The new food pyramid is lying to you

If you take anything at all from the latest edition of the federal dietary guidelines, out this week, it should be… not much. Although US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described them as “the most significant reset of federal nutrition policy in history,” the new guidelines don’t reveal anything new about nutrition science, and most Americans can safely ignore them. (Luckily in this case, most already do.)

If you’re a weirdo like me, however, the guidance offers a fascinating glimpse into the Make America Healthy Again movement’s push to remake American food culture, as well as the limits of those aspirations. A lot of its advice, to the relief of nutritionists and to the annoyance of some members of the MAHA coalition, is consistent with the expert consensus that has long formed the foundation of US dietary guidelines. Yet the guidelines also make a show of dispensing with expertise and making provocative, ill-supported recommendations in the language of science.

“Depending on which part of it you look at, you can conclude that not much has changed or things have dramatically” changed, writes Kevin Klatt, an assistant professor in the department of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto. “There are multiple levels of contradictions and errors.”

Parts of the guidelines read less like a professional or policy document than as an aggrieved manifesto. “We are ending the war on protein,” the guidelines’ showy new website declares. Perhaps most strikingly, to that stated end, the new guidelines make an aggressive turn to recommending an abundance of animal-sourced foods — meat and dairy — putting them at odds with both the consensus in nutrition science and the federal government’s own expert advisers.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans, published every five years by the US Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services, aim to help the public make healthy food choices; they also directly govern what goes into billions of meals served every year through National School Lunch, and shape funding for other federal food programs. Most Americans know the dietary guidelines through their public-facing visual representations like the food pyramid and MyPlate, which replaced the classic pyramid design during the Obama administration.

The new 2025-2030 guidelines succeed the circular MyPlate with an inverted pyramid that places animal foods (including red meat and full-fat dairy) and vegetables and fruits at the top:

Reverting to a pyramid might seem like an odd choice, given how often the old one was criticized as confusing, and given Kennedy’s goal of making the new guidelines simple and clear. But it gets even stranger than that: This food pyramid doesn’t make sense on its own terms. The purpose of a pyramid design, as Klatt writes, is to “convey relative amounts of foods that should be consumed, with foods to be minimized displayed at the narrowing point and the base detailing the majority of what your diet should be.”

Yet the pyramid’s proportions don’t reflect the actual quantities of food that the guidelines recommend — those are not radically out of step with past guidelines. You’d struggle to meet fiber intake recommendations, for example, eating according to the pyramid, as Klatt points out. The image would make you think, Klatt writes, that “this intended to be a reduced carbohydrate diet pyramid, with a strong base of fatty meats and dairy and olive oil, and low starch vegetables, with sparing fruits and nuts and even fewer grains,” but this is not the case in the guidelines text.

It invites misinterpretation, winking at the meat-centric dieters and saturated-fat evangelists whose ideas Kennedy didn’t fully manage to smuggle into the written guidelines themselves. Seen in that light, turning the traditional pyramid upside down to create a new hierarchy of foods reads less as a usability decision than as an aesthetic and political one.

At the core of the new guidelines is a paradox. In many ways, they are not a radical departure from past guidance; numerous nutrition experts, for example, noted that the document didn’t change the recommended limit on saturated fat intake, despite Kennedy’s promises to end the “war on saturated fats.” (To hear Kennedy speak at the press conference, there have apparently been many wars going on over American food recommendations.) Yet the guidelines are also characteristic of the Trump administration’s tendency toward memetic rather than technocratic governance, and they reveal the blunders of trying to turn vibes and folk wisdom into a public health agenda.

The guidelines feature a central message — “EAT REAL FOOD” — that the administration describes as “common sense.” Emphasizing minimally processed foods is generally good advice, and there is admittedly something refreshing and inspiring in hearing the federal government champion whole foods so vocally. But “just eat real food” is a dubious proxy for nutrition knowledge, and it can misleadingly demonize forms of food and processing that are perfectly fine or beneficial (more on that later).

The new guidelines reasonably recommend stricter limits on added sugars, one of the greatest contributors to poor health in the US, and on refined grains such as white breads. “I think that’s the way it should be,” David Ludwig, a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a professor of nutrition at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, told me. “Those should be targeted for reduction.”

