The New Dietary Guidelines for Americans, Part I: What the Guidelines Got Right

What are the New Dietary Guidelines for Americans?  

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) recently released a new edition of the “Dietary Guidelines for Americans”.   Every five years since 1980, the USDA has issued new editions of these guidelines – and, historically, they have consisted of abysmally bad advice, more influenced by industry influence and politics than by what would actually be best for human health (Nina Teicholz offers a very well-researched breakdown of the sordid history of these guidelines, and the corresponding push for a high-carbohydrate and low-fat diet, in The Big Fat Surprise).

Since 1980, the guidelines, while shifting slightly, have pretty consistently all recommended a high-carbohydrate, low-fat (especially saturated fat), low-meat diet.  The most recent edition of the guidelines, for the first time ever, deviates dramatically from that mold: as the report itself says, “These Guidelines mark the most significant reset of federal nutrition policy in our nation’s history”.  Indeed they do.  How do the new guidelines differ from the nutrition advice we’ve gotten from the USDA over the last forty-five years, and what does it mean for you?

Why Does it Matter?

Obviously, the new guidelines, the political figures behind the new guidelines, and the whole question of whether or not there even should be official nutrition guidelines, are all contentious topics.  So, I’ll steer clear of all but the first one, the guidelines themselves.  Whether or not we should have official guidelines, we do, and it looks highly unlikely that that will change any time soon.  

All public school lunches need to follow the USDA’s nutrition guidelines.  So do the diets fed to prison inmates, as do the diets fed to those serving in the military.   Hospitals all follow these guidelines.  So, if you are a public school student, a prison inmate, are serving in the military, or find yourself at the mercy of hospital wait staff, the USDA guidelines effectively dictate what kind of diet you will get.

If you are not in one of these categories, you can eat whatever you want.  Having said that, I still think that the integrity of these guidelines is worth fighting tooth and nail for, even if most adults (like me) are at liberty to just ignore them when we think they’re stupid.  Why?  Most people don’t take the time to do their own nutrition research, and official guidelines in practice have a huge impact on public opinion about what’s healthy and what’s not. 

During the low-fat craze a couple decades ago, very few people had actually read the guidelines themselves, let alone done their own research to see if they held up to scientific scrutiny.  Having them in place had a “trickle-down” effect which hugely shaped public opinion, though.  Which is why, even though I think that everyone should do their own research and adopt a diet that they think is healthiest for them, in a world where I know that a majority of people simply won’t do that, having official guidelines which are actually good is so important.  

A Brief History of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans

The first set of guidelines, released in 1980, already stressed the importance of limiting saturated fat and cholesterol, and increasing fiber and starch – in other words, replacing dietary fat with more carbohydrates.  These high-carb, anti-fat trends were carried on in the now (in)famous Food Pyramid.

In 1992, the Food Pyramid was released.  Conspicuously, the base of the pyramid – a whopping 6-11 servings a day – was dedicated to grains and starches.  Meat, poultry, fish, and eggs were unceremoniously glumped together with beans and nuts and limited to a mere 2-3 servings a day, and fats and oils were relegated to the very top of the pyramid – “use sparingly” – along with “sweets”.

In 2005, the classic Food Pyramid was replaced with “MyPyramid” – the horizontal levels of the pyramid were replaced with vertical bars, but grains were still the biggest contribution, and meat had to share a very small, measly section along with beans.  2011 saw the introduction of “MyPlate” – fruits and vegetables were given more prominence than grains this time, but “protein” (including meat and eggs as well as beans, nuts, and soy – as if these are all nutritionally equal) made up less than ¼ of the plate.

Notably, in all of these guidelines, fats and oils either didn’t get their own category at all or were relegated to the “use sparingly” section with sweets.  

How Do the New Guidelines Differ From the Old Guidelines?

The new Dietary Guidelines explicitly describes itself as the biggest change to official recommendations since the Guidelines have existed.  The graphic powerfully depicts this – it’s hard not to read the inverted pyramid as intentionally symbolizing turning preexisting guidelines on their head.   What are the biggest ways that these new guidelines differ from the old ones?

The new guidelines are significantly simpler and easier for the layperson to understand than the old guidelines.  While the original 1980 guidelines were only 11 pages long, the reports got longer and more complicated with every new edition, until the 2020 report was a 164-page beast that no average person would ever read, except perhaps to treat insomnia.  The 2025 report is ten pages long.  There is a much longer appendix including the scientific rationale for the guidelines, which is well worth a read, but it’s nice that that part is relegated to an appendix, so that average people won’t feel too intimidated to actually read the guidelines. 

