The Trump administration on Wednesday issued a long-promised revamp of national dietary guidelines, urging Americans to eat more protein and less added sugar and, for the first time, discouraging consumption of highly processed foods.
The guidelines, despite widespread expectations, do not change limits on saturated fats but do encourage eating “healthy fat,” which they say includes beef tallow and butter as well as olive oil. They also include a new, inverted food pyramid, emphasizing the consumption of fruits and vegetables along with protein, dairy, and “healthy fats,” to replace the MyPlate chart that had previously provided visual guidance for American diets.
Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delayed issuing the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025-2030 for months, after rejecting much of the work of a 20-person scientific advisory committee convened under President Biden.
“Today marks a decisive change in federal nutrition policy,” said Kennedy at a press conference Wednesday, adding that the government had previously been “lying to us to protect corporate profit-taking, telling us that these food-like substances” like highly processed foods and refined carbohydrates “were beneficial to public health.”
“The new guidelines recognize that whole, nutrient-dense food is the most effective path to better health and lower health care costs,” Kennedy said. “Protein and healthy fats are essential, and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines.” He added: “We are ending the war on saturated fats. Our government declares war on added sugar today.”
The scientific advisory committee had deemed research on ultra-processed foods too weak to develop recommendations, and it favored plant-forward diets. The new guidelines instead reflect Kennedy’s aim to mold policy along the interests of his Make America Healthy Again movement — namely, fewer processed foods and seed oils and more meat and dairy products.
“For the first time, the Dietary Guidelines call out the dangers of certain highly processed food — a common-sense and vital public health point,” the fact sheet says. That means a call to avoid highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet and avoid sugar-sweetened beverages, such as soda, fruit drinks, and energy drinks.
The guidelines do not define ultra-processed or highly processed foods, but warn about artificial flavors, petroleum-based dyes, artificial preservatives, and low-calorie non-nutritive sweeteners in food and drink.
The final guidelines are more than just advice to a nation experiencing both obesity and poor nutrition. Each iteration sets standards for 16 national food assistance programs, affecting 1 in 4 Americans through what children eat in their school lunches and what families can buy through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and the nutrition programs for older Americans.
Reaction from nutrition experts was mixed.
Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, said, “While they do have one or two good points, emphasizing fruits and vegetables and limiting alcohol,” the guidelines “are for the most part a strong reflection of industry influence.” The promotion of meat and dairy is particularly troubling, he said, especially as the guidelines call for limiting consumption of saturated fat — a contradiction. Barnard was similarly concerned by how the guidelines lump processed foods together, potentially villainizing foods like breads and cereals that provide folate and other nutrients to vulnerable groups.
Bobby Mukkamala, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement released with the guidelines: “The American Medical Association applauds the Administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for spotlighting the highly processed foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, and excess sodium that fuel heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic illnesses. The Guidelines affirm that food is medicine and offer clear direction patients and physicians can use to improve health.”
Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, said he approved of the new food pyramid, which effectively turns the original 1992 food pyramid upside down. The new pyramid to replace the “little-understood MyPlate” shows a “positive focus on minimally processed, whole foods,” he said, emphasizing that all grains should be whole grains and on eating seafood and plant sources of fats and protein. The pyramid does include red meat, poultry, and eggs, but not excessively so “if consumed in the proportions shown in the pyramid,” Mozaffarian said.
Other nutrition experts were outright scathing. “These guidelines are about ideology, not science,” Marion Nestle, a leading nutritionist and professor emeritus at New York University, said via email, calling them “muddled, contradictory, ideological, retro.”
That’s particularly true when it comes to the guidelines’ support for animal sources of protein, Nestle said.
“Some months ago, [Agriculture Secretary] Brooke Rollins said these guidelines would no longer reflect leftist ideology,” she said. “I could not imagine when they ever did, but then I realized she must mean plants. These guidelines recommend heavily meat-based diets — protein is a euphemism for meat.” The problem, she said, is that evidence clearly shows that “eating protein from plant sources is healthier than eating it from animal sources.”
Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine physician and scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said the guidance was issued as “absolute” without acknowledging uncertainty or population-specific nuance.
“As a member of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, I am concerned by clear and specific discrepancies between the Committee’s Scientific Report and the final Dietary Guidelines and accompanying press materials,” she told STAT. “The Scientific Report was a comprehensive, rigorously reviewed document grounded in systematic reviews, food-pattern modeling, and explicit grading of evidence and uncertainty. By contrast, the initial press release, fact sheet, and summary guidance present simplified claims that are often uncited, imprecise, and inconsistent with the underlying science.”
She said these differences matter. “The Dietary Guidelines shape federal nutrition programs, clinical counseling, and public trust. When public-facing guidance departs from the Committee’s evidence-based conclusions — and fails to transparently link recommendations to data — it risks confusing clinicians and the public and undermining confidence in the process.”
