New US dietary guidelines urge less sugar, more protein – and make a nod to beef tallow

By Jacqueline Howard, Katherine Dillinger, Tami Luhby, CNN

(CNN) — New US dietary guidelines released Wednesday echo past advice, but also include nods to US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement — urging Americans to prioritize protein and “healthy fats” and limit their consumption of ultraprocessed foods and added sugar.

“My message is clear: Eat real food,” Kennedy said during a White House briefing on Wednesday.

The previous guidelines, issued in 2020, featured almost 150 pages of extensive advice on how to follow a healthy diet and incorporate healthy foods into Americans’ diets at every age. The new recommendations from HHS and the US Department of Agriculture fulfill Kennedy’s promise that they will run only a few pages, but they were to be supplemented with hundreds more pages of research and justification.

The latest update includes images of an inverted pyramid that puts meats, cheese and vegetables in the widest part at the top, flipping a longstanding visual of the American diet and moving away from the circular MyPlate.

Officials say that following the guidance “can help prevent the onset or slow the rate of progression of chronic disease” — a tentpole topic of the MAHA movement. In addition to advice on protein, sugar and processed foods, they also tell Americans, when adding fats to meals, to “prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil. Other options can include butter or beef tallow,” another favorite of Kennedy’s.

The updated guidelines raised questions among some experts who worried they put too much emphasis on red meat and dairy products, but also garnered early approval from some influential voices.

“The American Medical Association applauds the Administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for spotlighting the highly processed foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, and excess sodium that fuel heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic illnesses,” AMA President Dr. Bobby Mukkamala, an otolaryngologist—head and neck surgeon, said in a statement. “The Guidelines affirm that food is medicine and offer clear direction patients and physicians can use to improve health.”

The American Heart Association said it commends the emphasis on eating more vegetables, fruits and whole grains while limiting consumption of added sugars, refined grains, highly processed foods, saturated fats and sugary drinks. But the association has concerns around the guidelines’ protein recommendations.

“We are concerned that recommendations regarding salt seasoning and red meat consumption could inadvertently lead consumers to exceed recommended limits for sodium and saturated fats, which are primary drivers of cardiovascular disease. While the guidelines highlight whole-fat dairy, the Heart Association encourages consumption of low-fat and fat-free dairy products, which can be beneficial to heart health,” the AHA statement said, urging more research on what protein amounts.

“Pending that research, we encourage consumers to prioritize plant-based proteins, seafood and lean meats and to limit high-fat animal products including red meat, butter, lard and tallow, which are linked to increased cardiovascular risk.”

The guidance shapes school meals, the Women, Infants and Children program or WIC and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP. Local health departments also will be looking at these updated dietary guidelines closely.

“The primary benefit of the dietary guidelines is to provide people with a tool that helps them stay on the track to being healthy. We have an obesity epidemic in this country that is causing chronic disease extensively,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive officer at the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “Diet and exercise guidelines help us get people focused on how to stay healthy and avoid chronic conditions.”

What’s in the dietary guidelines

The 2025-30 dietary guidelines focus on more protein intake than has previously been recommended, and the new recommendation is based on body weight: 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram per day, the equivalent of 81.6 to 109 grams for a 150-pound person.

The updated guidelines favor full-fat dairy with no added sugars, calling for three servings per day for someone on a 2,000-calorie diet.

They also suggest prioritizing “fiber-rich” whole grain with two to four servings per day and significantly reducing highly processed, refined carbs including white bread, flour tortillas and crackers.

The guidelines also recommend three servings of vegetables and two servings of fruits per day for a typical 2,000-calorie diet. The guidelines emphasize eating whole foods in their original form but also say, “frozen, dried, or canned vegetables or fruits with no or very limited added sugars can also be good options.”

Ultraprocessed foods are singled out in the new guidelines: “Avoid highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet, such as chips, cookies, and candy that have added sugars and sodium (salt). Instead, prioritize nutrient-dense foods and home-prepared meals. When dining out, choose nutrient-dense options.”

Infants should be fed breast milk for the first 6 months, or iron-fortified formula if breast milk is not available, the new guidelines say. Breastfeeding may continue for 2 years or longer, but formula should be stopped after 12 months.

Added sugars should be avoided in infancy and early childhood, through age 10.

Alcohol guidance

The updated guidelines echo the 2020 version by urging “less alcohol for better health,” although they do away with the previous recommendation that men limit their intake to two drinks or less per day and women to one drink or less.

“Alcohol is a social lubricant that brings people together. In the best case scenario, I don’t think you should drink alcohol, but it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize. And there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.

“But the implication is, don’t have it for breakfast. This should be something done in small amounts.”

School lunches

The new dietary guidelines will also affect what children are served in schools since they are required meet federal nutrition standards. Even before the update was announced, the School Nutrition Association raised concerns that meal programs will face challenges if required to further reduce ultraprocessed foods.

“Any new rules limiting UPFs in schools must ensure meal programs are permitted to serve nutrient-dense, pre-prepared foods,” the association wrote in its new position paper, released Tuesday. “Schools are simply not equipped to scratch prepare all menu items – more than 93% cited the need for more staff, culinary training, equipment and infrastructure to reduce reliance on UPFs.”

Some 79% of school meal program directors expressed an “extreme need” for more funding to reduce the reliance on ultraprocessed foods and make more meals from scratch, according to the association’s new school nutrition trends report. The share of respondents citing “significant” challenges with cost, food, labor and equipment all increased compared with last year’s survey.

