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 may be 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 difficulty 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