The Health Council's new Guidelines for Good Nutrition were recently presented.
The Health Council
In it, the committee evaluated the effects of foods and patterns on common chronic diseases, such as coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes and various cancers.
What is new here is that the committee looked at intake of pollutants through food. This in itself is an excellent addition, as this could also have an impact on human health.
But then it comes
As of now, these guidelines pay more attention to the environmental impact of food. For example, the Health Council says: "The current food system - from production to consumption, including food waste - causes about 30% of greenhouse gas emissions and 60% of biodiversity loss globally." In other words, the discussion is now being stretched to include not only human health in the here and now, but also that of future generations.
This may all sound very nice 'a healthy human being in a healthy lifestyle also in the future', but more than anything, I see the emergence of a total muddying of the discussion on the absolute health of food and dietary patterns for humans in the present.
Thus, adjustments have been presented in this edition advising along the lines of the 'sustainable protein transition'. Thus, more vegetable eat less animal-based and less animal-based. Compared to the current Dutch diet, this mainly means reducing consumption of red meat (such as beef and pork) and processed meat (such as meats) and an increase in the consumption of pulses (such as brown beans, soy beans, lentils, chickpeas) and unsalted nuts (including peanuts). This advice is going to be implemented in the Disk of Five.
These adjustments seem small at the moment, but I predict this is the beginning of a sliding scale. Communication will increasingly focus on giving plant-based food sources a healthy image and framing animal-based ones as unhealthy.
Of course, this is far from the truth
Both plant-based and animal-based food sources have advantages and disadvantages, and on top of that, every person is unique. Chips and brown rice are both plant-based but have a totally different impact on health. And a hamburger does not have the same impact as a piece of wild salmon. So you can't lump vegetable and animal sources together, but I see this happening more and more in pieces I read from the government and now even in The summary of the new Good Food Guidelines.
That this environmental and sustainability theme has now cycled in makes me not take and will not take nutrition advice as seriously in the future when it comes to pure health. This is because there is a bias created by interference from political causes.
'A bias is a bias, distortion or prejudice in thinking, reasoning, or acting, often also unconsciously, that leads to a systematic deviation from objectivity, where information is not processed neutrally. This can result in incorrect conclusions and decisions.'
Bias in practice often leads to...
- 'Confirmation bias': Only seeking and selecting information and studies that confirm your own beliefs or agenda. Instead, you leave out information that contradicts it. I also expect positive studies of animal products to be increasingly under-researched or even ignored.
- 'Halo Effect': One positive attribute overshadows a full verdict on a food product, such as the fact that the food is sustainable.
- 'Selection Bias': The incorrect selection of participants for a study, making the results unrepresentative. An example is comparing healthy living vegetarians from Scandinavia with unhealthy living Mc Donald's visitors who eat a lot of animal products from USA.
I expect the Health Council to work objectively, and the fact that sustainability has become an important criterion worries me. I think discussions and advice on sustainability should be detached from general human health, in the here and now. In doing so, as far as I am concerned the Nutrition Centre of course free to create a separate sustainable version of the Five, but it should be separate from the general Five.
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