USDA - Americans? Food Choices at Home and Away: How Do They Compare With Recommendations?

Laidback Al · Mar 11, 2013

USDA - Americans? Food Choices at Home and Away: How Do They Compare With Recommendations?

by Joanne Guthrie, Biing-Hwan Lin, Abigail Okrent, and Richard Volpe

In 1980, the Federal Government issued the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a guide to healthy eating for consumers. Though the Dietary Guidelines have been widely promoted and updated every 5 years to keep pace with advances in nutrition knowledge, Americans still make poor dietary choices. Compared with recommendations, most Americans consume too few fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and too much saturated fat and sodium. Poor diets contribute to obesity, heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and other health conditions that impose economic costs through increased health care expenditures and lost productivity, making dietary improvement an important public priority.

Measured against the Dietary Guidelines recommendations, two recent ERS studies find that consumers are underspending on vegetables, fruit, whole grains, and low-fat dairy and overspending on refined grains, fats, sweets, and convenience foods in the grocery store. Food choices when eating away from home are even more of a nutritional concern. Policies that promote healthy foods and make them easier to identify on store shelves and in restaurants may expand both demand for and supply of healthy food options.

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USDA - Americans? Food Choices at Home and Away: How Do They Compare With Recommendations?

Laidback Al

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