In 2017, Congress authorized $1 million of taxpayer money for a third-party review, conducted by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM). It was the first-ever outside peer review of the DGA process. The report showed how only 20% of our government’s nutrition recommendations are based on “strong” science, according to the government’s own standards. The NASEM report made specific recommendations about how to improve the transparency, manage the major conflicts of interest on the advisory committee, and improve the scientific rigor to make the DGA policy reliable and trustworthy.
Yet this congressionally mandated report was vastly ignored in the recently proposed DGA, and we can no longer allow this flawed outcome to continue. Continuing the ban on whole milk based on out-of-date science and a clearly unbalanced, one-sided subcommittee on saturated fats is appalling.
The 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee ignored a massive body of recent science-based research showing the longstanding caps on saturated fats are not supported by science.
This science includes large, government-funded studies on more than 75,000 people, demonstrating that saturated fats have no effect on cardiovascular or total mortality. The 2020 DGA Advisory Committee is relying instead on reviews conducted in 2015 and 2010, which were deemed by the NASEM to be “unsystematic” and, therefore, unreliable.
Without intervention, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) will go into effect at the end of the year. We must delay the Guidelines until these issues have been fixed — but we need your help! Americans deserve sound science, not outdated studies.
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