HHS and USDA release new dietary guidelines

Eat less sugar. That’s not exactly new advice, but new specific guidelines were released by the USDA and Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday.

The guidelines encourage Americans to consume a variety of vegetables, fruits, and grains. However, a big one point is that they say less than ten percent of calories a day should come from added sugars. That’s about twelve teaspoons of sugar a day based on a two-thousand calorie diet for an adult. To put that in perspective, one serving of root beer already has about ten teaspoons of sugar in it. After that, drink you’re already creeping on your max for the day. 

A local clinical dietician, Tamara Giles at Peninsula Regional Medical Center says it can be hard to make cold turkey changes when it comes to added sugar intake. She suggests tackling it one step at a time.

She continues, “Just cut back. If you have the same coffee just make it a medium or a small instead of a large; so it’s easier to deal with making some of those recommended changes if you choose to.”

Added sugars are not the same thing as natural sugars found in things like fruit or milk. Other big changes in the guidelines, what our great grandparents knew and then bad science and politics torpedoed for a while…eggs are good for you.

The new guidelines ditch the long-held belief that you should limit cholesterol intake to 300 milligrams a day, in light of evidence that dietary cholesterol is not what makes LDL cholesterol rise.