WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is urging Americans to prioritize protein and whole grains while avoiding highly processed foods and added sugar as part of a fresh set of dietary recommendations unveiled Wednesday.
What You Need To Know
The Trump administration is urging Americans to prioritize protein and whole grains while avoiding highly processed foods and added sugar as part of a fresh set of dietary recommendations unveiled Wednesday
The new federal dietary guidelines – which are required to be refreshed every five years – apply to the years 2025 to 2030
Along with offering nutritional advice to all Americans, the guidelines impact food programs connected to the federal government
The new standards take a hard line on added sugar and highly processed foods
The new federal dietary guidelines – which are required to be refreshed every five years – apply to the years 2025 to 2030 and, along with offering nutritional advice to all Americans, impact food programs connected to the federal government.
“These standards affect 45 million school lunches every day, meals for 1.3 million active-duty service members and food served to 9 million veterans in VA hospitals,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said at the White House press briefing. The National School Lunch program for instance, which gets funding from the federal government and provides low-cost or free meals to schoolchildren each day, will have to update food served to America’s kids to reflect the guidelines.
Kennedy, along with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and other Trump administration health officials, joined press secretary Karoline Leavitt at Wednesday’s briefing to lay out the new standards. Multiple officials put the topline goal succinctly: “eat real food.”
“That means more protein, more dairy, more healthy fats, more whole grains, more fruits and vegetables, whether they are fresh, frozen, canned or dry,” Rollins said. “We are finally putting real food back at the center of the American diet, real food that nourishes the body, restores health, fuels energy and builds strength.”
Recommendations include inverted food pyramid
The new set of guidelines spans just 10 pages in a digression from the nearly 165-page set released for the years 2020 to 2025. An image topping the document shows an inverted food pyramid with protein, dairy, healthy fats, fruits and vegetables at the top and whole grains at the point on the bottom. The administration also launched a website dedicated to the food standards and what it is calling the “New Pyramid.”
The recommendations advise Americans to aim to include protein in every meal either through sources such as eggs, seafood and red meat or vegetarian options like beans, nuts and seeds. Specifically, it advises 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day and using cooking methods such as baking, broiling, grilling and roasting over deep-frying.
Americans are generally recommended to consume three servings of vegetables and two of fruit a day, limiting the amount through juice form or diluting it with water, according to the standards. Three servings of dairy per day is also recommended, with the guidelines calling for full-fat options with no added sugar.
The new standards take a hard line on added sugar and highly processed foods, the latter of which the Health and Human Services Department noted in a fact sheet is for the first time.
The guidelines declare “no amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners” is considered as part of a healthy diet. Although it notes the topline consideration should be that no one meal should have more than 10 grams of added sugar. Yogurt, for example, it says, should not have more than 2.5 grams of added sugar per ⅔ a cup. It urges parents to completely avoid added sugar for children four years old and younger.
It also points out there is a difference between naturally occurring sugars and added ones.
On highly processed foods, the guidelines make clear Americans should avoid these whether in the form of packaged snacks and meals or salty and sweet foods. It specifically lists chips, cookies and candy as well as beverages like soda and energy drinks or those with low-calorie non-nutritive sweeteners.
The standards warn highly processed foods can disrupt gut health.
It also advises Americans to seek out fiber-rich whole grains and consume two to four servings a day, and stay away from refined carbohydrates, specifically white bread, flour tortillas and crackers.
On fats, it recommends the majority of these in diets be received from what it calls whole food sources like meat, full-fat dairy, olives and avocados. No more than 10% of total daily calories should come from saturated fat, it says. When cooking with fats, it recommends Americans seek out olive oil, butter or beef tallow.
The new guidelines advise Americans to generally cut back on alcohol consumption to improve health but do not keep previous recommendations for such drinks to be limited to one for women and two for men a day.
Those with particular chronic diseases, it advises, should lower the amount of carbohydrates in their diets in general.
Kennedy says guidelines seek to reduce health care costs
Kennedy and other officials at Wednesday’s briefing also presented the nutrition standards as part of a broader effort to save the government and taxpayers money through improving the nation’s health.
“The CDC reports that 90% of health care spending treats chronic disease,” Kennedy said. “That means that 40 cents of every dollar that taxpayers pay in this country is going to treat diseases that could be averted through good food.”
Rollins, meanwhile, also sought to highlight that the focus on whole foods in the standards should help better support America’s farmers and ranchers
“By making milk, raising cattle and growing wholesome fruits, vegetables and grains, they hold the key to solving our national health crisis,” she declared.
In a statement, Farm Action, a farmer-led watchdog group, said it was “encouraging to see the Dietary Guidelines put whole, minimally processed foods back at the center,” noting that the federal government is the largest purchaser of food in the country.
“The United States is running an agricultural trade deficit driven in large part by rising imports of fruits and vegetables, even though those are foods we could be growing here at home,” the statement continued. “Our federal programs are tilted toward commodity crops for feed, fuel, and highly processed products, not the food crops Americans need.”
It concluded by saying it will be “watching closely” to see how this translates.
It comes as significant attention has been fixated on the general health guidelines on food and beyond coming from the federal government with Kennedy at the helm of the Health and Human Services Department. The health secretary has sought to aggressively push what he has branded a “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA effort, in a nod to Trump’s campaign slogan. The effort has included seeking to reform what foods are allowed to be purchased using Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, and support of blocks on items like soda and candy.
And this week, the Health and Human Services Department announced a major change to the vaccines it recommends be given to American children, scaling back the types of shots from 17 to 11.
