Which Dietary Guideline Will Cause the biggest Ruckus?
Tomorrow, Monday, January 31st the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) are scheduled to be announced. We’ve been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the recommendations—every five years the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), release the latest research-based nutritional and physical fitness recommendations that are designed to reduce the incidence of overweight and obesity while promoting health and reducing the risk of chronic diseases. Of course we’re hoping for more focus to be placed on increasing vegetable consumption since we believe you can never get enough of the low-calorie nutrient powerhouses. But we’re also excitedly expecting a big reduction in sodium.
Actually in 2008, we predicted that due to the enormous impact that sodium has on health, slashing it would be one of biggest changes to the previous Dietary Guidelines—and we set out to write our second book The Secret To Skinny: How Salt Makes You Fat. As we discuss in our book, salt does much more than make our waistlines thicker. Salt causes inflammation and damage to our entire body; it raises our blood pressure, increases our risk for heart attack and stroke, while it also escalates our risk for stomach cancer, asthma and osteoporosis. And yes, as the title of our book suggests, salt makes us fat. Yes, it makes us FAT! It increases our cravings, makes us hungrier and thirstier and it makes our fat cells store more fat. We wrote our book to give people a simple roadmap to follow to help them to meet what we believe will be the new sodium recommendations.
In addition to the help we offer and the sodium solutions we provide in our book, there are a lot of changes being made by food manufacturers that will make reducing your salt intake easier. Last year, the area where the most new foods were introduced was in the low-sodium/ reduced sodium foods category. So manufacturers are jumping on board to help us to be healthier and companies are hard at work to make these foods taste delicious.
On Monday when the new recommendations will be released we will be anxious to hear how you will meet the new sodium guidelines. If you want some help, please pick up a copy of our book and be sure to check back in with us over the next few weeks as we give you some simple sodium reducing swaps..
We are thrilled that the government is taking action! What do you think? What will your biggest challenge to reducing sodium be? Dining out? Loving processed foods?