Every five years, the US Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Health and Human Services (HHS) convene a 15-member panel – the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) – to update the nation’s dietary guidelines.

The panel’s mission is to identify foods and beverages that help you achieve and maintain a healthy weight, promote health, and prevent disease. In addition to guiding the public at large, the guidelines significantly influence nutrition policies such as school lunch programs and feeding programs for the elderly.

The problem is the guidelines have a long history of flawed and misguided advice, such as recommending Americans consume diets heavy in grains and low in healthy fats, which has helped to fuel the epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases we’re now seeing.

The upcoming 2015 US Dietary Guidelines, which are currently being reviewed by US health and agricultural agencies, have a chance to change that and set the record straight – and there had been some promising steps forward, such as a recommendation to remove warnings about dietary cholesterol.

However, with the latest guidelines set to be released this fall, a new report published in the journal BMJ has brought deserved criticism, including suggesting the guidelines are still not based on the latest science.

BMJ Report: Dietary Guidelines Not Based on Latest Science

The DGAC scientific report, which serves as the foundation for the development of the dietary guidelines, “fails to reflect much relevant scientific literature in its reviews of crucial topics and therefore risks giving a misleading picture,” according to an investigation by the BMJ.¹

The report is authored by Nina Teicholz, an investigative journalist and author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. She continues:

“The omissions [in science] seem to suggest a reluctance by the committee behind the report to consider any evidence that contradicts the last 35 years of nutritional advice.”

While past committees used the USDA’s Nutrition Evidence Library (NEL) as a basis for collecting studies to form the guidelines, this year’s committee looked elsewhere for data on 70 percent of the topics it covered.

That data came largely from professional organizations like the American Heart Association (AHA), which not only conduct literature reviews based on different standards but are also known to be heavily supported by food and drug companies.