New Dietary Guidelines Rethink Cholesterol

The Dietary Guidelines are assessed and published each five years, and the time has come once again. Of course the overall idea is the same about what constitutes healthy eating, but there have been some changes as well.

Sugar has never specifically been limited before on the nutritional guidelines (even though we know that it should be), but now this has been made official. The government is now saying that sugar should only make up 10 percent of your total daily calories. If you were eating 2,000 calories a day 10 percent would come out to about 50 grams of sugar, which is close to drinking a can of soda. The American Heart Association suggests that the amount of sugar be almost half this guideline however.

This time around the guidelines are actually less strict about cholesterol, so if you’ve been avoiding eggs because of their cholesterol levels that advice has gone out the window. They do suggest avoiding a lot of foods that are high in cholesterol because they are frequently also high in saturated fat, but eggs are not high in saturated fat so there is not a limit on how many would be healthy to eat anymore.

According to dietitian Lisa Drayer:

“If you connect the dots together scientifically, we don’t believe there is a strong influence between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol. Even when I was training to be a dietitian, we knew that eating eggs didn’t increase your cholesterol as much as saturated fat does. So the government advice is catching up to the science.”

The guidelines go on to touch on the importance of eating lean proteins from fish and lean meats. They did not put a specific limit on red meats or processed meats but do discuss that there seems to be added health benefits from avoiding those. They now suggest that they “can be accommodated as long as sodium, saturated fats, added sugars and total calories are within limits in the resulting eating pattern.”

Unsurprisingly nothing has changed as far as the opinion about vegetables go, those are still healthy and you should be eating plenty of them each day to fill up on low calories and also get lots of nutrients and vitamins.

The guidelines suggest that one glass of wine for women each day and two glasses of wine for men each day can be a healthy habit. They also suggest that moderate coffee drinking can be good for you, thanks to the links between drinking coffee and reducing the risks of cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes. Moderate coffee drinking is considered three to five cups a day.

The same thoughts about fat are published, in that healthy fat is good in moderation, saturated fat should be limited as much as possible, and trans fats should be avoided completely. The guidelines also make a point to emphasise the fact that what’s healthy for each person changes depending on their current health level, so to always take your individual circumstances into account when you are changing your diet.