Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Brook Rollins unveiled the delayed 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for America Wednesday, which is already drawing criticism for its ties to the meat and dairy industry.
Headlining with the advice to “eat real food,” the new guidelines, which are updated every five years, are in a brisk, citation-free 10-page document. Overall, the new guidelines: lambaste added sugars and highly processed foods (though it doesn’t clearly define them); ditch previous limits on alcohol while directing Americans to just drink “less”; beef up recommendations for protein, including red meat; and appear to embrace saturated fats while not actually changing the 2020–2025 recommendation for how much you should eat—which was and continues to be no more than 10 percent of total daily calories.
“We are ending the war on saturated fats,” Kennedy said triumphantly in a White House press briefing Wednesday, despite the lack of a change. He went on to proclaim that “today, our government declares war on added sugar,” though that too is questionable.
This is war?
While the new guidelines say “no amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners is recommended,” it offers the suggestion that “one meal should contain no more than 10 grams of added sugars.” There are four calories in one gram of sugar, so the recommendation means no more than 40 calories from sugar per meal. For three meals a day, that’s a max of 120 calories from sugar a day, which on a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet, would be about 6 percent of total calories. The previous recommendation in the 2020–2025 guidelines was to have less than 10 percent of total calories per day from added sugars.