The Roze wants you to understand what American Dietary Guidelines are to achieve and maintain a healthy diet.
There are times when it seems like dietary recommendations are constantly changing, and nutrition is a field that is constantly changing as new information on the interactions between various nutrients, entire foods, and the human body is discovered. Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs) is a reliable place to find the most up-to-date advice as this field of study grows.
The HHS (Department of Health and Human Services) creates the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years. Also, the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture) is involved in setting these guidelines. This is a set of nutrition goals and suggestions. This 150-page manual can be a helpful guide for making personal nutrition decisions, even if you don’t necessarily need to read every word of it to maintain a healthy diet (in fact, it’s often meant for use by health experts).
Here is a brief overview of the DGAs’ history and goals, as well as what the standards mean for the average American.
Dietary Guidelines for Americans: A Brief History
The American government has worked to give its people accurate information on better health through good eating for more than 100 years. However, a Senate committee didn’t resolve to draft a definitive statement on what it meant to eat healthfully until the 1970s. Policymakers recognized the need to educate the public on the link between diet and illness prevention as they learned more about the relationship between diet and chronic diseases, which were on the rise even in the 1970s.
The Senate Select Committee specifically focused on Nutrition and Human Needs, which was led by Senator George McGovern, put out Dietary Goals for the United States in 1977. This research found that the best nutritional practices were to keep a healthy body weight and eat less sugar, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium.
However, not everyone in the nutrition industry agreed that any of the assertions made in this document were true. The USDA and HHS worked together to develop the first Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a set of seven guidelines for a healthy diet, in 1980 in an effort to present diet information that was supported by the most recent scientific findings.
How and When are the Dietary Guidelines Changed?
The Dietary Guidelines have been updated every five years with more up-to-date information for over 40 years. This practice is not easy to follow. In 1990, the National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act says that the DGAs must be changed at least every five years based on the preponderance of scientific and medical knowledge.
Over time, the DGAs have changed from a list of seven basic dietary guidelines to a document with tips for young children, teens, adults, women who are pregnant or breastfeeding, and older people. And unlike the general, one-size-fits-all rules of the past, the DGAs now take factors like a person’s cultural background, culinary preferences, and money into account.
Instead of focusing on the effects of individual nutrients on health, as they did in the past, the most recent Guidelines now look at how a person’s diet as a whole affects their health. Since food—rather than separate nutrients—is what people eat.
How the Dietary Recommendations are Created
The Dietary Guidelines don’t undergo a comprehensive revision with each new edition. Instead, each iteration builds upon the one before it. The procedure for revising the DGAs is nevertheless incredibly comprehensive.
First, an outside Federal Advisory Committee of nutrition experts looks over the most recent research on nutrition and health. They then write a report summarizing their research. American people are encouraged to take part in this process. Anyone can attend a committee meeting, give comments or questions for the committee to think about, or suggest an expert. As a point of reference, more than 106,000 comments from the public were used to make the 2020–2025 DGAs.
Following the completion of the committee’s study report, the USDA and HHS will use this data to develop the messaging for the new dietary guidelines. The final version of the DGAs must be approved by the secretaries of the USDA and HHS. This comes after a process of review and changes.
Highlights of the DGAs for 2020–2025
Make Every Bite Count is the topic of the most recent revision of the Dietary Guidelines, which was published in 2020. It is based on four fundamental rules for a healthy diet.
Follow a healthy food pattern at every stage of life is one of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020–2025’s four guiding principles.
Make and enjoy nutrient-dense food and drinks that take into account your personal tastes, cultural norms, and budget.
Use high-nutrient foods and drinks to meet the needs of each food group while staying within your calorie limits.
Limit your intake of alcoholic drinks and foods and drinks with a lot of added sugar, saturated fat, or sodium.
Key suggestions that offer more precise, measurable objectives support each of these four recommendations.
The following are the main suggestions of the 2020–2025 DGAs:
Decreasing your intake of saturated fat to less than 10% of daily calories for adults aged 2 and up, limiting added sugar to less than 10% of daily calories for adults aged 2 and up, and avoiding added sugars for infants and toddlers.
Limiting daily salt consumption to no more than 2,300 mg (or less for people younger than 14).
Reducing alcohol consumption to two drinks per day or less for men and one drink per day or less for women.
The 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines, broken down by age groups, describe how people at every stage of life can achieve these goals by consuming foods such as fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy products, fortified soy substitutes, proteins, oils, and beverages.
The recommendations also cover specific dietary and lifestyle recommendations for each age group, such as how much sugar-sweetened beverages should be a part of children’s and teenagers’ diets or how much alcohol, caffeine, and fish lactating mothers should take.
The Meaning of the Dietary Guidelines for You
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans were obviously developed with all Americans in mind, but they aren’t necessarily meant to be a detailed guide on how to eat for the typical person. The DGAs were actually primarily created for health professionals to develop public policy.
Numerous federal nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program, Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, are governed by the DGAs (SNAP). The DGAs are more like a government reference guide than a specific eating regimen.
Dietary Advice from the Roze
If you want to know what the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020–2025 document says, you can easily find it online. In terms of broad suggestions for a healthy diet, it won’t fail you. But it would be good to speak with a trained dietitian for a food plan that is more specifically catered to you.
The Roze Team wants you to better understand the American Dietary Guidelines and choose foods that help you achieve a healthy diet and contribute to a better life.