Whether overweight, healthy or sick, everybody needs to be up to date with the new 2015-2020 dietary guidelines based on scientific researches.
Last week, the federal government of United States released the new dietary guidelines to advise everyone on what we should and shouldn’t eat.
The verdict? It came as a no surprise that we must cut back on sugar.
These dietary guidelines come out every 5 years and the process is simple. There is a committee of experts put together, who based on the science of last guidelines moving forward, come up with a consensus report on what would make a good nutrition.
How Influential are the Dietary Guidelines?
At first, one would think that not a lot of people would visit a governmental website to follow dietary guidelines but, in fact, they are very influential.
One in four Americans eat at least one of the meals recommended by these guidelines. Most of nutritionists and medical doctor’s advice is based on these dietary guidelines.
So, being one of the backbones of nutrition, these dietary guidelines play a big role in the general public’s opinion. One of the main sources for everyone’s diet.
The 2015 Dietary Guideline Key Recommendations
The key message from the dietary guideline is instead of looking at “super-foods” as individual parts of one’s diet, looking at “super-diets” is way more important.
The whole diet working together is what is going to be the key to fighting heart-disease, certain cancers, stroke and type 2 diabetes (the 4 of the 10 leading causes of death).
The first most important recommendation this new guideline gives is: less than 10% of our diet should come from added sugar.
What is interesting is the fact that since the beginning of the new millennium, people have already started cutting back on sugar by over 20%.
Taking into consideration that the average person consumes over 60 pounds of sugar in a year (25 teaspoons per day), that is still not enough.
Probably half of the amount of added sugar people are consuming come from soft drinks, fruit drinks, energy drinks and most interestingly, tea and coffee.
That is one of the things people are not thinking about when they are going to the coffee shop — it could be one of the main source of unnecessary added sugar and calories.
The second most important dietary guidance missing from the previous guidelines is replacing saturated fats and refined carbohydrates with healthy, unsaturated fats like:
The third caution that the guideline addresses is protein intake. Apparently, too many men and boys are eating a lot of protein based foods (meat).
What happens is if you are getting too much of one food group, you are replacing another food group. That means your diet may be lacking essential fruits and vegetables, whole grains or lean diary.
That’s why it’s important that one group doesn’t empower another. Find your balance. We all need all the three food groups in moderation:
- simple carbs
- unsaturated fats
- healthy protein
When it comes to salt, the recommendation is now consuming less then 2300 milligrams of salt per day (Himalayan salt is the healthiest salt in the world). Even though that can be a very challenging thing to do in modern society, it sure does bring the awareness up.
When you go grocery shopping, make sure you check the labels.
One thing to keep in mind here is not to aim for as low sodium as possible. The Institute of Medicine found that reducing sodium too much can have adverse health outcomes, like insulin resistance, increased triglyceride levels and sympathetic nervous system activity, causing cardiovascular problems.
Much of these dietary advice in the new guidelines will sound familiar and even remain unchanged from 2010 guideline, but even so, most people today tend not to apply them.
I am sure reminding them does more good than bad.
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