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Australia; VIC
News release
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The Australian Dietary Guidelines – the primary source of dietary advice in Australia – are currently under review, with new recommendations due to be released this year.
But a new article published in Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health explains that the messaging around current guidelines have a glaring gap – they do not take into account the structural inequities that influence food intake, which can unintentionally cause marginalisation.
The authors are strongly calling for user testing of the new dietary guidelines to ensure that they are effective and don’t marginalise Australian communities.
“The reality for many Australians is that making the recommended food choices is not always possible,” says co lead author and Swinburne nutrition expert Dr Margaret Murray.
“Many Australians, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, students, migrants and those living in rural areas balance various competing factors that inform their food choices at an individual and structural level.
“For instance, different communities experience constraints related to food cost, access, and preparation time, as well as different cultural practices.
“If these differences aren’t accounted for, dietary guidelines can lead to confusion, and can be disempowering, marginalising and cause their target audience to disassociate from them.”
Dr Murray says that when public health nutrition messaging overlooks structural influences, it not only fails to achieve change, but risks deepening inequities by shifting responsibility onto those least able to act.
What should the new dietary guidelines look like?
Australia’s first dietary guidelines were first published in 1982. The current version was published in 2013, but a lot about the way we live and eat, and our understanding about the health and environmental implications of food, has changed since then.
Dr Carrie Wong, co-lead author and Swinburne nutrition expert, says those making the 2026 guidelines need to engage with diverse communities to develop the messaging.
She recommends adopting strategies like South Africa and Tanzania who completed testing of their own guidelines with real people from across different cultural and socio-economic backgrounds as well as different geographic locations who would be using them.
“This revealed potential messaging issues, such as certain words being difficult to understand, or certain images not accurately reflecting cultural norms, potentially causing confusion or even offence,” Dr Wong says.
“Dietary guidelines can be empowering and pragmatic, but they must be appropriate for diverse groups, not just dominant groups.”
Dr Wong also adds that the “look” of the guidelines should only be finalised after testing with users.
