Dietary Guidelines: Pushback from the Sugar, Salt, & Meat Industries

Below is an approximation of this video’s audio content. To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring, watch the above video.

The food industry was not happy with the new dietary guidelines. Complaints rained in from the Sugar Association and the Salt Institute. Sugar reduction is evidently “impractical, unrealistic and not grounded in the body of evidence,” according to the Chief Science Officer of The Sugar Association.

The Salt Institute’s Vice-President of Science said encouraging people to eat low-salt foods would just make them “eat excessively to make up for the lack of taste.” And saving the lives of up to 92,000 Americans a year is evidently more a “reflection of ideology than sound science.”

The American Meat Institute also predictably railed against the suggestion to moderate one’s consumption of meat.

When the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign hosted a Healthy Kids contest, asking students to prepare a recipe from one of three categories—whole grains, dark green and orange vegetables, or dried beans and peas—the meat industry was outraged. After all, there wasn’t a category for meat.

Healthier diets, wrote one industry commentator, “pose a hazard to meat producers.”

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• Bibbins-Domingo K, Chertow GM, Coxson PG, et al. Projected effect of dietary salt reductions on future cardiovascular disease. N Engl J Med. 2010;362(7):590-599.
• Intended Testimony of Betsy Booren, Ph.D., Director, Scientific Affairs To the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services in Response To the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee Technical Report. American Meat Institute. July 8, 2010.
• Recipes for Healthy Kids. Devpost.com. 2010.
• USDA Recipe Contest Excludes Meat. Beef Magazine. October 7, 2010.

Image thanks to 401(K) 2012 / flickr

• beans
• children
• dietary guidelines
• greens
• industry influence
• meat
• peas
• vegetables