What does DGA mean in Unclassified?

Dietary Guidelines for Americans

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) provide nutritional advice (see diet) for Americans older than 2 years. The Guidelines are published every 5 years by the US Department of Agriculture, together with the US Department of Health and Human Services. The nominal purpose of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is to help health professionals and policymakers to advise Americans about healthy choices for their diet. Although the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are purported to be based on a systematic review of the current body of nutrition science, critics have argued that the Advisory Committee tasked with formulating the plan for retrieval and analysis of the scientific evidence for the current edition of the DGA used a less than rigorous process for assessing the health effects of consumption of saturated fat and salt and for assessing the health effects of a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. This less than rigorous review of the nutrition science literature resulted in omission of multiple large, high-quality, clinical trials and also omission of some high-quality prospective observational studies. Some Advisory Committee members also had conflicts-of-interest that were not fully disclosed. For these reasons, the quality of the Advisory Committee's Scientific Report and the validity of the 2015–2020 DGA itself has been challenged by critics as being unduly influenced by commercial interests and as being flawed due to confirmation bias of some members of the Advisory Committee.

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