Wilbur Olin Atwater, Ph.D., did just that, and it was great, and we could have stopped there. Yet that is not the way of government. His recommendations were entirely sensible. Think about calories first. Eat meat and vegetables, limit fatty and carbohydrate foods. It was immensely popular but popularity breeds jealousy and now a desire by scholars to 'make their mark on history' and feel proud they have changed the world every five years.
In 2025, he's still correct.
Nothing in human biology has changed in five years yet thanks to the data from “What We Eat in America” and the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, we have increasingly gotten recommendations that are irrelevant to everyday life. Because they are physiologically implausible, based on unreliable recall, and completely leave out issues like cardio-respiratory fitness and exercise. Federally-funded nutrition scholars overwhelmingly ignore common sense.
The changes started early, though. In 1917, Instead of a scientist, a revised document was written by a nutritionist, Caroline Hunt, and it focused in vitamins and minerals in food rather than Atwater's guidance to moderate fatty and sweet foods.
It was not bad, and the reason why it was not bad was simple to understand. Scientific understanding of vitamins and minerals was making real strides and food had not become political evangelism yet.(1) The only time nutrition guidelines were redone again was in World War II, because there was rationing. No one needed to be told to eat less sugar when they couldn't get it anyway. They needed to optimize healthy diets with what they could both obtain and afford. After the war, and rationing ended, government created 7 food groups, then in the 1950s, it dropped to 4 food groups.
It didn't become overtly political until 1968, when progressive Senate George McGovern got the keys to a United States Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs to decide 'what next?'
Because malnutrition in America had been eliminated. Though fellow progressives like Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren were fomenting mass hysteria about Population Bombs and a need for World Government to mandate sterilization and abortion, scientists knew big things were about to happen that would make food a fraction of the cost relative to income it was. Senator McGovern believed them and gathered his staff, and they started looking into the evidence.
Much like with the American Medical Association obtaining dangerous levels of control over health care policy that still exists today, this period was when the American Heart Association became a de facto government nutrition agency. They had epidemiologists at Harvard School of Public Health and food surveys correlating this to that. Suddenly, despite surveys not being science and rarely being reliable, we got a War On Fat and government declared 60% of calories should instead be carbohydrates.
Eggs were bad, meat was bad, butter was bad. Trans fats were good.
Government-funded nutritionists created an entire food industry wrapped in the flag of government, and from then on many nutritionists wanted to have that impact on their resumes. They began to compete to be included, not to care about health. For decades, the same unscientific rhetoric and methodology was the norm.(2) The Obamas went all in against meat and for Team Carbohydrate, even mandating that poor kids have to suffer through entire vegetarian meals
That is why you were right to expect the worst in 2025. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy's favorite "raw" (no pasteurization) milk dairy in California (naturally) plus organic farming unwillingness to be humane and give sick chickens medicine is why eggs were $12 a dozen when the 2024 election happened. When he brought over Democrats by throwing his support behind a Republican, there was concern about him joining the administration.(3)
And it happened. With now 20 years under our belts, Science 2.0 has learned to understand the sway of politics but an anti-vaccine activist was alarming. It was one thing when progressives in California believed vaccines cause autism. Yes, they had more deniers than the rest of the U.S. combined and killed three kids with Whooping Cough beliefs in 2014, but Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom (now Governor), who had refused to vaccinate his child and claimed cell phones cause cancer, had no real power, and Governore Jerry Brown listened to state representative Dr. Richard Pan and us and others and eliminated arbitrary exemptions for school kids.(4)
Today, Republicans, where states like Alabama and Mississippi once had outstanding levels of vaccination, have become Clinton-era Democrats.
That is why Secretary Kennedy being in charge of nutrition guidelines is cause for concern.
But the new one is not that bad. It still isn't science, it is still so aspirational it might as well be a diet book, but it isn't as crazy as you might have worried.
Sure, there is mumbo-jumbo about "ultraprocessed" food but literate people know that term was only invented after Democrats failed to get "processed" food bans in allied states like California. Even people in a state with 80,000 cancer warning labels on harmless products know Whole Grain Organic Bread is still "processed", so food activists popularized "ultraprocessed."
No betting agency would have given you decent odds that ultraprocessed wouldn't be chided in the new guideline when the same political demographic claims weedkillers cause cancer and trans fats reduced risk of diabetes - before they claimed it caused diabetes. Bizarre food is medicine nomenclature was certain to be in there as well.
Yet it does not call for reduction of affordable food, as we may have gotten if his Big Organic proclivities had remained unchecked. Nowhere in there does he try to claim it is healthier, or any other lie Whole Foods got away with promoting before they got bought out by a corporation with ethics.
Yes, some of the recommendations remain unclear, but some, like more protein and less carbohydrates, are stated plainly enough and they are correct enough that this is a win. He inverted the pyramid, which undid that 1980s Sweden bad-stuff-at-the-top Egyptian thing Clinton loved but had been replaced by the pie chart of Obama - which is just a graphic, but more importantly undid the fetish with carbohydrates.
Ultraprocessed food is as ridiculous as the war on fructose that preceded it (honey somehow good, corn syrup bad, despite biology not knowing the difference) but so was the blatant evangelizing of carbohydrates. It does not matter if they are fruits or vegetables, sugar is sugar. Orange juice is a Coca-Cola with a Vitamin C tablet stuck in it.
In no sane world should carbohydrates have ever been at least 60 percent of a daily diet. They got rid of low-fat milk but didn't mandate raw milk, so children won't face 700X the risk of being poisoned as they would if pasteurization did not occur. It does not read like if Sheryl Crow had written it.
Some definitions have to be cleared up, and ultraprocessed food has no scientific basis so that will need to go, but that is a problem for 2030. Because by then a new administration will be in office and a new set of nutritionists will want to embrace some new food fad.
Until then, if history is any indication, people will continue to ignore this as they have done since the Clinton presidency.
NOTES:
(1) People were poor. They wanted enough food, not to be told by companies that making a sandwich was too time-consuming and a meal-plan subscription for hundreds of dollars per month was the answer, as even young people who complain about being unable to afford a house believe.
(2) The Clinton years were terrible for everything in science. He is the guy who banned nuclear energy, gave supplement grifters a free pass around FDA, and ordered Big Organic into existence under the auspices of USDA, so lifting the food pyramid from Sweden, a country with far higher rates of heart disease than America, was par for his course, but Republicans didn't do any better.
Do you remember having the science feels about this thing from 2005?
No one used it except government-controlled schools that were forced to put it on walls.
(3) I didn't think it would happen. 'If he wasn't good enough for Obama, why would I want him?' was my Trump expectation. His anti-vaccine beliefs had not changed. He was still at heart a Natural Resources Defense Council ('all science is bad') lawyer and a Republican wouldn't go for that. Politica is unpredictable.
(4) Wealthy progressives still did it. They got their bespoke pediatricians to provide medical waivers. People with less money instead met up to plan Measles Parties in places where political allies against science were known to frequent; organic food and supplement stores.
February 1st, 2020. Six weeks later, California would go into lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic and left-wing people would cast off 22 years of anti-vaccine rhetoric and demand that Big Pharma save us.
That didn't end until the COVID-19 pandemic hit. After the Trump administration gave emergency authorization to the COVID-19 vaccine, wealthy elites bought their way to the front of the line and have been for vaccines ever since.
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