Most Americans ignore the country’s dietary guidelines, but millions will be directly affected by upcoming changes to these recommendations.

On 6 January, after months of proclamations about seismic improvements to the country’s dietary recommendations, the US Department of Health and Human Services and the US Department of Agriculture released those updated Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA). This document – once visually presented to millennial schoolchildren as a food pyramid and to today’s zoomers as a segmented lunch plate – synthesizes the latest nutritional research and offers revamped eating advice every five years.

The guidelines exist mostly to shape federally funded nutrition programs that provide food in one form or another to a huge swath of Americans: the 42 million people served by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap or food stamps); 6.7 million moms and children in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC); and 2.6 million seniors in the Meals on Wheels program. Federal monies also feed an unspecified number of mostly low-income, food-insecure or health-challenged Americans through Food Is Medicine programs. And, consequentially, they fund the school lunches that are served to almost 30 million kids every day.

As a result, experts say these vulnerable Americans are most likely to feel the ripple effects of the DGA changes once they’re set in motion. This can take several years; every time the DGA morphs, school cafeteria meals and their daily intake requirements, for example, must be adjusted in a lengthy rule-making process, according to the School Nutrition Association.

But those changes won’t all be positive with this iteration of the DGA, say critics who’ve blasted it for confusing, contradictory and scientifically nebulous recommendations. Ethan Balk, director of graduate programs in clinical nutrition at New York University, questions the DGA’s advice to “‘Eat the right amount for you.’ What the hell does that mean? Unless you have any sort of idea of how to take age, height, sex, weight and level of physical activity and produce a caloric number for yourself, the statement is useless.”

Hot food is packaged food for delivery to the elderly by Meals On Wheels in Dallas on 30 January 2025. Photograph: LM Otero/AP

Grace Chamberlin, policy associate at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), pointed out just how significant DGA changes can be to many young people.

“For some students, school lunch is the only meal they eat,” she said, “which means that changing the foods in these federal nutrition programs is changing all of the food in someone’s diet.”

Chamberlin finds the new DGA’s characterization of vegetables and fat particularly concerning. For starters, the guidelines do away with previous vegetable sub-categories, often color-coded to reflect a diverse, balanced diet. Chamberlin said that, now, the new DGA implies that a person could get their daily protein and veg needs from four servings of red meat and three servings of potatoes – a distinct departure from the nutritional turn to a plant-rich diet that infused previous guidelines.

“That’s a huge problem for school meals that are trying to feed children nutritious meals that … look like the rainbow – red and orange vegetables, starchy vegetables, dark green vegetables. If plates are updated to reflect the new DGA, that might change to provide a lot less variety.”

Chamberlin’s rough math suggests that implementation could also lead to school kids being served too much saturated fat in future meals. The reason: the latest version foregrounds foods from animals, which it counts as “healthy fats”.

As CSPI’s Chamberlin explained, the DGA recommends eating three servings of full-fat dairy, four-and-a-half servings of “healthy fats”, and three to four servings of protein every day based on a 2,000-calorie diet (kids need fewer calories but the DGA’s daily servings meal pattern does not break out its caloric recommendations by age group). With “no emphasis [now] on plant-based proteins, if you’re following the written guidance and the serving sizes in the meal pattern, you could eat 14 grams of saturated fat from whole milk; over 11 grams of saturated fat from butter; [and] then, depending on what meat you pick, 9 grams to 40 grams of saturated fat. Which ends up being 34 to 66 grams of saturated fat” – a significant overload, even by the guidelines’ own standards.

For kids getting school lunch, such a tally doesn’t even factor in the consumption of the full-fat milk that’s now allowed in school meals. That milk does not have to be weighed when considering a school meal’s fat content.

Additionally, low reimbursement rates for the cost of school meals already mean that switching to whole foods and away from ultra-processed foods, as the DGA proposes, is an uphill battle for school nutrition directors. What will be the effects on their budgets if more and costlier meat is suddenly added to the equation? And how will they define what a “healthy fat” is, or how much of it to include in a meal?

