Eat this, don’t eat that. Sound familiar?

Diet and nutrition recommendations seem to change every few years.  Eggs and cholesterol were bad for you and now we find can be a part of a balanced diet. Coffee’s been deemed OK too.

Brushing off its past poor advice, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) is again ignoring nutritional science to wage a campaign against sugar, meat and potatoes – blaming them for obesity. The DGAC’s recent report on nutrition is used as a basis for U.S. dietary recommendations issued every five years.

The science of nutrition is clear: obesity is a complex issue that cannot be solved by singling out any single food, beverage or ingredient.  Rather, it requires a comprehensive solution that looks at the whole diet.

Arron Carrol, professor of pediatrics at Indiana University School of Medicine, made this very point in a column in The New York Times that criticizes the DGAC for focusing on one food or nutrient to address the challenge of obesity:

“This is the real problem: We eat more calories than we need. But in much of our discussion about diet, we seek a singular nutritional guilty party. We also tend to cast everyone in the same light as ‘eating too much.’ ...The best diet is the one that you’re likely to keep. What isn’t helpful is picking a nutritional culprit of bad health and proclaiming that everyone else is eating wrong. There’s remarkably little evidence that that’s true anytime anyone does it.”

We could not have said it better.  We at Sip & Savor believe that there are no “good” or “bad” foods  - it’s all about balance.  We know that maintaining a healthy weight comes down to balancing all of the calories we consumed throughout the day with how much activity we get.

Please visit DeliveringChoices.org to see how our industry is helping its consumers find their balance by providing choice and information.