Prominent food scientists, including a member of the federal Dietary Guidelines Advisory Commmittee (DGAC), reported to the IFT last week on the process underway to revise the Guidelines. Dr. Fergus Clydedale of UMass, the lone food scientist on the 2005 DGAC, and Dr. Roger Clemens of USC, the token food scientist on the 2010 DGAC, painted a bleak picture of the use of science and understanding of food technology. Clemens noted he has been relegated to food safety issues and, implied, kept at a distance from nutrition issues.

Clydesdale and Clemens addressed the IFT session on "The evolution of dietary guidance: Lessons learned and new frontiers."

Covering the session, BakingBusiness.com quoted Clydesdale saying: "A food scientist should not be regulated to just food safety on the Dietary Guidelines, and there should be more than one." The report continued:

Dr. Clydesdale said technology has helped society in many areas. He said he doubted people would like to go back to using typewriters or that teachers would like to go back to using chalkboards.

"We’re not going to go back to 78 r.p.m.s (records)," he said.

Dr. Clydesdale said he wondered why people do not embrace technology in the food system. He said he wondered why people wanted to cook the way people did 100 years ago.

The Dietary Guidelines could use input on how food science technology may help meet the Guidelines goals, Dr. Clydesdale said.

We'd prefer an evidence-based approach rather than the DGAC's current expert opinion process. Apparently so do the experts.

A recent study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Fumiaki Imamura et al examined adherence to the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans to determine how compliance related to coronary artery disease outcomes. Their conclusion: some Guidelines are more important than others.

In fact, they documented that the salt Guideline doesn't work at all. Women who had better overall quality diets actually were LESS compliant on the salt (reduction) Guideline. The lowest third in terms of Dietary Guidelines compliance consumed much less than the recommended 2,300 mg/day sodium while the upper two-thirds in terms of overall dietary compliance actually consumed 12% MORE SODIUM. (table 3).

Considered as a whole, the authors concluded:

No significant association was identified between the DGAI as a measure of diet consistent with the 2005 DGA and narrowing of coronary arteries after a mean 3.3 year follow-up period in post-menopausal women with established cornonary artery arthersclerosis.

The study found that "no womeno[of the 224 in the study] reported complete adherence to all dietary recommendations" consistent with other studies. On the other hand,

not all components have an equal weight in describing diet-disease relations....not all dietary recommendations are equally related to disease progression. Our findings highlight the need for the development of more sophisticated approaches to the assessment of dietary recommendations on disease progression and other chronic disease outcomes.

Amen.

A former National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute employee, DebbieN, blogging on Slow Food Fast , showed her true colors earlier with her "Salt Rant" post. She has now opened a discussion about the science underlying her former agency's support for universal sodium reduction.

DebbieN's post "Misunderstanding Salt Research: Bon Appetit's Shamfeul 'Health Wise' column" yesterday doesn't fully avoid the name-calling and attempted intimidation that has characterized past attempts to suppress discussion of the science. She lashes out at John Hastings, author of a skeptical piece in Bon Appetit , noting that as "a former editor of Prevention and health column contributor to O, the Oprah Magazine, is someone you'd expect to be reasonably accurate in reporting health research findings." But she at least continues through her rant to address some meaningful issues. Would that the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee did the same, but that's another post.

Yesterday, I posted comments on DebbieN's post, but her blog is moderated and she has not seen fit to approve my comments. Even without reading her original post, you can get the flavor of her representations. In my signed comment, here's what I said:

Your post provides so many "targets of opportunity."

John Hastings posed the right question: if an intervention modifies one of many risk factors but does not modify health risk (or even worsens that risk) then we should reconsider advice to follow that recommendation. But let me skip ahead first.

I am president of the Salt Institute. We do not "demonize salt moderation." We endorse moderate salt intake recommendations as were part of the Dietary Guidelines until 2000 when they abandoned "moderation" in favor of specific (lower) intake levels.

Studies of health outcomes of those lower levels show 20-37% greater cardiovascular mortality among those reporting they consume the lower, recommended levels -- these data from the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Hypertension. See a discussion on our website at: http://www.saltinstitute.org/Issues-in-focus/Food-salt-health and http://www.saltinstitute.org/Articles-references/References-on-salt-issues/SI-references-on-issues/SI-references-on-food-salt-health-issues .

It is the proponents of "moderate" low-salt diets who are misleading the discussion by claiming that a 60% reduction in salt is "moderate." A 60% reduction is not only not "moderate" -- it is unsustainable in free-living subjects.

The health outcomes question CAN be studied. NHLBI has already proved the protocol -- the Trials of Hypertension Prevention -- only it measured the wrong outcome (BP not CV mortality).

The DASH Study you mention is very important for the blood pressure argument (but not for health outcomes). Its findings, however, are that for those with high blood pressure, the systolic BP fall on the DASH Diet was 11.4 mmHg. When hypertensive subjects were put on a diet with 60% less salt, their SBP declined 11.5 mmHg. Thus, the "DASH effect" is 11.4 mmHg and the "salt effect" is 0.1 mmHg.

I could go on, but read the website and, even better, read the referenced medical journal articles to better understand the scientific controversy that John Hastings had the courage to describe.