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans come out every five years, jointly framed in their final form by federal health and agriculture agencies. The new set missed its December deadline, after the academic experts finished reviewing scientific evidence and filing their advisory report. HHS has blamed last fall’s government shutdown for the delay.
An early arrival of the new guidelines had been foreshadowed.
In March, Kennedy and Rollins released statements after the first meeting of the Make America Healthy Again commission that questioned the motivations of the outside experts. The volunteer committee had set out to use a health equity lens throughout its evidence review, asserting that social determinants of health, which include economic, environmental, social, educational, and structural factors, play a role in dietary intakes throughout the lifespan, limiting how individuals and population groups find healthy foods and meet nutrition goals.
“We will make certain the 2025-2030 Guidelines are based on sound science, not political science,” Rollins said after the MAHA Commission’s closed-door session. “Gone are the days where leftist ideologies guide public policy.” And Kennedy said, “We are going to make sure the dietary guidelines will reflect the public interest and serve public health, rather than special interests.”
Almost a month later, Kennedy again attacked the scientific committee’s work. “There’s a 453-page document that looks like it was written by the food processing industry,” he said on April 4. “We’re going to come up with a document that is simple, that lets people know, with great clarity, what kind of foods their children need to eat, what kind of foods they can eat.”
USDA, HHS, and the advisory committee have been criticized for combining potential conflicts of interest in one list for all 20 members instead of by individual disclosure. The 2025-2030 roster includes pharmaceutical companies Abbott, Boehringer Ingelheim, Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Pfizer as well as Beyond Meat, the plant-based meat substitute maker; Dairy Management; and both the American Egg Board and Egg Nutrition.
The document that landed Wednesday numbers a shade over six pages — although supplemental material was said to be coming later. Here are other highlights.
Processed foods: ‘It’s time’
The recommendation to limit highly processed foods is “the one good thing” about the new guidelines, said Nestle: “clear, straightforward, supported by science.” The guidelines recommend “nutrient-dense and home-prepared meals” over packaged foods that have added sugars and sodium.
When the committee made public in October its decisions not to issue guidance on ultra-processed foods, it was not well received, even though there is some agreement that the murky definition of what makes a processed food, whether it’s whole-wheat bread or a food-dyed sugary cereal, hampers research. The Food and Drug Administration is also developing a new definition of these products, loosely understood to mean foods prepared with ingredients unlikely to be found on kitchen shelves at home.
“I think it’s time” for guidelines to take a stance on ultra-processed food, said Alyssa Moran, director of policy and research strategy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Psychology of Eating and Consumer Health (PEACH) Lab. The advisory committee’s literature review was limited, she said, and major institutions and publications have pushed the conversation forward in the last year, including a landmark Lancet series published in the fall, a report from the American Heart Association on their health harms, and a committee established by the World Health Organization to develop guidelines on ultra-processed food.
Ultra-processed foods have been a major focus for Kennedy and his allies. Much of May’s MAHA report discussed it as a driver of chronic disease, noting that most Americans don’t get enough nutrients from whole foods like fruits and vegetables and that ultra-processed foods tend to be higher in calories as well as food additives. The subsequent MAHA report in September, however, was notably lighter on mentions of highly processed foods.
Nutrition experts broadly agree that ultra-processed foods like soda, candy, and packaged snacks are bad for people’s health, although researchers are still trying to understand why that is. The problem could be that many ultra-processed foods contain higher levels of nutrients like added sugar and sodium; additives like synthetic dyes, emulsifiers, and thickeners; the ways that food is broken down and reconstituted into new textures; or some combination of those three factors.
The new guidelines refer to these foods as highly processed rather than ultra-processed, language that was also used in September’s MAHA report. Moran said the naming convention doesn’t matter much, so long as the core concept is the same — that “these industrially produced foods are making us sick.”
Saturated fat: win for meat industry
The new guidelines contain another surprise: While Kennedy and others in the administration had long dropped hints that they planned to loosen restrictions on saturated fat, they ultimately stuck with longstanding advice to limit consumption to 10% of daily calories. Ample research shows that eating too much saturated fat is associated with higher levels of LDL cholesterol (the “bad” kind) and increased risk of heart disease.
“The good [news] is that they backed off from a high saturated fat intake diet,” said Barry Popkin, a distinguished professor of nutrition at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. It was also a canny public-relations move to preserve the credibility of the guidelines, he said: Encouraging Americans to eat more saturated fat “would have faced so much criticism, it would have discounted the whole thing.”
The guidelines do, however, recommend red meat as a source of protein, despite evidence on the risks of saturated fat from red meat. They also advise Americans who cook with oils to use those “with essential fatty acids,” such as olive oil, butter, or beef tallow.
Administration officials also gave a full-throated endorsement of meat- and dairy-derived saturated fats in a news conference Wednesday.
“For decades we’ve been fed a corrupt pyramid that has had a myopic focus on demonizing natural, healthy saturated fats, telling you not to eat eggs and steak,” Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary said.
