Dietary Guidelines
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-02-01/dietary-guidelines
Yesterday the U.S. Department of Agriculture released new dietary guidelines. The recommendations emphasize the importance of a diet with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. The government is also advising Americans to cut back on salt and, in general, to eat less. It’s no secret that our diets are less than ideal. A majority of adults and over one third of all children are overweight or obese. But some question what impact, if any, federal dietary guidelines can have. Join us to discuss the new government recommendations on what we should eat, whether these guidelines can help improve our health.
Guests
Robert Post
deputy director, Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion,
USDA
Margo Wootan
director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Scott Faber
vice president, the Grocery Manufacturers Association
Dr. Walter Willett
chairman of the Department of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health; professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School; co-author of "Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy."
Comments
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We have been aware of the desirability of some of these recommended eating habits since the late 1960s and yet we have been marketed into what amounts to suicidal consumption. When your guests say that the food industry needs to change (and I might add that the relationship between the food industry and the government needs to change), what do they think will bring those changes about? Our children and grandchildren cannot wait another 50 years for wellness and health driven changes in our food industry. How can we hope to compete in the global market with an unhealthy (and under-educated) workforce?
This concerns labeling. Some of us are trying very hard to limit such things as calories, sodium, fats, etc., and I am finding more and more labels will list something like 458 grams total, servings 2, serving size 200 grams. I wonder how many people eat these foods by dividing the can into two servings and think they have their sodium or whatever correct. If you add the 200 grams + 200 grams you get 400 grams. That leaves 58 grams unused. Nobody in their right mind would measure out 200 grams twice and throw the rest out, but the average person would not think to check these figures and each of them would be getting 229 grams, not 200, and over a day or week these extras will matter if it is a health issue. This should be illegal.
No one will probably see this since the discussion and show are over, but I would like to point out that anyone dictating what we eat should be illegal. Yes, promote and subsidize healthy food and educate people, but don't dictate what they can and can't eat. Work with the industrial food complex.
Obesity relates to another hot-button topic for me: insurance companies. How dare they discriminate against overweight people? What facts do you have that prove they cost more? I mean real science, not distorted and selective reporting. Thin people may have a higher morbidity rate than overweight people. BMI is an ineffective measure of health.
Read junkfoodscience.blogspot.com and scroll down on the right side to the relevant research. Gosh it makes me angry that there is a "war" on overweight people and not the industries that promote it. Make fruits and vegetables easier to obtain, parks prevalent, and people educated. Make food companies pay for the right to serve food with no nutrition and lots of processed sugar, fats, etc. Support local farmers!
To busy parent SK_DC of two young boys: Mark Bittman of the New York Times had a recent column showing three basic, quick, nutritious recipes that are open to all kinds of variation ("Chop, Fry, Boil: Eating for One or Six Billion"). I believe that you can still access them at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/02/weekinreview/02bittman.html?scp=2&sq=m.... The recipes tend to focus on vegetables and leaner protein (e.g., beans). Also, I highly recommend the Center for Science in the Public Interest's "Nutrition Action Healthletter," which has super, clear information on food, food supplements, and health, and always offers healthy and easy to prepare recipes. CSPI takes NO financial support from the food or supplement industry. / To those who are looking for salt free canned tomatoes: I know they're available. For example, POMI tomatoes have no added salt, and are packed in asceptic packages, not cans, so also avoid exposing consumers to BPA. (BPA is used to line cans, especially of acidic foods, to avoid botulism, but has been implicated as a hormone disruptor.
The USDA representative said that they only recommend lean meat. Factory Farms which produce all of the supermarket meat feed the animals hi-starch corn, growth hormones and keep the animals sedentary all designed to fatten the animal fast and therefore produce only extremely fat products. The USDA has abdicated its oversight responsibility by allowing shortcuts in their own criteria for crop rotation and soil management resulting in huge losses of this finite resource, now estimated to be half gone in Iowa. They allow over fertilization of corn to increase yields. All of this is designed to keep the price low. But all they are doing is shifting the cost to our Natural Resource depletion and loss of water species and our fisheries. Now we know that the red meat and dairy is causing massive health issues and increased health care cost. Please keep reporting all facets of this health and natural resource disaster. DON KERSTETTER see our site at fixingourfood.com for more.
The USDA has many facets. Its agricultural research group, ARS, provides a wonderful service and publishes many products thru its Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) group located in Beltsville but USDA oversight of grain farmers and animal food production is dismal. For example: their publication Building soils by Magdoff & Van ES which is now in its second edition has recommended a minimal 3 crop rotation plus winter cover crop for the last 10 years. There is not one grain farmer following this guideline and we are losing massive amounts of topsoil while grain farmers point to equipment changes they made decades ago as a solution. Johns Hopkins Pew Commission made many recommendations non have been implemented and these facilities continue to contaminate our air and our soil and our food with antibiotic pathogens. USDA has a top management problem and they exist in a government oversight void controlled by politicians in turn controlled by agribusiness lobbies. The result is a public health and environmental disaster. Hopefully you will continue to shed light on this long term major problem.