Tag Archives: dietary-guidelines

New Dietary Guidelines Won’t Include Sustainability

by TahliaCJVchx Posted on October 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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When the USDA’s Dietary Guidelines are released later this year, they’re sure to make waves in the nation’s food economy. Updated every five years, the rules—the government’s official line on what Americans should eat to stay healthy—inform decisions on everything from agricultural subsidies to government food assistance programs to school lunch.

But there’s one thing the new guidelines won’t touch: the health of our environment.

In a statement posted Tuesday on the USDA website, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwel announced that the guidelines will not include recommendations about how to choose foods with the lightest impact on the planet. The dietary guidelines, they wrote, are not “the appropriate vehicle for this important policy conversation.”

The decision came despite the fact that in its February report, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee—the team that reviews scientific and medical evidence and offers advise on what should be included—highlighted the ties between environmental impact and healthy eating. “Access to sufficient, nutritious, and safe food is an essential element of food security for the US,” the report stated. “A sustainable diet ensures this access for both the current population and future generations.”

As my colleague Maddie Oatman noted when the committee released its recommendations, those ideas didn’t go over well with Big Ag backers. Industry groups sent letters to Secretary Vilsack arguing that environmental impact is outside the scope of the Dietary Guidelines and spent millions of dollars trying to dissuade the USDA from including sustainability in its update.

Director of the Earth Institute Jeffrey Sachs, who is a Special Advisor to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, called Tuesday’s announcement a “shameful abnegation of political responsibility,” after heralding the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report as a key breakthrough.

“For US government officials to suggest that this chapter should be deleted would be to argue for deleting science itself; a shameful abnegation of political responsibility in the face of lobbying pressure,” he said in a press release. “Secretaries Burwell and Vilsack will be remembered for whether they stand up for science or for corporate lobbies.”

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New Dietary Guidelines Won’t Include Sustainability

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Will Obama’s Ag Chief Wimpify the 2015 Dietary Guidelines to Please Big Meat?

by BenjamiBoren Posted on March 14, 2015

Mother Jones

Should the new Dietary Guidelines—the advice the federal government issues every five years on what constitutes a healthy diet—include recommendations about what makes for a healthy planet? The meat industry sure doesn’t think so.

The industry started flipping out when it saw some of the language in the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s February report: “Consistent evidence indicates that, in general, a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods…and lower in animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with a lesser environmental impact (GHG emissions and energy, land, and water use) than is the current average US diet.”

Big Meat takes issue with two main things:

1) That the committee’s scientists dared to comment on environmental sustainability issues in a nutrition report.

2) That the report said (elsewhere) that a healthy diet should be lower in red and processed meats.

The North American Meat Institute, a massive trade association, retaliated this week with a “Hands Off My Hot Dog” petition on Change.org, a flurry of tweets about saving the Ruben sandwich, and this short film, starring plastic-wrapped packages of raw beef:

The film focuses on the health merits of meat, arguing that it trumps other foods because, unlike plants, “animal proteins are considered complete proteins, or ideal proteins.” Never mind that plenty of other accessible and cheap vegetarian foods, including rice and beans, or buckwheat, also provide complete proteins.

But the video does not try to refute the notion that meat’s environmental footprint is cause for concern—the UN argues, for instance, that livestock produce 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The Dietary Guidelines’ committee points out that producing one calorie of beef requires 18 times as much fuel as producing one calorie of grain.

It’s no coincidence that the committee chose to flag the carbon footprint of our food: The guidelines are ultimately about people’s relationship with food, and the deterioration of the environment’s health is a blow to our food security. “Meeting current and future food needs,” the committee notes, will depend on changing the way people eat and developing agricultural and production practices “that reduce environmental impacts and conserve resources.”

So will the Dietary Guidelines retain this responsible language when they are officially published this fall by the departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture? On Wednesday, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said that he could not rule out the chance that the final version will mention sustainability, but he implied that he would steer clear of doling out environmental advice. He told the Wall Street Journal:

“Our job ultimately is to formulate dietary and nutrition guidelines. And I emphasize dietary and nutrition because that’s what the law says. I think it’s my responsibility to follow the law.”

The law or the money? The AP has reported that meat processing and livestock industries spent $7 million on lobbying and donated $5 million to members of Congress during the last election cycle.

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Will Obama’s Ag Chief Wimpify the 2015 Dietary Guidelines to Please Big Meat?

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Federal diet guidelines won’t mention food’s environment connection. Ugh.

by KlaraGuzm Posted on January 8, 2015

Federal diet guidelines won’t mention food’s environment connection. Ugh.

By on 8 Jan 2015commentsShare

Well, shoot. Looks like the Department of Agriculture’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans won’t mention anything about the environment, after all.

USDA nutritionist Eve Essery Stoody told Vice News that the federal food recommendations will be, as always, based on how diet affects human health, not the health of the planet.

In case you haven’t been following: The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the group charged with writing new eating instructions for the U.S. every five years, wanted to acknowledge that yes, food is produced on Earth and what we choose to eat plays a role in determining what food is produced and how. A few months back, Tufts University professor Miriam Nelson, a member of the committee, said to her colleagues, “In general, a dietary pattern that is higher in plant-based foods and lower in animal-based foods is more health-promoting and is associated with less environmental impact.” That language was included in the draft report that the DGAC voted to submit at its Dec. 15 meeting. 

Predictably, Big Meat wasn’t cool with mixing advice on what’s good for eaters with facts about what’s good for ecosystems, since large quantities of animal products are unhealthy for both. So the meat industry’s lobbyists saw to it that congressmembers attached some directives to a spending bill imploring that the new guidelines make clear that food has nothing (nothing!) to do with that thing out there called the environment.

Earlier this week, though, it still seemed possible that the USDA might include some remarks on our food choices’ impact beyond personal nutrition. John Light, who wrote for Grist about how the new guidelines might tell Americans to eat less beef for the sake of the environment, points out that taking earthly issues into account would go against the corporate-influenced history of the federal guidelines:

The beef industry has long held sway over the guidelines the USDA puts out, with unfortunate results for the environment — University of Michigan researchers found last year that if all Americans followed the USDA dietary guidelines, we’d see a 12 percent increase in dietary-related greenhouse gas emissions.

Once again, the ag department appears to have caved under intense political pressure. Now no Americans will ever know that what’s salubrious for them is also generally unhealthy for the climate, since everyone gets all their dietary advice from the government food pyramid!

Maybe they’ll sneak some green talk in the guidelines next time around, in 2020. Unless by then our laboratory-made food really is effectively disconnected from the biosphere.

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