What Does the DGE Recommend? Chapter 1
Since I strictly ignore the dietary recommendations of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Ernährung - German Nutritional Society, a largely government funded NGO, designated as appointed authority on nutritional matters and have had exclusively good experiences doing so, I’m taking a closer look at those recommendations and their foundations in a loose series of articles. Each chapter I’ll pick out individual points from the available DGE documents and studies. Today: the basics:
Food-based dietary recommendations […] are recommendations for a healthy diet. They are based on established scientific evidence and take into account national conditions, such as common dietary patterns.
What the DGE recommends for nutrition is therefore based on science(1). That’s a good start. But if I ignore those recommendations: am I living unscientifically? Do I not believe in science? Do I reject science?
The Aspects and Their Weighting
To examine the science for relevance, I’ll first look at what question was actually being scientifically investigated.
My most important expectation by far is that dietary guidelines are first and foremost healthy, and that it’s this healthfulness that is scientifically justified.
However, under “Objective function and weighting of the aspects considered” it reads(2):
The three aspects of the objective function (reduction of disease burden, reduction of environmental burden, proximity to usual dietary intake) must be weighted so that within the solution space defined by the constraints, various optimized dietary patterns can be selected by the objective function…
This means first of all that “health” was not the goal - at best “reduction of disease burden”, and even that only as one of three aspects. We’ll look at the reduction of environmental burden separately shortly, but what surprised me most was the most heavily weighted aspect:
…Based on this finding, the DGE working group set a weighting of 40% for the aspect of proximity to usual dietary intake.
(The other two aspects each contribute 30%)
Proximity to Usual Dietary Intake
Let me put it this way: if I ask someone to draw up dietary guidelines, I would not expect the most important criterion to be that I have to change my habits as little as possible.
Compromises can be made in the end - the DGE doesn’t publish a recipe book with an obligation to cook along in exact order. But for that you’d need to know what is actually advisable - not what is closest to your usual eating habits.
The aspect most important to the DGE is therefore - by a wide margin - the least important to me.
Reduction of Disease Burden
Is it an academic nicety to not simply write “health” here? I don’t think so. My impression is that health is not what’s meant, but rather the actual reduction of disease to one degree or another.
Ironically, I now no longer know who the DGE is actually writing the dietary guidelines for. After all, the target audience is explicit (I’ve already addressed this in another article):
The DGE’s dietary recommendations apply to healthy adults in Germany between the ages of 18 and 65 who eat both plant and animal foods (mixed diet).
What I've already said about this target group
DGE Guidelines. A Contradiction?
Why the recommendations of the German Nutrition Society don’t actually contradict my completely different personal experience
Read more →The target audience is healthy people, and one of the goals is the reduction of disease burden. In healthy adults. Reading that, my most important goal - the healthfulness of the recommended diet - just flew straight out the window: the disease burden of the target group cannot, by definition, be substantial.
Reduction of Environmental Burden
That leaves the reduction of environmental burden. For this, the DGE primarily references the Planetary Health Diet. Except that this has a very cleverly chosen misleading name - it explicitly does not consider environmental impact because the authors write in their own glossary that the limitations on meat consumption were not calculated for environmental impact, but purely derived from theoretical health models.
What I've already said about the Planetary Health Diet
Planetary Health Diet - The Great Misunderstanding
The one aspect most commonly cited in favor of the ‘Planetary Health Diet’ is an aspect the associated report explicitly did not examine.
Read more →Furthermore, the Planetary Health Diet seems to me to be very absolute and to tolerate only a single approach. Other research (e.g. from Prof. Frank Mitloehner, mentioned in the above article) points to quite different solutions.
An alternative approach to reducing environmental burden
Pasture-Raised Ruminants
Cattle get a lot of blame - how the farming method can turn that picture around
Read more →That said: based on the Planetary Health Diet’s own claims (namely, to be good for human health), one would think my health criterion from the previous section would now come back into play - right? Right?
Objection: Does the PHD Not Rescue Health After All?
The objection is an obvious one, but:
It turns out that the diet recommended by the PHD is in fact not healthy. Not least because it references supplementation or food fortification at all sorts of points - it is apparently incomplete - and if a proposed diet cannot manage without artificial enrichment and supplements, I call it “not healthy”.
Then there’s my own experience, which is what led me to create butterbei.de in the first place: nearly 14 years on a ketogenic diet, almost 2 of them with negligible fibre intake, which has significantly improved all my health markers and eliminated several recurring symptoms.
Further evidence: the perennially-cited unhealthiness of Fatty acids with no reactive molecular component — normally solid at room temperature. Typically animal fats. → more, which is firstly not scientifically sustainable(3), and secondly incomprehensible based on personal experience.
The promise that a ketogenic, low-fibre diet would ruin my health has not only failed to materialise. The exact opposite has happened.
I may be repeating myself, but Richard Feynman put it well:
“It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.”
― Richard P. Feynman
The Bottom Line: Weighting the Goals of the Dietary Guidelines
40% “Proximity to Usual Dietary Intake”
In first place with a 40% weighting is the desire to change as little as possible. You see this everywhere, when readers are reassured that nobody wants to take their dessert away. But since my question is not “what can most healthy people get away with?” but “what is a healthy diet?”, this is entirely the wrong starting point for me. And the highest-weighted aspect at that.
30% “Reduction of Disease Burden”
The reduction of disease burden simply doesn’t fit the stated target audience of the healthy population, and I consider it - not least based on my own experience - a non-statement. I won’t impute bad faith, but in the usually carefully worded world of scientific publications, the contradiction between stated objective and target audience carries some weight.
Even if I generously reclassify this as “health”, 30% of the outcome isn’t enough for me.
30% Reduction of Environmental Burden
The remaining 30% attributed to reduction of environmental burden matters to me - but in the context of dietary recommendations it should be a secondary consideration, not a commitment to exactly one solution space that preemptively forecloses finding out what optimal nutrition actually looks like. Since alternative approaches to improving agricultural impacts already exist and are being pursued, I’d want those weighed against optimal health.
Is This Science Denial?
No: the science the DGE uses is solid - I’ll go into the details in a later chapter. But that’s not my point.
Science investigates its respective domain within the framework of stated objectives, and weighs certain solution spaces against each other. And it’s both the objectives and the chosen and examined solution spaces that I disagree with.
(further aspects in upcoming chapters)
