In February, the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee submitted the Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee which gives recommendations to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) for the upcoming Dietary Guidelines. The Advisory Report is not the final Dietary Guidelines.

Of note, the Advisory Committee removed the advice to reduce dietary cholesterol and the advice to include lean meat. Ginny Messina, RD wrote a good summary of what this means for animal advocacy in her article, The 2015 Dietary Guidelines: What Will They Mean for Vegans?

On February 20, the New York Times ran an opinion piece, The Government’s Bad Diet Advice, by Nina Teicholz. It’s the typical Weston Price-type, pro-animal-product piece, in the same vein as writings by Nina Planck (no, they are not the same person).

David L. Katz, MD, MPH wrote a fun response to Teicholz’s piece, We’re Fat and Sick and The Broccoli Did It!

And speaking of Dr. Katz, he recently wrote a thoughtful piece on the Paleo diet, Paleo for a Shrinking Planet?

Michael Greger, MD has released the Latest in Clinical Nutrition Volume 23 which has a strong focus on the Mediterranean Diet. From his website:

The Mediterranean Diet is an “in” topic nowadays, in both the medical literature and the lay media. More than 450 papers were published in the medical literature during just the last year alone, more than one a day. As a recent commentary noted “Uncritical laudatory coverage is the common parlance. Specifics are hard to come by: what is it? what is its history? why is it good? Merits are rarely detailed; possible downsides are never mentioned.” I answer these questions and more in a 6-part video series.

You can order the full DVD from his website (click here), or you can watch them in short videos as they are released starting with another interesting one about the Paleo diet, The Problem With the Paleo Diet Argument.

I’ve criticized paleo eaters in the past for not taking their diet seriously and eating bugs (see my article Can a Natural Diet Require Supplements?).

But on Monday, the NY Times ran an article about a paleo dieter who started an energy bar company that uses crickets as the protein source (Energy Bars That Put a Chirp in Your Step).

Excerpt:

“According to the two men’s research, the insects are 69 percent protein by dry weight as compared with 31 percent for chicken breast and 29 percent for sirloin steak; they provide more iron than beef does and nearly as much calcium as milk. They produce one-eightieth the amount of methane that cattle do, and need one-twelfth their feed, based on 100-gram portions of each. And they can reproduce quickly and don’t require acres of grassland to graze.”

A move from people eating mammals and birds to crickets is something I can get behind.

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