New Federal Dietary Guidelines Somewhat Less Idiotic Than The Previous Versions

Do you think that the U.S. federal government might be a good place to seek reasonable guidance on matters involving science? If so, I question your sanity. In recent years the part of the federal enterprise masquerading as “science” has suffered one debacle after another resulting from acceptance and promotion of pseudoscience, examples being Covid lockdowns and school closures, let alone the entire catastrophic climate change fiasco. Do you remember the CDC ordering (on no authority) a nationwide eviction moratorium (until struck down by the Supreme Court)?

And of course, the acceptance of pseudoscience by a federal bureaucracy is somehow inevitably associated with an effort by that bureaucracy to increase its budget and enhance its power to order the American people around.

In the area of federal claims based on dubious scientific authority, the Dietary Guidelines emanating from the Department of Agriculture are a prominent instance, although perhaps relatively benign. The Guidelines are relatively benign because, for the most part, they are not mandatory. However, their influence is pervasive. If you doubt that assertion, try walking a supermarket aisle and counting up the number of items making claims of “low fat” or “heart healthy” based on information from the Guidelines. Also, the Dietary Guidelines are mandatory for things funded by the federal government, like school lunches.

USDA’s Dietary Guidelines got their start back in 1980, and have since been updated every five years. If they have been known for one thing above all others, it has been their recommendation to limit the amount of fats in the diet, and in particular to limit the amount of what are called “saturated” fats (the kind generally found in meat and dairy products). The basis for these recommendations in particular has always been weak to non-existent.

Back in 2014 a food and nutrition writer named Nina Teicholz took on the scientific claims about dietary fats being unhealthy in a book titled “The Big Fat Surprise.” Teicholz argued persuasively that the case for lowering the amount of fats in the diet had never been established. I wrote a review of “The Big Fat Surprise” in this post from January 2016. That is now 10 years ago. In the intervening decade, nothing much changed.

There is every reason to think that the 40+ year campaign by the federal government to lower the amount of dietary fat has actually been harmful. The reason is that there are only three main categories of nutrients in the human diet — fats, carbohydrates, and proteins — such that lowering one of the categories must inevitably mean raising one or both of the others. In the real world, eating fewer fats means eating more carbohydrates. That may well be an underlying cause of the increase in obesity that has overlapped with the guidelines to lower fats.

Anyway, for several months now there has been talk that the federal government was going to issue a new version of the Dietary Guidelines. The talk has included repeated statements to the effect that the long-running “war against saturated fats” would be ended. For example, in a speech on November 17, 2025, Secretary of HHS Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was quoted as follows:

“We’re ending the war on saturated fats in this country. So, we’re going to publish dietary guidelines that are going to stress the importance of protein and saturated fats. And those will come out, I think, next month. And I think that will really revolutionize the food system in the country, the food culture in this country. . . .”

After several months of delays, the new Dietary Guidelines finally came out on January 7. Here is a link. Unlike previous versions, these new Guidelines appear to be a joint effort of HHS with the Department of Agriculture. The cover message carries the signatures of both Kennedy and Brooke Rollins of USDA.

Are the new Guidelines a substantial improvement over what has gone before? I guess I will agree that they are a better, but not that much. Let’s say that they are somewhat less idiotic.

First up, it is not clear at all that the war on saturated fats has actually been ended. On the first page of the new Guidelines, we find straightforward recommendations to “consume meat” and to “consume dairy.” That’s a pretty good start. But then on page 3, we come to this:

In general, saturated fat consumption should not exceed 10% of total daily calories.

Sorry guys, but we are not going to be able to eat multiple portions of meat and dairy in a day and at the same time keep our consumption of saturated fats down to 10% of daily calories. In a January 6 post on her Substack, Teicholz points out that the recommendation for multiple portions of meat and dairy per day is flatly contradictory with the recommendation to keep saturated fats down to 10% of calories.

Here’s the fundamental problem: how can anyone eat butter, tallow, and red meat while adhering to the 10% cap? They can’t. The messages are impossible to reconcile.

Teicholz includes some numerical examples to illustrate the impossibility. It seems that once again the great experts in the federal government prove to be completely innumerate.

And then, they just can’t stop themselves from going off into pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo. Start at the top of the introductory message from the Secretaries:

The message is simple: eat real food.

What does that even mean? Elsewhere in the document they bounce from “real food” over to “whole food,” another meaningless term as far as I can tell. Yet another term that appears a few times is “nutrient dense.” What does that one mean? Sounds like pure mumbo jumbo to me.

As you would expect from Kennedy, there is much criticism of “highly processed” foods (e.g., “Avoid highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet.”) Well, the term “highly processed” sure sounds bad. But does “processed” include, for example, cooking? Why isn’t that OK? Where is the line drawn? There’s also a recommendation to avoid “chemicals.” OK, how about vitamins? Aren’t vitamins chemicals? Is it OK to add them? If vitamins are OK, how about preservatives?

The more of this you read, the more you realize that they don’t know what they are talking about. Yes, I am glad to see them backing off on their previous war against meat and dairy, but they don’t even know how to do that consistently. My takeaway is that these people should just mind their own business, and stay away from trying to pretend they know more than you do about your diet.