Every five years, the U.S. government releases an updated set of recommendations on healthy eating. This document, called the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, has served as the cornerstone of nutrition policy for almost half a century.
On Jan. 7, 2026, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture released the 2025-2030 edition of the guidelines. The updated guidelines recommend that people consume more protein and fat, and less ultraprocessed foods.
These guidelines are the foundation for governmental nutritional programs – for example, they are used to determine which foods are covered by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as well as how school lunches are prepared. Eldercare centers and child care centers use them when providing meals, as do clinical nutritionists working with patients to help them achieve a healthy diet. And because the guidelines are so scientifically rigorous, many countries around the world base their own nutritional guidelines on them.
I’m a nutrition scientist specializing in developing interventions for preventing obesity. Between 2022 and 2024, I served on the scientific advisory committee tasked with assessing the best available evidence on a wide range of topics in nutrition in order to inform federal officials in updating the guidelines.
But most of the committee’s recommendations were ignored in developing the latest dietary guidelines.
On the surface, these guidelines share a lot of similarities with the previous version, published in 2020, but they also have a few important differences. In my view, the process followed was different from the norm.
For each update, HHS and USDA establish a scientific advisory committee like the one I served on. Members with expertise in different aspects of nutrition are carefully selected and vetted. They then spend two years reviewing the latest scientific studies to assess evidence about specific nutrition-related questions – such as the relationship between saturated fats in foods and cardiovascular disease and what strategies are most effective for weight management.
For each question, the committee first prepares a protocol to answer it, identifies the most rigorous studies and synthesizes its findings, discussing the evidence extensively. It then produces specific recommendations about the topic for the HHS and USDA. At each step, the public and the scientific community are invited to provide comments, which the committee considers.
All this scientific information is put together in a massive report, which the federal agencies then use to create the updated guidelines, translating the expert recommendations for the public and health professionals.
The advisory committee I served on functioned as usual – our report was published in December 2024.
But the dietary guidelines released on Jan. 7 were mainly not based on that report. Instead, they were based on a different scientific report that was also published on Jan. 7. That report drew some material from ours but went through a completely different process.
It was created by a group of people who were not vetted in the usual way, and although they repeated some of the same questions we did, they also explored other topics that were chosen with no input from the wider community of nutrition researchers or from the public. It was not based on a publicly available protocol, with no input from the scientific community, and it’s unclear how and to what degree it was peer-reviewed.
The updated dietary guidelines were developed through a different process compared with the established methodology that has been used to assess nutrition science behind the guidelines for many years.
Many of the recommendations in the 2020 guidelines and the ones released on Jan. 7 are broadly the same: that Americans should consume three servings of vegetables, two servings of fruits and three servings of dairy products per day, as well as replacing refined grains with whole grains, and limiting intake of sugar and sodium.