The biggest change to the guidelines is that there’s a new villain: processed foods have replaced animal fat as the biggest category of foods to avoid.  The new slogan is “eat real food”.  Previous guidelines paid lip service to avoiding processed foods, but avoiding saturated fat was clearly a bigger priority.  Now, Americans are advised to make avoiding processed foods a top priority and are told that the ideal amount of added sugar in the diet is zero. 

Older guidelines simply said to limit added sugar to less than 10% of total calories. Think about it – if you are eating 2,000 calories a day, that’s 50 grams of added sugar a day.  That’s a lot.  The new guidelines also very correctly point out that even “natural” fruit juice is an unnaturally concentrated source of sugar and should be minimized.  

The old guidelines harped on the importance of limiting fats, especially saturated fats.  Plant-based protein sources (including processed foods and soy products) and very lean meats were emphasized, and fatty meats discouraged.  Dairy products were supposed to be low-fat.  The new guidelines (with one glaring exception, to be discussed in an upcoming post) have all this anti-fat and anti-meat language removed.  Americans are now advised to eat eggs and red meat and drink full-fat whole milk and cook in olive oil, butter, and tallow.  

Finally, the guidelines finally mention a low-carbohydrate diet as an effective treatment for chronic diseases.  After so much low-carb prejudice, it’s nice to see low-carb finally mentioned as a legitimate option.  

What the New Guidelines Got Right

The guidance to eat real food and avoid processed foods is mostly good advice.  Obviously, “processed foods” is a vague term, and not all foods that have been processed are equally bad.   For example, bacon counts as processed meat, but I would not consider eating bacon once in a while (or on a regular basis, for that matter) to be a big deal.  Furthermore, there are real whole foods that are very high in fast-acting carbs and low in nutrients that can still cause problems for at least some people (such as rice and oats).  

Still, overall, the advice to avoid processed foods is good advice.  It pretty much means, by default, that people will be eating more meat, veggies, and fruit and less sugar, white flour, seed oils, and colorings and other additives, and that’s a very good thing.  

The new pyramid makes animal products and veggies the base, prioritizing nutrient-dense foods.  This is refreshing after the original Food Pyramid, which made grains and other fast-acting carbohydrates the main component of the diet, and MyPlate, which relegated meat and eggs to a measly little corner of the plate along with beans and soy products.  

Protein recommendations are increased to 1.2-1.6 grams per kilogram of bodyweight per day.  For somebody who weighs 150 pounds (roughly 68 kilograms), that’s between 81 and 109 grams of protein a day.  I would contend that many people could eat significantly more protein even than that and see no ill effect, but it is certainly better than the old guidelines, which say that most adults only need 46 to 56 grams of protein a day.  

The obsession with calories is significantly downplayed.  While the guidelines do stress that “The calories you need depend on your age, sex, height, weight, and level of physical activity” (which, of course, is true, but it also depends on where those calories are coming from), and advises people to “Pay attention to portion sizes, particularly for foods and beverages higher in calories”, the rest of the document focuses primarily on food quality and talks very little about calories.  

While lip service is still paid to limiting saturated fat – in a bizarre move that I will talk about more in an upcoming post – most of the anti-saturated fat rhetoric is removed from the guidelines.  Full-fat dairy and eggs and meat, including red meat, are encouraged.  Americans are advised to cook with olive oil, tallow, or butter. 

Seed oils are not really talked about much at all one way or another – while I would like to take it farther and actively discourage them, this is still a big step in the right direction, since most previous versions of the guidelines have actively encouraged their consumption.  If you do focus on whole foods, eliminate processed junk, and cook with olive oil or animal fat as the guidelines recommend, you will automatically remove most of the seed oils from your diet even if you are not directly intending to.  

The new guidelines give a shoutout to fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, and yogurt, and mention the importance of the microbiome.   This is a new and welcome development.  

Finally, while it is brief, the guidelines finally include a low-carb option!  While it is sparse on details, just acknowledging the legitimacy of a low-carb diet for chronic health conditions is a huge step in the right direction: “Individuals with certain chronic diseases may experience improved health outcomes when following a lower carbohydrate diet.”  Since the guidelines just mentioned diabetes, heart disease, and diabetes as especially pernicious chronic conditions, this actually would still imply that a low-carbohydrate diet could be considered by a significant portion of the population.

Ok, that’s what the new guidelines got right – and it’s actually a lot.  Of course, they’re not perfect though.  Stay-tuned for part two, where I discuss some of the things that I wish the new guidelines had done better on.