(Press-News.org) BOSTON, June 23 -- In a Viewpoint published today in the Journal of the Medical Association (JAMA), researchers from the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and Boston Children's Hospital call on the federal government to drop restrictions on total fat consumption in the forthcoming 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Co-authors Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., Dr.P.H., dean of the Friedman School, and David Ludwig, M.D., Ph.D., director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children's Hospital, highlight a key, but overlooked, focus of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee (DGAC), a group of independent scientists convened by the federal government to review current scientific and medical literature on nutrition. For the first time since 1980, the DGAC did not propose restricting total fat consumption in its technical report, released in February. According to the current dietary guidelines, only up to 35 percent of daily calories should come from fat.
By the end of this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) will write the final Dietary Guidelines for Americans, referring to the DGAC report for guidance. The 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are scheduled to be published later this year.
'Placing limits on total fat intake has no basis in science and leads to all sorts of wrong industry and consumer decisions,' Mozaffarian said. 'Modern evidence clearly shows that eating more foods rich in healthful fats like nuts, vegetable oils, and fish have protective effects, particularly for cardiovascular disease. Other fat-rich foods, like whole milk and cheese, appear pretty neutral; while many low-fat foods, like low-fat deli meats, fat-free salad dressing, and baked potato chips, are no better and often even worse than full-fat alternatives. It's the food that matters, not its fat content.'
For obesity prevention, the DGAC recommends shifting the focus from total fat intake to adoption of a healthier food-based dietary pattern with more vegetables, fruits, whole grains, nuts, seafood and beans; and fewer meats, sugars, and refined grains.
'When U.S. guidelines began recommending low-fat diets in 1980, people responded by turning to low-fat or non-fat products, away from healthy high-fat foods and toward refined grains and added sugars,' Ludwig said. 'A growing body of research shows that refined carbohydrates increase metabolic dysfunction and obesity. Yet, foods rich in added sugars, starches and refined grains like white bread, white rice, chips, crackers and bakery desserts still account for most of the calories people eat. Lifting the restriction on total fat would clear the way for restaurants and industry to reformulate products containing more healthful fats and fewer refined grains and added sugars.'
To maximize success, Mozaffarian and Ludwig call on a wide range of other government agencies and programs to also lift the limit on total fat. This includes the National School Lunch program, which recently banned whole milk while keeping sugar-sweetened non-fat milk on cafeteria menus; the FDA, which regulates health claims and food package labeling and remains strongly low-fat focused; and the National Institutes of Health, whose guidelines on healthy diets for families and children classify fat-free creamy salad dressing and trimmed beef and pork as foods to 'eat almost any time' while being cautious about eating vegetables cooked with added fat, nuts, vegetable oil and olive oil.
'From agriculture to food producers to school cafeterias to restaurants, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans serve as a beacon for countless dietary choices in the public and private sector,' Mozaffarian said. 'With obesity and chronic disease impacting public health so deeply, we can't miss this critical opportunity to improve the food supply. The USDA and HHS must use the 2015 guidelines to send the message that limiting total fat provides no benefits and actually leads to confusion and bad dietary choices.'
INFORMATION:
Mozaffarian D. and Ludwig D.S. 'The 2015 US Dietary Guidelines-Lifting the Ban on Total Dietary Fat' Journal of the American Medical Association. June 23/30. Volume 313, Number 24.
Dr. Mozaffarian was supported in part by grant # R01 HL115189 from the National, Heart, Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI) and Dr. Ludwig, in part, by career award K24DK082730 from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). The content of this Viewpoint is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NHLBI or NIDDK. Please see the paper for additional disclosures.
About the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy
The Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University is the only graduate school of nutrition in the United States. The school's eight degree programs -- which focus on questions relating to nutrition and chronic diseases, molecular nutrition, agriculture and sustainability, food security, humanitarian assistance, public health nutrition, and food policy and economics -- are renowned for the application of scientific research to national and international policy.
ANN ARBOR--A months-long literature search that involved tracking down century-old scientific papers and translating others from Czech and French helped University of Michigan ecologist Meghan Duffy answer a question she'd wondered about for years.