But MAHA instincts cash out most prominently in the guidelines’s central emphasis on eating meat, dairy, and eggs. The tone, text, and visual language of the guidelines make “protein foods” appear as the central food group, with animal foods depicted as the primary source. Plant-based options such as beans, lentils, and nuts are listed as protein options but are barely present and notably subservient to animal products in this food pyramid, and the scientific report released alongside the guidelines emphasizes the importance of animal proteins. The guidelines also instruct Americans to “consume dairy,” which in reality is not necessary for good health, and it’s not clear why fortified soy milk, which was included as an appropriate substitute for dairy in the previous guidelines, was excluded from this document.

This prioritization of animal proteins represents an explicit rejection of the recommendations of the scientific panel that advises the dietary guidelines, known as the dietary guidelines advisory committee. In late 2024, that panel urged the USDA and HHS to list plant foods like beans, lentils, and soy ahead of meat as recommended protein sources, because Americans could benefit from eating more of them — they’re associated with excellent long-term health outcomes and are rich in fiber, which, unlike meat and dairy, most Americans don’t get enough of.

But the Trump administration’s guidelines wholesale discard that idea, along with much of the rest of the committee’s advice; the new guidelines’ scientific report even implies that the advisory panel’s recommendations were ideologically rather than scientifically founded. (Perhaps this is an ideal place to point out that although Kennedy has vocally complained about industry influence on past nutrition guidance, he appears at peace with the numerous meat and dairy industry ties among the authors of the guidelines’ scientific report.)

“The thrust of nutrition science for the past several decades has been toward plant-based protein sources, and this reverses that,” Ludwig said.

At the same time, the guidelines also call for higher overall protein consumption — between 1.2 and 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, or about 82 to 109 grams for a 150-pound person. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing — some scientists believe a protein target in that range is beneficial, though it’s far from clear that it’s necessary. But combined with the guidelines’ focus on animal foods, the protein recommendation could easily be interpreted as an invitation to pile on more meat and dairy, foods that Americans already consume in large amounts, rather than fiber- and phytonutrient-dense plant proteins.

Meanwhile, the guidelines’ characterization of vegetarian and vegan diets can only be described as hostile and stigmatizing, enumerating an inflated list of potential nutrient shortfalls, some of which are not well-supported. This isn’t to say that there aren’t nutrients that need special attention in plant-based diets — there absolutely are — but they can be met fairly straightforwardly, and all dietary patterns come with nutritional trade-offs. The alarmism directed toward vegan diets in particular is a shame, because there are extremely good ethical and environmental reasons to avoid meat and dairy.

The new guidelines are littered with confusingly contradictory advice — limit saturated fat, but red meat and full-fat dairy are fine, and also consider cooking with butter and beef tallow! Focus on whole grains, but according to the guidelines’ website, preferred grains include “true sourdough.” There are also what appear to be outright errors: Olive oil is mentioned as a meaningful source of essential fatty acids, but it’s actually very low in them (though it’s still really healthy!).

This is evidence of an administration that seems to see nutrition guidance as a culture-war emblem rather than a careful public health policy instrument. Mercifully, and unlike in other parts of Kennedy’s agenda like the administration’s revised vaccine policies, the guidelines avoid the worst excesses of MAHA. They don’t go full-bore on the concept of “ultra-processed foods,” a paradigm that I’ve covered as highly problematic scientifically and too clumsy to be used in nutrition policy. (The short of it is: It includes forms of processing that nutrition science already knew are unhealthy, while also being wrong about a bunch of other things and sweeping foods that are processed in ways not harmful to health under its overly broad umbrella, like soy milk and many types of plant-based meats.)

But the new guidance still implements a version of this thinking through its framework of “highly processed foods.” The scientific appendices to the guidance include a lengthy list of “chemical additives and food packaging contaminants,” many of which may sound dubious but in fact are not harmful (like guar gum, a thickener made from guar beans).

What this administration calls “common sense” feels far from it. With nutrition as with nearly everything else, the MAHA agenda falls short of helping people healthfully navigate the modern world. The new guidelines won’t cut through Americans’ confusion about how to eat, nor will they, as Kennedy had hoped, successfully simplify the inherent complexity of nutrition science.

In the end, though, all this might just be so much sound and fury — most Americans, after all, don’t follow the government’s food rules anyway.