Active Low-Carber Forums - AHA wants dietary counseling in routine checkups

I first saw this on a membership-only website for physicians, so I didn't want to use that source, but this says essentially the same thing. Get ready to defend our lifestyle!

https://licensetoblog.com/aha-state...utine-checkups/

Quote:

A new scientific statement from the American Heart Association (AHA) recommends incorporating a rapid diet-screening tool into routine primary care visits to inform dietary counseling and integrating the tool into patients’ electronic health record (EHR) platforms across all healthcare settings.

The statement authors evaluated 15 existing screening tools and, although they did not recommend a specific tool, they did present advantages and disadvantages of some of the tools and encouraged “critical conversations” among clinicians and other specialists to arrive at a tool that would be most appropriate for use in a particular healthcare setting.

“The key takeaway is for clinicians to incorporate discussion of dietary patterns into routine preventive care appointments because a suboptimal diet is the number 1 risk factor for cardiovascular disease,” Maya Vadiveloo, PhD, RD, chair of the statement group, told theheart.org | Medscape Cardiology.

“We also wanted to touch on the fact the screening tool could be incorporated into the EHR and then used for clinical support and for tracking and monitoring the patient’s dietary patterns over time,” said Vadiveloo, who is an assistant professor of nutrition and food sciences in the College of Health Science, University of Rhode Island, Kingston.

The statement was published online August 7 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.
Competing Demands

Poor dietary quality has “surpassed all other mortality risk factors, accounting for 11 million deaths and ~50% of cardiovascular disease (CVD) deaths globally,” the authors write.

Diets deficient in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and high in red and processed meat, added sugars, sodium, and total energy are the “leading determinants” of the risks for CVD and other conditions, so “strategies that promote holistically healthier dietary patterns to reduce chronic disease risk are of contemporary importance.”

Most clinicians and other members of healthcare teams “do not currently assess or counsel patients about their food and beverage intake during routine clinical care,” the authors observe.