The Nutrition Coalition Supports Senator Grassley’s Call to Suspend DGA Process

For Immediate Release

Contact: Press@nutritioncoalition.us

The Nutrition Coalition Supports Senator Grassley’s Call to Halt DGA Process

The Nutrition Coalition strongly supports Senator Chuck Grassley’s call for suspending the development of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans until the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services (USDA-HHS) fully disclose all financial conflicts-of-interest (COI) on the appointed expert group that oversees the science for the guidelines, called the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC).

The current COI disclosure recently released by HHS has been deemed by experts to be inadequate and lacking in transparency. The document lists the COI altogether, with the names anonymized, whereas standard disclosures list conflicts by individual name. Without this specific information, the particular influences on each committee member cannot be assessed.

Senator Grassley, in his letter to the Secretaries of USDA-HHS, requested that the, "DGAC suspend writing the new recommendations until DGAC comes into full compliance with the recommendations made by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) in their 2017 report to Congress." 

Nina Teicholz, journalist and founder of the Nutrition Coalition, stated: 

“Unless we know exactly how Big Food is influencing the experts in charge of our Dietary Guidelines, this policy will be neither trustworthy nor reliable. The Guidelines currently advise all Americans to eat 3 servings of refined grains and up to 10% of calories as sugar every day. We all know that’s bad for health, but until we can start to get some control over the massive influence of the ultraproceessed food industry on the Guidelines, we can’t begin to fix this policy or save America’s health.”

Teicholz was a co-author of the first-ever systematic review of the COI on a DGAC, which found that 95% of the 2020 committee had at least one tie with a food or pharmaceutical company, and more than half of the members had 30 such ties or more.

In not providing full disclosure of COI USDA-HHS are failing to comply with a 2017 recommendation by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to “explicitly disclose financial and non-financial biases and conflicts” of committee members.

In a 2022 follow-up report, the NASEM again urged the USDA-HHS to fully adopt the recommendation on COI disclosure, stating, “Full implementation of this recommendation would provide improved transparency and reduce possible conflicts of interest, which are needed to establish public trust in the DGA.”

A final follow-up report, published earlier this year, reiterates the importance of COI transparency:

“Given the erosion of trust in expertise in general and the public attention on COI in nutrition research, these issues are likely to remain pertinent to future DGA cycles. Therefore, assessment and transparent management of both individual and institutional COI will remain important for maintaining and increasing public trust in the DGA.”

Congress mandated these NASEM reports with a total $2,000,000 allocation and the clear intention that the resulting recommendations would be adopted.

Gordon Guyatt, one of the world’s most cited researchers and Distinguished Professor at McMasters University, stated the following on the recent disclosure:

“The USDA's disclosure doesn't meet basic standards of scientific practice. Conflicts need to be listed for each individual by name. Without this information, the public can't understand the particular influences on each committee member and the possibility that individual members are inappropriately included. Furthermore, because the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is broken up into subcommittees to answer different questions, the public has no idea whether each subcommittee is comprised of people with a balanced set of viewpoints. This disclosure by USDA may be legal according to federal regulations, but it does not comply with widely accepted standards for any group making guidelines for practioners, patients, or the public. If the USDA is trying to convey the message that they have something to hide and are doing their best to hide it, they are doing an excellent job.”

The Nutrition Coalition supports the idea that full disclosure, according to international standards, is imperative to help ensure that the Dietary Guidelines will be based on scientific evidence without undue influence by industry interests.