A nutrition advisory panel that helps shape the country’s official dietary guidelines on Thursday eased some of its previous restrictions on fat and cholesterol, and recommended sharp new limits on the amount of added sugars that Americans should consume.
The US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which convenes every five years, said that Americans were eating too much salt, sugar and saturated fat, and not enough foods that fall into a “healthy dietary pattern,” like fruit, vegetables, nuts, whole grains and fish. Members of the panel said they wanted Americans to focus less on individual nutrients and more on overall patterns of eating, such as a Mediterranean-style diet, which is associated with lower disease rates.
However, the panel did single out added sugars as an area of concern. Previous dietary guidelines have included warnings about eating too many added sugars, but for the first time the panel recommended that Americans limit them to no more than 10 percent of daily calories — roughly 12 teaspoons a day for many adults — because of their link to obesity and chronic disease.
Americans typically consume between 22 and 30 teaspoons of added sugars daily, half of which come from soda, juices and other sugary drinks. The panel said it supported a rule proposed by the US Food and Drug Administration that would require a distinct line for added sugars on food nutrition labels, a change the food and sugar industries have fought aggressively.
Many experts, including some who disagreed with the panel’s advice on salt and saturated fat, applauded its stronger stance on added sugars.
“That was one of the high points of these guidelines — and something that was sorely needed,” said Ronald Krauss, the director of atherosclerosis research at Children’s Hospital Oakland Research Institute. “There is a striking excess of added sugar intake in all age groups across the population.”
Krauss, former chairman of the American Heart Association’s dietary guidelines committee, said that the advisory panel’s emphasis on overall dietary patterns was “a tremendous move in the right direction.”
As part of that move the panel dropped a suggestion from the previous guidelines that Americans should limit their total fat intake to 35 percent of their daily calories.
Since they were first issued in 1980, the guidelines have largely encouraged people to follow a low-fat diet, which sparked an explosion of processed foods stripped of fat and loaded with sugar and refined carbohydrates. Studies now show that replacing fat with refined carbohydrates like bread, rice and cereal may actually worsen cardiovascular health, so the guidelines now encourage Americans to focus not on the amount of fat that they are eating, but on the type.
The guidelines advise people to eat unsaturated fat — the kind found in fish, nuts and vegetable oils — in place of saturated fat, which occurs naturally in animal foods.
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