The association reiterated its call for Congress to increase funding for school meal programs after the guidelines were unveiled Wednesday.

“School nutrition programs are where the vision of the DGAs becomes reality for the 30 million children eating school meals each day,” Stephanie Dillard, the association’s president, said in a statement. “Congress has a tremendous opportunity to improve the health of America by investing resources to help schools expand scratch cooking, serve more fresh, local foods and further positive momentum in cafeterias.”

The new guidelines may take years to affect school meals. The US Department of Agriculture must first turn the updated guidelines into breakfast and lunch standards and then give schools time to implement them, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, an association spokesperson.

As for costs, Kennedy said that he believes the Trump administration can make healthy foods affordable for Americans.

“We are working on an education and information program that will allow American families all over the country to come onto our website and find the healthiest foods at the lowest cost for themselves,” Kennedy said.

“The idea that a cheap meal made of processed food is cheap is an illusion, because you’re paying for it on the back end,” he said. “You’re paying for it with diabetes, with obesity, with illness, and if you internalize that cost of the meal, it would be a tiny fraction of the long-term cost of eating bad food.”

The ‘nuance’ of ultraprocessed food

There are varying degrees to which certain foods are processed, said Dr. David Seres, director of medical nutrition and professor of medicine in the Institute of Human Nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. He agrees with limiting the consumption of ultraprocessed foods but said he hopes the public understands that there is nuance.

“What constitutes junk food and how you actually define that can be gradated,” said Seres, who was not involved in the new dietary guidelines. “But in general, if people want to know what I think they should do, they should eat food that looks as close to what it looked like when it was in the earth on the ground, attached to a plant, or on a hoof or swimming in a sea.”

For decades, previous dietary guidelines recommended low- or fat-free dairy for everyone older than 2, and they recommended that saturated fat intake be less than 10% of daily calories.

The new guidelines echo only the 10% recommendation, although they also note that “More high-quality research is needed to determine which types of dietary fats best support long-term health.”

Some studies have found that people who eat more dairy have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease than those with low intakes.

“Some saturated fats found in full fat dairy including yogurt, cheese and milk are less inflammatory than other types of animal fat such as beef or beef tallow. But they are higher in calories. Full fat dairy isn’t better than low fat dairy – it is simply not as dangerous as we once thought. But having full fat dairy can add an additional 200 or more calories each day which increases obesity risks further,” Bethany Doerfler, a registered dietitian from Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, said in an email.

“More than 50 years of well-designed nutrition research demonstrates the protective effects of a dietary pattern rich in plants, unsaturated fats and limited in processed animal proteins. This pattern decreases the risk of chronic diseases including obesity, cancer and cardiovascular disease,” Doerfler said. “Additionally, we need to make access to healthy food a priority. Deciphering definitions and guidelines are important but access to healthy foods remains critical.”

Dr. Walter Willett, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and the most cited nutritionist internationally, worries that the updated guidelines will be used to promote high intakes of red meat and dairy products, “which will not lead to optimally healthy diets or a healthy planet,” he said in an email.

“Sugar-sweetened beverages are the most serious problem, and this was ignored” in earlier reports from HHS’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, Willett said.

The new guidelines, however, do recommend against consuming sugary drinks such as sodas, fruit drinks and energy drinks.

How the guidelines are made

Every five years, HHS and the USDA update the federal dietary guidelines based on the latest research. The guidelines are often used by medical professionals and policymakers to help determine what students eat in schools, what doctors recommend to their patients and what people can buy with food stamps.

Kennedy and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins have already pushed states to restrict foods regarded as unhealthy from SNAP, although retailers and health experts have questioned whether programs are ready to implement such sweeping changes, especially when data is mixed about whether it will improve diet quality and health.

Food guidelines were never meant to last forever. The data that any type of medical guidance or scientific review is based on could change as more research is done, and that seems to be why the dietary guidelines shift over time, Seres said.

For instance, one version of the guidelines could make recommendations based on observational studies that show only associations. But then randomized controlled trials could be conducted to measure cause and effect, and the guidelines could be updated to reflect the new findings.

Typically, before each new dietary guideline report is issued, a scientific advisory committee reviews the latest research and provides its own recommendations to the secretaries of the USDA and HHS to help inform the development of the guidelines.

But Kennedy has criticized the development process and promised a vastly shortened set of recommendations to emphasize whole foods.

Kennedy has also called the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans “antiquated” and said he’s pushing Head Start programs, which provide early childhood education and other services to children and families, to switch from low-fat to full-fat dairy products, including whole milk.

In the Trump administration’s Make Our Children Healthy Again report, released in September, federal officials noted that “USDA and HHS will further reform future … development processes, including structure and members of the advisory committee and scientific review.”

Willett said he is “seriously concerned” about that reform.

“The 2025 US Dietary Guidelines scientific advisory committee was carefully selected based on extensive experience and knowledge across many relevant areas and carefully evaluated for conflicts of interest. The review process took approximately three years with many opportunities for public input,” Willett said in an email. He added that “none of this is happening” under the Trump administration’s process.

“I fear a rerun of the CDC vaccine review committee process, which purged those with knowledge and experience in vaccines effectiveness and safety, resulting in states setting up their own vaccine review processes because the CDC recommendations are regarded as no longer trustworthy,” Willett said, referring to the abrupt firing and replacement of members of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine advisory committee and major changes to US vaccine policy that followed.

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CNN’s Sarah Owermohle and Kristen Rogers contributed to this report.