When Caitlin Dow, a senior nutrition scientist also at CSPI, hears the term “healthy fats”, she thinks of avocados, olives, nuts, and vegetable oils. But under the new DGA, butter, beef tallow and lard all qualify. This despite the fact that all are saturated fats, which the American Heart Association and other health organizations have long cautioned can increase the risk of heart disease. “This is where it feels like the [DGA authors] just made up their own definitions, assigning words to mean whatever they want them to mean,” Dow said.

Katherine Nagler grabs packaged meals while preparing a delivery for a client at Sound Generations’ Meals on Wheels warehouse on 03 February 2025, in Seattle, Washington. Photograph: Lindsey Wasson/AP

How does the new DGA define deleterious fats? It doesn’t exactly; the one mention appears in its introductory message, written by the USDA and HHS secretaries, where “highly processed foods” are dinged for containing “unhealthy fats”.

The guidelines now proclaim: “Every meal must prioritize high-quality, nutrient-dense protein from both animal and plant sources, paired with healthy fats from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meats, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives and avocados.” It lists a quotidian “protein target” of 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, as much as double the prior recommendation for 2,000-calorie diets. The guidelines maintain the previous DGA’s recommendation to keep saturated fat consumption to under 10% of consumed calories (notably, the American Heart Association recommends keeping it under 6%). This adds up to about 22 grams, although anyone eating four servings of red meat a day, plus lard and full-fat dairy, will exceed that.

The new DGA’s overall emphasis on animal products has raised many eyebrows. “Lots of scientists and practitioners are seeing the new guidelines as a subtle nudge towards animal-based foods – maybe not so subtle,” said Carmen Byker Shanks, director of scientific strategy at the Center for Nutrition & Health Impact, who evaluates Food Is Medicine programs. Some of these programs provide medically-tailored meals, others allow clinicians to write prescriptions for patients for fruits and vegetables, increased consumption of which has been linked to improved health. Now, even DGA’s guidance for vegetarians and vegans prioritizes dairy and eggs over legumes and tofu. “It’s hard for a dietician or policymaker, thinking about how these apply to a program, to know what to do” with the guidelines, “because there’s a lot of conflicting messaging,” Shanks said.

At least seven of the nine nutrition experts who wrote the scientific foundation reviews for the DGA have ties to the meat, dairy, packaged food, and supplement sectors, according to the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. These are “clear, clear conflicts of interest with industries that will directly benefit from these protein-heavy guidelines”, Chamberlin said. This despite the fact that the health impacts of consuming high amounts of animal products are well-established: processed meat and saturated fat consumption are linked to higher overall mortality rates; eating red meat increases the risk of colorectal cancer. (USDA did not respond to a query from the Guardian requesting clarity on various contradictions and conflicts of interest in the DGA.)

Given all this, “perhaps it’s a bit of a saving grace that not many individual Americans are attuned to the dietary guidelines,” Dow said.

Chamberlin does see hope in the fact that many nutrition directors at schools, WIC and senior feeding programs, and hospitals that offer Food Is Medicine “are informed on the issues and will do whatever they can for their constituents and participants. To assist them, CSPI has devised its own alternate dietary guidelines, built on the science that informed previous DGAs; other organizations are likely to follow suit. But Chamberlin worries “we’re heading towards a place where it’s going to come down to well-intentioned individuals making good decisions for their communities, as opposed to being able to rely on science-based evidence from above.”

Questions – and criticisms – continue to emerge around potential impacts for people in all age groups. AARP expressed concern that the protein-centric DGA might lead older adults, who can be at high risk for malnutrition, to consume too few nutrients from other sources. Meals on Wheels said in astatement that the DGA failed to adequately consider the special needs of elderly Americans. Previous iterations gave more age-specific tips across the lifespan, while this DGA offered a mere 70 words in its section on older adults.