Current U.S. Dietary Guidelines Ignore Climate, and That’s a Problem

Every five years, the United States Department of Agriculture releases an update to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), a set of recommendations aimed at promoting nutritious diets. And yet despite its ostensible focus, the document fails to address one of the largest determinants of personal health: the health of the planet. Why is it that U.S. dietary guidelines don’t consider climate, and is there any hope of changing that?

Though freely available to the public, the DGA is primarily aimed at informing and guiding all public policies regarding food. School lunches, military food, government food programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, also known as food stamps), public health campaigns and many other policies are informed by the DGA’s recommendations. On the whole, the DGA influences over $80 billion in government spending every year.

Who Writes the U.S. Dietary Guidelines?

The USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) get final say over what’s in each updated version of the DGA. But the document itself is written by a 20-member panel called the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC). This panel is assembled by the USDA and the HHS, and most members are academics with a background in health, science or nutrition.

Marion Nestle is emerita professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, and she served on the DGAC in the mid-90s. Nestle says that despite its name, the federal dietary guidelines are not presented in a way that’s very accessible to most everyday Americans; the fact that the document is a whopping 164 pages long, which would test the patience of even the most health-conscious reader, is just one of many problems with the guidelines.

“They’re terribly, terribly written, and enormously obfuscating. They’re repetitive. They’re inconsistent,” Nestle tells Sentient. “They’re not meant for the public. They’re meant for policymakers.”

What Are the DGA’s General Dietary Recommendations?

Although the full document is quite lengthy and complicated, the gist of it is rather straightforward. A healthy diet, according to the DGA, comprises the following elements:

• Vegetables
• Fruits
• Grains (half of which the DGA recommends should be whole-grain)
• Dairy (which the DGA says can include fortified soy beverages)
• Protein (which the DGA says can include lean meats, poultry, eggs, seafood, beans, peas, lentils, nuts, seeds and soy products)
• Oils (both vegetable oils and those found in foods, like seafood or nuts)

Likewise, the DGA suggests the following dietary restrictions:

• Less than 10 percent of daily calories should come from added sugars or saturated fats;
• Daily sodium intake shouldn’t exceed 2,300 milligrams (and less for children);
• Men and women should consume no more than two and one alcoholic beverages per day, respectively

For several decades, the USDA used an illustrated “food pyramid” to communicate its general dietary recommendations in an accessible way. But the agency retired the food pyramid in 2011 and replaced it with something called MyPlate, which uses a different visual metaphor — a dinner plate — to present nutritional guidelines.

MyPlate was created to be more customizable to individuals’ specific needs than the food pyramid, and also to address concerns that the pyramid recommended overconsumption of carbohydrates. However, Nestle thinks that MyPlate is a step backwards, as it’s less straightforward to read and contains some internal inconsistencies.

“MyPlate is ridiculous,” Nestle says. “It’s absurd. You have a protein section, for heaven’s sake, and a dairy section and grain section. Dairy and grains have lots of protein, both of them. And people don’t put fruit on their dinner plate.”

What Do the Guidelines Say about Sustainability?

Nothing. The words “sustainability,” “climate change” and “global warming” don’t appear anywhere in the federal dietary guidelines, and the document makes no mention of the environmental impacts of various types of foods.

This isn’t for a lack of trying, however. In 2015, the advisory committee, or DGAC, proposed adding sustainability to the DGA for the first time, so that the guidelines would “have alignment and consistency in dietary guidance that promotes both health and sustainability.” The committee went on to note that their recommendations reflect “the significant impact of food and beverages on environmental outcomes,” an impact that should be addressed, just as human health is.

However, this proposal was immediately shot down by Congress, which provides funding for the USDA and, as such, has veto power over what’s included in the DGA. While writing the next appropriations bill for the agency, lawmakers inserted language stating that the DGA “shall be limited in scope to only matters of diet and nutrient intake,” and that the guidelines must be “solely nutritional and dietary in nature.”

Shortly thereafter, the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of Health & Human Services wrote in a joint statement that “we do not believe that the 2015 DGAs are the appropriate vehicle for this important policy conversation about sustainability.” The 2015 version was eventually released without any references to sustainability.

