Scientists have developed a new international food pyramid that brings together nutrition advice from around the world, with some surprising differences.<\/p>\n
Nutrition advice has a way of making dinner complicated. Between arguments over protein, warnings about sugar and questions about carbs, it\u2019s easy to lose sight of what a healthy meal is supposed to look like.<\/p>\n
The official food guides from several parts of the world are much less divided. <\/p>\n
An international team has pulled their shared advice into a new International Food Guide Pyramid, with plenty of vegetables, fruit and whole grains, and less room for red meat, sugary drinks, and white bread.<\/p>\n
Karen Della Corte, a nutrition scientist at Brigham Young University<\/a>, led the work. <\/p>\n \u201cDespite what people often hear, there\u2019s actually substantial agreement in nutrition science about the foundations of healthy eating,\u201d said Della Corte.<\/p>\n She worked with 22 colleagues from North America, Europe and Australia. <\/p>\n The team reviewed existing research and guidelines to build a guide for generally healthy people aged two and older; they didn\u2019t run a new diet experiment.<\/p>\n What the countries share<\/p>\n The researchers compared official advice from Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, China, Australia and the Nordic countries. <\/p>\n They also read the scientific advisers\u2019 report for the newest US guidelines, looking for agreement across countries rather than giving one country\u2019s advice the final say.<\/p>\n All the guides put vegetables and fruit first, with whole grains, beans, nuts and soy also favored. <\/p>\n They preferred unsaturated fats to saturated ones and recommended limiting red and processed meat, added sugar and salt.<\/p>\n The team sized the layers using food intake ranges from the EAT-Lancet Commission<\/a>, which considers human and planetary health. <\/p>\n Its ranges assume an average adult eating about 2,400 calories daily, so the pyramid shows proportions rather than fixed servings.<\/p>\n The paper draws on nearly 300 published sources. Readers can choose between an upright pyramid and an upside-down version, both carrying the same advice.<\/p>\n What\u2019s inside the new food pyramid<\/p>\n Vegetables and fruit fill the biggest layer, together with whole grains and traditional grain staples.<\/p>\n Beans, lentils, nuts, seeds and soy make up the main protein<\/a> foods in the next layer. Potatoes go there too, as do plant oils such as olive and canola.<\/p>\n The guide includes up to about two daily servings of animal foods: one of dairy, preferably yogurt or another fermented option. The other is fish, poultry, eggs or lean red meat.<\/p>\n Red meat<\/a> gets about half an ounce (15 grams) a day, or roughly one weekly serving. <\/p>\n The recommendation is supported by long-term research involving three large groups of US adults. Over more than 30 years, researchers recorded over 22,000 new diabetes cases.<\/p>\n Diabetes risk was lowest among people who ate little or no red meat. The more they ate, the higher their risk tended to be.<\/p>\n The environmental cost of meat<\/p>\n Beef, lamb, and pork sit together in the guide\u2019s health categories. <\/p>\n On land use and greenhouse<\/a> gases, though, pork generally has a smaller footprint than beef or lamb.<\/p>\n David Jenkins is a co-author and nutrition researcher at the University of Toronto<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cOur diet has to be not only for our own health but also for the health of our planet,\u201d Jenkins said.<\/p>\n Why pasta fits in<\/p>\n The pyramid looks beyond the usual whole-grain versus refined-grain distinction. <\/p>\n It also uses the glycemic index, first developed by Jenkins\u2019s team, to measure how much carbohydrate-containing foods raise blood sugar compared with a reference food.<\/p>\n Durum wheat pasta can lose its bran and still score low on the index because its coarse grain cells stay largely intact. <\/p>\n Grind grain down to fine flour, though, and those cells break open, which helps explain why white and whole-wheat bread both raise blood sugar more than intact grains do.<\/p>\n At least half the grains<\/a> should be whole, the guide says, while traditional staples with a low glycemic index can make up the rest. <\/p>\n White bread goes at the top with sweets and chips, a separation most national guides don\u2019t make because they show grains as one group.<\/p>\n \u201cA healthy diet won\u2019t look exactly the same for everyone around the world,\u201d Della Corte said. <\/p>\n \u201cDurum pasta, basmati rice, tortillas, rice noodles, bulgur and many other staples with a low to moderate glycemic index can all fit into a healthy diet.\u201d<\/p>\n What comes with sugar<\/p>\n Much of the research behind the familiar sugar limit concerns sugary drinks<\/a>, the authors argue. <\/p>\n That limit, used in many guidelines, asks people to get less than 10% of their daily calories from sugar, but the team questions treating every source alike.<\/p>\n Della Corte previously led an analysis combining long-term studies: each additional serving of a sugary drink was linked to a 25% higher risk of type 2 diabetes. <\/p>\n For fruit juice, each serving was linked to a 5% higher risk, yet total sugar intake was linked to lower risk.<\/p>\n That last result doesn\u2019t mean sugar prevents diabetes. The authors point to what comes with it: whole fruit and yogurt offer fiber<\/a>, protein or other nutrients, while soda contains sugar and little else.<\/p>\n The authors also warn that diet surveys don\u2019t always capture how much sugar people eat, because people tend to report too little. <\/p>\n That may have skewed the results, but the pyramid still gives sugary drinks their own spot at the top.<\/p>\n A disagreement over protein<\/p>\n The authors say the newest US guidelines<\/a> call for about 30% to 50% more protein, or up to twice the standard requirement, while emphasizing meat and dairy. <\/p>\n In their view, the standard amount of 0.36 grams per pound of body weight (0.8 grams per kilogram) is enough for most adults.<\/p>\n One large combined analysis linked eating more protein to lower death rates, but plant protein accounted for that link. A modest increase in protein may still help older adults and people losing weight keep muscle<\/a>, the authors say.<\/p>\n The US advisers\u2019 calculations also favored a swap: less meat, poultry and eggs, and more beans, lentils, nuts and soy. <\/p>\n That added fiber, folate, magnesium and vitamin E without new nutrient shortfalls, although more iron came in a form the body absorbs less easily.<\/p>\n Butter gets different treatment, too. The authors disagree with the US pyramid\u2019s grouping of butter and other foods high in saturated fat with plant oils. <\/p>\n Feeding trials show that replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat lowers LDL cholesterol, which is linked to heart disease.<\/p>\n The new food pyramid has its limits<\/p>\n This pyramid is a proposal, and its authors reached agreement by revising drafts, without a formal vote. <\/p>\n The guidelines they selected weren\u2019t meant to represent the whole world, and they haven\u2019t tested whether seeing the pyramid changes anyone\u2019s eating habits.<\/p>\n Several authors reported financial ties to foods it favors: two received research support from pasta maker Barilla, others from groups promoting nuts, soybeans and pulses. <\/p>\n One runs a university glycemic index testing service, and the authors reported no funding for the paper itself.<\/p>\n Study co-author Anette Buyken is a professor at Paderborn University<\/a> in Germany.<\/p>\n \u201cKnowing what is healthy and being motivated to eat healthily is not enough when these choices are difficult or expensive,\u201d Buyken said. <\/p>\n \u201cNutrition policies need to support this through measures on food marketing, access and prices.\u201d<\/p>\n The authors want to develop local versions using each region\u2019s staple foods.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Advances in Nutrition<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Scientists have developed a new international food pyramid that brings together nutrition advice from around the world, with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":943259,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[64,63,137,532],"class_list":["post-943258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-health","tag-nutrition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=943258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/943258\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/943259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=943258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=943258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=943258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}