By Mel Nolan, RD, MSc
The release of the 2025–2030 US Dietary Guidelines has generated significant attention and debate, not only within the United States but across the global nutrition and public health community. While intended to guide dietary choices for Americans, US dietary guidelines exert influence far beyond national borders, shaping food marketing, product reformulation, agricultural priorities, and policy discussions internationally. As one of the most visible and authoritative sources of nutrition guidance, where the US leads, others often follow.
This latest iteration marks a notable departure from recent guidance, prompting questions about both what is being recommended and how those recommendations were developed. Concerns have been raised about divergence from the conclusions of the Scientific Advisory Committee, the framing of key nutrients and food groups, and the apparent influence of political and industry interests on final messaging.
Since publication, the guidelines have prompted a strong and public response from registered dietitians, nutrition scientists, and public health professionals, reflecting wider unease about their implications for health, equity, and trust.
This article offers a critical reflection from a dietetics and public health perspective, examining the content of the new guidelines, the process behind their development, and what this episode may signal for public trust, professional credibility, and future nutrition policy.
What Has Changed: Key Tensions in the New Guidance
The 2025–2030 US Dietary Guidelines introduce several notable shifts in dietary messaging and emphasis compared with previous editions, prompting widespread commentary from nutrition professionals, public health experts, and journalists. While many headline messages echo familiar public health advice, their framing and relative emphasis have generated significant tension.
The “Real Food” Message: Familiar, but Poorly Contextualised
The guidelines promote a return to “real food”, prioritising whole fruits and vegetables, fibre-rich whole grains, and nutrient-dense foods. They place stronger emphasis on reducing added sugars, refined carbohydrates, non-nutritive sweeteners, and highly processed foods, stating that no amount of added sugar is recommended within a healthy dietary pattern.
While this messaging broadly aligns with long-standing dietary advice, several commentators have noted that, without clearer definition or context, the concept of “real food” risks oversimplification. Questions of affordability, access, and interpretation remain unresolved, particularly for populations experiencing food insecurity.
Protein: Increased Targets and a Meat-Forward Emphasis
Protein recommendations have been substantially increased, from approximately 0.8 g/kg body weight to 1.2–1.6 g/kg, with repeated messaging around the importance of protein at every meal. Reporting by CNN and analysis in The Atlantic note that this shift is framed largely around animal-based sources, including red meat and dairy.
The scientific report underpinning this change draws primarily on a rapid systematic review of 30 randomized controlled trials (Appendix 4.9) examining higher-protein diets in relation to weight management and body composition. Most studies were conducted in adults with overweight or obesity, often during calorie restriction, with primary outcomes including fat mass and lean mass preservation. The report states that, due to time constraints, the 1.2–1.6 g/kg range was not applied to other long-term health outcomes beyond weight-related measures.
This contrasts with the original Advisory Committee’s broader systematic reviews, which evaluated dietary patterns in relation to cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and overall mortality. The Committee emphasised increasing beans, peas, lentils, nuts, and seafood, while moderating red and processed meat, and did not propose an increase in population-level protein targets.
Writing in The Grocer, registered nutritionist Ali Morpeth argues that this heightened focus on protein reflects a broader ideological and commercial agenda rather than a clear population health need. She notes that most adults in high-income countries already consume adequate, and often excessive, amounts of protein, particularly from animal sources, and cautions that further elevating protein as a central dietary goal risks displacing other protective dietary components.
Similar concerns are echoed by Michael Pollan in The San Francisco Standard, who criticises the protein- and meat-forward tilt of the guidance. Pollan argues that Americans already consume more meat than is optimal for health or planetary sustainability, and that the renewed emphasis on animal products resembles mid-20th-century dietary patterns associated with higher rates of cardiovascular disease.
Saturated Fat: Quantitative Limits, Qualitative Confusion
The guidelines retain the long-standing recommendation that saturated fat should provide no more than 10% of total energy intake, yet adopt a notably softer framing in practice. Full-fat dairy, butter, and beef tallow (a rendered cooking fat made by melting down suet, the hard fat found around cattle kidneys and other organs) are included within a category of “healthy fats” alongside olive oil, marking a clear departure from previous guidance that emphasised low-fat dairy and limiting saturated fat. This creates an internal contradiction: beef tallow contains approximately 12 g of saturated fat per tablespoon, and butter around 7 g per tablespoon, meaning that relatively small amounts can account for a substantial proportion of the recommended daily limit, making the guidance difficult to operationalise at a population level.
