Newsletter Update | July 2020
In This Issue:
- TweetStorm to #DelaytheDGA on July 7 led to 5500+ tweets in just a few hours
- Another paper rejects low-saturated-fat diet for heart-disease prevention
- New book on red meat: Sacred Cow
- Take Action: Your Voice Needed! (See Below)
TweetStorm
On July 7, nutrition groups, doctors, and grassroots citizens joined in a TweetStorm to urge a delay in the expert report for the Dietary Guidelines, until major concerns have been addressed. These concerns are: the exclusion of large bodies of science, such as all studies on weight loss, the exclusion of virtually all low-carb studies, and the exclusion of all recent studies and reviews on saturated fats. Also, the USDA continues to use its “black box” methodology that does not explain how its experts are evaluating or grading the science—effectively making their reviews unable to replicate (Replication is a hallmark of good science). The expert report is due out this week.
And perhaps most importantly, the Dietary Guidelines continue to be designed only for “healthy Americans,” thereby excluding the 60% of the population with one or more diet-related chronic disease.
Within just a few hours, the TweetStorm generated overwhelming engagement, with more than 5,700 posts, reaching more than 1.6 million people and generating nearly 5.8 million impressions.
Here are just a few of the posts:
More Evidence that Lowering Saturated Fats Does Not Fight Heart Disease
Following upon the groundbreaking “State of the Art” Review on saturated fats published in the highly influential Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC) came a review last week, by another international group of ten experts on heart disease and diet, including five cardiologists, in the prestigious BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. These experts challenged the idea that a diet low in saturated fat is an ‘evidence-based’ recommendation for people with extremely high cholesterol—a condition called familial hypercholesterolemia (FH).
These papers add to the nearly 20 review papers, published over the past decade, almost all of which conclude that saturated fats have no effect on cardiovascular or total mortality. Our list of the papers is here. The 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, in concluding that caps on saturated fats should be continued, ignored all these papers.
Read the full BMJ paper HERE.
New Book Challenges Conventional Wisdom on Red Meat
A new book, Sacred Cow, challenges the conventional view that beef is the most environmentally destructive and least healthy of foods. Sacred Cow takes a critical look at the assumptions and science on meat. Among its arguments is that meat and animal fat are essential for human life and that a sustainable food system cannot exist without animals. It further argues that regenerative cattle ranching is, paradoxically, one of our best tools at mitigating climate change
For a highly worthwhile read, order Sacred Cow here. (For those who buy and submit receipts to sacredcow.info/book by July 14th, they will receive pre-pub materials and a preview link to the companion film.)
The Dietary Guidelines’ final report is due out in 2 days. You can still take action!
YOUR VOICE MATTERS.
For Everyone:
With the expert report coming out in just two days take action now and call for change. Please take time to reach out to your Member(s) of Congress to let them know you are concerned with the current Dietary Guidelines and care about evidence-based Guidelines for all Americans.
For Doctors, and PhDs:
Please consider also signing an open letter asking for a delay in final the report of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, currently due out July 15, in order to have time to remedy the serious failures of science described above. The Guidelines must include all the science “that is current at the time.” U.S. residents only, please.
Please Donate
The Nutrition Coalition would be grateful for your support! Like so many others, we’ve have had to cut back during this difficult time. If you are one of the fortunate people with something to give, we hope that you might consider a donation! Reducing diet-related diseases has always been urgent, perhaps now more than ever. We believe there is still good reason to hope that we can make a difference for these 2020 Guidelines.
Get our newsletter delivered to your inbox.
The Nutrition Coalition is a nonprofit educational organization working to strengthen national nutrition policy so that it is founded upon a comprehensive body of conclusive science, and where that science is absent, to encourage additional research. We accept no money from any interested industry.