🥩 Myth: Nutrition guidelines are evidence-based

Aug 19, 2023

Our mission is to promote the benefits of a meat-based diet as a counter to the anti-meat rhetoric that’s pushing modern humans in the wrong direction. We gain ground by introducing more people to this results-driven way of life.

🥩 Hello Meatlings,

If you were like me, you thought that public agency food recommendations such as MyPlate, The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the EAT-Lancet Commission, and the American Heart Association were made to help people achieve optimal health.

Sadly, this isn't reality.

These groups have significant conflicts of interest (COI), including stocks and Big Food and Pharma donations.

The data they use is often from low-quality studies, and the members of these organizations often use plant-based individuals to “review” all the data. What a "you can't make this stuff up" situation. We're hoping to help untangle this for you in upcoming newsletters. (Subscribe if you haven't!)

The Low Down on the USDA MyPlate Committee

Every five years, the US gets new dietary guidelines from this panel.

Biden appointed Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford to the 2025 committee, and she claims that "obesity can't be treated with exercise and a good diet because it's genetic."

This is someone who will help decide new diet guidelines… should be interesting…

Before 2020, committee members had NO public disclosure of their COI, despite a 2017 recommendation by the National Academies of Sciences.

In 2022, the committee was found to have major COI for their latest release in 2020:

"Our analysis found that 95% of the committee members had COI with the food, and/or pharmaceutical industries and that particular actors, including Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson, General Mills, Dannon, and the International Life Sciences had connections with multiple members. Research funding and membership of an advisory/executive board jointly accounted for more than 60% of the total number of COI documented.
Trustworthy dietary guidelines result from a transparent, objective, and science-based, process.
Our analysis has shown that the significant and widespread COI on the committee prevent the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans from achieving the recommended standard for transparency without mechanisms in place to make this information publicly available.”

We all know what these food companies primarily make. It makes sense that the MyPlate recommendations continue to promote 45-65% of dietary intake from carbohydrates, even though most Americans are insulin resistant, overweight, and obese.

As a side note, this group makes diet recommendations intended for healthy Americans but omits recommendations for disease treatment. The Nutrition Coalition encourages legislation for dietary guidelines to address disease prevention for healthy Americans and disease treatment for 60% of adults with a chronic disease.

The report includes the following language:

The Committee recognizes that the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is designed to include all Americans. Given the increase in chronic disease, the Committee directs USDA to include in the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans a dietary pattern for the treatment of diet-related diseases, including obesity and diabetes, based exclusively on rigorous data.

The report's language is non-binding, but it makes a powerful statement about the intention of Congress and is precedent-setting. For the first time, we can now say that Congress has acknowledged that the Dietary Guidelines ignore most of the adult population and will point to this language in future advocacy efforts. Read this Nutrition Coalition blog post on the topic.

This news is particularly relevant for healthcare professionals who are told the Guidelines are the gold standard for disease treatment. They’re not.

Stay tuned next time for even more illumination into this messy situation.

✌🏻and ribeyes,

-Miranda MS, LN & The Yes2Meat Team

📰 News & 🔬 Research

😷 Cancer among younger Americans is on the rise. The numbers: Early-onset cancer diagnoses rose by nearly 1% between 2010 and 2019, a new study found. In the 30-to-39 age group, cases increased by about 19%. Why? There’s no clear explanation. Possible reasons include rising obesity rates, lifestyle factors like drinking and smoking, and exposure to pollutants and carcinogens.

🪰 Waiter, there's a fly in my waffle. Belgian researchers try out insect butter: Scientists at Ghent University in Belgium are experimenting with larva fat to replace butter in waffles, cakes and cookies, saying insect grease is more sustainable than dairy produce. 🤮

😘 Sexsy farming: The Rise of Regenerative Agriculture. The idea is that by following the basic principles of regen ag – not disturbing the soil, keeping it covered, maintaining living roots, growing a diverse range of crops, and the use of grazing animals – they can regenerate tired and depleted soil and produce nutritious food. There’s a lot of EU conventional farmers who are now at least trying to adopt one or two of the principles.” The EU aims to reduce fertilizer use by 20% and halve chemical pesticides and soil nutrient loss. “And this way of farming is really sexy – I’ve been to plenty of other farms, and I wouldn’t share them on Instagram.”

🦴 Scientists recently published studies comparing the effects of different protein sources (plant vs. animal) on muscle and bone metabolism. A study found swapping animal proteins with plant-based proteins increased markers of bone and collagen catabolism(breakdown).

