Brigid Titgemeier, a functional-medicine dietitian, argues the U.S. Dietary Guidelines have fueled chronic disease by ignoring added sugar and refined grains. The Guidelines didn't address added sugar until 2015 and still recommend six grain servings daily, half of which can be refined. She says the Guidelines shape school meals, WIC, and SNAP, magnifying their damage across the country.
If I hear one more dietitian or healthcare practitioner that says that the Dietary Guidelines over the last several decades have not contributed to our chronic disease epidemic, I'm going to lose my mind. I'm Brigid. I'm a functional Medicine registered dietitian. I got my Master's in Public Health Nutrition where I studied the Dietary Guidelines in graduate school and population based initiatives. Whether the administration was Republican or Democrats, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans have absolutely contributed to worsened health outcomes in the United States by not taking a proactive and aggressive stance around some of the leading causes of chronic disease, including added sugar and refined grains in the diet. Yes, it is absolutely true that we switched from the food pyramid to MyPlate in 2005, but that is the physical representation. Dietary Guidelines themselves have not even taken a strong stance on limiting added sugar consumption until 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. That was the first time that the dietary guidelines just 10 years ago said that added sugar is contributing to an increase in chronic disease and that it should be limited to less 10% of total calories per day before that it was consumed sugar in moderation and other very vanilla statements that absolutely contributed to worsened health outcomes. Wasn't until the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans that the government actually recommended no added sugar consumption for children under the age of two. Before, when we had the Pyramid, the guidelines were recommending 6 to 11 servings of grains per day, including slice of bread, cereals, pasta, rice, and said try to make as many of them whole grain. Since that changed in the year 2000, they've now recommended six servings of grains per day, at least half of them being whole. That means that the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are inadvertently recommending refined grains in a person's diet to be quote unquote healthy, even including a space for refined grain consumption. Since MyPlate came out in 2005 is absolutely contributing to the increase in insulin resistance in type 2 diabetes in cardiovascular disease. And a lot of people are saying, well, it doesn't matter because no one follows them anyways. But these are the national Nutrition Standards. This sets the tone for what companies think that they're capable of getting away with international nutrition recommendations with what is being included in the school Lunch and Breakfast program and in WIC and in the SNAP program. I was in Washington D.C. in 2014 prior to the release of the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. At that point there was still not even a line for added sugar on the Nutrition Facts label. There were several petition groups that were petitioning the FDA saying not to include the added sugar line on the total sugar list because they didn't want the transparency for consumers to be able to see how much added sugar was actually in the food. And the government waited way too long to even add that added sugar line.
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