“Eat real food.”
That’s the stated intention of the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released Wednesday by the federal government.
“Real food is back at the center of the American diet,” a video from the Department of Health and Human Services says, on the government’s new realfood.gov website.
The federal guidelines, which are updated every five years, serve as a guidepost for nutrition and health advice and form the basis for federal food programs, such as the National School Lunch Program, as well as meals and snacks for the military, veterans, and preschoolers in Head Start.
The new realfood.gov site claims that Americans have been “misled” by previous guidelines, an idea that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. echoed Wednesday at the White House.
“The hard truth is that our government has been lying to us to protect corporate profit-taking, telling us that these food-like substances were beneficial to public health,” he said. “These new guidelines will revolutionize our nation’s food culture and Make America Healthy Again.”
Here’s what’s changed:
A new food pyramid
In 1992, the food pyramid was introduced into the guidelines, encouraging bread and pasta to form the basis of the American diet:
The original food pyramid has been heavily criticized for being too cozy with food lobbyists, particularly in the grains industry, as it prioritized more bread, cereal, rice, and pasta than sound nutrition advice would recommend.
It was replaced in 2011 by “My Plate,” a new framework meant to simplify how people thought about building their daily meals. Vegetables, protein, and grains were prominent on the plate, with an emphasis on consuming more whole grains:
Under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” campaign, a new upside-down pyramid was unveiled on Wednesday:
The new pyramid deliberately de-prioritizes whole grains by flipping the triangle upside down — even though it’s not a true inversion of the old pyramid, which had “bad” ingredients, like sweets, fats, and oils, at the top.
The new pyramid has as its cornerstone protein and “healthy” fat, which Kennedy said “are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines.”
Red meat is at the head of the table
For the first time, the new guidelines encourage people to prioritize “high-quality, nutrient-dense” protein at each meal.
Animal sources are recommended, such as eggs, poultry, seafood, and red meat, even though most nutritionists would encourage a focus on lean proteins like chicken, fish, and plants like beans, nuts, and seeds, with less red meat.
The daily protein serving goal, at 1.2-1.6 grams per kilogram of your body weight, is generally in line with what dietitians and protein experts recommend. For example, a 150-pound person would be aiming for about 82 to 109 grams of protein every day on this plan, far more than previous guidelines would suggest.
Full-fat dairy is back — controversially
“We are ending the war on saturated fats,” Kennedy said Wednesday.
The new guidelines encourage consumers to “include full-fat dairy,” which is a somewhat controversial stance among nutritionists, especially when it comes to foods like butter and milk.
Christopher Gardner, a nutrition expert at Stanford who was on the expert panel convened in 2024 to advise health authorities on the new dietary guidelines, had said in a previous committee meeting that “butter is not back” — at least, not according to any new scientific data.
Gardner raised concerns about how butter can raise your LDL cholesterol, in particular, affecting the arteries.
There is more scientific debate about full-fat cheese and full-fat yogurt, because of the unique ways that calcium and protein are arranged in those foods.
The new guidelines also highlight the importance of fermented foods, including the dairy item kefir, for promoting a healthy microbiome, which is something nutrition experts and scientists are increasingly emphasizing.
For the first time, the guidelines call out ‘highly processed foods’
Ultra-processed foods are in the crosshairs of the new guidelines. Evidence has been mounting for years that these foods tend to make people eat more calories, and can promote inflammation and, over time, contribute to chronic health issues.
“If a foreign adversary sought to destroy the health of our children, to cripple our economy, to weaken our national security, there would be no better strategy than to addict us to ultra-processed foods,” Kennedy said.
Nutrition experts say it’s generally true that ultra-processed foods are not great, but the composition of those foods still matters. UPFs with more vegetables and whole grains in them are better choices than sugary beverages and sweets. Some studies have suggested that certain ultra-processed items like packaged yogurts with added sugar and industrial whole-grain cereals may not be so detrimental to our health after all.
Absolutely no added sugars
In the new pyramid, there is no place for a sugar bowl, because “added sugars are not part of eating real foods.”
The new pyramid recommended avoiding added sugars entirely, while allowing naturally occurring sugar from fruit and dairy.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the leading sources of added sugar in the American diet are sugar-sweetened beverages, desserts, and sweet snacks, so though it may be challenging to nix all added sugar in your diet, given the food landscape we live in, cutting back on those items is a simple place to start.
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