🙄 USDA Funds Study on Ultra-Processed Food Diet. US taxpayer dollars recently funded a study where the authors crafted a week-long menu with 91% of calories sourced from ultra-processed foods (UPF). Incredibly, they labeled this a "healthy" diet, because it conforms to the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. This apparent disregard for the processing level of the foods underscores the obvious flaws in our current approach to dietary recommendations. A UPF pattern clearly benefits the food industry, not the health of Americans.

🍗 High-protein diet for weight loss. This recent study found that a high-protein diet was more effective than both calorie restriction and intermittent fasting for weight loss. After 60 days, weight loss, body fat, body mass index, and waist circumference were significantly lower in the high-protein group. And they experienced more improvement in fasting blood glucose, HbA1c, triglycerides, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein, and high-density lipoprotein.

🔗 Link Corner

🐄 Chews Wisely Podcast: What Butchery Teaches Us About Life with Kate Kavanaugh, Part 1. A vegetarian becomes a butcher, trying to save the prairie one steak at a time. Kate Kavanaugh shares her story, from harvesting her first chicken to opening up Western Daughters Butcher Shoppe.

🐄 Chews Wisely Podcast: What Butchery Teaches Us About Life with Kate Kavanaugh, Part 2. How does a butcher feel when people tell her “I could never do what you do?” Today, we dive into big questions with Kate Kavanaugh. How did becoming a butcher inform her farming practices? And change her relationship with food? How do we bring more embodiment back into our food system and ourselves? What do butchers most want the public to know?

🏛️ Legislative Updates

Legislation to Make SNAP Healthier

Senators Cory Booker and Marco Rubio recently joined forces to introduce a bipartisan bill named the "SNAP Nutrition Security Act," which demands that the USDA divulge the specific food items purchased using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) dollars.

You might find it surprising that such monitoring doesn't exist, but the USDA currently needs more means to track or report on using $127 billion in annual SNAP funding. This legislation aims to shift SNAP's focus from solely ensuring food security to emphasizing nutrition security, i.e., the idea that Americans need not just calories but all the vitamins and minerals needed for good health.

While SNAP has effectively addressed hunger since its inception in 1939 (originally called Food Stamps), a growing consensus, with bipartisan support, is now focusing on the need for food assistance programs to prioritize nutritious options for our most vulnerable citizens. Even two former Secretaries of Agriculture recently collaborated on an op-ed, promoting this legislation.

Twitterings 3x

🎪 Events

Common Ground

The Kiss The Ground team is excited to partner again with Big Picture Ranch, this time to celebrate the release of Common Ground, the follow-up to the 2020 film Kiss The Ground.

The film takes a deep dive into America’s corrupt food systems and how farmers and families have had to live through tragedy and illness at the hands of government policies that favor big ag and big profits.

Narrated by actors Laura Dern, Jason Momoa, Rosario Dawson, Woody Harrelson, Ian Somerhalder, and Donald Glover – together we aim to rally for the transition of 100M more acres of US land to regenerative practices.

Tickets currently available for:

September 27th: SEATTLE, WA
September 28th: PORTLAND, OR
September 29th: NEW YORK, NY
October 8th: SANTA BARBARA, CA

💸 $4.3 trillion on health care

🪣 Ken Barry And YouTube Censorship

🤝 CEO Corner

Colin on advice, feedback, and musings.

Perception is reality.

Your perception is your reality.

Mine is mine.

What this means goes exactly like this….

I say something to you.

I think I did a good job of explaining myself.

You might even nod in agreement.

I might ask you, “Do you understand?”

You say, “Yup.”

I say, “Do you have any questions?”

You say, “Nope.”

Then, a week later, you do or say something that shows you did not understand what I said, which means I didn’t do an excellent job explaining myself (or maybe I did, but you didn’t absorb it all).

This is one example. And it happens all the time.

You tell someone something multiple times. Yet it doesn’t stick.

Eventually, we all learn how hard it is to communicate with others.

People believe what they believe.

This is why the Socratic method is so powerful, because it forces people to say things to answer questions that then feel like they came from them.

Compare that to someone listening to you. They hear something, nod, think they understand, and move on. Not much active participation.

Answering questions is an entirely different ballgame.

I know this. I think about it all the time, usually after the fact. I still struggle with using it and default to making statements.

And I have no illusions about why I often have to repeat myself.

🤔 To Ponder

Most people live with regrets.

Most never try. Comfort is too appealing.

Most live lives of quiet desperation… and then their life is over.

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