Please invest in Our Daily Planet today, by making a one time or monthly contribution.
We do not charge our readers a subscription fee for our content. We want to continue to grow our readership, particularly among millennials and public servants. Voluntary contributions from readers will help us employ interns and freelance journalists, expand our content, and reach a larger audience.
If you make a contribution of $150 or more, you will become an official “Friend of the Planet” and receive a Friend of the Planet T-shirt or water bottle.
Our Daily Planet is a daily morning email (M-F) to keep you informed of the stories shaping our environment. If these issues matter to you, we’d like to be the best ten minutes of your morning.
The national Dietary Guidelines for America set standards for what food gets produced and consumed, but it’s influenced by big food corporations — to the detriment of Americans’ health. The latest set of guidelines was released at the very end of 2020 after five years of work. As Civil Eats reports, there was “troubling influence” by the food and beverage industry, including that 75 percent of the advisory committee members have ties to industry corporations or trade associations. More than half have ties to a single pro-sugar group euphemistically called the International Life Sciences Institute.
Even with that influence, the final guidelines still ignored many of the recommendations from the committee, including:
Reducing daily sugar
Limiting alcohol consumption to a drink a day
Considering “sustainability of the food supply and food insecurity”
Why This Matters: Agriculture is directly related to climate change. Globally, we can’t keep climate change in check without shifting what food we eat and how we grow it. National standards like the Dietary Guidelines can help the U.S. move toward more sustainable agriculture. As recommended by a WWF report last fall, shifting to a planet-based diet can improve human and planetary health.
Aligning the guidelines with climate-forward science, could shift national food supply chains, since they directly shape many federal food programs like SNAP and WIC. A more holistic approach to the guidelines could both provide healthier options to food-insecure Americans and reduce agricultural emissions.
Lobbying efforts by the food and beverage industry: Getting to more climate-friendly national guidelines means getting the industry influence out of guideline development. How would we get there? These steps would help:
Prohibiting industry and trade groups from nominating participants to the advisory committee
Creating a transparent process to disclose any industry ties committee members do have
Keeping Health and Human Services and USDA officials, who oversee the guidelines, separate from industry ties
Right now, though, food and beverage industries are spending plenty on lobbying efforts. In the three years before the guidelines were released, alcohol industry trade groups spent an average of $27 million per year on lobbying. And it pays off: Rep. Mike Thompson (D-California) called for less restrictive alcohol guidelines after receiving over $184,000 from the industry.
“The process is vulnerable and the industry has been exploiting it for its own good for decades,” Ashka Naik, the research director at Corporate Accountability, told Civil Eats.
By Ashira Morris, ODP Staff Writer If climate change keeps temperatures rising, staple crops in eight East and Southern African countries could decrease by up to 80% by midcentury. According to a new report by the UN’s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a 2-degree Celsius increase in temperature (which the world is currently on […]
By Natasha Lasky, ODP Staff Writer With drought continuing in the West, and the summer’s historic floods throughout Europe, the world is wondering how climate change will also affect the way we eat. This controversial question was addressed by agriculture experts, NGOs, government officials, and corporate leaders at Peas, Trees, and 1.5 Degrees, a Climate […]
By Ashira Morris, ODP Staff Writer In the lead-up to today’s United Nations Food Systems Summit, young activists spoke about their priorities for the global gathering at yesterday’s Food is the Future event. At the event, youth representatives from worldwide interviewed adult peers in the world of food system work. In an effort to […]
Subscribe to the email that top lawmakers, renowned scientists, and thousands of concerned citizens turn to each morning for the latest environmental news and analysis.
Want the lastest climate news summarized for you each morning?
Our Daily Planet is your daily dose of the stories shaping our world and the ways that you can take action. From the climate crisis to the protection of biodiversity, if these issues matter to you then please subscribe & stay informed!
Your privacy is Important! We promise never to use your email address to send you spam or advertisements.