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2020 Dietary Guidelines requesting our input

This was posted on Twitter just now by Nina Teicholz (sp?)
FINALLY!!!! AT LAST!!!!!!
I wonder of they really mean it this time

2020 Dietary Guidelines requests input

Terrific News!
This "public" will most definitely be commenting.

I hope sooooo that you are all correct. I predict "they" see all the "public" comments as addressed towards "fad" dieting, and "they" stick with the same old same old. I HOPE that I am WRONG.

I'm working on my "public" comment right now. I noticed that there is an option to attach a file. I just printed my "1000 Days of Healthy Eating" milestone to a PDF. Hopefully they will accept that as an attachment.

Edited to add... I finished my comment and submitted it. They actually give a significant amount of space to write. Here is what I said...

Quote:

Comment:
I have been morbidly obese for most of my adult life. In 2014 at age 50 I weighed 440 pounds. I had type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, back issues, and at least half a dozen other health problems. I dieted on and off for decades. I could lose weight, but I could never keep it off. Standard dietary advice did not work for me. In fact, I gained my first 100+ pounds in the late 1980's trying to eat a "healthy" low fat, low cholesterol diet. After that I could never sustain a diet long enough to lose all the weight. I'd diet, lose weight. Then when some short term goal was reached the diet would falter and I'd gain all the weight back and more. This yo-yo pattern went on for decades. I tried many different diets including low fat, low carb, and Weight Watchers. I had the best success losing weight with low carb, but I still gained all the weight back when the diet ended. By 2013 I'd pretty much given up trying. I was huge, I was sick, and I didn't see any way out. If I could have afforded weight loss surgery I would have done it. I had given up hope. I was about to become a huge burden on the healthcare system, too. I was sick with a multitude of metabolic conditions and things were not going to get any better.

Today I weigh 205 pounds. I lost over 230 pounds. I reversed my diabetes. I no longer have high blood pressure. I take no prescription drugs. I am completely healthy again. What did I do? I stopped dieting and changed how I eat to Low Carb/High Fat (LCHF). I stopped cheating. I deprived myself of the processed carbs that I used to love until I no longer felt deprived. I discovered along the way that I really was addicted to processed carbs and sugar. It wasn't until I abstained from eating those things that I was able to gain control over what I ate. By eating foods that normalized my blood sugar I naturally wanted to eat less and move more. Eating this way fixed my broken metabolism and it did so within the first few months of my new way of eating. It took me 30 months to lose all the weight. At my last two annual checkups my A1C scores were 5.3 and 5.1 - totally normal. After reaching my goal weight I just kept doing what I was doing. After 3 decades of struggle I finally found something that worked. 4 years ago I had to stop for a rest after climbing 1 flight of stairs. In April I will be running my 3rd Richmond 10K. I have my life back and I refuse to give it back. I'm eating LCHF for life.

So I pretty much eat the food pyramid upside down. My body runs better on fat. My health markers are the best they have ever been. I'd be happy to provide you copies of my annual checkup labs to back up my claims. The food pyramid/my plate guidelines may work for the majority of the population. But for those of us who are metabolically ill, those guidelines don't work for us. For some of us a carb centric diet breaks our metabolism. Once broken we tolerate carbs less and crave them more. When it comes to the guidelines one size does not fit all. Lord knows I tried the low fat approach. No amount of trying harder was ever going to make that diet work for me. I simply don't tolerate high glycemic carbs very well. When I eat such foods in my daily diet I lose control. I'm constantly hungry. I gain weight. I simply have to avoid foods that hammer my system with sugar.

I am just one of many. Recent studies have shown that low carb diets are effective in reversing metabolic diseases, including diabetes and obesity. These metabolic conditions are the driving force behind the catastrophe of exploding heath care costs. In one year's time I lost over 140 pounds, attained an A1c score of 5.1, and my doctor took me off of hypertension medication. I still weighed 297 pounds at the time and I'd regained my health. Eating low carb did that. It didn't end there. Sticking to my program I continued to lose down to a healthy weight. LCHF is sustainable. I've been doing it for 4 years now. Obviously it did wonderful things for my health, too; and did so very rapidly.

