Experts: Dietary Guidelines Shouldn’t Restrict Total Fat Consumption
Should the federal government drop its long-held restrictions on total fat consumption in the forthcoming 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans? Many nutritional experts think so. Two researchers explain why in a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“Placing limits on total fat intake has no basis in science and leads to all sorts of wrong industry and consumer decisions,” co-author Dariush Mozaffarian, MD, DrPH, dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science & Policy at Tufts University and Boston Children’s Hospital said in a press release.
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“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,” he said. “It’s the food that matters, not its fat content.”
This is essentially the conclusion that the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Committee (DGAC) came to earlier this year in a report prepared for the federal government—and Mozaffarian and his co-author David Ludwig, MD, PhD, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, want to make sure this key finding isn’t overlooked.
For the first time since 1980, the DGAC did not propose restrictions on total fat consumption in its technical report released in February. The federal government convenes this group of independent scientists to review all of the current scientific and medical literature on nutrition in order to provide dietary guideline recommendations for the secretaries of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Current guidelines specify that no more than 35% of daily calories should come from fat. But according to the new DGAC report, “Dietary advice should put the emphasis on optimizing types of dietary fat and not reducing total fat.”
For obesity prevention, the committee recommends shifting the focus from total fat intake to adoption of healthier food-based dietary patterns that include more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seafood, and beans; and fewer meats, sugars, and refined grains.
“The limit on total fat presents an obstacle to sensible change, promoting harmful low-fat foods, undermining attempts to limit intakes of refined starch and added sugar, and discouraging the restaurant and food industry from providing products higher in healthful fats,” Mozaffarian and Ludwig concluded. “Randomized trials confirm that diets higher in healthful fats, replacing carbohydrate or protein and exceeding the current 35% fat limit, reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.”
They’re calling on the USDA and HHS—in addition to a wide range of other government agencies—to lift the limit on total fat, and to develop the proper signage, public health messages, and other educational efforts to “help people understand that limiting total fat does not produce meaningful health benefits, while increasing healthful fats has documented health benefits.”
—Colleen Mullarkey
Reference
Mozaffarian D, Ludwig DS. The 2015 US dietary guidelines lifting the ban on total dietary fat. JAMA. 2015 Jun 23/30;313(24):2421-2. doi:10.1001/jama.2015.5941.