\n<\/p>\n
Every five years, America\u2019s top nutrition experts jockey to be part of a rite of passage in the field. The federal government chooses a small group of researchers to serve on a committee that spends months poring over scientific literature to answer questions such as: What is the relationship between sweetened beverages and risk of type 2 diabetes? And how does eating saturated fat influence a person\u2019s chance of heart disease? The end result is something called the Dietary Guidelines for Americans<\/em>\u2014in other words, the government\u2019s official nutrition recommendations. The whole process might seem a bit excessive, if not pointless. Presumably, few Americans even know about this document, and even fewer intentionally use it to guide what they eat. But the recommendations touch the diets of tens of millions of Americans, affecting what food is served in schools and in the military. They also influence the food industry. After the dietary guidelines began more explicitly warning about the risks of added sugar, several major food companies committed to reducing added sugar in their products.<\/p>\n Those guidelines are now on the brink of getting MAHA-ed. It just so happens that 2025 marks five years since the previous version, so they\u2019re now due for an update. Much of the work has already been completed. In December, the Biden administration released the scientific report that is supposed to undergird the guidelines. But Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has since promised to start from scratch and remake the recommendations to match his convictions about how Americans should be eating. Last month, he told Congress that the new dietary guidelines could be released \u201cbefore August,\u201d teasing big changes. The current version of the document is 149 pages. The forthcoming update, he said, will stand at just four pages that tell people to \u201ceat whole food; eat the food that\u2019s good for you.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond that, RFK Jr. hasn\u2019t given any more specifics on what his dietary guidelines will include. (A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson didn\u2019t respond to a request for comment.) It\u2019s a reasonable bet that RFK Jr. will come after his least-favorite foods, such as seed oils, ultra-processed snacks, and synthetic food dyes. If so, he will pave the way for the MAHA diet to become part of many more people\u2019s lives. Kennedy\u2019s dietary guidelines could have a much larger impact on what Americans eat than anything else he has done to date.<\/p>\n For all of his big talk about how Americans are eating unhealthy food that\u2019s making us sick, RFK Jr. has had only middling success so far at enacting change in his short tenure as health secretary. Take food dyes: Kennedy has tried to rid the food supply of most dyes through a handshake agreement with the food industry. The agreement allows food-company executives to decide for themselves whether and when to phase out these products. But by formally discouraging food dyes in the dietary guidelines, Kennedy could effectively block their use in millions of school lunches. Although the lunch program does not need to follow the guidelines word for word, it must be \u201cconsistent with the goals\u201d of the government\u2019s official recommendations.<\/p>\n Even if Kennedy doesn\u2019t outright use the dietary guidelines to come for synthetic dyes or any other MAHA villain, his promise to keep the guidelines to just four pages\u2014essentially a leaflet\u2014would mean trashing much of the existing nutritional advice. Nevertheless, RFK Jr. might be onto something, at least directionally. Consider the 2020 version of the dietary guidelines. I read all 149 pages, and at times, they left me utterly perplexed about what a healthy meal actually looks like. The word guidelines<\/em> implies simple instructions that a person can actually follow. \u201cDon\u2019t eat Oreos\u201d would be a useful nutrition guideline\u2014one that I, myself, should observe more often. \u201cCustomize and Enjoy Food and Beverage Choices to Reflect Personal Preferences, Cultural Traditions, and Budgetary Considerations\u201d is not. The report advocates, for example, that people meet their \u201cfood group needs with nutrient-dense foods and beverages,\u201d but it struggles to explain exactly what makes a food nutrient-dense. If the concept seems self-explanatory, consider that the guidelines claim that both vegetable oil and sparkling water are nutrient-dense. (They also state that a nutrient-dense burrito bowl would have sliced avocado, but a \u201ctypical burrito bowl\u201d would have guacamole.)<\/p>\n Look, nutrition can be complicated. And this is not to say that the guidelines are entirely useless. They do, for example, outline the amount of vegetables that the average person should eat in a day: two and a half cups. But clear directives like these are the exception. Part of the issue is that the dietary guidelines are not written for regular people with questions about their diet. In the early 2000s, the guidelines changed from a document explicitly focused on providing everyday people with actionable advice into a report whose stated goal, according to the heads of the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services at the time, was \u201cto be a primary source of dietary health information for policymakers, nutrition educators, and health providers.\u201d But the fact that the document is meant for experts doesn\u2019t obviate the need for its overarching message to at least be decipherable to the public.<\/p>\n In Kennedy\u2019s telling, the guidelines\u2019 increasing complexity over time is the nefarious work of the food industry. Before even being nominated to lead HHS, Kennedy posted a video decrying that \u201ccorporate interests have hijacked\u201d the guidelines. When he promised lawmakers last month to cut the document down to four pages, he also alleged that the guidelines were \u201cclearly written by industry.\u201d It\u2019s true that a sizable portion of the experts who have served on the advisory panel developing the guidelines have had ties to the food industry. One study found that 19 of the 20 experts on the advisory committee for the 2020 guidelines had conflicts of interest. (It\u2019s common for nutrition experts to receive funding from food companies for their research.)<\/p>\n But there\u2019s another potential explanation for the bloat plaguing the guidelines. \u201cI don\u2019t think a conspiracy theory is needed here,\u201d Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition at NYU who served on the dietary-guidelines advisory committee in 1995, told me via email. She added that every committee \u201cthought it had to improve on what was done previously.\u201d Consider the 1980 guidelines, a mere 18 pages in total. By 2000, the size of the document had more than doubled, to 39 pages. By 2010, 95 pages. The growing complexity of the guidelines is all the more perplexing because the government\u2019s overarching advice on how to eat healthier hasn\u2019t changed that much over the past 35 years. \u201cThey all say the same thing no matter how many pages they use: eat more plant foods; restrict salt, sugar, saturated fat; balance calories,\u201d Nestle said.<\/p>\n One of Kennedy\u2019s particular skills is finding messages that get through to people. So many of his views on nutrition seem to have resonated precisely because they are not full of mealy-mouthed verbiage and caveats. It\u2019s easier to grasp that seed oils are poisonous than it is to understand the nuances of how the fatty acids in these oils are digested in the body. For Kennedy to actually benefit Americans\u2019 health, however, his guidelines still have to reflect reality. (You shouldn\u2019t freak out about seed oils.) Going too far in simplifying dietary messages could further degrade the credibility of the guidelines all the same, warns Michael Pollan, the writer who\u2019s perhaps the most famous concise food messenger. \u201cThe challenge always is: How do you simplify science without distorting it?\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n Kennedy\u2019s views of individual ingredients oscillate between commonsense dietary maxims and conspiratorial musings. His views about the risks of added sugar, for example, are far more scientifically founded than his love of beef tallow. That is one of the most troubling elements of Kennedy\u2019s tenure as HHS secretary: Especially when it comes to food, he mixes mainstream views with conspiracy theories. No one can predict exactly which of these views he will glom on to from one day to the next\u2014or which will appear in four pages of dietary guidelines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Every five years, America\u2019s top nutrition experts jockey to be part of a rite of passage in the field. The federal government chooses a small group of researchers to serve on a committee that spends months poring over scientific literature to answer questions such as: What is the relationship between sweetened beverages and risk of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9601,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[473,1285,2001,2003,2000,2002,789],"class_list":{"0":"post-9600","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-american","9":"tag-big","10":"tag-chance","11":"tag-diet","12":"tag-jr-s","13":"tag-maha","14":"tag-rfk"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9600"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9600\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}