Remember that food pyramid you grew up on via the U.S. Dietary Guidelines? It’s about to get an update — and people are already mad about the proposal.
If you don’t remember those handy posters of the food pyramid from grade school, let us jog your memory. As Food & Wine reports, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines provide “advice on what to eat and drink to meet nutrient needs, promote health, and prevent disease,” the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) explains. The organization noted, it’s specifically written for a “professional audience, including policymakers, healthcare providers, nutrition educators, and Federal nutrition program operators.” Which, in turn, affects all of us. The guidelines are updated every five years, with the current edition expiring in 2025. That means a brand-new set of guidelines is on the horizon. Here’s what you need to know.
First, a little history of the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.
The U.S. Dietary Guidelines launched in 1980 as a joint initiative between the (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). “Each edition of the Dietary Guidelines reflects the current body of nutrition science,” the USDA noted.
The recommendations in 1980 were simple: Eat a variety of foods, maintain an “ideal” weight, avoid too much fat and cholesterol, eat foods with adequate starch and fiber, avoid too much salt, and if you drink alcohol, do so in moderation.
Over the years, the graphics for the guidelines have evolved to include a “range of amounts of food across three calorie levels” in 1992, to the addition of oils in 2005, to switching over to the “My Plate” graphic in 2011 to “help grab consumers’ attention with a new visual cue “that was meant to serve as a reminder for healthy eating, not intended to provide specific messages,” which was only slightly updated in 2020. Of course, the actual guidelines are much more in-depth. Here are the current 2020-2025 guidelines.
Who’s in charge of creating the guidelines?
The USDA and HHS still develop the Dietary Guidelines, but these groups rely heavily on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC). The 2025 committee is made up of 20 “nationally recognized nutrition and public health experts,” which include the chairperson Dr. Sarah Booth, the director of the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center and a professor at Tufts University, and vice chairperson Dr. Angela Odoms-Young, the director of the Food and Nutrition Education Program in the Division of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. (See the entire committee and all their bios here.)
The USDA noted that this year’s committee will “examine the relationship between diet and health across all life stages and will use a health equity lens across its evidence review to ensure factors such as socioeconomic status, race, ethnicity, and culture are described and considered to the greatest extent possible based on the information provided in the scientific literature and data.” This, it added, is to ensure the guidelines and advice are “relevant to people with diverse racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and cultural backgrounds.” Again, they will influence everything from nutrition labels to military rations to school meal programs.
So, what do the guidelines look like for 2025?
To be clear, the 2025 guidelines are still in draft form, and the committee does take feedback from the public before officially declaring the guidelines. (Of note, the committee says it received nearly 10,000 comments between January 19, 2023 and October 7, 2024, for this new update.) However, in late October, the committee held its seventh and final meeting, where the draft showed that its updates could include a more significant emphasis on plant-based diets, including fruits, veggies, legumes, and nuts, and more of a focus on seafood consumption. With that, the committee is (again, still in draft) recommending people limit their consumption of red and processed meats and limit foods high in saturated fats, salty snacks, and refined grains.
The potential recommendation for people to reduce their intake of red and processed meats quickly drew ire from the meat industry. Julie Anna Potts, president and CEO of the Meat Institute, shared that the suggestion to reduce meat is “alarming, disappointing and … contradictory to the committee’s other findings about nutritional deficiencies,” Agri-Pulse reported.
Shalene McNeill, the executive director of nutrition science at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, who is also a registered dietitian, stated, “It’s baffling that we are trying to get Americans to cut out red meat when the evidence indicates nutrient deficiencies and chronic disease are increasing as red meat consumption declines,” McNeill added that red meat contains “important nutrients including potassium, iron, and choline.”
Ethan Lane, the vice president of government affairs at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, had even stronger words, adding, “The preview meeting of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee this week stands out as one of the most out-of-touch, impractical, and elitist conversations in the history of this process.”
Another hotly debated potential change for 2025 concerns alcohol consumption. The current guidelines suggest two drinks or fewer per day for men and one drink or fewer per day for women. In the full text document, the guidelines add, “Emerging evidence suggests that even drinking within the recommended limits may increase the overall risk of death from various causes, such as from several types of cancer and some forms of cardiovascular disease.”
The updated guidelines were going to be informed by a study by the Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking (ICCPUD). However, in early 2024, a bipartisan group of 100 lawmakers sent a letter putting a stop to the study, calling it “inappropriate” for a committee dedicated to underage drinking to study adult use and not in line with the work already done by the Department of Agriculture.
“The secretive process at ICCPUD and the concept of original research on adult alcohol consumption by a committee tasked with preventing underage drinking jeopardizes the credibility of ICCPUD and its ability to continue its primary role of helping the nation prevent underage drinking,” the letter read in part.
During the last two meetings, Agri-Pulse reported, Booth said that the DGAC did not review scientific evidence on alcohol as it’s part of a separate agency effort. However, Agri-Pulse noted that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are conducting scientific reviews on adult alcohol consumption. Its findings are expected by the end of the year. The findings, the DGAC added, “will help HHS and USDA develop alcoholic beverages guidance to include in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025-2030.” Here’s more about the ongoing study on adult alcohol use.
What comes next?
After the draft by the advisory committee is completed, they will send it to the USDA and HHS, who will then “release the updated Dietary Guidelines and work with Federal, state, and local partners to implement the new edition.”
However, just because they recommend it doesn’t mean the government heeds the advice. In 2020, under the first Trump administration, the federal government rejected the committee’s recommended advice to have people cut their consumption of added sugars to 6 percent of their daily calorie intake and rejected its advice for adult men and women to limit their daily alcohol consumption to one drink a day.
“I’m stunned by the whole thing,” Marion Nestle, author and professor emerita of nutrition and food studies at New York University, shared with the New York Times at the time. “Despite repeated claims that the guidelines are science-based, the Trump agencies ignored the recommendation of the scientific committee they had appointed and instead reverted to the recommendation of the previous guidelines.”
—
Photo Credit: Billion Photos / Shutterstock.com