Consumer Trends in Fats and Sweets: Policy Options for Dietary Change

The following topics are examined in this paper to illustrate how dietary quality improvements maybe overestimated: trends in fats, added sugars, and the percent of energy contributed from fat. Although a variety of policy and regulatory options are available to improve diet, the dlfficuky of making basic structural changes in people or society makes sustained change challenging. The issue attention cycle is used to illustrate a possible background to the rise and decline in interest given to healthy diet by the U. S population Despite recent changes in the food supply and a wide range of health promotion efforts to improve consumers ’ dietary practices, the U.S. diet still needs improvement. During the past dec-ade, the overall quality of the U.S. diet has failed to attain the overall food pattern and nutrient in-take recommendations suggested by the U.S. Die-tary Guidelines (USDA and USDHHS, 1995), the Food Guide Pyramid (USDL 1992), and the Die