New dietary guidelines have four key steps for better health
Nutrition guidelines from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Unless you are a nutrition nerd like my friends and me, you probably missed the publication of the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Originally published in 1980 and updated, based on science, every five years, the Dietary Guidelines are used to guide national health objectives, nutrition education and food-assistance programs.
Reviewing the guidelines from 1980 to today, I see fine tuning more than radical change. For the first time this year’s guidelines include specific recommendations for infants and toddlers as well as more data on chronic disease.
The four guidelines are:
- Consume a healthy diet across the life span. No one can pinpoint when chronic diseases begin, but healthy habits start around the family table.
- Customize your dietary pattern to satisfy personal preferences, cultural traditions and budgets. There is no one perfect diet — embrace cultural traditions. Your great-grandmother was not buying drive-through fried foods. Google eating on a budget for hundreds of affordable meal ideas.
- Emphasize nutrient-dense foods to meet your daily food group needs while considering calorie limits. Nutrient-dense foods provide vitamins, minerals, fiber and antioxidants. Examples are beans, vegetables, whole grains, eggs, nuts and seeds and fruits.
- Keep foods high in added sugar, sodium and saturated fat to a minimum. The easiest way to minimize intake of these foods is to not keep them in the house.
Using the Healthy Eating Index, a tool that measures how closely the public’s eating habits align with the Dietary Guidelines, provides some compliance insight. The best score is 100. In 2005, the score was 56 and in 2016, it was 59. Apparently, there is a gap between knowledge and practice.
Useful tools for making your bites count and raising your Healthy Eating Index can be found at www.dietaryguidelines.gov There is also an app, Start Simple with MyPlate, which assists with making food goals and charting progress.
Sheah Rarback MS, RDN is a registered dietitian nutritionist in private practice in Miami. Email her at [email protected]
