While we don’t know what the new guidelines will say, we can look overseas to see what the latest dietary guidelines of other countries include.<\/p>\n
And one issue pops up time and again: the health of the environment.<\/p>\n
Sustainability in newer dietary guidelines<\/p>\n
Over the past five years or so, new dietary recommendations from elsewhere around the world haven’t just addressed human health \u2014 they’ve incorporated the health of the planet too.<\/p>\n
Production of certain food groups, such as red meat, have a relatively higher environmental impact \u2014 on carbon emissions, land use and biodiversity loss \u2014 than others.<\/p>\n
In 2019, a group of researchers, called the EAT-Lancet Commission, published the planetary health diet<\/a>. It’s designed to be adapted for different countries and cultures, and is a “plant-forward” diet, where most foods are whole grains, fruit, vegetables, nuts and legumes.<\/p>\n How to get the fibre you need<\/a><\/p>\n People share a lot of their lives on social media. This can even include digestion details, with content about “staying regular”, bloating and fibre far from off-limits.<\/p>\n While red meat is not off the table, the planetary health diet suggests people eat no more than 98 grams of red meat each week.<\/p>\n “That’s about a third of what the current Australian Guide to Healthy Eating recommends,” Jessica Danaher, a RMIT University dietitian and nutrition scientist, says.<\/p>\n The Danish dietary guidelines, published in 2020<\/a>, also emphasise climate-friendly, plant-rich eating. They suggest people eat less meat, and choose fish and legumes instead.<\/p>\n Other sets of dietary guidelines<\/a> also explicitly incorporate<\/a> environmental sustainability<\/a>, but not all. Norway’s guidelines<\/a>, while being similar to the Danish guidelines, don’t mention the environment at all (but do suggest people “eat with pleasure and make time to sit down and eat”).<\/p>\n So will we see a focus on planetary health in the next iteration of the Australian Dietary Guidelines?<\/p>\n Dr Danaher suspects so: “[We may be] shifting towards looking at health from a more holistic perspective as opposed to just looking at the clinical perspective or nutritional adequacy.”<\/p>\n What are the current Australian dietary guidelines?<\/p>\n You may be wondering what our current recommendations even are.<\/p>\n They include recommendations about breastfeeding and food safety, but mostly focus on people eating a variety of nutritious foods<\/a>.<\/p>\n The visual representation of our guidelines is called the Australian guide to healthy eating plate<\/a>, and it’s divvied up into five food groups.<\/p>\n The five food groups include vegetables, fruit, grain, protein and dairy. (Getty Images: fcafotodigital)<\/p>\n What is a ‘serve’?<\/p>\n Source: Eat For Health<\/a><\/p>\n It comprises around a third of grain-based foods, a third veggies and legumes, and the rest split roughly between fruit, lean protein, and dairy and dairy-alternatives.<\/p>\n “Discretionary foods” such as chips, chocolate, cream and soft drinks are recommended to be eaten “sometimes and in small amounts”.<\/p>\n Despite being portrayed as a single meal, the healthy eating plate is not designed to show you what you should be eating every meal, Dr Danaher says.<\/p>\n “It’s not so much about ticking that off every single day, but more of what it looks like, say, over the space of a few days or a week.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n For instance, the guidelines recommend no more than two serves of “discretionary foods” every day.<\/p>\n “One quarter of a pie at the footy is a serve of discretionary foods, so my whole pie is doubling the daily recommendations,” Dr Danaher says.<\/p>\n “But I’m not going to eat half my pie and chuck it in the bin and go, ‘Oh, I’ve met my pie limit for today’.<\/p>\n “I’ll have that whole pie, but I’m not eating a pie every single day.”<\/p>\n How many people meet the current Australian dietary guidelines?<\/p>\n The fruit and vegetable sections recommend people aged nine years or older eat two serves of fruit and at least five serves of vegetables every day.<\/p>\n According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only 4.2 per cent of Australian adults met the recommended targets<\/a> for both fruit and vegetables in 2022.<\/p>\n That may seem incredibly low, but the Australian dietary guidelines are just that \u2014 guidelines, Dr Danaher says.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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