1. Dietary guidelines, committee detail

A federal panel’s dietary recommendations calling for less meat and potatoes on the plates of Americans is provoking pushback from agricultural organizations.

USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services update the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years. The next version will be for 2025-30. The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee met Oct. 21-22 and will submit a final report to the agencies, an HHS spokesperson said.

The guidelines form the basis of federal nutrition policy and programs, support nutrition education efforts, and guide local, state and national health promotion and disease prevention initiatives.

One committee recommendation is that Americans reduce their consumption of starchy vegetables such as potatoes. The committee scrapped the idea to reclassify the potato from a vegetable to a grain.

The National Potato Council opposes the recommendation on starchy vegetables. The conclusion is “unsupported by nutritional science and will confuse consumers,” CEO Kam Quarles said in a news release.

The council urges USDA and HHS secretaries to “discard this erroneous recommendation in any final report,” he said.

Communicating reasons that a reduction of starchy vegetable consumption is unwarranted — supported by nutritionists and dietitians — “will be a push” in the next session of Congress, Sam Eaton, Idaho Potato Commission vice president of legal and government affairs, said at a commission board meeting Oct. 23. “It’s important that we have a strong narrative as to why.”

Instead of reducing recommendations for any vegetable, the agencies “should focus on increasing Americans’ intake of vegetables overall,” Quarles said in the release. The advisory committee acknowledges “the overwhelming and clear evidence that Americans do not eat enough vegetables.”

The Potato Council is pleased the committee rejected potato reclassification, which “would have made potatoes less affordable for schools and other feeding program managers who struggle to put nutritious, cost-effective and appealing vegetables on Americans’ plates,” he said.

Another recommendation is to move beans, peas and lentils from the vegetable category to the protein category and reduce the consumption of red meat.

“It’s baffling that we are trying to get Americans to cut out red meat when the evidence indicates nutrient deficiencies and chronic disease are increasing as red meat consumption declines,” Shalene McNeill, National Cattlemen’s Beef Association dietitian and executive director of nutrition science, said in a release.

Red meat consumption has declined and obesity and chronic disease have increased over the past 40-plus years, she said. Some 70% of calories in the U.S. diet are plant-based.

Beef contributes 5% of the calories but a greater share of essential nutrients, McNeill said. Committee recommendations “put some of the most vulnerable at risk for nutrient gaps.”

The National Pork Producers Council supports the recommendation to increase protein intake but believes replacing animal proteins “will severely compromise the American diet, as plant proteins are not nearly as nutritionally rich,” CEO Bryan Humphreys said in a release. Though reclassifying beans, peas and lentils could increase recommended protein intake, “there are essential nutrients in animal protein that plant proteins do not provide.”