The Scientific Advisory Committee’s 2025 report graded as strong the evidence supporting replacement of saturated fats, including butter, with plant-based oils rich in unsaturated fatty acids, citing multiple randomised controlled trials demonstrating reductions in LDL cholesterol and improved cardiovascular risk markers. The Committee also recommended continued emphasis on low-fat or non-fat dairy and dietary patterns characterised by lower intakes of red meat and high-fat dairy products. The final published guidance, however, retains the <10% saturated fat limit while including full-fat dairy, butter, and beef tallow within a “healthy fats” category and stating that more high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health. The Scientific Foundation For The Dietary Guidelines For Americans (Appendix 4.8), referenced in support of fat-related messaging, is primarily a narrative review examining oxidised lipids from thermally stressed oils and identifies only six human intervention studies (five acute feeding trials and one four-week study) focused on short-term metabolic markers rather than long-term cardiovascular outcomes. No new cardiovascular outcome trials are presented that overturn the Committee’s graded conclusions regarding saturated fat replacement. This shift in evidentiary emphasis raises legitimate questions about consistency in how evidence standards were applied between the Advisory Committee report and the final guidance.
Registered dietitian Lara Al-Dandachi has argued that this approach risks downplaying well-established links between saturated fat intake from red meat and full-fat dairy and adverse cardiometabolic biomarkers, including raised LDL cholesterol and ApoB, which are routinely observed in clinical practice and strongly predictive of cardiovascular disease risk.
Political context has further shaped interpretation of these changes. Reporting in The Atlantic notes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s personal dietary preferences, including promotion of meat-heavy and “traditional fat” dietary patterns, have framed public narratives around the guidance, even though the formal saturated fat limit itself was not raised.
Early Policy Signals: Whole Milk in Schools
The implications of this shift are already visible in policy. The reintroduction of the “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act” promotes whole milk in school meal programmes. Whole milk contains approximately 5 g of saturated fat per 240 ml, raising concerns about the achievability of saturated fat limits for children when considered against persistently high rates of childhood overweight and obesity in the United States.
Ultra-Processed Foods: Broad Signals, Blunt Categories
While the guidelines adopt a stronger stance against ultra-processed foods, several experts have highlighted the absence of a clear definition and the risk of treating all processed foods as nutritionally equivalent. Analysis from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Nutrition Source notes that although the guidance cautions against “highly processed foods,” it does not adequately distinguish between different types or degrees of processing, despite evidence that health effects vary substantially across this category.
Michael Pollan has also observed that references to ultra-processed foods were substantially reduced between earlier and later drafts of MAHA-associated reports, raising questions about how political or industry pressures may have shaped the final language.
Evidence cited by the Harvard Nutrition Source indicates that associations between ultra-processed food intake and adverse health outcomes are driven largely by specific categories, including processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, and foods high in saturated fat, salt, and added sugars. In contrast, some processed foods, such as whole-grain products, fortified plant milks, and certain plant-based meat alternatives, can support diet quality and healthier substitutions.
This tension is further complicated by the fact that calls to “eat real food” sit within a food system where affordability, availability, and commercial influence continue to shape dietary choices, raising questions about how such guidance translates into practice for populations facing structural barriers to healthy eating.
Plant-Based Diets: Evidence vs Deficit Framing
The guidance on vegetarian and vegan diets has drawn criticism for its deficit-focused framing. Plant-Based Health Professionals UK (PBHPUK) argue that this approach assumes foods are removed rather than replaced and overstates the risk of nutrient inadequacy.
Professional guidance from the British Dietetic Association confirms that well-planned vegetarian and vegan diets can meet nutritional requirements across the life course, with attention required for a limited number of nutrients such as vitamin B12, vitamin D, iodine, and sometimes iron.
Framing plant-based diets primarily in terms of risk may therefore reinforce misconceptions and discourage plant-forward dietary patterns that are otherwise associated with positive health outcomes.
Finding Value in the New Guidance
Despite the significant concerns outlined above, the 2025–2030 US Dietary Guidelines retain elements that align with long-standing public health nutrition advice. These include continued emphasis on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, alongside clearer language on reducing added sugars and shifting away from diets dominated by highly processed foods.
The guidance states that no amount of added sugar is recommended within a healthy dietary pattern, a position welcomed by organisations such as the American Heart Association, which has consistently highlighted links between added sugars and cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes risk.
