Welcome to the United States of America — the homeland of the largest corporate matrix in the history of mankind. And now, the process of its dismantlement begins with the Trump administration’s 2025-2030 nutritional guidelines.
Since the inception of food’s corporate capture in the 1980s by major tobacco companies, Americans have been relentlessly fed food with unnecessary and illness-driven additives: maltodextrin, high fructose corn syrup, sodium nitrate, and aspartame to name a few.
With each passing second, Big Food companies lead Americans away from nutritional sovereignty and closer to potential chronic diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease, increased cardiovascular disease and potentially, cancer.
For decades, America’s Dietary Guidelines have continuously favored the interests of Big Food, which hosts household brand names like General Mills, Coca-Cola and Nestlé, and Big Pharma rather than the needs of American people. According to the MacIver Institute’s 2024 study on “Vertical Integration and the Fraud of the Nation’s Nutrition Guidelines,” the corporate-driven-and-funded Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics has undeniably failed to condemn ultra-processed foods.
There are established platforms, beyond and independent of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics and the FDA, whose mission is to provide unbiased, science-driven advice and recommendations to the United States Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Unfortunately, that mission is a logical fallacy.
For example, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee — an independent group of nationally recognized scientists who report back to their appointees on current nutrition science. But this group of so-called independent scientists is riddled with corporate conflicts of interest.
According to the MacIver Institute, out of all the members appointed to the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, 95% of its membership had associations with Big Food or pharmaceutical companies.
Unfortunately, it continued on to the 2025-2030 committee, with 8 members having conflicts of interests with food conglomerates, three with pharmaceutical companies, and two with weight loss companies who incessantly advertise GLP-1 prescriptions.These are institutions driven by profits.
With the Trump administration’s new guidelines, we can finally escape Big Food’s corporate trap and directly dismantle these long-standing deceptions.
For the first time in history, the nutritional guidelines explicitly and unremorsefully calls out ultra-processed foods, such as chips, cookies, sugary snacks and ready-to-eat meals. In doing so, it makes it incredibly difficult for food conglomerates to market them as part of a healthy, nutritious diet.
In addition, it hones in on the avoidance of sugars, both added and non-nutritive sweeteners. As sweeteners — especially artificial, such as aspartame and sucralose — are detrimental to gut health, it’s critically important to monitor sugar intake.
The heraldment of whole grains and steering away from refined carbohydrates is another essential element of these new guidelines. It’s vital that Americans begin to focus on fiber-rich whole grains and reduce the amount of carbohydrates on our plate.
While there exists some controversy around these guidelines, such as the prioritization of animal protein and full-fat dairy and saturated fat advice, it’s a stark deviation from the corporate grasps of food conglomerates.
I agree, some of the elements of the new guidelines are unusual and unconventional, but these are incredible grounds to civically debate on rather than perpetuating the corporate-funded deception.
Because if we don’t support this dismantlement, Big Food will consume America.
