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Comment by mtw | Hacker News Reader

For those who are curious, the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines is available here https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015/resources/2015-202... (PDF)

Unfortunately it does not highlight the danger of sugar & processed food. Someone can follows these dietary guidelines and still be able to have a high intake of sugar, HCFS, processed food and all sorts of food chemicals (emulsifiers etc.), all prevalent in the american food industry, and get cardiovascular disease.

We are not going to reverse the obesity epidemic anytime soon!

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Dietary guidelines typically self-moderate to something that they think the populace has a chance of adopting. I.e., they don't want people to completely shrug it off as too drastic of a change.

I would like to see a different approach: show the actual best diet guidelines, and then explain which partial steps will do the most good. Or something like that. It's better to be up front with what's known and then proceed to harm reduction rather than telling people that these partial steps are where they should end up.

"Unfortunately it does not highlight the danger of sugar"

From the guidelines: When added sugars in foods and beverages exceed 10 percent of calories, a healthy eating pattern may be difficult to achieve.

Third year nutrition undergrad. Was told that this recommendation will likely be reduced further as more future research justifies doing so.

For most people that follow the recommendations, their diet may not be optimal but it will be markedly improved from average, at least in regards to preventing chronic diseases that are among the top causes of death (CVD, diabetes, etc) and improving overall wellness/health.

I disagree that the recommendations do not sway people toward healthier/less processed foods. See Table 1-1.

Are there any studies showing that "processed food" is, on its own, dangerous? Or is the inherent danger largely due to the HFCS, sugar, and other items that are usually added in the process?

A few studies https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26514947 http://thorax.bmj.com/content/early/2016/11/25/thoraxjnl-201... http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2016/11/05/0... http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/4/8/895.short https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20479151

I am sure there is a meta-analysis somewhere but this would take a bit of time to find

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