A Personal Account Of Testifying Before The USDA’s 2010 Dietary Guidelines Panel

Filed under: Health — @ July 13, 2010

Last week I embarked on quite an adventurous journey that took me away from my daily routine in my hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina all the way to our nation’s capital in Washington, DC to stand before one of the most powerful government agencies overseeing nutritional public policy in the United States of America. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) along with The Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) have combined forces every five years since 1994 to come up with brand new recommendations known as MyPyramid about how the public should be eating and exercising in order to attain optimal health and weight control. They do this through a subset of the USDA called The Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (CNPP) created in December 1994 and charged with identifying all of the latest and relevant scientific research linked with nutrition that is important to the American people. These recommendations are used as a template and guide for many government programs such as school lunches in public schools. Additionally, major health organizations like the American Heart Association and the American Diabetes Association cite the information provided by the USDA as their evidence for promoting nutritional solutions to health conditions related to diet, namely heart disease and diabetes. In other words, this is all a very big deal and 2010 just happens to be the year when the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans is set to be released.

Click here to read about the process that led me to Washington, the representation of the low-carb message to the USDA, and a bold proposal about making meaningful changes by the time the next Dietary Guidelines roll around in 2015.