Federal Dietary Guidelines are too "Fatty"

One: Change the way government develops its dietary guidelines. Right now,
the U.S. government's most widely publicized dietary recommendations are
deadly. The Food and Nutrition Board's 2002 report says that to reduce
degenerative diseases like heart disease and cancer, we can consume up to
35 percent of our calories as fat, up to 35 percent of our calories as
protein and up to 25 percent of calories as added sugars.

Here is a daily diet that meets those nutrition guidelines: Breakfast: 1
cup Fruit Loops; 1 cup skim milk; 1 package M&M milk chocolate candies;
fiber and vitamin supplements. Lunch: Grilled cheddar cheeseburger.
Dinner: 3 slices pepperoni pizza, with a 16-ounce soda and 1 serving
Archway sugar cookies.

This helps explain why 12-year-old schoolchildren develop thickening of
their carotid arteries to the brain, and 80 percent of 20-year-old
soldiers, dying in combat, are found to have coronary artery heart
disease.

How could the government distribute this information and call it science?
Members of the committee had financial ties to industries that benefit
from higher protein and sugar allowances, and the panel was partly funded
by corporate money.

The Obama administration should establish a rule: No scientist with
financial ties to the food and drug industries should chair - or choose
the members of - panels that set dietary guidelines.

Two: President Obama should establish a new institute at the National
Institutes of Health dedicated exclusively to exploring the link between
diet, health and disease. Today, there are 27 institutes and centers at
the National Institutes of Health, but none devoted to nutrition, despite
the great public interest in the subject. For the sake of the people who
pay the bills, it's time for NIH to dedicate an institute to studying the
effect of nutrition on health.

Three: Congress should require that medical schools - as a condition of
receiving federal grants - offer residency programs on dietary approaches
to preventing and treating disease. Americans don't understand the
disease-fighting power of a good diet because their doctors don't. Medical
schools teach a drug-centered curriculum. They do not learn about the many
population-based studies that show the connection between diet and
disease. They do not review the biochemical studies on disease formation
that support the population-based studies. And they do not study the
results found in treating disease with diet in clinical settings. Drugs
and surgery can offer miraculous benefits in certain cases. But it's
unconscionable for doctors not to know about - or tell their patients
about - the preventive and healing power of food.

These three proposals won't cost much, and they will pay back our
investment a million-fold by making people healthier and reducing health
care costs. Moreover, they reflect a commitment - expressed by the White
House last week - to finally let the public enjoy the health benefits of
scientific research.

T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of nutritional
biochemistry at Cornell University. He is co-author of "The China Study."
Caldwell B. Esselstyn Jr., M.D., former president of the American
Association of Endocrine Surgeons, is a preventive medicine consultant at
the Cleveland Clinic. He is the author of "Prevent and Reverse Heart
Disease." ----------------------------------------------------------------------