CNN– New US dietary guidelines released Wednesday echo past advice, but also include nods to US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement — urging Americans to prioritize protein and “healthy fats” and limit their consumption of ultraprocessed foods and added sugar.
“My message is clear, eat real food,” Kennedy said during a White House briefing on Wednesday.
The previous guidelines, issued in 2020, featured almost 150 pages of extensive advice on how to follow a healthy diet and incorporate healthy foods into Americans’ diets at every age. The new recommendations from HHS and the US Department of Agriculture fulfill Kennedy’s promise that they will run only a few pages, but they were to be supplemented with hundreds more pages of research and justification.
The latest update includes images of an inverted pyramid that puts meats, cheese and vegetables in the widest part at the top, flipping a longstanding visual of the American diet and moving away from the circular MyPlate.
Officials say that following the guidance “can help prevent the onset or slow the rate of progression of chronic disease” — a tentpole topic of the MAHA movement. In addition to advice on protein, sugar and processed foods, they also tell Americans, when adding fats to meals, to “prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil. Other options can include butter or beef tallow,” another favorite of Kennedy’s.
But the updated guidelines raised questions among some experts who worried they put too much emphasis on red meat and dairy products, but also garnered early approval from some influential voices.
“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,” AMA President Dr. Bobby Mukkamala, an otolaryngologist—head and neck surgeon, said in a statement. “The Guidelines affirm that food is medicine and offer clear direction patients and physicians can use to improve health.”
The guidance helps shape school meals, the Women, Infants and Children program or WIC and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. Local health departments also will be looking at these updated dietary guidelines closely.
“The primary benefit of the dietary guidelines is to provide people with a tool that helps them stay on the track to being healthy. We have an obesity epidemic in this country that is causing chronic disease extensively,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive offer at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “Diet and exercise guidelines help us get people focused on how to stay healthy and avoid chronic conditions.
“Revisions to dietary guidelines and a review of them are certainly always welcomed by the public health and broader health community, especially when things haven’t been looked at for some time or there’s new or evolving data.”
What’s new in the guidelines
The previous guidelines recommended 13 to 56 grams of protein per day, or 5% to 35% of calories. By comparison, the new recommendation is based on body weight: 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram, the equivalent of 81.6 to 109 grams for a 150-pound person.
The updated guidelines favor full-fat dairy with no added sugars, calling for three servings per day for someone on a 2,000-calorie diet; the previous guidelines recommended three cups per day.The new fiber recommendation is for two to four servings per day, whereas the 2020 guidelines aimed for 14 grams per 1,000 calories.
Ultraprocessed foods are singled out in the new guidelines: “Avoid highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet, such as chips, cookies, and candy that have added sugars and sodium (salt). Instead, prioritize nutrient-dense foods and home-prepared meals. When dining out, choose nutrient-dense options.”
The updated guidelines echo the 2020 version by urging “less alcohol for better health,” although they do away with the previous recommendation that men limit their intake to two drinks or less per day and women to one drink or less.Infants should be fed breast milk for the first 6 months, or iron-fortified formula if breast milk is not available, the new guidelines say. Breastfeeding may continue for 2 years or longer, but formula should be stopped after 12 months. Added sugars should be avoided in infancy and early childhood, through age 10.
The ‘nuance’ of ultraprocessed food
There are varying degrees to which certain foods are processed, said Dr. David Seres, director of medical nutrition and professor of medicine in the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. He agrees with limiting the consumption of ultraprocessed foods but said he hopes the public understands that there is nuance.
“What constitutes junk food and how you actually define that can be gradated,” said Seres, who was not involved in the new dietary guidelines. “But in general, if people want to know what I think they should do, they should eat food that looks as close to what it looked like when it was in the earth on the ground, attached to a plant, or on a hoof or swimming in a sea.”For decades, previous dietary guidelines recommended low- or fat-free dairy for everyone older than 2, and they recommended that saturated fat intake be less than 10% of daily calories.
The new guidelines echo only the 10% recommendation, although they also note that “More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.”
Some studies have found that people who eat more dairy have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than those with low intakes.
“Some saturated fats found in full fat dairy including yogurt, cheese and milk are less inflammatory than other types of animal fat such as beef or beef tallow. But they are higher in calories. Full fat dairy isn’t better than low fat dairy – it is simply not as dangerous as we once thought. But having full fat dairy can add an additional 200 or more calories each day which increases obesity risks further,” Bethany Doerfler, a registered dietitian from Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, said in an email.“More than 50 years of well-designed nutrition research demonstrates the protective effects of a dietary pattern rich in plants, unsaturated fats and limited in processed animal proteins. This pattern decreases the risk of chronic diseases including obesity, cancer and cardiovascular disease,” Doerfler said. “Additionally, we need to make access to healthy food a priority. Deciphering definitions and guidelines are important but access to healthy foods remains critical.”
Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and the most cited nutritionist internationally, worries that the updated guidelines will be used to promote high intakes of red meat and dairy products, “which will not lead to optimally healthy diets or a healthy planet,” he said in an email.
“Sugar-sweetened beverages are the most serious problem, and this was ignored” in earlier reports from HHS’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, Willett said.
The new guidelines, however, do recommend against consuming sugary drinks such as sodas, fruit drinks and energy drinks.
How the guidelines are made
The data that any type of medical guidance or scientific review is based on could change as more research is done, and that seems to be why the dietary guidelines shift over time, Seres said.
For instance, one version of the guidelines could make recommendations based on observational studies that show only associations. But then randomized controlled trials could be conducted to measure cause and effect, and the guidelines could be updated to reflect the new findings.
Every five years, HHS and the USDA update the federal dietary guidelines based on the latest research.
The guidelines are often used by medical professionals and policymakers to help determine what students eat in schools, what doctors recommend to their patients and what people can buy with food stamps.
The guidelines influence programs such as school meals, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, and the Women, Infants and Children program or WIC, which is estimated to serve nearly 7 million pregnant women, new mothers and young children. Kennedy and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have already pushed states to restrict foods regarded as unhealthy from SNAP, although retailers and health experts have questioned whether programs are ready to implement such sweeping changes, especially when data is mixed about whether it will improve diet quality and health.
Typically, before each new dietary guideline report is issued, a scientific advisory committee reviews the latest research and provides its own recommendations to the secretaries of the USDA and HHS to help inform the development of the guidelines.
But Kennedy has criticized the development process and promised a vastly shortened set of recommendations to emphasize whole foods.
Kennedy has also called the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans “antiquated” and said he’s pushing Head Start programs, which provide early childhood education and other services to children and families, to switch from low-fat to full-fat dairy products, including whole milk.
In the Trump administration’s Make Our Children Healthy Again report, released in September, federal officials noted that “USDA and HHS will further reform future … development processes, including structure and members of the advisory committee and scientific review.”Willett said he is “seriously concerned” about that reform.
“The 2025 US Dietary Guidelines scientific advisory committee was carefully selected based on extensive experience and knowledge across many relevant areas and carefully evaluated for conflicts of interest. The review process took approximately three years with many opportunities for public input,” Willett said in an email. He added that “none of this is happening” under the Trump administration’s process.
“I fear a rerun of the CDC vaccine review committee process, which purged those with knowledge and experience in vaccines effectiveness and safety, resulting in states setting up their own vaccine review processes because the CDC recommendations are regarded as no longer trustworthy,” Willett said, referring to the abrupt firing and replacement of members of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee and major changes to US vaccine policy that followed.
CNN’s Sarah Owermohle and Kristen Rogers contributed to this report.
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