Making nutrition guidelines fit for purpose

Dietary risk factors are the leading contributors to the global burden of disease.1 But what we choose to eat also affects the health of the planet.2 Nutrition guidance therefore serves multiple purposes, including promoting health and wellbeing, maintaining adequate nutrition, combating dietary excesses and imbalances associated with non-communicable diseases, and protecting sustainable food systems. However, existing nutritional guidelines often do not consider the right questions or fail to take full account of available evidence because they rely on methods borrowed from other fields. We need different types of evidence informed nutrition guidelines to tackle these unprecedented challenges to population health