What the Dietary Guidelines for Americans Isn't Telling You.
- Rebecca Snyder
- Sep 10, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Sep 13, 2020
Though you might not recognize the name, if you grew up going to schools in America, you were taught how to eat based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). What you may remember more easily is the graphic that is made to go along with the DGA, which used to be a Food Pyramid, but has made the shift to MyPlate.
Look familiar? MyPlate shows the 5 main food groups as fruits, vegetables, grains, protein, and dairy.
In an ideal world, we could all be super confident that the government’s guidelines are exactly what science tells us to do in order to be as healthy as possible! After all, that is the basic nutrition knowledge that most Americans are exposed to. However, in reality, this sadly is not the case.
Industries that want you to be purchasing their food lobby the government to say that their food is healthy so that sales stay up. This is especially prominent when looking at the animal agriculture industry.
Research has shown that processed meats, including bacon and sausage, are a class one carcinogen (carcinogen- a compound that causes cancer). To put this term into perspective, this is the exact same classification as cigarettes and asbestos! A plant-based diet is a diet that reduces all animal products in the diet, including eggs, dairy, and meat. Studies have shown that when people adopt a more plant-based diet, heart disease can be reversed, cholesterol levels plummet, and blood pressure lowers. This should be especially shocking because heart disease and cancer are the top two causes of death in the United States, and diabetes comes in at number seven.
This all just goes to show that even if somehow the animal products are not what is causing these horrible health problems, they definitely are not helping. Why would our government not tell the American public this important information if they truly had our health and best interests at heart? But America’s guidelines go even farther than just not sharing this information; they recommend these products that are scientifically shown to harm your health!
Why? Well, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that over 10 million dollars were spent lobbying in 2019 by the meat and dairy industries. If each of those dollars was a person, there would be more people than the populations of New York City and Los Angeles combined.
I am confident that if we were teaching Americans what a proper, healthy diet looks like, we would see a country with less obesity and less chronic disease. You can see the same principle play out when looking at sex education. In places that include comprehensive sex education in their schools, you see lower rates of teen pregnancy. When you teach proper information in schools, it can make such a big difference! This is especially true when looking at nutrition because there is already such confusion and conflicting information being shown to the public. If there could be a trustworthy source from the government, it could cure a lot of this mystery that surrounds nutrition information.
The new DGAs come out in a few months and will be what is taught to children all across the United States for the next five years, and I really deeply hope that these guidelines are more scientifically accurate than the last set. In the future, the way these guidelines are created needs to be revised to give more power to the scientific experts and less power to the government. In the next 25 years, it is projected that 1 out of every 3 Americans will have diabetes, so there truly is no time to waste. Changing how the education system addresses dietary recommendations and nutrition is an amazing first step to create positive change.
If anyone has any questions or wants to talk more about this, please reach out! My contact information and social medias are at the bottom of the page, and you can also message me here on Wix!
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