Let Them Eat Real Food

The new dietary guidelines place the burden of a broken food system on individuals

I’m writing this while eating a bowl of blueberries in kefir with honey drizzled on top. Yesterday, I ate a bowl of Grape-Nuts midday after realizing it was 2 p.m., and I hadn’t eaten anything. Washed it down with a crispy Diet Coke and a handful of peanut M&Ms before rushing off to my next meeting.

It’s about balance.

My approach to food and feeding my kids is that I don’t vilify or prohibit any one food or class of foods. Snacking is not off limits. I have days when I eat “better” than others. I do my best to emphasize veggies, fruits, and fiber-rich foods. I try to eat something green with every meal. My kids enjoy snack plates with carrots, apples, cucumbers, radishes, and celery. Their favorite thing is steamed artichokes dipped in a mayo-Worcestershire concoction, courtesy of my husband’s family’s Appalachian roots. But then they’ll also eat Oreos and Cheetos while watching movies (just follow the orange dust trail).

This is what normal eating looks like for many families. A mix. Good days and less good days. Artichokes and Oreos.

I mention all of this because the new 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans dropped this week, and the central message is: Eat Real Food.

There’s a slick new website (realfood.gov), catchy graphics, and a revamped food pyramid. I’ll give them this: the marketing is top tier. That was the first thing most of my public health colleagues and I noticed. Wow, they’re really good at PR and branding.

But branding isn’t policy. And when you dig into what these guidelines actually say, and what they don’t, things get messier.

The MAHA movement has tapped into something real, a widespread frustration that Americans are sick and that the status quo isn’t working. That frustration is legitimate. When I participated in a debate on whether RFK Jr. is good for American health, I noticed that most people supporting him couldn’t name specific policies he was proposing. They just knew he was advocating for something different. I understand that impulse. I share the goal of improving American health. I just wish the execution matched the ambition.

Let’s discuss…

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My brilliant friend, Dr. Kevin Klatt, a nutrition scientist, wrote an incredibly detailed breakdown that I’d encourage everyone to read in full. I’m going to summarize some of his key points here, but the nuance is worth your time.

The short version: These guidelines are internally contradictory, vaguely written, and likely unenforceable. A few highlights:

The math doesn’t math. The guidelines recommend full-fat dairy, fatty meats, and cooking with butter or beef tallow while also retaining the recommendation that saturated fat stay below 10% of daily calories. Kevin did the math: three cups of whole milk alone get you to about 6% of your daily saturated fat on a 2,000-calorie diet. There’s almost no room left for the steak and eggs featured prominently in the new food pyramid. These two recommendations cannot coexist.

“Highly processed” means nothing. The guidelines introduce this new term but don’t actually define it. Past guidelines included quantifiable limits, like “no more than 10% of calories from added sugars,” because that’s what allows for enforcement in federal programs. You can put a number on a school lunch tray. Without a real definition, “avoid highly processed foods” sounds good but does nothing operationally.

The evidence standards shift depending on the conclusion. When dismissing decades of research on replacing saturated fats with polyunsaturated fats, the bar is set impossibly high: only large randomized controlled trials with hard disease endpoints will do. But when justifying the new high-protein recommendations? Suddenly, short-term weight loss studies in people actively dieting are sufficient.

Health equity? Never heard of her. The advisory committee’s report included a health equity lens. It’s gone. In a country where race, income, and geography dramatically shape what people can access and afford to eat, pretending dietary guidance exists in a vacuum is a missed opportunity.

And there are errors. Incorrect calorie math on a yogurt label in the scientific review. Protein serving equivalents that don’t add up to meet the guidelines’ own targets. A recommendation to cook with oils “containing essential fatty acids like olive oil” when olive oil is notably low in essential fatty acids, and their own appendix argues against cooking with essential fatty acids anyway. These kinds of mistakes raise questions about the level of nutrition expertise involved in the review process.

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Take my breakfast and lunch yesterday as an example of how incoherent this gets.

I ate a bowl of full-fat kefir with blueberries and honey for breakfast. Under the old guidelines, that kefir was supposed to be low-fat or fat-free to fit the recommendations. Under the new guidelines, full-fat kefir is actively encouraged. It is called out by name in a new “gut health” section on fermented foods, so overnight, my usual kefir bowl got an upgrade.

But my midday Grape-Nuts and Diet Coke? Under the old guidelines, both were fine. Grape-Nuts is high-fiber, whole grain, basically just wheat and barley. A sensible, boring choice. Under the new guidelines, both are now considered “highly processed” and are explicitly discouraged because they’re packaged and ready-to-eat. Low-calorie sweeteners are specifically listed as something to avoid.

If Grape-Nuts is “highly processed,” the term has lost all meaning.

Same person. Same foods. Very different interpretations of nutrition, depending on which guidelines you read.

