Researchers suggest U.S. Dietary Guidelines lack scientific credibility
Medical Xpress | Bob Shepard 18 December 2015
The methods used to base decision-making for the Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee are inherently and fatally flawed, according to findings from a researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
In a recent presentation to a special session of President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology titled “Strengthening the U.S. Dietary Recommendations through Enhanced Nutritional Science,” Edward Archer, Ph.D., an obesity theorist and research fellow with the UAB School of Public Health, told the council the primary method used to gather information for the guidelines is scientifically invalid, and funding for this method should be discontinued.
Archer says the guidelines are primarily informed by memory-based dietary assessment methods, known as M-BMs, which typically consist of interviews and surveys that require study participants to remember and report theirdietary intake.
“Most of the data analyses conducted by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee used the M-BMs of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey dietary component, ‘What We Eat in America,'” Archer said. “Relying on M-BMs to inform dietary policy continues despite decades of unequivocal evidence that M-BM data bear little relation to actual energy and nutrient consumption. Data from M-BMs are defended as valid and valuable despite no empirical support and no examination of the foundational assumptions regarding the validity of human memory and retrospective recall in dietary assessment.”