Similarly, the stated intention to reduce ultra-processed food consumption reflects a growing evidence base associating high UPF intake with poorer diet quality and adverse health outcomes. However, as highlighted during a Food Foundation webinar with Anna Taylor and Professor Mike Rayner, translating these broad signals into practice raises challenges around affordability, access, and equity, particularly where definitions remain vague and guidance risks feeling aspirational rather than actionable.
Key Areas of Ongoing Professional Concern
Sustainability Silence
One of the most consistently raised concerns across professional and academic commentary is the complete absence of environmental sustainability considerations in the 2025–2030 US Dietary Guidelines. This omission has been highlighted by public health organisations, academics, and civil society groups as a significant departure from the direction of travel in dietary guidance internationally.
PBHPUK argue that excluding sustainability places the US guidelines at odds with the prevailing scientific consensus linking dietary patterns, food systems, climate change, and population health. They note that recent updates to dietary guidelines across Europe increasingly integrate health and environmental objectives, reflecting recognition that dietary advice must support both human and planetary health. This approach aligns with calls from the FAO and WHO, as well as findings from the EAT-Lancet Commission, which emphasise the need for a global transition towards plant-forward dietary patterns to remain within planetary boundaries while supporting long-term health.
The omission is particularly striking given that animal-sourced foods, especially red meat and dairy, are consistently identified as having the greatest environmental impact across indicators including greenhouse gas emissions, land use, and biodiversity loss. Both PBHPUK and Martin Bowman have highlighted that the final US guidelines not only fail to acknowledge these impacts, but actively promote increased consumption of animal-based foods, placing them in direct tension with climate mitigation and food system resilience goals.
Beyond climate change, professional concerns also extend to wider food system risks. The routine use of antibiotics in intensive livestock production has been identified by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) as a key driver of antimicrobial resistance, now recognised as a major global public health threat. The guidance also omits consideration of zoonotic disease emergence, despite the WHO and the EAT-Lancet Commission highlighting intensive animal agriculture and high-density livestock systems as relevant factors in pathogen spill over and pandemic preparedness.
Taken together, these omissions have led many public health professionals to question whether dietary guidelines can be considered fully evidence-based when they exclude environmental and food system determinants that directly shape long-term population health, health equity, and resilience. The absence of sustainability considerations is therefore viewed not as a neutral choice, but as a substantive gap with implications that extend well beyond individual dietary behaviour.
Process, Power, and Whose Expertise Counts
Central to professional concern about the 2025–2030 US Dietary Guidelines is not only what they recommend, but how those recommendations were produced.
The development of the guidelines is underpinned by a formally mandated process. An independent Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) is appointed to review the evidence, conduct systematic reviews and food pattern modelling, and produce a scientific report to inform final policy decisions. As discussed by Professor Mike Rayner during aFood Foundation webinar, this process is generally regarded as robust, transparent, and evidence-led, with committee members volunteering substantial time over a two-year period.
For the 2025–2030 cycle, this process did take place. The original DGAC report recommended dietary patterns that prioritised plant-based protein sources, including legumes and nuts, alongside reduced consumption of red and processed meat. These recommendations aligned closely with prevailing scientific consensus and international guidance. However, multiple sources note that key elements of the committee’s conclusions were not reflected in the final published guidelines.
PBHPUK describe this divergence as a significant departure from evidence-based practice, arguing that advisory recommendations were selectively discarded following political changes in leadership. Martin Bowman similarly highlights that a new group of experts was subsequently involved in shaping the final guidance, many of whom had documented links to meat and dairy industry bodies. He points to the alternative “Uncompromised Dietary Guidelines”, developed by the Center for Biological Diversity and endorsed by former advisory committee members, as evidence that a science-led, plant-forward approach was both available and feasible.
Concerns about conflicts of interest and transparency have also been raised by Marion Nestle, who has documented the extent to which individuals involved in shaping the final guidelines have financial or professional ties to food and agricultural industries. Reporting by DeSmog further situates these concerns within a broader pattern of industry influence on food and agriculture policy.
Across these critiques, a recurring issue is the limited visibility of registered dietitians and public health nutritionists in final decision-making roles. Professional bodies argue that meaningful representation matters not as a question of professional protectionism, but because accurate interpretation of complex nutrition evidence requires specific training and expertise. Excluding these perspectives risks undermining public trust, policy legitimacy, and confidence in dietary guidance at a time when misinformation and scepticism toward institutions are already widespread.
Reflecting the seriousness of these concerns, elements of the guideline development process are now subject to legal challenge, underscoring that questions of governance, transparency, and accountability extend beyond academic debate and into the legal and policy arena.
