Federal dietary guidelines, which were first introduced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1980 and are updated every five years, have long been the target of intense criticism by nutrition experts. The guidelines have often been cast as incomplete at best and inaccurate and misleading at worst.
It is already clear that the new guidelines, which were unveiled last week, will not be immune to the type of criticism that its predecessors weathered, but health advocates are happy about at least one major new development: For the first time in history, the U.S. government is getting specific on the dangers posed by sugar.
Sugar should not account for more than 10 percent of daily calories, say the new guidelines. In the past, the standards simply recommended Americans "reduce intake" of sugar, but weren't specific on what level of consumption was healthy.
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That means that a person consuming 2,000 calories a day shouldn't be taking in more than 12 teaspoons of sugar, estimates Mother Jones. For a bit of context, a can of Coke has nine-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar, and the average American consumes about 30 teaspoons a day.
Dr. Steven Stack, president of the American Medical Association, lauded the new focus on sugar and added sweeteners, which he said were linked to cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
"With obesity and its associated health consequences—namely type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease—on the rise throughout our country, the AMA also is extremely pleased that the new recommendations call for significantly reducing the amount of added sugars and sugar sweetened beverages from the American diet," he said in a statement provided to Time.
Other experts say the guidelines still sacrificed far too much to food industry lobbyists, who fought to keep emerging consensus about the danger of processed foods out of the guidelines.
"This is a loss for the American public and a win for big beef and big soda," Walter Willett, a Harvard professor of nutrition, said to Time.
Although the new guidelines for the first time found that teenage boys and men were eating too much protein, they stopped short of recommending an overall decrease in meat consumption, which many nutrition advocates have called for.
However, the response to the guidelines also demonstrates a big divide among nutrition experts on whether fat and saturated fats are a problem.
While the conventional wisdom that has guided federal guidelines for the past 35 years holds that saturated fats are a key driver of heart disease and other health problems, many experts now blame fat phobia for driving people to diets heavy in sugar and carbohydrates, which they hold as the chief causes of obesity. The latter group argues that the link between high-cholesterol diets and heart disease is far from proven.
Dr. Robert Lustig, a professor of nutrition at the University of California, San Francisco, said that while he is unhappy that the guidelines continue to "harp" on saturated fats, its condemnation of sugars is a major step in the right direction.
"(T)hey provided a limit for added sugars and sodium, the two consumables for which we have causation of disease," he told Time. "Now let's see if the processed food industry listens."
However, Dr. Dean Ornish, founder of the Preventative Medicine Research Institute, was happy to see the feds refrain from a full-on endorsement of fat.
"They didn't agree with all the misinformation coming out that it doesn't matter how much fat you eat, and that saturated fat may not be bad for you after all, and I think they are right," he said.
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