Metabolic diseases are about to bankrupt the world heath care system. People are suffering horrific and costly health conditions. Worker productivity is suffering. And things are just getting worse. IT IS TIME TO MAKE A CHANGE. NOW. May I suggest that a special set of guidelines be created for those with metabolic conditions; one that acknowledges that a low carb diet may be an effective treatment for those who are on the road to diabetes. Perhaps even provide incentives to Medicare/Medicaid doctors who provide diet programs that encourage and support as a low carb solution. Do this and be prepared for some magic. A miracle happened for me. Help make it happen for others, too.

BTW: I just live down the road near Richmond. I'd be happy to come up and bring my old size 56" pants and my medical records for show and tell. I wear size 34 pants now. Call me up!

Uploaded File(s)(Optional)

•2011_vs_2016_full_len.jpg: success
•DC_bench2_2014-2016.jpg: success
•20160409_10Ka.jpg: success
•LCHF_Success_Story_2016c.pdf: success
•LCHF_Health_Success_2016a.pdf: success

Ken, that’s an amazing letter! If I have any criticism at all it’s that you’re too kind to the food pyramid.

Very well written, Ken.

Oh, wow. This is great news indeed!

I wonder if they'll take comments from people overseas? I would hope so, considering the extent to which the DGAs influence the guidelines for other countries around the world. Here in NZ, your DGAs are top of our reference list as "evidence" for why ours is the way it is...

Quote:

Originally Posted by Grav

Oh, wow. This is great news indeed!

I wonder if they'll take comments from people overseas? ...

Let 'em have it. Give them a piece of your mind. After all, it was the US that led the way... down the road to disaster. You were a victim just as much as I.

From MedPage:

Quote:

USDA/HHS Gear Up for Dietary Guideline Update
New process follows recommendations from independent review

by Ian Ingram, Deputy Managing Editor, MedPage Today
February 27, 2018

WASHINGTON -- In the wake of severe criticism over the government's official dietary guidelines released in 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will seek public comments ahead of developing their 2020-2025 updates.

This change follows an independent review from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine that criticized and recommended a redesign of the current process for developing the guidelines.

USDA and HHS added this new step "early in the development process to ensure transparency in communicating the topics that are priorities to meet the needs for nutrition programs across the federal government -- the primary role of the DGA [Dietary Guidelines for Americans]," said Brandon Lipps, Acting Deputy Under Secretary for the Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services at the USDA, during a press briefing.

The DGA provides food-based recommendations with the aim of promoting overall health and helping prevent diet-related chronic diseases. "The dietary guidelines have evolved and addresses a pattern of eating not a focus of individual foods or food groups," said Lipps.

The final 2015 guidelines were attacked by the American Cancer Society and others, in part for departing from Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) recommendations on limiting red and processed meats. Processed meats such as bacon and sausage have been linked with pancreatic and other cancers, and numerous studies have linked red meat consumption and early mortality.
The newly proposed topics and questions for the 2020-2025 guidelines do not mention the word meat once. It is unclear if the DGAC will be allowed to include their own topics and questions that are not part of the USDA and HHS's list of topics.

The public comment period will be open for 30 days -- from February 28 to March 30, 2018.

USDA and HHS are inviting comments on a set of proposed priority topics and supporting scientific questions that will guide the development of the upcoming edition of the DGA.

The departments' approach to the next edition of dietary guidelines will focus on "life stages." Birth to 24 months is a new focus following passage of the 2014 Farm Bill, which mandated that starting with the 2020-2025 edition, the DGA provide guidance for this life stage, as well as for women who are pregnant.
"This will be the first time that we've had this focus on life stages in the dietary guidelines," said Lipps. "We're doing this in the context of looking at eating patterns -- what we eat and drink as a whole on average and over time."

Examples of topics and questions open for public comment include:

Added sugars in children and adolescents (ages 2-18): "How much added sugars can be accommodated in a healthy diet during childhood and adolescence while still meeting food group and nutrient needs?"

Saturated fats (ages 19 to 64): "What is the relationship between saturated fats consumption (types and amounts) during adulthood and risk of cardiovascular disease?"

