Dive Brief:
- It's easy to miss, but in an infographic — the MyPlate, MyWins tips sheet — from the USDA following the release of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines, the agency sneaks in a recommendation to choose water over sugary drinks, or in other words, soda.
- While public health advocates have requested the addition of water to the USDA's MyPlate graphic, which replaced the food pyramid in 2011, the USDA has refused to include the word or a symbol for water in the graphic.
- Instead, the USDA included the verbiage "Drink water instead of sugary drinks" in the bottom-right corner, though no image accompanies the message.
Dive Insight:
"Ideally, [the water symbol] would be part of the main MyPlate image. That's the thing that's going to get the most publicity," Michael Jacobson, executive director for the Center for Science in The Public Interest, told NPR. Jacobson, who has been a public health advocate for decades, notably for his campaign against salt intake through CSPI, signed a letter requesting the inclusion of stronger language for water consumption in the Dietary Guidelines.
This shift away from soda was happening long before this, and it's not clear what kind of impact the inclusion of this language on the tip sheet could have on soda and other sugary drinks. The message is not included on the MyPlate image, and that's what is most heavily marketed.
Both the WHO and FDA offered recommendations for caps on daily sugar intake last year, the latter being that sugar should make up no more than 10% of a consumer's daily calorie intake. WHO recommended cutting back to about six to 12 teaspoons of sugar per day, when the average American consumes about 18 teaspoons per day on average.