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 New Report Asserts Major Issues With the 2015 U.S. Dietary Guidelines

The updated version of the U.S. dietary guidelines isn’t officially set to be issued until later this fall, but a new reportin the British Medical Journal is claiming there’s already a major problem: The expert recommendations used to draw up the guidelines are flawed.

A new draft of the U.S. dietary guidelines comes out every five years and sets the standard both nationally and in much of the Western world. This year’s advice is seeking to make some key changes, notably to stop the demonization of eggs and dietary cholesterol and ease restrictions on salt intake, instead limiting sugar and meat intake — while also giving an OK to moderate coffee consumption. The draft guidelines came out to substantial fanfare earlier this year. 

However, according to the report, the contributing experts failed to look closely at the most recent nutritional science, and thus got plenty wrong. Here are the significant criticisms:

The process

Health journalist Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise, wrote the BMJ report, noting that the committee working on guideline recommendations did not use the best resources at its disposal: the Nutrition Evidence Library (NEL), established by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

In 2010, when the last guidelines were released, the NEL was created to systematically review nutrition studies in order to be more rigorous in analyzing the science. However, the NEL was not consulted for about 70 percent of the topics discussed in 2015. Reviews conducted by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology were heavily used.

According to Teicholz, there are conflicts of interest with an external group’s reviews, based on the industries that fund them. “These groups conduct literature reviews according to different standards and are supported by food and drug companies,” she writes in her report. “The ACC reports receiving 38 percent of its revenue from industry in 2012, and the AHA reported 20 percent of revenue from industry in 2014.”

Saturated fat

Teicholz criticizes the experts’ advice on saturated fats, which is to limit intake to no more than 10 percent of total calories. Citing several high-profile studies showing saturated fat isn’t necessarily linked to disease risk, she questions the experts’ assertion that there is “strong” reason to condemn this type of fat. In fact, she says the committee didn’t use the NEL to re-review saturated fat.

The author notes several “ambitious” studies of more than 25,000 people from the 1960s and ’70s that look at saturated fat but have never been reviewed by the guideline committee — and probably should be in light of more recent, more inconclusive research on the type of fat found in some forms of dairy and meat products.

“These studies showed mixed health outcomes for saturated fats, but early critical reviews, including one by the National Academy of Sciences, which cautioned against the inconclusive state of the evidence on saturated fats and heart disease, were dismissed by the USDA when it launched the first dietary guidelines in 1980,” writes Teicholz. “Subsequent guideline committees have never gone back to systematically review these early trials but instead relied on other government reports.”

The low-carb diet

Another major point of contention highlighted in the BMJreport was the low-carb diet, which wasn’t recommended by experts in their report. Although the guideline committee members said they were lacking evidence on regimens of this sort since 2000, Teicholz says there was actually a significant number of studies conducted since that year: 11 case studies, 19 observational studies, and 74 randomized controlled trials.

Low-carb diets showed potential results for controlling diabetes, improving heart disease risk, and, perhaps most notably, weight loss — results that seem more promising than low-fat regimens. “Given the growing toll taken by these conditions and the failure of existing strategies to make meaningful progress in fighting obesity and diabetes to date, one might expect the guideline committee to welcome any new, promising dietary strategies,” Teicholz writes. “It is thus surprising that the studies listed above were considered insufficient to warrant a review.”