Do American diets meet the Guidelines recommendations?
A 1999 report titled A Dietary Assessment of the U.S. Food Supply: Comparing Per Capita Food Consumption with Food Guide Pyramid Serving Recommendations found that most American diets do not meet Federal Food Guide Pyramid dietary recommendations. On average, people consumed too many servings of added fats and sugars and too few servings of fruits, vegetables, dairy products, lean meats, and foods made from whole grains—compared with the Food Guide Pyramid’s serving recommendations appropriate to the age and gender composition of the U.S. population. This report was the first dietary assessment to use ERS’s time-series Food Availability data (also known as food supply or food disappearance data) to compare average diets with Federal dietary recommendations depicted in the Food Guide Pyramid. Both the ERS Loss-Adjusted Food Availability data and the baseline Food Availability data are available. A 2008 ERS report tells a similar story that Americans are not making much progress in impro