Trust, Misinformation, and the Dietitian’s Front-Line Role
A recurring concern across media reporting and professional commentary is the potential impact of the new US Dietary Guidelines on public trust in nutrition advice. The combination of familiar public health messages, such as reducing added sugars and ultra-processed foods, alongside more controversial shifts, including increased emphasis on animal protein and traditional fats, has created conflicting dietary signals that may be difficult for the public to interpret.
Several sources highlight how politicised nutrition guidance can exacerbate confusion and misinformation. Reporting in The Atlantic describes how the framing of the guidelines has become closely associated with political identity and ideology, blurring the line between evidence-based public health advice and personal or partisan dietary beliefs. Michael Pollan, writing in The San Francisco Standard, similarly cautions that selective use of slogans such as “eat real food,” when detached from their original scientific context, risks oversimplifying nutrition science and amplifying misleading narratives.
Concerns about the consequences of such mixed messaging are not limited to media commentary. A recent JAMA commentary emphasised that dietary policy must be demonstrably grounded in robust and transparently evaluated evidence, warning that guidance shaped by shifting narratives rather than scientific consensus risks eroding public trust.
These dynamics place registered dietitians and nutritionists in a challenging front-line role. As highlighted by Lara Al-Dandachi and PBHPUK, dietitians are frequently required to translate headline guidance into nuanced, evidence-based advice, while addressing confusion around saturated fat, protein requirements, plant-based diets, and ultra-processed foods. This work increasingly involves countering misinformation circulating online and supporting individuals who are uncertain whom to trust.
This raises a central question for the nutrition and public health community: who benefits when dietary guidance becomes harder to interpret, more polarised, and less trusted—and who bears the consequences when trust is eroded?
What Needs to Change — and Why It Matters
Taken together, the controversy surrounding the 2025–2030 US Dietary Guidelines highlights the need for stronger governance, transparency, and professional accountability in the development of dietary guidance. Key priorities include:
- Greater transparency in decision-making
Where advisory committee recommendations diverge from final guidance, the rationale for those decisions should be clearly documented and publicly accessible. Without this, confidence in the integrity of the process is difficult to maintain. - Stronger conflict-of-interest safeguards
Robust protections are needed where individuals involved in shaping guidance have current or recent ties to food and agricultural industries with a clear stake in the outcomes. - Meaningful inclusion of professional expertise
Registered dietitians and public health nutrition professionals should be involved throughout guideline development to ensure that complex evidence is interpreted accurately and translated into guidance that is both scientifically sound and practically achievable. - Integration of environmental sustainability
Food systems shape long-term population health, health equity, and resilience. Dietary guidance that ignores sustainability risks becoming increasingly disconnected from real-world public health challenges. - Clearer communication of evidence and uncertainty
Dietary guidelines carry significant authority, and how evidence is framed matters. Inconsistent or overly simplified messaging risks fuelling confusion, misinformation, and loss of trust.
These issues are not limited to the United States. In contrast to the US system, where dietary guidelines directly shape school meals, food assistance programmes, and federal procurement, UK dietary guidance currently lacks equivalent statutory power. The Food Foundation has highlighted the potential benefits of giving UK dietary guidelines greater policy weight and is actively working to strengthen alignment between dietary guidance, food policy, and public procurement to support both health and sustainability goals.
Conclusion: Guidelines Shape Futures, Not Just Plates
Dietary guidelines are more than technical summaries of nutrition science. They are scientific documents, political instruments, and powerful signals of public trust. The controversy surrounding the 2025–2030 US Dietary Guidelines illustrates what is at stake when evidence, governance, and communication become misaligned. When guidance appears inconsistent, politicised, or insufficiently transparent, it risks undermining confidence not only in nutrition advice, but in public health institutions more broadly.
For dietitians and public health professionals, this moment reinforces the importance of evidence-led processes, robust safeguards against conflicts of interest, and the meaningful inclusion of professional expertise in shaping guidance that supports health, equity, and trust – both now and in the future.
Unlike the US, there is currently no statutory requirement to regularly update UK dietary guidelines. The Eatwell Guide was last revised in 2016, following the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition’s 2015 review of carbohydrates and health, and has not been formally updated since.
MyNutriWeb, alongside partners, is involved in ongoing research and discussion around the future of UK dietary guidance, including how it might better reflect current evidence, sustainability, and equity considerations. If you are interested in learning more or getting involved, further information is available via a recent MyNutriWeb blog or you can get in touch at hello@mynutriweb.com.
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