On Thursday, the lobby of the Hubert H. Humphrey building, which houses the Department of Health and Human Services, was abuzz. Food industry leaders, nutritionists, and social media influencers gathered in a room filled with “Eat Real Food” posters, awaiting members of the Trump administration to highlight the recently released Dietary Guidelines for Americans, federal recommendations on how Americans should eat healthy.
Only about 10 percent of Americans follow the guidelines, which are updated every five years. But their recommendations also critical in shaping federal nutrition programs like school meals, which reaches millions of children annually.
The new recommendations include contradictions and conflicts of interest, experts warn, and may not prompt the shakeup that the administration anticipates.
The latest guidelines, released Wednesday, reflected several ideas and priorities backed by the Make America Healthy Again movement. The document included recommendations to eat more meat, cut down on added sugars, and avoid highly processed foods. At Thursday’s event, MAHA leaders and followers took their victory lap.
To a room full of applause, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took to the podium to call the guidelines the “most significant reset of federal nutrition policy in history.”
Many nutrition experts, however, were less enthusiastic. The new recommendations include contradictions and conflicts of interest, they warn, and may not prompt the shakeup that the administration anticipates. In fact, even while the administration celebrated Thursday, challenges to the new guidelines—including an alternative set of “uncompromised guidelines”—were coming out.
Alternative Guidelines
On Wednesday, a coalition of public health organizations, including the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), released an alternative Dietary Guidelines they coined the “uncompromised” version.
This version updated the guidelines using recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), which submitted a scientific report to the agencies last year.
“If the DGA that came out had not been compromised at all, if it had pretty much followed scientifically sound recommendation and they’d shown their justification, then we would not have released it,” said Grace Chamberlin, a policy associate at CSPI. “But looking at the DGA that came out today, we realized that it was absolutely called for.”
Chamberlin added that her organization acted because the DGA largely rejected the recommendations from the DGAC.
The CSPI’s “uncompromised guidelines” include recommended limits on added sugar, saturated fats, and sodium and prioritize plant-based proteins like beans, peas, and lentils over red and processed meat.
Public health groups were not the only ones pushing back on the guidelines.
Posters of food and beverages line the seats ahead of a policy announcement event at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. (Photo credit: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
On Thursday, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) petitioned the HHS and USDA Offices of Inspector General to withdraw the latest DGA and reissue another version. This petition was promped by what the group called “rampant industry influence” in the new DGA.
Other groups, including CSPI, have voiced concern over the level of industry involvement in the final guidelines even as the administration argues that this is the first DGA free of those influences.
Specifically, the physician and public health groups point to the administration’s “scientific foundation” for the DGAs. The over 400-page document was published along with the guidelines and appears to serve as a replacement for the DGAC scientific report.
In a separate document published on the government’s DGA website, the administration states that it rejected much of the advisory committee’s work and recommendations because each scientific question was evaluated through a health equity lens.
“I am incensed,” said Chris Gardner, who served on the DGAC and is a nutrition researcher at Stanford University, referring to the administration’s dismissal of the panel’s work. “I am infuriated.”
Gardner explained that each time the panel looked at a scientific question, they examined whether the available papers had adequate data on race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. In most cases, there was not enough scientific evidence to address health equity, which therefore had minimal impact on the final recommendations to the agencies.
“The Guidelines need to be rewritten by unbiased authors referencing the latest nutrition research that will actually help keep Americans healthy and fight diabetes, heart disease, and obesity.”
Since the final DGAs need to be evidence-backed, the administration’s scientific foundation includes a series of studies that support its recommendations. This report was conducted by a separate “scientific review” panel of authors. The panel was dominated by people with financial ties to the beef and dairy industries, according to the disclosures included in the report.
The petition by PCRM states that eight of the nine authors have received research funding or other dollars from groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the Texas Beef Council, General Mills, and the National Dairy Council. The group also points out that the creation of the scientific report and the names of its authors were not revealed until the DGAs were officially released.
“The Guidelines need to be rewritten by unbiased authors referencing the latest nutrition research that will actually help keep Americans healthy and fight diabetes, heart disease, and obesity,” said Neal Barnard, president of PCRM, in a statement.
Despite these challenges, it’s unlikely the administration will go back to the drawing board with the guidelines. The next step for agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is determining how to implement the recommendations, which nutritionist call a mixed bag of wins and possible setbacks.
Cattle feed on a farm near Belvidere, Illinois, in December. (Photo credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Explicit Recommendation on ‘Junk Food’
The core message of the Trump administration guidelines does not vary dramatically from past iterations. The last DGAs also encouraged whole fruits and vegetables, whole grain, and protein consumption.
