Three Interesting Things – About New Dietary Guidelines
Here’s three interesting things in the Trump administration’s recently released dietary guidelines for Americans.
#1 The recommended diet is meant to decrease chronic disease and medical costs.
From the report: “The United States is amid a health emergency. Nearly 90% of health care spending goes to treating people who have chronic diseases.” It goes on to say that many chronic diseases can be linked to diet.
That 90% of medical care is for chronic diseases is not surprising, nor is it a “health emergency”. Chronic diseases keep you alive and in need of medical care for as long as you live. Acute diseases either go away or kill you. Which would you prefer? Chronic diseases have and always will take up most of our medical care spending.
To think that improving diet alone will decrease chronic diseases is naïve. For the lowest 40% of American households, the struggle to pay rent (around 40% of their income) and meet basic needs has more impact on their health than their diet has.
#2 Beef and meat are prominently at the top (widest part) of the pyramid.
What was $20 worth of steak in 1997 cost $66.52 today. Even for the highest 20% of households by income, the steak dinner would be one-fifth of their weekly grocery bill. For the lowest 20% of households, a steak dinner would cost two thirds of their entire week’s grocery budget. (2023, Consumer Expenditure data.)
A reasonable person might ask how the administration is “working to ensure all families can afford” the diet recommended, since the most prominent foods on the guidelines are the most expensive.
#3 The report frequently refers to the need for “more high-quality research” on nutrition.
Nutrition research is horribly complex and difficult to do well. For example, how do you recruit participants and how do you measure their nutritional status at the start? How do you find a control group? There is virtually no way to “blind” the participants to what intervention they are getting.
Thus we get a lot of studies that conflict -- Red wine is good for you! Red wine may not raise your risk of cancer, but white wine might! They likely made different choices about who to include, how to measure wine intake, and myriad other details. These problems with nutrition research do not go away just because we want “better” research.
Where the much-needed, high-quality nutrition research will come from is mysterious, since this administration disrupted or cut thousands of National Institutes for Health grants in 2025.
For what will actually be on our plates, try Taste of Home’s Food Trends 2026: What Everyone Will Be Eating this Year. You’ll get the lowdown on 3-D printed milk and the vegetable of the year. (I also learned about a few I need to catch up to from 2025 -- CheezIt pizza and Reese’s Oreos.)
Bon appetit!
