black boy eating blueberries in school
By dgoode - February 1, 2026

Last month, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) released its long-awaited 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The Guidelines reinforce widely-supported advice to eat more fruits and vegetables and limit added sugars and highly processed foods. But troublingly, they also contradict key recommendations made by the Dietary Guidelines’ own scientific advisory committee.

Updated every five years, the Dietary Guidelines shape nutrition standards nationwide. The scientific basis for the Guidelines comes from the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, an expert panel charged with reviewing the best available evidence.1 For the 2025–2030 Guidelines, the Committee stressed plant-forward eating as a key strategy to fight chronic disease. It advised increasing intake of plant proteins such as beans, peas and lentils, while also lowering consumption of red and processed meats. It even proposed listing plant proteins before animal products, underscoring their importance in a healthy diet.2

The recommendations by the Advisory Committee sent a clear message: plant-forward diets are healthy, practical and supported by science. Indeed, decades of research—including Loma Linda University’s famed Adventist Health Studies—have documented how diets rich in fruits, vegetables, grains and plant proteins and low in animal products are associated with lower rates of diabetes, obesity, hypertension and cancer.3,4

When the Dietary Guidelines were released on January 7, however, they told a different story. Despite the Advisory Committee’s call to prioritize plant proteins and reduce meat consumption, the new pyramid placed steak, cheese, beef and full-fat dairy at the top. The shift has certainly drawn concern from experts. As Dr. Deirdre Tobias, who served on the Advisory Committee, put it, “the biggest deviation from the science is a new prioritization of animal sources within the protein food group, instead of a plant-forward pattern.”5

The messaging around saturated fat adds to the confusion. Technically, the Guidelines preserve long-standing recommendations to keep saturated fat below 10% of daily calories. Yet the Guidelines also promote foods like cheese and meat—the two leading sources of saturated fat in the American diet.6 In practice, this makes the recommendation nearly impossible to follow. A single cup of cheddar cheese or an eight-ounce ribeye steak could easily put someone over the daily limit.

So what happened? Warning signs started appearing months before the Guidelines were released. After hearing that the Advisory Committee was favoring plant proteins, industry groups began to push back. The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association called the recommendations “questionable,” citing a study funded by the beef industry itself.7 A lobbying group called the Meat Institute attacked the idea that Americans should be eating less processed and red meat (this despite the World Health Organization having classified processed meat as a known carcinogen and red meat as a probable carcinogen more than a decade ago).8,9 Leadership also began to show cracks. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was co-leading the development of the final guidelines, was also simultaneously promoting saturated fat consumption.10

What has since come to light is even more concerning. The Trump administration had quietly convened its own panel to “address and correct deficiencies” in the Advisory Committee’s report.  Of the nine hand-picked experts on the panel, eight had ties to organizations such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the Texas Beef Council, General Mills, the National Dairy Council and the National Pork Board.11 The level of corporate involvement was severe enough that the D.C.-based Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a formal petition for the administration to withdraw the Guidelines, citing unlawful industry influence.

These developments may help explain why the final Dietary Guidelines look so different from the Advisory Committee’s recommendations, and the results are nutrition recommendations shaped more by politics than evidence. Amid the turmoil surrounding these guidelines, however, it’s important that we not lose sight of who ultimately will be bearing the consequences: the American public.

Author Bio

Keri Rosen, DO, MSc

Keri Rosen, DO, MSc

Dr. Rosen is a board-certified family and lifestyle medicine physician and a current Plus One Fellow in the Loma Linda Preventive Medicine Residency. She is passionate about plant-based nutrition, public health and food policy. When she is not working in the clinic or on community projects, she enjoys reading, traveling, connecting with friends and family, exploring California’s mountains and discovering new coffee spots.

References

  1. U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. (n.d.). Process to develop the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. DietaryGuidelines.gov. https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/about-dietary-guidelines/process
  2. 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. (2024). Scientific Report of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee: Advisory report to the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Secretary of Agriculture (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services & U.S. Department of Agriculture). https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/Scientific_Report_of_the_2025_Dietary_Guidelines_Advisory_Committee_508c.pdf
  3. Almuntashiri, S. A., Alsubaie, F. F., & Alotaybi, M. (2025). Plant-Based Diets and Their Role in Preventive Medicine: A Systematic Review of Evidence-Based Insights for Reducing Disease Risk. Cureus, 17(2), e78629. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.78629
  4. Orlich, M. J., & Fraser, G. E. (2014). Vegetarian diets in the Adventist Health Study 2: a review of initial published findings. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 100 Suppl 1(1), 353S–8S. https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.113.071233
  5. Roeder, A. (2026, January 8). Understanding the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/understanding-the-new-dietary-guidelines-for-americans/
  6. Wambogo, E. A., Ansai, N., Terry, A., Fryar, C., & Ogden, C. (2023). Dairy, Meat, Seafood, and Plant Sources of Saturated Fat: United States, Ages Two Years and Over, 2017-2020. The Journal of nutrition, 153(9), 2689–2698. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2023.06.040
  7. National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. (2024, December 10). NCBA responds to Dietary Guidelines report and reiterates role of beef in a healthy diet. https://www.ncba.org/news-media/news/details/41293/ncba-responds-to-dietary-guidelines-report-and-reiterates-role-of-beef-in-a-healthy-diet
  8. The Meat Institute. (2025, February 11). Meat Institute: HHS and USDA dietary guidelines should include meat as part of a healthy American diet. https://www.meatinstitute.org/press/meat-institute-hhsusda-dietary-guidelines-americans-should-include-meat-part-healthy-american
  9. American Cancer Society. (2024, August 1). Known and probable human carcinogens. https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/understanding-cancer-risk/known-and-probable-human-carcinogens.html
  10. Todd, S. (2025, November 12). What Kennedy’s saturated fat guidelines would mean for American health. STAT. https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/12/is-saturated-fat-bad-new-dietary-guidelines-maha-vs-science/
  11. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. (2026, January 7). New dietary guidelines were written by authors with strong ties to the food industry, doctors report. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/new-dietary-guidelines-were-written-authors-strong-ties-food-industry-doctors