But the new guidelines go further, actively telling Americans to avoid eating highly processed foods high in refined carbohydrates, added sugars, and sodium. Previous guidelines did encourage consumers to eat less red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened foods and beverages, and refined grains.
“My message is clear: Eat real food,” Kennedy said at the event Thursday. “If it comes wrapped in a package, and it’s clear the whole thing is a package, don’t eat it.”
Nutrition experts that are critical of other parts of the guidelines said research supports removing these foods and ingredients from American diets.
About 55 percent of calories consumed by Americans come from ultra-processed foods, according to a report published last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These foods made up a higher percentage of children’s diets than they did with other age groups.
“If it comes wrapped in a package, and it’s clear the whole thing is a package, don’t eat it.”
While the directive to cut highly processed foods is widely welcome, it’s still unclear how it will be implemented in schools and the food system.
School meal program directors across the country already report needing more funding, particularly to expand healthier cooking options, according to a recent survey by the School Nutrition Association (SNA). In the survey, 79 percent said they have an “extreme need” for more funds to reduce reliance on ultra-processed foods. Over 90 percent of responding schools also reported needing more staff, culinary training, and equipment.
SNA welcomed the latest guidelines, but urged Congress to make investments to the school meal program so the recommendations can be implemented.
After Thursday’s gathering, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters that the guidelines are a first step and that she’s hoping changes will take effect in schools this fall. But she acknowledged that significant changes would require regulation, a slow and lengthy process.
Currently, schools are implementing Biden administration nutrition standards for meals. These included new limits on added sugar and sodium. The final implementation stage for those rules is in 2027.
Added sugars are specifically discouraged throughout the new guidelines. In fact, the document recommends no added sugars at all for children between the ages of five and 10, and, overall, a recommended limit of 10 grams of sugar per meal. The previous dietary guidelines included a recommended limit of 10 percent of daily calories from added sugars—a significantly looser suggestion.
It’s unclear exactly how this will translate to school meals and other federal nutrition programs, particularly if schools are required to provide breakfast and lunch with no added sugars.
Boost to Protein
One of the biggest changes in the latest guidelines is a renewed push for Americans to eat more protein, specifically meat and dairy. The 2020-2025 guidelines recommended protein sources like poultry, lean meats, seafood, eggs, legumes, nuts, and seeds.
The Dietary Reference Intakes for the U.S., which are set by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM), recommend 56 grams of protein in a 2,000 calorie diet, or .8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight.
The latest guidelines recommend between a 50 to 100 percent increase at 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. This alone is unusual, as it’s a recommendation typically handled by NASEM rather than the DGAs, Gardner said.
And Americans typically eat enough protein, even exceeding the recommended levels, Gardner said. The new guidelines recommend Americans prioritize protein at every meal.
“[It’s] very weird that we have to prioritize it when there’s no data to suggest this,” Gardner said.
Given Americans read from top to bottom and left to right, Gardner also noted that the first thing the public will see in the updated food pyramid is red meat. The DGAC and previous guidelines encouraged people to prioritize other sources of protein, especially lean meat or plant proteins.
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines encourage the use of animal fats, including butter, contrary to previous guidelines. (Photo illustration: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Fat, Butter, and Tallow
The latest guidelines encourage eating animal proteins and even animal fats like butter and beef tallow. It also encourages full-fat milk consumption. This is where nutritionists and public health groups argue that the guidelines become contradictory, confusing, and potentially dangerous.
Ahead of the guidelines’ release, Kennedy and others in the administration said they were going to “end the war” on saturated fat. Those in the MAHA movement have discouraged the use of seed oils and instead promote fats and oils higher in saturated fat, like butter and beef tallow. Some restaurants have responded by offering fries made with beef tallow instead of oil, and have been praised by the administration for doing so.
The updated guidelines did not explicitly change the recommended limit on saturated fat, which is 10 percent of daily calories. But nutrition experts point out that if Americans follow the rest of the guidelines on dairy and protein, they will likely exceed the saturated fat limit.
The guidelines also say more research is needed on sources of fat and oils. But Gardner said saturated fat was one of the few areas where the DGAC had found enough research and evidence.
Grace Chamberlin, a policy associate at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said this confusion will become more prominent when school nutritionists begin to implement the new guidelines.
“I truly do not know how a school nutrition director is supposed to create meals that both prioritize animal protein and full fat dairy, butter, and beef tallow and meet a saturated-fat limit,” Chamberlin said.
The recommended three servings a day of full-fat dairy delivers approximately seven percent of saturated fat calories, Gardner said. Which leaves very little space for meats or the recommended fats and oils before exceeding the recommended saturated fat level.
“You can’t actually have both of those at the same time,” Gardner said.
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