WASHINGTON — A recent post in NPR’s blog, The Salt, discusses the upcoming Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s report “on the latest science on nutrition and medicine.”
According to The Salt Editor Eliza Barclay, many people are “eagerly awaiting” the release of the report, including a group of scientists interested in the panel’s findings on what the U.S. population is drinking.
“Since the last version of the guidelines was released in 2010, more evidence has piled up showing the benefits of drinking water and the harm that can come from drinking sugary beverages,” stated Barclay in the post.
The blog post reported that a group of scientists from the Nutrition Policy Institute at the University of California are considering adding a water icon to “MyPlate,” which replaced the food pyramid in 2011 with an image of a plate divided into portions of fruits, grains, vegetables and protein with dairy off to the side.
The post also noted that Christina Hecht — senior policy adviser at the UC Nutrition Policy Institute, together with Barry Popkin of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Kelly Brownell of Duke University, submitted a letter to the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee for the addition of the water symbol to MyPlate, and also made the case “for including stronger language on water as a substitute for soda and other sugary beverages.”
"Consumption of sugary beverages is the leading contributor to added sugar in the American diet," said Hecht in The Salt’s blog post. "If people could make that one change to drink water to quench their thirst instead of sugar beverages, that would solve a big piece of the problem."
You can read the entire blog post here.
