Why Nutrition Guidelines Need a Major Overhaul | Dr. Donald Layman

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (0:00)
Welcome to The Dr. Gabrielle Lyon Show, where cutting-edge science meets innovation and practical application for everybody. In this episode, I sit down with my long-time mentor, Dr. Donald Layman. We discuss some very important components to the dietary guidelines. These guidelines are what the recommendations are to eat. We talk about the fat and the protein, the carbohydrates, and really the science behind the dietary guidelines. I know that you're going to love this episode. Please join me in conversation with Dr. Donald Layman.
Dr. Donald Layman, you need no introduction, but welcome to the show. Just to give a brief background for the new listeners, you are my long-time mentor and best friend of going on, might even be over 20 years at this point, world-class protein expert. Wait, just let me lay it on thick, okay? World-class protein expert, a real maverick and innovator in the nutrition space, especially when it comes to aging well, muscle and protein. Today, we are going to discuss the preliminary report of the dietary guidelines that will come out, hopefully, spring of 2025 Welcome to the show.

**Dr. Donald Layman** (1:20)
Well, great to be back. You've been so busy and traveling so much, it's hard for us to keep up our daily contacts.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (1:27)
I know. Now it's weekly, which we have reconciled being back to daily. So we're in a great swing. Tell me, what have you been up to, even though I know, but what have you been up to?

**Dr. Donald Layman** (1:40)
I've had an opportunity to change some of the way we think about protein. I get asked a lot about what do I think the future of protein is, and my answer off the cuff is that we're finally going to realize we don't have a protein requirement at all. We have a requirement for essential amino acids, the nine essential amino acids, and I think the futures, we're going to have to start treating those as nutrients, just like we do vitamins and minerals, and stop treating them as some vague thing called protein, which is really just a food source that we eat. So anyway, that's what I've been up to. We've written some papers, got another one coming out in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that we might get into as we go along with the discussion. So anyway, that's what I've been doing.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (2:29)
Well, this is going to be a really exciting discussion. And I do want to preface this by saying we're going to discuss the dietary guidelines and the Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee, but we are also going to begin to discuss more about carbohydrates and fats. And this is really a wonderful landscape for setting that up. Tell us a little bit about the history. Number one, what are the dietary guidelines? What is a bit of the history behind why they exist and what they are intended to do for Americans?

**Dr. Donald Layman** (3:03)
That's really interesting because they're sort of changing. So post World War II, there was a lot of concern about public health, particularly heart disease, cardiovascular disease. And so there was a push to start having more government guidelines. And in the late 70s, we started to get much more interested in it. And then in 1980, the Surgeon General came out with first dietary guidelines for Americans. And they were fairly general, you know, eat a variety of foods and things. But what they finally what they did at that point is they came out with some negative nutrient ideas. They came out with sugar is bad for you, salt is bad for you, saturated fat is bad for you, cholesterol is bad for you. And that sort of underpins sort of, you know, where we're at. You know, how do we interpret that information? The first actual dietary guidelines that you and I are going to talk about came out in 1985
And shortly after that, we got the Food Guide Pyramid. And dietary guidelines then get revised every five years. So as you just mentioned, 2025 will be the next guidelines that come out.

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (4:19)
Why did they originally come out in the 80s? So the first dietary guidelines came out roughly 1980

**Dr. Donald Layman** (4:27)
Why?

**Dr. Gabrielle Lyon** (4:27)
What's the intention?

**Dr. Donald Layman** (4:28)
You know, I think really the motivation again was public health and people were witnessing increased obesity.
They were concerned about the level of cardiovascular, the number of heart attacks people were having. And so that was sort of the motivation to see, you know, what lifestyle issues related to that. And certainly in that, you know, part of what we found out in that period was that smoking was particularly bad for cardiovascular health. So, you know, a lot of our recommendations from smoking came out of that in those aspects. But one of the things is we started to get diet information. And the problem with diet information is, you know, we're still evolving the science. So basically, we're recommending, we're making recommendations in an area of evolving science. And so there's always the risk that you don't have it right.