Other life stages included are pregnancy and lactation, and older adults (ages 65 and older).

The proposed topics by the USDA and HHS are based on four criteria: relevance to the guidelines (food-based recommendations); importance to public health; potential federal impact; and avoiding duplication or topics addressed by other federal guidelines.

"Guidelines are used by health professionals, policymakers, educators, and many more as guidance to promote the role of nutrition in promoting health and preventing chronic disease," said Don Wright, MD, MPH, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Health at HHS, during the press briefing. "We know that healthcare professionals use our tools and resources to help patients and clients understand how to make healthy choices and why nutrition is important for their health."
After the topics and supporting questions are finalized, the departments will post a public call for nominations to the DGAC. These final topics and supporting scientific questions, will determine the areas of expertise needed, resulting in a coordinated and efficient review.

Just woke up and caught the end of Nina Teicholz's presentation at Low Carb Breckenridge. She mentioned a petition for change to the 2020 DGAs at https://forbetterdietaryguidelines.org/ which she encourages everyone to sign.

As long as the guidelines are controlled by the USDA, the guidelines will favor the USDA. Let me illustrate with (probably) a hypothetical analogy. As long as transport regulations, Laws, safety standards, tax credits, research funding, etc, are controlled by petrol-powered car makers, regulations, Laws, safety standards, tax credits, research funding, etc, will favor petrol-powered car makers, as opposed to any other form of transportation like motorcycles, electric vehicles, mass transit, and so forth.

Another way to explain.

How it works now

Producers decide DGA - consumers consume producers' product

How it should work

Consumers decide DGA - producers produce accordingly

The point is producers must have no say on DGA. Instead they must be made to produce according to certain standards for nutrition and health for example. One idea is to impose a quota for certain foods prescribed by DGA, maybe a % of total production. In this example, wheat producers couldn't produce more than, say, 20% of their total production as wheat. Ya, they wouldn't be wheat producers anymore, but that's the point.

Also, since DGA dictates production, this production should then be funded with tax credits and grants accordingly.

It's pretty much unreasonable to expect everybody (the consumers, those who would decide the DGA) to know anything about nutrition and health, but it's also reasonable to expect anybody to desire health and fitness and leanness, rather than sickness and obesity. So, to bypass this problem, it's simple enough to determine what makes us sick and fat, and what makes us healthy and lean and fit, then design the DGA accordingly, and in turn impose quotas and such on producers.

Finally, the DGA cannot be monolithic as they are now, favoring a single group over all others, both from the producers side (wheat vs meat for example) and from the consumers side (low-fat diet vs low-carb diet for example). Instead, the DGA must include all possible diets (whether healthful or not, but if not, then ways to compensate like certain supplements like B12 and fat-solubles for a vegan diet for example) and provide equal support for each, so that consumers have a choice, but also have ample support to maintain that choice. In this way, diabetics type 2 for example would have a wider choice of diets, instead of the single diet prescribed by registered dieticians and nutritionists, which by the way says to eat at least 240g of carbs per day (I've seen it with my own eyes). Indeed, registered dieticians and nutritionists would have no choice but to be taught and learn about all those other diets that do not necessarily say to eat lots of carbs, like the Atkins diet or The Zone or whatever you can think of. Their curriculum would have to be revised to reflect the revised DGA, the supporting experiments that determine adequate nutrition and health, and so forth. RD's could no longer act as simple sales reps for producers - even though they don't see themselves as such, that's how it is now.

OK, so I won't give them this comment or any comment in fact, you guys take what you want from this and do it yourselves.

I prefer the "glass is half full" approach. We can debate the terrible state of nutritional awareness and related conspiracies until the cows come home. Rather, awareness of dietary health issues due to the recommendations since the late 1970s is in a much different place today due to grass roots communications and sharing the baton with an increasing number of scientific, technical, and medical experts who are adopting and promoting a new approach. Food manufacturers will fall in line when the current market for much of the processed carbage starts to dwindle. They have no choice. Yes, we can plan to see the USDA lobby and other global organizations with similar interests like the HPCSA, NHMRC promoting the dietary guidelines for Australia, FAO, and WHO who receive backing and funding from food manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies fight this trend. But they won't win in the free world. Keeping this dynamic in mind should serve to strengthen the movement toward dietary health awareness, and embolden people with the resolve to never give up the focus on achieving health through improved nutritional awareness and corresponding dietary adaptation.

