The Trump administration unveiled major revisions to the food pyramid last week. The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans were designed with lots of input from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, a Texan.
The new guidance emphasizes the need to avoid so-called highly processed foods, which can contain preservatives, sweeteners, and other synthetic additives. It also recommends a higher level of protein intake.
Kellie Casavale, director of the Agriculture, Food, and Nutrition Evidence Center with Texas A&M AgriLife Research, spoke to Texas Standard about how these guidelines are written, and how they’re applied. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Before we get into what’s new here, we should mention you helped design previous versions of the dietary guidelines for Americans when you worked for the Federal Agriculture and Health and Human Services Department. What is the process? What goes into developing this food pyramid?
Kellie Casavale: Yeah, well, the process is really in-depth. So the dietary guidelines for Americans is actually our national nutrition policy for the United States. And it’s designed to promote health and to reduce diet-related chronic disease.
So it was actually set up by a law back in 1990 that requires it to be published and updated every five years. And this is for a really important purpose. So the purpose is to provide nutrition and diet information and guidelines for the general public so that it can be based on the preponderance of the scientific and medical knowledge that’s really current at the time.
Maybe you can clarify something then because you just said this sort of is an illustration of national nutrition policy, which I totally get.
Does that mean we should make this our personal policy? That we should follow the the pyramid if we want to lead a healthy life? Is that the big idea?
Yeah, so it’s a really essential piece of information for your audience to know is that by this law, the guidelines are required to be based on what we know about science and about diet and health promotion and disease prevention. And so that is the foundation for our national nutrition policy, which then in turn is interpreted into all sorts of other approaches that reach the community.
So this includes things like their new pyramid. It also includes all of our federal programs that bring nutrition services to Americans every day.
I wonder if they’ll ever get to a point where it’s like, okay, this the science, this is where we are, or is it just always going to be subject to tweaks here and there? What do you think?
So the dietary guidelines really are an evolution. So each addition builds on that previous addition. And traditionally, changes to any of the recommendations are then based on the most current evaluation of the science.
So for example, we have long known that eating vegetables and fruits, eating whole grains and other whole foods are associated with reducing the risk for chronic disease. And so that concept is not new.
However, the big difference in the dietary guidelines for Americans for this edition, which will cover the years 2025 to 2030, and the big different with previous editions is the directness and the concise focus of the message to Americans, which is to eat real food. They are recommending that consumers prioritize whole, nutrient-dense foods – such as protein foods, dairy, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats and whole grains.
And they really encourage pairing that with a dramatic reduction in what they call “highly processed foods.” Those include refined carbohydrates, added sugars, excess sodium, unhealthy fats, and chemical additives, the way they described it.
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You touched on something I want to follow up. One of the changes is that the guidelines support so-called “full-fat dairy products.” Can you briefly explain what makes milk or yogurt full fat and the nutritional argument for consuming those?
Sure, yeah. When dairy products are produced, they come out in a full-fat form. And then there is a process where you can actually extract some of the fat from those products. They otherwise are identical in those both same ways.
So when they focus on a lower-fat dairy source, you’re focusing on a version where some of that fat has been removed.
I want to go back to what you were telling me a little bit earlier about the Nutrition Evidence Center. When these new guidelines came out, what did you do then? Did you start to compare this with what you know about the best science and say okay, this looks like it sizes up well or matches well?
How did you go about evaluating what the government’s done here?
Yeah, well our role at the Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Evidence Center is really to focus in on robust, rigorous scientific methods to evaluate the state of the science in specific areas.
So we’re based in Fort Worth and we actually evaluate the state and the science on relationships between agriculture, food systems, and food and nutrition on human health, but we also evaluated on the health of our land and our waters and the health of our community.
And so this is what makes us really uniquely positioned to support what is called evidence synthesis. So that is bringing together the findings of research and data in systematic and rigorous ways to answer challenging questions to inform decision-makers to make those decisions about the dietary guidelines, but also things like food safety regulations and best practices for agricultural production of America’s food.
So really what it comes down to is us having a look at what is the updated science that’s available, how is it evaluated, was it evaluated in a rigorous and transparent way, and was that information then very transparently applied to changes in the dietary guidelines.
And so our role really going forward is to see what additional scientific questions need to be answered to help us advance the science and know what really we know about food and health, as well as what we know about the role of agriculture and food systems.
How much is known about how much these guidelines actually influence the diets of everyday Americans?
Yeah, that is a wonderful question and because the guidelines are mandated by law, that part of that mandate is that they have to be implemented in all federal food nutrition and health programs.
So by law, the dietary guidelines are incredibly influential. They are an underpinning of federal food programs. They provide information that really helps those services come forward to Americans These include programs like WIC, head start school meals, and also food that’s fed to the military or to veterans that are under VA care.
So they’re updated every five years using the most recent state of the science to inform nutrition resources that then, in turn, reach millions of American families every day.
And so the dietary guidelines help inform those guidelines for school lunches, hey encourage food product reformulations, they provide definitions for what could be labeled as, quote unquote, “healthy” on food labels, and they also help package labels to inform consumers about what’s in their food.