Is There Any Way to Get the DGA to Promote Sustainable Eating?

With the USDA refusing to consider sustainability as a criteria in crafting the dietary guidelines, the best way to bring the document in closer alignment with planetary health would be to demonstrate the health benefits of sustainable food, Nestle says, because positive health outcomes are what the DGA is officially meant to promote.

There’s no disputing that plant-based foods are more environmentally friendly than animal products — but are they healthier, too? The answer is complicated.

On the one hand, numerous studies have shown that plant-forward diets, whether vegan, vegetarian or veg-heavy omnivore, are associated with a range of health benefits. Plant-rich diets have been shown to reduce the risk of many adverse health outcomes, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes and some forms of cancer.

On the other hand, we know a range of factors influence health, including where you live and how much money your household makes. Many people don’t have easy access to fruits and vegetables. They live in what were once called “food deserts,” or regions where fresh produce is in limited supply and/or too expensive for the average person to afford on a regular basis.

This ambiguity surrounding health could be part of why the USDA is reluctant to promote plant-forward or plant-based — and thus, more sustainable — diets in the federal dietary guidelines. But there’s another important reason too: the USDA has always been closely allied with the meat industry, and the meat industry, of course, doesn’t want people to eat less meat.

The USDA and the Meat Industry

Historically, one of the main purposes of the USDA has been to stabilize the American agriculture industry and promote U.S. agricultural interests. Meat has always been an enormous part of American agriculture, so in a very real sense, promoting meat consumption is part of the USDA’s mission.

“Meat is a very powerful industry politically, because every state has cattle in it, and every state has two senators,” says Nestle, whose book Food Politics looks at how food industry interests affect public health. “And so forever, the Department of Agriculture was essentially an arm of the meat industry.”

‘Saturated Fat’ As a Euphemism for ‘Meat’

The USDA’s resistance to recommending lower meat consumption dates back to before the DGA was created. The document is the successor to the Dietary Goals For The United States, a 1977 Senate report that contained recommendations for a nutritious diet. One of those recommendations was that Americans eat less meat, as meat is high in saturated fat. Unsurprisingly, meat producers weren’t pleased.

“The meat industry went berserk,” Nestle says. “So they changed it to, ‘choose foods that have less saturated fat.’ ‘Saturated fat’ is a euphemism for ‘meat,’ because they can’t say ‘eat less meat.’”

The current DGA contains 158 references to “saturated fat,” and in general, admonishes readers to limit their consumption of it as much as possible.

Do Other Countries Include Sustainability in Their Dietary Guidelines?

Many other countries publish dietary guidelines, and several have incorporated sustainability concerns into their recommendations.

One is Austria. The latest version of the government’s official nutritional recommendations says that Austrians should eat a predominantly plant-based diet, and that omnivores should limit their meat consumption to just three servings per week. Austrian Federal Minister Johannes Rauch said that the new guidelines “show people how to make their diets healthy and environmentally conscious” at the same time.

The German government has taken a similar approach. Its latest nutritional guidelines recommend that people adopt a diet that’s 75 percent plant-based, with fewer servings of dairy than previous versions, and a prioritization of plant-based fats, like avocados, over fats that come from animal products.

In 2019, the Canadian government released its latest updated nutritional standards as well. Although the document doesn’t specifically cite planetary health as a factor in its recommendations, the new guidelines themselves certainly promote sustainable eating: it advises Canadians to eat more plant-based protein than animal-based protein, and no longer treats dairy as an exclusive category of food, instead folding it into the section on protein.

The Bottom Line

Planetary and personal health are inextricably linked, and our food systems are a crucial part of that link. We all need clean air to breathe, and clean water to drink. We can’t grow crops without arable land, and our long term survival as a species requires a minimum level of biodiversity across the planet’s food chains. The food we eat plays an enormous role in sustaining ecosystems — or destroying them.

Presenting a diet as “healthy” while ignoring its impact on the planet ignores the ways in which environmental health is inextricably linked to human health. It’s all connected, and the fact that our Department of Agriculture won’t acknowledge this doesn’t make it any less true.