Diet Experts Push More Plants, Less Meat in Nod to Environment

Diet Experts Push More Plants, Less Meat in Nod to Environment

Nutrition panel also makes recommendations on coffee, cholesterol consumption

By Tennille Tracy in the Wall Street Journal

U.S. dietary guidelines, the government’s benchmark for balanced nutrition, have long advised Americans to eat dark, leafy greens. Now, there is another way the standards could be going green.

A panel of nutrition experts recruited by the Obama administration to help craft the next set of guidelines, to be issued this year, said in long-awaited recommendations Thursday that the government should consider the environment when deciding what people should eat.

The panel, in a departure from a decades-old recommendation, also said dietary cholesterol was no longer a big concern: It scrapped guidance that Americans limit their cholesterol intake to no more than 300 milligrams a day—less than that found in a couple of eggs.

The panel said consuming three to five cups of coffee a day can reduce the risk of Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. It endorsed the idea that moderate amounts of alcohol were beneficial for some people.

Generally speaking, the environmental focus means endorsing a diet that includes limited amounts of meat and more plant-based foods, while also encouraging the consumption of seafood whose stocks aren’t threatened.

“Addressing this complete challenge is essential to ensure a healthy food supply will be available for future generations,” the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a panel of roughly a dozen academics and nutrition experts, said in its recommendations to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services. The guidance will be used by those departments to revise the dietary guidelines, issued by the federal government about every five years and represented as color-coded food groups on a plate. The MyPlate symbol replaced the food pyramid in 2011.

With obesity rates high, it is unclear how much of an impact the guidelines have on the country’s eating habits. But they do influence billions of dollars of spending on government food programs, including the school lunch standards and the Defense Department’s menu guidelines.

The focus on sustainable diets is angering the meat industry, particularly beef producers, accused of taking a particularly heavy toll on the environment.

“The committee’s foray into the murky waters of sustainability is well beyond its scope and expertise,” said Barry Carpenter, president of the North American Meat Institute, which represents beef and poultry producers.

The meat industry believes the panel, which has been meeting for well over a year, is pursuing a broader antimeat agenda, even though it doesn’t recommend specific daily reductions in meat or poultry consumption.

The trade group criticized the committee for not giving greater consideration to studies that provide evidence of the nutrient density of meat and poultry.

The committee recommended that Americans eat less red and processed meat, and excluded lean meat from a list of foods that make up a healthy diet. While lean meat is firmly endorsed in the current guidelines, the panel explained that researchers don’t yet have a standard definition for what qualifies as lean meat. It did acknowledge in a footnote that lean meat could have a role in a good diet.

“The committee’s activities are solely advisory in nature,” USDA spokeswoman Brooke Hardison said before the release. “We look forward to reviewing the recommendations from the advisory committee, as well as public comments and the views of other experts.”

Broadly speaking, the advisory committee said Americans eat too few fruits, vegetables and whole grains and far too much sodium and saturated fat.

“The quality of the diets currently consumed by the U.S. population is suboptimal overall and has major adverse health consequences,” the panel said.

While the current dietary guidelines point out the need for sustainable agriculture, the advisory committee this time went so far as to suggest Americans eat less animal-based foods, in part because of the environmental impact, and said a product’s environmental footprint should be disclosed on food or menu labels.

“The committee is making a stronger statement than has been made before,” Erik Olson, a health and food expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in a recent interview. “But I think the [dietary] recommendations are still primarily driven by health considerations.”

According to Johns Hopkins University’s Center for a Livable Future, large-scale animal operations can generate large amounts of waste, pollute waterways and produce greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change. The committee said the global production of food is responsible for 80% of deforestation and more than 70% of freshwater use.

Ranchers and farmers counter that their production practices are actually “quite green” when looking at the environmental impact of meat on a per-calorie basis, as opposed to the number of pounds produced, the North American Meat Institute said.

Richard Thorpe, a physician and rancher in Winters, Texas, said he was “very disappointed” in the committee’s recommendations, as the beef industry has worked to incorporate nutritional and environmental considerations into farm practices for decades.

“Our industry over the last 20 or 30 years has done nothing but reduce the amount of fat in our animal,” Dr. Thorpe said. “I think these recommendations can hurt some very vital, important industries to the United States in the business of feeding people.”

A broader issue with the guidelines the industry raised deals with what it deems “inconsistencies” across the recommendations, which span over 500 pages.

“There are some areas of the report which are misleading,” said Shalene McNeill, head of nutrition research at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, a beef industry group, pointing out that some red meats, which the committee recommends Americans reduce in their diet, can be leaner than others. “Suggesting a diet lower in red meat is not consistent with science…we need to be specific and clear because people need good advice on what to eat,” she said.

Meat producers and their allies on Capitol Hill believe the advisory committee strayed too far from its primary mission, which is to examine the components of a healthy diet.

Late last year, just as the advisory committee wrapped up its deliberations, Congress inserted language into the 2015 spending bill that directs the administration to abandon any discussion of “extraneous factors” when developing the dietary guidelines. The language is nonbinding.

Corrections & Amplifications:
Shalene McNeill, head of nutrition research at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, in discussing why she thinks parts of a report by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee are misleading, said that some red meats can be leaner than other red meats. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said she was referring in those comments to some processed meats being leaner than fresh cuts.

—Kelsey Gee contributed to this article.