Recipe For Disaster: The New US Dietary Guidelines

The science of nutrition is a disaster. For a variety of very good reasons it is nearly impossible to perform high quality, long term randomized controlled trials to provide satisfactory answers to most of the pressing questions of the day.

But many experts are convinced they do know the answer to many of these questions. The problem, of course, is that these experts hardly ever agree with each other.

You wouldn’t know about all the confusion by reading the recently published updated US Dietary Guidelines (USDG). It appears to represent the consensus of  a significant portion of the nutrition establishment. But, as if to highlight the complete lack of a genuine consensus, these guidelines are coming under fierce attacks from other, equally distinguished experts representing a wide range of differing views. There is no consensus among these critics regarding the specific details of how the guidelines went wrong or how they should be fixed. But there is widespread agreement that the guidelines are seriously deficient in that they lack strong scientific support.

The most recent assault on the USDG is contained in a commentary by Steve Nissen (Cleveland Clinic) in Annals of Internal Medicine. Nissen writes that the lack of genuine evidence “has left dietary advice to cult-like advocates, often with opposite recommendations. One group advises virtually complete elimination of carbohydrates from the diet, whereas others promote a virtually fat-free diet.” Nissen concludes that “it is time to transition from the current evidence-free zone to an era where dietary recommendations are based on the same quality evidence that we demand in other fields of medicine.”

Nissen’s article focuses largely on the recommendations about dietary fat and cholesterol. Although early in 2015 a preliminary draft of the guideline stated that “cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for over-consumption” Nissen writes that  “incredibly, in the final 2015 report, this statement has been removed, instead suggesting that ‘individuals should eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible.’ Which version should we believe? How can the same committee arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions?”

Bad dietary advice has serious consequences. Nissen reminds readers that as a result of previous guidelines and campaigns that demonized fat, Americans “binged on carbohydrates and became increasingly obese. Type 2 diabetes grew into an epidemic that is now threatening to reverse decades of progress in reducing coronary heart disease incidence.”

Nissen appears to side with critics who oppose the continued recommendations to reduce dietary cholesterol and saturated fat. “The best available evidence does not clearly support the widely held belief that Americans should limit saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet,” he writes.

A leading figure in the fight against the guidelines has been Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise and a controversial BMJ investigation presenting a very detailed case against the guidelines. Teicholz says that Nissen’s piece “confirms much of what” she wrote in the BMJ.  “These ideas are challenging to the nutrition establishment, which has long defended a diet low in fat and saturated fat, but the science on those recommendations has never been strong and is now being challenged by a growing number of researchers.”

The Circular Firing Squad of Nutrition Experts

The sheer number and variety of attacks against the new guidelines is bewildering, since no two critics seem able to reach agreement or disagreement on most major points.

In an article labelled an “authoritative review” by the editors of Circulation, one expert, Dariush Mozaffarian (Tufts University), points out the weak scientific evidence underlying much of the new guidelines, but then proceeds to offer his own personal interpretation that in many cases closely mirrors the USDG. Mozaffarian, who is himself a well-regarded member of the nutrition establishment, rejects the scientific basis for the guideline recommendations that saturated fat be restricted to 10% of all calories in the diet and that favor vegetable oil over butter. On the other hand, Mozaffarian appears to give broad support to the low sodium position adopted by the committee, though this has also provoked strong scientific criticism.

Another frontal assault on the guidelines appears in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.  The authors write that “in the 2015 DGAC report, the distinction between correlation and causation is either ignored or dismissed. For example, the words association, associated, and relationship are used more than 900 times in the 571-page DGAC text, whereas the words causal and causality are used fewer than 30 times and not once to describe an actual causal diet-health relationship.” They conclude that the guidelines committee “generates national public health policy recommendations via mere statistical associations from physiologically implausible data while ignoring established causal factors for the development of chronic noncommunicable diseases.”

However, it is important to note that these authors have themselves been the target for intense attacks over the past year. Two of the authors, Edward Archer (University of Alabama at Birmingham) and Carl Lavie (Ochsner Clinic), were criticized for receiving research funds from Coca Cola.

Another often-quoted obesity expert, David Katz, calls the guidelines a “national embarrassment,” but for very different reasons. He doesn’t appear to object to the science behind the guidelines but, instead, “the political adulterations of the excellent work of scientists.” Katz endorses the committee’s recommendations regarding dietary fats and cholesterol. In fact, if I understand him correctly he believes the committee, subjected to pressure from industry and other sources, didn’t go far enough.
You may also want to read: Why Guidelines Are Bad For Science

 

 

 

Comments

  1. Dietary Guidelines de Jour!

    “There is no evidence to support the theory that dietary fat causes CHD. On the contrary, it is difficult to believe that dietary fat plays any significant role in its causation. Diet does not appear to have any significant predisposing effect, but hypercholesterolemia plays a decisive role in the causation of CHD in young persons. According to some, CHD occurs more commonly among nonvegetarians.” This is an excerpt from an article published in the Medical school magazine in India by this author as a medical student in 1970.
    (http://www.dollarsfordieting.com/PDFs/can_heart_attacks_be_prevented.pdf)

    The new dietay guidelines and the controversy and the debates by the so called scientists is what we got after 45 years of research and spending millions, if not billions, of dollars. To put it bluntly, it is an embarresment and disgrace to the scientists and science itself.
    Is it science what gets published in scientific journals? Does this help physicians or the public?

  2. “If I understand him”. When you’re talking about the statements of Dr Katz, you really need that kind of qualifier.
    To modify Steve Nissen’s claim about cult-like diet advocates; from what I can read of his article, cult diets are those not supported by RCTs.
    The science of carbohydrate restriction is supported by about 25 RCTs and many more well-designed feeding experiments.
    The benefits of this way of eating for weight control, management of type 2 diabetes, and improvement of cardiovascular risk factors have been established in this way, and not though observational epidemiology.

  3. Harleyrider1978 says

    To bad its all junk science!

  4. Thanks for the article. It is good that the poor state of nutritional science be discussed further.

    I have one small disagreement though. I disagree with your characterization of Nina Teicholz’ BMJ article as controversial. No significant criticism of her points about the poor state of nutritional science have been made. The only thing that her critics have done is attack her and thus they were hoping to make her controversial. That is not science. In fact, their attacks are similar to the attacks Ancel Keys made against the critics of his arteryclodingcholestrolsaturatedfat mime.

    True scientist would welcome criticism of their mimes, theories, research, etc. True scientists are interested in the truth. I know that that is difficult to practice because in reality scientists are people. But I think there is plenty of money and prestige in arguing for better science. So, I hope you continue this discussion.

    Disclosure: I have been a T1D for 50 years and I believe I’m alive and not totally blind because I have been eating a low carb, high fat diet for 11 years.

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