USDA Ignoring the Science on Low-Carb Diets
28th June 2022
“I was wondering if we should have a separate section on low-carb diets rather than burying it,” wrote Harvard nutrition professor Frank Hu about the official expert report for the 2015 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Over the past decade, thousands of scientists, doctors and others have urged officials overseeing our nation’s nutrition policy to pay attention to studies on low-carbohydrate diets, yet even as the science has advanced rapidly, the federal agencies in charge of the guidelines seem ever-more intent on ignoring and yes, burying the science.
The literature on low-carb is now vast. A quick search for “low-carbohydrate” on pubmed.gov, a government database of scientific studies, today turns up 7,821 publications, including 858 clinical trials (the most rigorous kind of evidence).12 Compare this to the 401 trials on the “vegetarian diet,” which has been formally recommended by the U.S. guidelines since 2015.