Alyssa Moran:
I would say that I have mixed feelings about the dietary guidelines, as I typically do. I think that the core message of eating real food is spot on. I was thrilled to see the recommendation around limiting highly processed foods and shifting towards more minimally processed, whole foods.
This is the first time in history that the dietary guidelines have explicitly called out highly processed foods. They’ve alluded to it in past guidelines by recommending that we limit foods high in added sugars or foods high in salt, but this is the first time that they have made it easier for consumers by identifying specific categories of foods that contain those ingredients. So these are things that we typically think of as junk foods.
They’re ready to eat, ready to heat, sweet and salty snacks, candy, sugary drinks. And the US actually lags behind many other countries in terms of recommending that these types of foods be limited. Countries like Brazil, for example, have recommended avoiding ultra-processed foods in their national dietary guidelines for more than a decade now.