The new government put the dietary guidelines in a drawer and announced the professional preparation of new ones. Photo: SNG2025
The new dietary guidelines are illegal again
The new dietary guidelines, which were created in great secrecy, which are not professionally coordinated and which were not approved by any competent institution, but which nevertheless ended up on the government’s website on May 22, are no longer there as of today. At the request of several nutritional experts, they were withdrawn. In February of this year, their authors published a summary of these guidelines in two articles in the international professional journal MDPI Foods, which a few days ago alerted readers to their alleged controversy.
The knowledge that the government published the Slovenian Nutrition Guidelines 2025 (SSP2025) on its website on May 22 brought the professional public to their feet. In a joint press release, the National Institute of Public Health (NIJZ), the Faculty of Biotechnology of the University of Ljubljana and the Institute of Nutrition warned that the published documents were not relevant, as they were not professionally coordinated, and were not approved by any expert body, nor by the government or any of the ministries. They also wrote that the documents are professionally disputed and that they list the personal information of individuals who did not agree to the publication, and in the guidelines it is stated as if they were professionally reviewed, even though they were seen for the first and last time in May 2024, when they got their hands on the first draft.
They also bypassed the Ministry of Health
To add to the confusion, the Ministry of Agriculture was listed as the issuer of SSP2025, although the preparation of the guidelines took place under the auspices of the Ministry of Health (MOH) for three years. On May 22, the Ministry of Health confirmed to Dnevnik that the guidelines are not professionally coordinated, which is why they have not yet been submitted for public consideration. It was already announced for the end of 2024 that the government will nevertheless publish them on its website, but the Ministry of Health did not know, they stated and added: “At this stage, we cannot confirm the National Dietary Guidelines 2025 as a professionally coordinated national document.”
Despite this, SSP2025 have been hanging on the government’s website until today, where they were also posted by the previous government team. Three names were deleted from the list of nine experts who were supposed to participate in their review from the published documents related to the guidelines. “I had no insight into the content of the document before it was made public, nor did I ever confirm it. The first and last time I saw the draft guidelines was in 2024, when the Ministry of Health appointed me to a wider working group for peer review of the guidelines. At the time, I highlighted a number of shortcomings in the guidelines in a written review, but my criticisms were not well received by some of the authors. Even then, I did not perceive a serious intention to harmonize the content of the document with the wider professional public, so on May 22, 2024, I withdrew from the wider working group, which never met again after that,” said Dr. Igor Pravstdirector of the Institute of Nutrition.
Cigler Kralj: I will not allow activism to take precedence over profession
“The current publicly released document represents uncoordinated and unconfirmed guidelines, and the indication of my participation is inappropriate, as I never confirmed the document. On the contrary, the issuer of the document did not take into account the comments that NIJZ forwarded to him just before the publication of the document,” Dr. Ivan Erženprofessional director of NIJZ, dr. Mojca Korošec from the Faculty of Biotechnology in Ljubljana told Dnevnik: “In May 2024, I was asked to comment on the first English version of this document. I gave her my comments and recommendations for additions or corrections within the stipulated time. I have not seen or received the later versions, the Slovenian translation and the final document for review or confirmation, so I do not agree with the conclusion that I participated in the creation or that I agree with the content of the publicly published document. In this regard, listing my name on the list of experts who reviewed the document is inappropriate, incorrect and misleading.”
The names of the mentioned three experts were first deleted from the documents published on the government website, and yesterday the guidelines were withdrawn from it in their entirety. The new Minister of Agriculture Janez Cigler Kralj explained in a press statement that they did so “because I will not allow activism to take precedence over the profession”. At the same time, he emphasized that the current guidelines are outdated, “therefore, in cooperation with the profession and stakeholders, we will start the process of preparing new, modern nutritional guidelines”, announced Cigler Kralj. The professional director of NIJZ dr. Ivan Eržen said: “Nutritional guidelines are first and foremost a public health document. Their purpose is not to represent individual interests, but to improve the health of the population. Therefore, they must be created on the basis of scientific evidence, in a transparent process and with the participation of the widest circle of experts. So far, documents of this type have generally been created under the auspices of the NIJZ, where we are also ready to take over the coordination of the preparation of new nutritional guidelines.”
