The Dietary Health Crisis

Thursday, June 4, 2015, 10am to 11:30 in the Meeting Room (behind the fireplace)

Every five years, the USDA Dietary Guidelines gets updated; 2015 will be the latest update. The scientific recommendations have been submitted and is awaiting approval. However, past recommendations have not halted the nations decline in health due to poor nutrition. What went wrong?

One possibility is that past guidelines did not clearly delineate refined carbohydrates from whole grains. HERE is a talk by the Walter Willett, the chairman of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, which has dominant influence on the interpretation of science used by the USDA Dietary Guidelines.

Another possibility is that current dietary science is flawed. The unhealthy person is blamed for not following the guidelines, but at least for some people the guidelines is the cause of the problem. In THIS TED Talk, Peter Attia relates how he blamed obese people for their poor health habits, but later had his own problems and had to shift to a fat based diet, not recommended by the dietary guidelines, to regain health. Attia is now leading a foundation to bring integrity in dietary science.

New discoveries in microbiology suggest that past dietary guidelines have been unsuccessful because they underestimated the role played by gut bacteria. HERE is a TED Talk about this promising line of research.