New USDA Dietary Guidelines Validated by UCSF Sugar Research

UCSF News reports on new USDA dietary guidelines that were validated by a research team at UCSF

Just in time for flailing New Year resolutions, the U.S. Department of Agriculture have served up new dietary guidelines, including one of the biggest changes in recent years: For the first time, they’ve placed a clear limit of no more than 10 percent of daily calories from added dietary sugars.

The USDA guidelines, which are updated every five years based on the latest advances in nutritional science, specifically refer to sweetened foods such as sodas or candy, not naturally-occurring sugars in milk, fruits or other foods. The new recommendations concur with those of the World Health Organization.

For many UC San Francisco researchers, the guidelines serve as clear support for recently established campus and citywide initiatives and follow their extensive studies on added sugar and its impact on health.

“This is the first time the guidelines clearly link sugar with chronic disease based on the evidence,” says Laura Schmidt, PhD, MSW, MPH, a health policy researcher at UCSF and lead investigator of SugarScience, a research and education initiative designed to highlight authoritative, evidence-based, scientific findings. “In the past, added sugar guidelines have been very industry friendly, but in this case, for whatever reason, the findings were not what industry or trade groups might have wanted to hear.”

“To put it into perspective, that’s less than what you would consume in one 12-ounce soda,” says Schmidt.