The early studies helped Duffy determine that the microscopic aquatic parasite she first observed as a graduate student, and which her research team had recently collected in more than a dozen southeast Michigan lakes, is the same fungus-like organism that a French biologist first described in 1903.
"The longer historical ...
U.S. consumers are often urged to "buy American," and some special interest groups even claim that buying foreign products is inappropriate, or even immoral. But when it comes to buying domestic products, positive feelings for one's own country may play a more important role than negative feelings toward another, according to a new study in the Journal of International Marketing.
"National identity--feeling proud to be, say, an American--and believing that Americans should not buy foreign products influence attitudes toward domestic products, but the impact of national ...
More than four out of five counselors who treat patients for substance abuse have experienced some form of patient-initiated workplace violence according to the first national study to examine the issue, led by Georgia State University Professor Brian E. Bride.
The study, forthcoming in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, is the first to measure the extent of workplace violence in substance abuse treatment centers across the United States. Bride and his co-authors analyzed a large, national sample of Substance Use Disorder counselors from the National Institutes ...
Everyone in China knows global automobile brands such as Ford and Chevrolet. But do those brands really sell better than local ones such as Senova or Eado? The answer is yes, and the reason lies in a complicated mix of brand recognition and local culture, according to a new study in the Journal of International Marketing.
"In countries such as China with strong class divisions, internationally recognized brands can be a way of conveying wealth, prestige, and status," write authors M. Berk Talay (University of Massachusetts), Janell D. Townsend (Oakland University), and ...
ANN ARBOR--A University of Michigan researcher and his colleagues are forecasting a slightly below-average but still significant "dead zone" this summer in the Chesapeake Bay, the nation's largest estuary.
The 2015 Chesapeake Bay forecast calls for an oxygen-depleted, or hypoxic, region of 1.37 cubic miles, about 10 percent below the long-term average. The forecast was released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which sponsors the work.
Farmland runoff containing fertilizers and livestock waste is the main source of the nitrogen and phosphorus ...
CAMDEN, N.J. -- How do we remember colors? What makes green... green?
As Sarah Allred explains, while color perception universally involves the practice of categorizing colors according to basic labels, the influence of categorization on color memory remains largely unknown and understudied.
'So that leaves a lot of questions unanswered,' says Allred, an assistant professor of psychology at Rutgers University-Camden. ''Do we remember colors just as we saw them?', 'Does time affect how we remember colors?', 'Are some colors easier to remember than others?''
Thanks ...
Just because more men pursue careers in science and engineering does not mean they are actually better at math than women are. The difference is that men think they are much better at math than they really are. Women, on the other hand, tend to accurately estimate their arithmetic prowess, says Shane Bench of Washington State University in the U.S., leader of a study in Springer's journal Sex Roles.
There is a sizeable gap between the number of men and women who choose to study and follow careers in the so-called STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics ...
Unauthorized immigrants pay billions more into Medicare's Hospital Insurance Trust Fund each year than they withdraw in health benefits, according to research from Harvard Medical School, the Institute for Community Health and the City University of New York School of Public Health at Hunter College. The study appeared last Thursday as an "online first" article in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.
In 2011 alone, unauthorized immigrants paid in $3.5 billion more than they utilized in care. Unauthorized immigrants generated an average surplus of $316 per capita ...
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards "the Internet of things" -- the idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment, and even livestock would have their own embedded sensors that report information directly to networked servers, aiding with maintenance and the coordination of tasks.
Realizing that vision, however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes -- or, even better, that can extract energy from the environment to recharge.
Last ...
Many primary care physicians - the top prescribers of prescription pain pills in the United States - don't understand basic facts about how people may abuse the drugs or how addictive different formulations of the medications can be, new Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health research suggests.
This lack of understanding may be contributing to the ongoing epidemic of prescription opioid abuse and addiction in the U.S.
Reporting online June 23 in the Clinical Journal of Pain, the researchers found that nearly half of the internists, family physicians and general ...
