Incorporating sustainability into America’s dietary guidelines

Incorporating sustainability into America's dietary guidelines

The American diet was under debate last fall as part of the run-up to the 2015 release of the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Historically, the American diet is harmful to the environment and the people who consume it. With a shift toward a more sustainable food system, this was a promising strategy to heal the planet and ourselves.

Original Paper:
Merrigan, Kathleen, et al. "Designing a sustainable diet." Science 350.6257 (2015): 165-166. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aab2031

A monumental discussion on diet and sustainability took place last year within the secretaries of the United States Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Agriculture (USDA). For the first time in history, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) recommended environmentally sustainable food systems to be part of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGAs). This proposal quickly sparked a series of intense debate, as DGAC's controversial and highly criticized recommendations are first of its kind to be discussed at the highest federal levels. This landmark development signified a mainstream shift towards sustainability and the first of many conversations to come.

The Dietary Guidelines, which are updated every five years, consistently recommend Americans to consume more plant-based and less animal-based foods. With constant scientific evidence, the DGAC's suggested diet is not only more healthful than the average American diet, it is more environmentally responsible. Published on Science online, the authors of this article discussed the urgent need for sustainability to be integrated into the U.S. dietary guidelines and suggest political discourse.
 
Current diets threaten human health for both the global north and south. In contrary, sustainable diets are healthful and environmentally viable. When applied, they have the potential to change the food group system (e.g. fruits, vegetables, and protein) to individual foods within a group (e.g. banana, lettuce, and chicken). This means the "ecologically detrimental" effects of consumption can be closely monitored and guided for individual species. For example, the 2011 Dutch dietary guidance lists four actions of sustainability, including two portions of fish a week. Aware of the sustainability concerns within the fishing industry, the Dutch Health Council evaluated the sustainability of each individual species — rather than the industry as a whole — recently updated its dietary guidance report.  

The DGAC argues that without attention to food sustainability, a food insecure future is inevitable. Additionally, their recommendations foster the production of healthful foods in an economically sustainable manner while minimizing the environmental impacts of the agriculture industry. Eco-friendly, sustainable diets contribute to food and nutrition security for present and future generations.

While no country has achieved a sustainable diet, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Brazil have adopted sustainability into their dietary guidelines. However, the United States continues its active yet unresolved discussions. With a low adherence rate of 4 percent and less than 40 percent of American adults within the recommended healthy weight range, the DGAs are basically ignored.

While endorsement of the DGAs by U.S. citizens is voluntary, they are legally enforced for many governmental programs. Just to name a few, 8.6 million Americans are served by the Women, Infants, and Children program, 31 million children are served through the National School Lunch Program, and military rations for American Military personnel adhere to these guidelines. Therein lies a major basis for the controversy; to serve all these programs under the DGAC's recommendations, the U.S. government would have to increase its annual spending by billions of dollars.

Industries worry that sustainability may lead to civil beliefs that some foods are better than others, potentially setting regulations or even food bans such as trans-fats. The authors pose that meat industry would be very apprehensive in regards to sustainable DGAs. Be it for health reasons (reducing coronary heart disease) or environmental reasons (reducing methane emissions and deforestation), the recommendations explicitly include eating less meat.
 
Another positive impact of the DGAC recommendations is that they can attract a formation of an international coalition for healthy diets. For example, despite the opposition of the food industry, the 2014 Brazilian dietary guidelines to reduce consumption of ultra-processed food (chicken nuggets) were adopted given the support of an awoken Brazilian civil sector. The authors suggest that the U.S. civil society is awakening to potential of the DGAs beyond simple nutritional guidance.

Furthermore, if the U.S. government had adopted the DGAC's recommendations, the authors suggest that demands for sustainable investments could have intensified and helped to facilitate support within political campaigns.
 
Although the authors accepted the low likelihood that Congress would have approved the sustainable recommendations for the DGAs, they still remain optimistic. They see this as the first of many serious challenges to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and United States Health and Human Services. The hope is that the recommendations will start to shift American dietary trends and appetites from conventional produce to more organic, local, and sustainably cultivated foods.  

In October 2015, the DGAC's campaign to include sustainability into the U.S. Dietary Guidelines was not successful. The 2015 Guidelines were published without the sustainability recommendations.

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