The Protein Power Life Plan” by Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, I am convinced that low carbohydrate living is a healthful lifestyle that needs to become part of the USDA recommendations.
Over the past 30 years, Americans have increased their calories with the caloric increase predominantly coming from processed starchy foods. Who can blame us, starches, particularly processed ones, are highly addictive and non-satiating. They increase the production of insulin, and tell our bodies to begin preparation for famine, and store store store excess calories as fat.
If we reduce the carbohydrates in our diet, we will turn off the insulin process, and make it more difficult to store excess calories as body fat. Our HDL cholesterol will increase, LDL cholesterol stay about the same but move toward large particle cholesterol which studies show is more beneficial to health, and triglycerides go into freefall.
The research is pouring in showing that low carbohydrate living is quite healthful, and matches our evolutionary history. We as hunter-gatherers got where we are today by eating plenty of meat, some nuts, berries, and vegetables, and the rare occasion when we found a honey tree. Evolution has not caught up with the advances we have made in agriculture, so our bodies need to produce more and more insulin to deal with the carbohydrate load we throw at them. It is no wonder we are becoming a nation of diabetics.
In addition, a clear recommendation away fron trans fatty acids, and toward natural fats such as butter, lard, olive oil, is necessary for optimal health. Saturated fats get a bad rap, but they also are being proven in the research to be far more healthful than the TFA’s that we have developed to avoid their use.
As a holistic nutritionist I am disgusted every time I see the USDA’s food pyramid. Just last night a friend showed it to me as a guide for how she plans her meals. My first response was “If you are eating 6 to 11 servings of grain per day you will become obese”. Not to mention, of course, the fact that many of us are intolerant to dairy, and that the USDA does not specify quality of foods on their diagram (indeed, one illustration is of slices of American cheese!)