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What bothers me most, though, is the fundamental assumption baked into “Eat Real Food.”

The framing assumes that Americans are eating processed foods because we’ve been tricked into thinking they’re healthy. That if we just had the right information, we’d all be roasting whole chickens and steaming artichokes every night.

But that’s not why most people eat processed foods.

People eat processed foods because they are cheap. Because they are accessible. Because a single parent working two jobs doesn’t have three hours to cook from scratch. Because in a lot of neighborhoods, the corner store or the dollar store is what’s available. Because cooking from scratch requires equipment, storage, time, and skills that not everyone has. Because when you’re stretching a grocery budget to feed a family, you’re not confused about nutrition. You’re doing math.

Telling people to “eat real food” without addressing any of that isn’t guidance. It’s judgment and guilt-mongering. It places the burden of fixing a broken food system entirely on individuals who are already navigating impossible constraints.

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I’m also thinking about what this means for schools. (My kids eat school lunch every day. On a good day, I’ll stick some carrot sticks and a bag of pretzels in their bag.)

Federal nutrition programs, including school lunches, are required to align with the Dietary Guidelines. That’s the whole point of having guidelines: they translate into actual policy for programs that feed millions of people.

But these guidelines make that nearly impossible. School nutrition directors are now supposed to meet a saturated fat cap while serving full-fat dairy. They’re supposed to avoid “highly processed” foods without any definition of what that means, and without funding to overhaul their kitchens for scratch cooking.

What about kids who are dairy-free or lactose intolerant? The Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics points out that the guidelines largely ignore them. The fortified plant-based alternatives those kids rely on would, by definition, be “highly processed” under this framework.

If implementation is impossible, then the guidelines aren’t really meant to govern. They’re meant to message.

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And the messaging tells us something about who these guidelines are for…

Have you looked at the new food pyramid? It’s dominated by animal products. Fatty cuts of steak, whole cartons of milk, large wedges of cheese, a whole turkey. The plant proteins, which the text of the guidelines groups equivalently with animal sources, are barely visible. Kevin notes that they’re represented by literally one nut of each type and a can of green beans. No lentils. No chickpeas. No soy.

The administration hasn’t been subtle about the political calculus. There’s been explicit messaging about supporting ranchers and farmers.

To be clear: I have tremendous respect for farmers and ranchers. They do hard, essential work, and they’ve faced real economic pressures. They deserve substantive policy support, things like fair pricing, sustainable land management programs, and protections against consolidation by large agricultural corporations.

What they’re getting instead is their image on a nutrition website. That’s not support. That’s symbolism. Using dietary guidelines as a vehicle for agricultural politics doesn’t actually help farmers or public health. It muddles the purpose of both.

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I’m an omnivore. I eat meat. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But I also understand the evidence on limiting red meat for heart health. I enjoy a glass of Malbec as much as anyone, but I understand that alcohol, even in moderation, increases cancer risk. The American Cancer Society’s guidelines recommend limiting red and processed meat and state that, for cancer prevention, it’s best not to drink at all.

So I genuinely don’t understand this: an administration that has been extremely vocal about chronic disease, about obesity, about the health crisis facing American children, has produced guidelines that remove quantitative limits on alcohol and promote red meat and saturated fat at levels that conflict with cardiovascular guidance.

The American Heart Association‘s response was telling. They welcomed parts of the guidelines but expressed concern that recommendations around red meat and salt “could inadvertently lead consumers to exceed recommended limits for sodium and saturated fats, which are primary drivers of cardiovascular disease.”

If you’re going to make chronic disease your signature issue, shouldn’t your dietary guidelines address the things that cause chronic disease?

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One more observation.

The MAHA movement has built its brand on calling out institutional capture: Pharma owns the FDA. Vaccine manufacturers control the CDC. Doctors are bought and paid for.

But look at these guidelines. The explicit messaging about supporting ranchers. The food pyramid dominated by animal products. The predetermined conclusions that saturated fat is fine and seed oils are bad, with a scientific review clearly constructed to justify positions already taken.

I don’t think industry influence is inherently corrupting. Experts need funding. Industry knowledge can be valuable. But the selective outrage is revealing. When it’s pharma, it’s corruption. When it’s agriculture, it’s just supporting American farmers. Why is that?

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If we actually want to improve how Americans eat, the answer isn’t a catchier tagline. It’s making produce cost-competitive with processed foods. It’s addressing food deserts. It’s adequately funding SNAP. It’s investing in school food infrastructure. It’s supporting working families with time and resources.

A slick website costs almost nothing and accomplishes almost nothing. But it makes for effective messaging.

In the meantime, I’ll be over here with my kefir and my Diet Coke, doing my best. Like everyone else.

Stay Curious,

Unbiased Science