Edited to add: I too have been watching Low Carb Breckenridge 2018 streaming, and the presentations are a tremendous indicator of how far nutritional awareness and practice has come over the past 5 years. This year, many physicians, nutritional scientists, and other health providers are attending. It's this trend that will continue in the coming years and makes me realize that progress is being made, day-by-day, year-by-year.

Quote:

As long as the guidelines are controlled by the USDA, the guidelines will favor the USDA.
~snip~
Producers decide DGA - consumers consume producers' product

~snip~
The point is producers must have no say on DGA. Instead they must be made to produce according to certain standards for nutrition and health for example.

Unfortunately, the USDA actually controls the producers (farmers), instead of the other way around.

I know this for a fact, because I come from a farming family. Dad bought a farm in the mid-60s, which at the time was all corn production. Dad switched some of the acreage to soybeans, and for a while raised some wheat too, rotating crops from one field to another to improve the soil.

My brother has been farming that acreage since about 2000. My brother has eaten LC for about 20 years, so he's well aware of the problems with a grain heavy diet, just like I am. He would genuinely like to switch to some other kind of farm production, but as he's explained it to me, the USDA has the acreage of that farm designated for grain production, and nothing else can be grown there. Therefore, he is listed as a grain farmer, just as my Dad was when he bought that farm.

[Coincidentally, the reason he can grow soybeans -even though they're not technically a grain - is that the USDA considers soybeans to be a grain crop, even though they're a legume. How can we possibly expect them to get nutrition right, if they can't even get the classification of crops right?]

My point is that unless my brother goes through a tremendous amount of expense and red tape to get his classification and the farm's classification changed to some other type of farm production, he can't raise anything for sale, except what the USDA classifies as grain.

Actually, I guess he could stop growing grain, and raise vegetables, berries, grapes, dairy cattle, chickens, etc - the USDA just wouldn't allow him to sell anything from what he would produce, unless he wants to pay heavy fines on anything he earns (the fines are so stiff they'd be higher than what he'd earn from selling any non-designated farm production).

Basically, the USDA has a choke hold on farm production - the USDA designs the DGA's, and therefore they're the ones who decide what portion of total US farmland is to be devoted to each type of farm production - grains, veggies, fruit, dairy, and meat. Considering that so much of the DGAs is supposed to be grain based, obviously they have a huge amount of farmland in the US designated just for the production of various types of grains, in order to provide enough grains to meet the DGAs of every man, woman, and child in the US, plus enough extra to fulfill any trade agreements with other countries.

Please don't fool yourselves into believing that farmers are the ones who actually decide what to grow, except within the strict parameters of what type of crop production the USDA has designated for their farmland.

It's my understanding that the USDA represents producers, I mean the big producers. Small farms are imposed regulations that benefit those big producers, i.e. competition is eliminated by those regulations, it's a defacto monopoly. In essence, even though a small farm is independent, regulations make it so that it's working for the big guys. Beyond production, it's also my understanding that distribution is tightly controlled, maybe to control prices, likely by the big producers as well.

Regardless, the DGA won't change unless the underlying system changes. Rather, the DGA will change only at the whim of whoever controls them. Requesting our input? Guffaw. All of it will be ignored in the facts, even though it gives the appearance of willingness to change, if not at least to listen. The King listens too, if only to keep his subjects happy with his Kingly decrees.

I fear that the monetary interests involved in maintaining the nutritional status quo along with issues of pride and reputation that compel so many "experts" to stick with what they've always said will derail any serious attempt to overturn the dietary guidelines. Change is going to have to come from below, grassroots, people figuring it out for themselves and acting on their own behalf, "experts" be damned. That doesn't mean I don't think people should add their comments. I just don't believe that there is any reason to expect much coming from above will change any time soon.

Jean