By Reed Mangels, PhD, RD

Dietary Guidelines for Americans is a document that is produced every 5 years by the U.S. government. It is important because it is used as the foundation for federal nutrition education materials as well as being used by schools, the food industry, and many others. The most recent Dietary Guidelines, released in 2020, endorses “a healthy vegetarian dietary pattern” as one of three recommended dietary patterns. All of the Vegetarian Dietary Patterns call for use of eggs with no suggestions for vegan foods that could replace eggs. We, at The Vegetarian Resource Group would like to see vegan dietary patterns included in Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

A recent study provides evidence that it would be easy to modify the vegetarian dietary pattern in Dietary Guidelines to make it vegan. In this study, the “dairy food group” was replaced with fortified soy milk and fortified soy yogurt. Eggs were replaced with a combination of beans, peas, lentils, nuts, seeds, and soy foods. Vegan patterns were created to be similar in calories to the original Healthy Vegetarian Dietary Pattern. The resulting vegan dietary patterns were analyzed for nutritional adequacy and compared to the original Healthy Vegetarian Dietary Patterns which contained dairy products and eggs.

The vegan patterns were higher in iron, copper, vitamin D, riboflavin, vitamin B12, and vitamin K. Protein was slightly lower but still adequate. Sodium, cholesterol, and zinc were lower in the vegan patterns. Other nutrients were similar in both patterns.

This study only looked at nutritional adequacy for non-pregnant, non-lactating adults. Hopefully, future studies will examine other age and life-cycle groups. Additional studies should examine the use of other fortified plant milks and determine the minimum amount of these products needed and examine the need for supplements if fortified foods are not used as sources of vitamin D, calcium, and vitamin B12.

We hope that the results of these and similar studies will be used to include vegan dietary patterns in the next edition of Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Reference:

Hess JM. Modeling dairy-free vegetarian and vegan USDA food patterns for non-pregnant, non-lactating adults [published online ahead of print, 2022 Apr 29]. J Nutr. 2022.

To read more about the Dietary Guidelines for Americans see:

2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans Released

VRG’s testimony about the 2020 Dietary Guidelines and the Scientific Report Underlying the 2020 Dietary Guidelines