The revamped food pyramid prominently features a slab of beef, a thick wedge of cheese, and a half-gallon of whole milk as foods that should form the core of Americans’ diets.
That’s a win for the meat industry and for members of the MAHA contingent who enjoy steak-heavy diets and their french fries sizzled in beef tallow. “Beef is not what we’d like people to eat, either for health or climate,” Popkin said.
The guidelines also recommend full-fat dairy in particular, which Nestle said will make it harder to meet the recommendations for limiting saturated fats. Research on the health effects of full-fat dairy is mixed, but the advisory committee had previously decided to stick with longstanding recommendations for nonfat and low-fat dairy.
Protein: plant-based as well as animal
Another change is the recommendation that Americans eat protein at every meal, from both animal- and plant-based sources. That’s a departure from the advisory committee’s recommendation to prioritize plant-based protein from foods like legumes, beans, and soy.
Overall, the new guidelines say that Americans should aim for 1.2-1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight each day. Nestle noted that most Americans already get plenty of protein. The government’s minimum requirement for protein for sedentary adults had been 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight.
The guidelines do not distinguish between the healthfulness of red meat as opposed to chicken or seafood, while the advisory committee had suggested discouraging the consumption of red meat and processed meat specifically. They do, however, say that people should avoid meat that has added sugars, additives, and refined carbohydrates, which would presumably include processed meats like bacon and sausages.
The guidelines also for the first time recommend particular cooking techniques for protein, like baking and roasting, over deep-frying.
As for what to eat alongside those servings of protein, the guidelines also include a separate section on the importance of fermented foods like sauerkraut and kimchi for gut health. Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, noted in an interview late last year that he’s so devoted to sauerkraut that he asks her to put it in her purse when they go out to restaurants.
Sugar: stringent limits
Added sugar gets flagged as something to limit in foods and beverages. “While no amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners is recommended or considered part of a healthy or nutritious diet, one meal should contain no more than 10 grams of added sugars,” the guidelines say.
The advice gets detailed when it comes to food labels. Crackers, for example, should not exceed 5 grams of added sugar per 3/4 ounce whole-grain equivalent. Yogurt should not exceed 2.5 grams of added sugar per 2/3 cup equivalent.
All the possible names for added sugar are listed with this tip: “To help identify sources of added sugars, look for ingredients that include the word ‘sugar’ or ‘syrup’ or end in ‘-ose.’”
Alcohol: less, but unspecified
The new guidelines include only two bullet points on alcohol. The first recommends consuming “less alcohol for better overall health,” without specifying how many drinks Americans should stick to each day.
The second point lists who should abstain from drinking altogether, including pregnant women, people in recovery from alcohol use disorder or who are “unable to control” their drinking, and people taking medications that may have hazardous interactions with alcohol.
People with a family history of alcoholism should “be mindful of alcohol consumption and associated addictive behaviors,” the report concludes.
On one hand, the recommendation that all Americans reduce their drinking is a positive change, Thomas Gremillion, director of food policy at the Consumer Federation of America, said. That message is consistent with the last dietary guidelines, which emphasized that drinking less is better for one’s health.
However, the mention of alcohol use disorder, familial addiction, and a lack of self-control “echoes this mythology of the damaged person who cannot hold their liquor,” he said.
“If you don’t have a family history of alcoholism you don’t have to be mindful of addictive behaviors? That’s not right.”
Federal officials previously outsourced studies on alcohol and health to two groups. The Interagency Coordinating Committee on Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD) and the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) each separately weighed in on the health risks of drinking, with at-times contradictory findings.
The results of those panels’ work was meant to be incorporated into the new diet advice. Given the brevity of the new alcohol guidance, and the lack of footnotes, it’s unclear whether the analyses were used to arrive at the recommendations.
A bitter tension between the alcohol industry, federal agencies, public health advocates, and some members of Congress about the competing reports further complicated matters.
The industry, which has close ties in Washington, pressured federal officials to ignore the scientific report that pointed to increased health risks from even light drinking, citing alleged bias on the committee. A congressional report, released Wednesday — just minutes before the publication of the guidelines — painted a picture of corruption in the ICCPUD group, which was led by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
In the fall, the Trump administration quietly barred the final version of that report from being published. Officials offered no explanation for the move.
Other groups said the report by NASEM, which found lower all-cause mortality among moderate drinkers, used cherry-picked data to paint a favorable image of alcohol use.
Both studies were taxpayer-funded.
Kennedy, despite being sober and opposing other processed foods, which he calls “poison,” has stayed quiet about alcohol — an ultra-processed product and a literal toxin, health advocates point out.
The new guidelines similarly steer clear of the debate around precisely how much alcohol is safe, instead making broad recommendations.
Since the 1990s, the guidelines have recommended adults who drink alcohol ought to do so “in moderation,” if at all. Before this version of the guidelines, women were advised to have no more than one drink per day (pregnant women none at all). Men were advised to have no more than two drinks per day.
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Source: www.statnews.com
