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Dietary Guidelines: Pushback From the Sugar, Salt, and Meat Industries

The Sugar Association, Salt Institute, and American Meat Institute all railed against the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

November 8, 2011 |
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Dietary Guidelines: Pushback From the Sugar, Salt, and Meat Industries, 5.0 out of 5 based on 5 ratings

Sources Cited

All written public comments submitted and posted on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 process as well as the written comments posted on the Advisory Committee Report can be found at http://bit.ly/publicdietarycomments. Let me know if you find any other doozies.

US Department of Agriculture. 2011. Report of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010.

Acknowledgements

Image thanks to 401(K) 2013 / Flickr.

Transcript

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 a, “reflection of ideology than sound science.

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

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images, and quotes to which Dr. Greger may be referring watch the above video. This is just an approximation of the audio contributed by Peter Mellor.

To help out on the site please email volunteer@nutritionfacts.org

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 dry 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.

Dr. Michael Greger

Doctor's Note

Please feel free to post any ask-the-doctor type questions here in the comments section and I’d be happy to try to answer them. Be sure to check out all the videos on dietary guidelines and industry influence as well as yesterday's blog post Dietary Guideline graphics. And as always, there are 1,449 subjects covered in my other videos–please feel free to explore them!

For some context, please check out my associated blog post: Dietary Guideline Graphics: From the Food Pyramid to My Plate, Harvard’s Healthy Eating Plate, and PCRM’s Power Plate.

  • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/mgreger/ Michael Greger M.D.

    Please feel free to post any ask-the-doctor type questions here in the comments section and I’d be happy to try to answer them. Be sure to check out all the videos on dietary guidelines and industry influence as well as yesterday’s blog post Dietary Guideline graphics. And as always, there are 1,449 subjects covered in my other videos–please feel free to explore them!

    • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/gfortcher/ gfortcher

      Dr. Greger: Thank you for the daily videos. I watch and digest them every morning along with my steel-cut oatmeal and fruit. The best way to start my vegan day. Good for the body, good for the brain. I also enjoy your quizes. I take them to see exactly how much information I have retained from the related videos. Repetition is the mother of learning.

    • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/patmcneill/ patmcneill

      When the label says: “No Additives” how did the salt get in there?

      http://screencast.com/t/5qEFBWvZa

      • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/drdons/ DrDons

        There are many techniques employed by the food industry to disguise what is in the package or can. Salt must be classified as something other than an additive. Another technique is to increase the number of servings until the fat content is below 0.5%/serving. It can then be labelled “fat free” even though as in the case of cooking oil sprays they are 100% fat. Check out the number of “servings” in each container. The best guidelines on reading labels that I’ve seen is a DVD by Jeff Novick RD entitled, “Should I Eat This?” available through his website. You can see a brief You Tube preview of his longer talk at, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yd9XnyNGXGs. It is important to keep reading labels or better yet avoid eating foods that have labels!

  • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/EricNeeds/ Eric Needs

    With a massive body of evidence supporting the benefits of a diet without animal products, along with the negative effects of consuming them, it is clear that the misconceptions that people have are solely determined by the false rhetoric of these corporations! Despicable.

  • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/veguyan/ Veguyan

    Some people I know tell me that because they are not a Blood Type A, they need to eat meat or dairy or whatever; and I know people who claim that they were vegan for blah blah years and they almost died, and felt so much better after they started eating the meat or dairy or whatever again. I don’t know what to say to them.

    • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/mgreger/ Michael Greger M.D.

      I was just actually interviewed about D’Adamo’s Blood Type Diet astrology in the Chicago Tribune. Probably best summed up by a quote from a review published in the Journal of the Norwegian Medical Association: “The theories of D’Adamo must be viewed as lacking a scientific basis and should not be taken seriously….[H]ad D’Adamo been practicing in Norway, his practice would have been a violation of the so-called quack law….[I]t is difficult not to see the whole thing as a crass fraud.”

  • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/GalaChristen/ Gala Christen

    When I hear how the corporations respond to attempts to educate the public for their health and well-being, It appears that the Atkins Diet and the Blood Type Diet, and that Soy Causes Cancer and Soy Causes Dementia controversies are sneaky ways to manipulate the public away from healthier vegan choices.

    I was at a “health discussion” at a vegan restaurant, presented by “Health Professionals” whose whole point seemed to be that vegetarian and vegan diets are destructive to health. I politely offered that credible scientific studies support the health of vegan diets, and the man of the couple very angrily shot back that there were plenty of studies to support his anti-veg position. In spite of his uncalled-for aggression in this small group which had been encouraged to participate in the discussion, I asked him to elaborate and be specific as to what studies. He went into a rage, he held a book up like it was The Bible, shaking it in the air. “Well, let me see it,” I said. He threw it at me. It was “Nourishing Traditions.” The cover looked like it was specifically designed to appeal to the counter-culture health types, and the Weston A. Price Foundation was on the cover page. “Weston Price” I said, “they’re behind the Atkins Diet, one of the most unhealthy and thoroughly discredited diets ever.” Oh, his rage became hotter, he and the woman tried to do this scripted good cop / bad cop routine with me. The woman was saying that I just don’t understand how unhealthy vegetarian diets are and essentially that they’re trying to save poor ignorant vegetarians from themselves, and from spreading dangerous radical beliefs. Their technique was effective, none of the others dared to oppose them, and they had a shill in the “audience” who agreed passionately with them.

    It certainly appeared that some organization is paying these attractive young professionals to infiltrate vegetarian groups to spread propaganda and undermine emerging vegan resolve and frighten them into eating diets heavily laden with meat, eggs and dairy. They portrayed meat eggs and dairy as the magic foods that will cure all your ills. I wish I knew what was behind it all, exactly. I know Weston Price is a tax-exempt “nutrition education” organization. And they are very anti-soy.

    As a funny post-script, the female “professional” had a degree in “human/animal communication” and she maintained that many animals had told her that they were fine with being killed and eaten, because that’s what they were for, and it fulfilled their purpose in life.

    • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/thea/ Thea

      Wow Gala. That is am amazing story. Thanks for taking the time to share it. I read it with my mouth open. That last bit is especially bizzare.

      I don’t get it either. It’s pretty sad that people would set out to take actions that hurt people, the planet and innocent animals.

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=670735069 Tan Truong

      When science fails, just make wild accusations about vegetarians and hold up more
      pseudoscience references. Thanks for standing up to the confusionists.

      How did these people get the stage in a vegan restaurant?

    • Movies989

      I get the same response from people. After one of my coworkers was stating how full he was from lunch, I replied me too. His response was but you eat “rabbit food”. Which I choose to view as a compliment. He added, “I still don’t understand.” He’s a hard core meat eater, who’s already heard my reason for going vegan. Which is to be healthier. So my response was, “And that’s ok.” The irony is that he’s been complaining about heart issues. My point is people are brainwashed to the point where there is no connection between their medical issues and what they eat. I didn’t even see it until I watched the movie ‘Forks Over Knives.’ Since then I’ve been doing research, and it’s amazing how much the food industry has manipulated the general public to even believe that food preservatives are ok to eat.

  • http://nutritionfacts.org/members/hotvedt/ hotvedt

    I think this site is great, really opening my eyes to making better food choices. I am still interested in eatting chicken, is organic chicken healthier? If so is there something I should be looking for on the label?
    thanx

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