The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are the best yet for American consumers — and, possibly, for ecological farmers
“The message is simple: Eat real food.”
That’s how USDA’s 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, just released this January, begins.
“To make America Healthy Again, we must return to the basics. American households must prioritize diets built on whole, nutrient-dense foods — protein, dairy, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, and whole grains.”
Accompanying this statement is — in my opinion — the best graphic the USDA has ever made for dietary guidelines. The most recent iteration, which replaces MyPlate, was boring. So was MyPyramid, that short-lived colourful abstraction from the 2000s. The 1995 food pyramid looked cool, with all its little drawings of food, but was highly criticized for its hierarchal implications.
The Eat Real Food graphic is a triangle (not an inverted pyramid, as some critics call it) emphasizing just three food categories: protein, dairy, and healthy fats; vegetables and fruits; and whole grains. Each category is illustrated by tasty-looking drawings, all of which — except perhaps for the canned green beans — represent fresh, whole foods.
Most importantly, for the first time ever, the new dietary guidelines say that there is no place for highly processed foods in a healthy diet. This is what organic farmers have been saying ever since the 1930s, but for over a century, the USDA has said that all foods — including white bread, white sugar and processed foods — can be part of a healthy diet in moderation. They’ve never said to completely avoid highly processed foods.
Until now.
History of the Guidelines
As nutritionist Marion Nestle explains in her 2002 book Food Politics, the USDA has been issuing recommendations on what Americans should eat for over a hundred years. The 1917 USDA pamphlet How to Select Foods grouped essential foods into five groups: fruits and vegetables, meats and other protein-rich foods, cereals and other starchy foods, sweets, and fatty foods. Yes, that’s right — USDA actually recommended that people eat sugar every day.
In the 1920s and 1930s, nutritionists discovered the importance of vitamins and minerals for preventing deficiency diseases like pellagra, beriberi and scurvy. Since the vitamins were discovered before they could be synthesized and sold as supplements, nutritionists recommended that people get their vitamins and minerals from “protective foods.” These fell into three categories: whole grains (essential sources of B vitamins); green leafy and yellow-orange vegetables and fruits (vitamins C and A); and butter, whole milk, eggs and animal organ meats like liver (vitamin A).
By the 1930s, the USDA incorporated protective foods into their guidelines but still included sugar as a separate food group and kept white flour at the center of the “cereal” category. Leaders of the early organic movement went much further, seeing no place for white flour or sugar in any healthy diet and recommending only whole grains.
The number of food groups changed over the years, eventually settling down to four or five — meat, dairy, fruits, vegetables and grains. Since 1980, a new version of the dietary guidelines has been released every five years. Because these guidelines serve as the basis for school lunch, WIC, and other government-funded food purchasing programs, every sector of the food industry lobbies to ensure that they can fit their product somewhere into the guidelines as “healthy.”
That’s why, despite always seeking input from nutrition experts, the guidelines have never truly reflected what the best possible diet would look like. The 2025–2030 guidelines don’t, either. But they’ve taken several major steps toward that goal.
Avoid Highly Processed Foods
“Avoid highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet, such as chips, cookies, and candy,” the new guidelines state. Next, they warn to “avoid sugar-sweetened beverages, such as sodas.” They say that “no amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners is recommended or considered part of a healthy or nutritious diet.” And they specifically note that “no amount of added sugars is recommended” for children. No more candy for kids.
This is unprecedented.
Previous guidelines never straight-out endorsed highly processed foods, but they always said that they could be part of an otherwise healthy diet. And they usually said to limit added sugars to 10 per cent of total calories, which can still be quite a lot. Historically, USDA has never taken a strong stance against added sugars. But this is exactly what the organic movement has been urging since the 1930s.
Another huge change is the recommendation to “Focus on Whole Grains.” Up through the last iteration of Dietary Guidelines (2020–2025), the USDA still only recommended that half your grains be whole. The new guidelines say to “prioritize fiber-rich whole grains” and “significantly reduce the consumption of highly processed, refined carbohydrates, such as white bread, ready-to-eat or packaged breakfast options, flour tortillas, and crackers.” That cuts out most of the “grains” pictured on the bottom of the 1995 food pyramid.
Again, this is huge. Nutritionists have known since the 1920s that refined grains — white flour, white rice and de-germinated cornmeal — were major contributors to deficiency disease. Whole grains, in contrast, are protective foods. But starting in the 1940s, the USDA took the stance that enriched white flour was healthy, even though enrichment only restores a handful of the nutrients removed in processing. This is the first time ever that an official USDA publication has recommended that all grains in a healthy diet be whole.
Overemphasis on Meat and Dairy?
Interestingly, most media reports have ignored the new guidelines’ unprecedented endorsement of whole grains. They’re more concerned about the heavy emphasis on protein, especially animal-based protein. The new guidelines say to eat more protein than necessary, and the prominent steak on the new food triangle definitely shows the influence of the beef lobby.
Despite the meat-heavy emphasis, there is a section for vegetarians and vegans, with the sound advice to “consume a variety of whole foods” and “significantly limit highly processed vegan or vegetarian foods that can include added fats, sugars, and salt.” It’s a good reminder that many vegan foods (especially fake meat products) are highly processed. A healthy vegan diet will avoid those and emphasize minimally processed beans, nuts and seeds instead.
The most controversial part of the new guidelines is that they reverse USDA’s decades-old recommendation to eat low- or nonfat dairy products. The recommendations now encourage full-fat but unsweetened dairy products. The accompanying “Whole Milk for Healthy Kids Act” allows schools to offer whole milk in lunch programs instead of just 1 percent or skim. Butter, for the first time ever, is prominently featured right at the middle of the triangle, rubbing shoulders with an avocado and olive oil.
Old-school nutritionists, who still think saturated fat is a major cause of heart disease, lament this change. But the data linking saturated fat to heart disease has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, and there has never actually been a correlation between per capita butter, beef, cheese, egg or milk consumption and heart disease. While historians are still debating the cause of the mid-century spike in heart attacks, there’s little evidence that eating beef or butter had anything to do with it.
Confusingly, the new guidelines still recommend keeping saturated fat intake below 10 per cent of total calories, which would be difficult to do when consuming as much full-fat dairy and meat as the guidelines recommend. It’s unclear why this outdated recommendation wasn’t removed.
Strangely, the other main criticism of the new guidelines is that the document is too short. It’s only 10 pages long; the 2020–2025 guidelines had 164 obfuscating pages that made it difficult to quickly figure out what the actual recommendations were. The big difference is that the new guidelines are targeted directly at consumers, not dieticians. Nobody needs a degree in nutrition to understand what “eat real food” means.
Best Yet
What should eco-farmers make of the new guidelines? As Joel Salatin pointed out in a January 9 blog post, production methods aren’t mentioned. The guidelines don’t, for example, even mention that grassfed beef and dairy have a healthier fatty acid profile than conventional products. They don’t put as much emphasis on vegetables as they could, nor do they recommend that people choose organic produce. But to be fair, no dietary guidelines have ever said anything about production methods.
Overall — aside from the obvious beef and dairy lobby influences — the new guidelines are a huge breakthrough in acknowledging the importance of whole, natural, minimally processed foods. They are the first ever to recommend that people consume only whole grains, no highly processed foods, and no added sugars (especially for children). They’re the closest thing to what organic farmers of the 1940s were recommending that the USDA has ever put out.
Are the guidelines perfect? No. Are they the best yet? Yes. And if people actually listen to them and start eating more unprocessed, whole foods, it will only be one more small step to get them eating grassfed animal products, organic produce and regeneratively grown whole grains.
