Improving Compliance With Dietary Recommendations: Time for New, Inventive Approaches?

For more than a century, experts have produced dietary guidance aimed at increasing consumption of certain nutrients and food groups, yet compliance is poor. As the planning stage for the Dietary Guidelines begins and it is clear that dietary change has been difficult to accomplish, perhaps, the right question to ask is "Which dietary changes are most likely to have the greatest impact on Americans' health?" There is a compelling need to assign the highest priority to those messages that will have the greatest impact on health. One approach is to use prioritized risk for determining the need for establishing population-based guidelines. A symposium held in December 2007 examined the challenges of how best to have a more meaningful impact on public health through nutrition guidance