New U.S. Food Guidelines Emphasize Actual Food

Big Additive is apoplectic; experts are concerned; your grandma is vindicated.

In a shocking development that’s left cereal mascots sweating through their marshmallow suits, the U.S. government has released new dietary guidelines that—brace yourselves—recommend eating actual food.

Not food-like substances. Not “fortified” rainbow pellets shaped like horseshoes. Not former-foods stripped of anything resembling nutrition or flavor or reengineered to somehow be we-promise-you-healthier than what the Divine Chef designed.

Food-food.

On the new menu: Meat. Dairy. Fats. Fruits. Vegetables. Nuts. Olives. Avocados. The kind of stuff humans accidentally survived on for millennia before being told that breakfast should be sponsored by General Mills.

Understandably, chaos ensued.

After all, even though it’s how our grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents ate, it’s also the exact opposite of the advice America’s been given for more than half a century. As a young adult learning to feed myself, I was trained on the Food Guide Pyramid—which recommended six to eleven servings of bread, cereal, rice or pasta a day. Every single day. (I don’t think I currently eat that in a month.) If you had any room left after carb-loading your weight in processed crap, you were free to enjoy some scrambled egg whites and maybe a nice cup of nonfat yogurt.

In 2011, the pyramid was replaced by MyPlate, which promised clarity and balance while quietly preserving the same low-fat, grain-forward logic—just rearranged into a friendlier graphic. Spoiler: Americans did not get healthier.

It was in 2023 that Tufts University unveiled the unintentionally hilarious Food Compass. This was the NIH-funded, three-years-in-the-making nutrient profiling system that evaluated foods across nine domains using “a complex mix of science-based measures” to famously conclude that an ice cream cone is healthier than a steak. Not metaphorically. Literally. Numerically. With charts.

According to Tufts, Frosted Mini Wheats were nutritional powerhouses—up there with nonfat frozen yogurt and Honey Nut Cheerios *I can’t even*—while whole milk, cheese, and eggs cooked in butter belonged in the nutritional sin bin. Egg whites fried in vegetable oil were deemed healthier than boiled eggs (presumably because the yolk contains flavor and joy, both known carcinogens). Lucky Charms and skinless chicken breast? Basically the same thing. Ground beef? I hope you have your affairs in order.

And people wonder why faith in “experts” is nonexistent.

Sure, it made for great Substack material—no really, tell me again why Americans are diabetic whales—but it also mattered. Because these kinds of guidelines don’t stay in academic journals or dusty university filing cabinets. They seep into school lunches, hospital menus, SNAP restrictions, and the vague advice your doctor gives you between prescribing statins and admitting she had exactly zero nutrition training in med school.

And lo and behold, after decades of “fat makes you fat,” “load up on grains,” and “eggs are the devil’s candy,” Americans are sicker, thicker, and more metabolically broken than any generation in recorded history. Seventy percent of Americans are overweight or obese. Less than ten percent would get an “I have decent cardiometabolic health!” sticker on their medical chart. As a country, we spend nearly 20% of our GDP on healthcare (in 2023, that translated to $13,432 per person).

Clearly we haven’t been eating enough Frosted Mini Wheats.

If you can watch this without giggling, you’re dead inside.

The old regime didn’t fail accidentally; it delivered exactly what it was designed to deliver. Decades of food policy shaped by corporate funding, lobbying, and profit protection produced a system where dessert in a bowl could be labeled a health food and soda qualified for nutritional assistance. That wasn’t incompetence. It was intentional. It was greed. It was capture.

What’s happening now is the exact opposite. And it’s spectacular.

We have an actual health nut in the White House—a guy who at 71 has a better body than most men half his age and can do more pushups than your average CrossFit bro. With Bobby Kennedy at the helm of HHS, the people writing the rules are no longer career bureaucrats with revolving-door résumés and snack food-company consulting gigs. Instead of asking, “How can we make more money?” the new guidelines pose a question that hasn’t been fashionable in Washington since the last time a Kennedy was in the White House: “How can we make Americans healthier?”

The answer, inconveniently, isn’t glorified merengue for breakfast.

The updated guidance literally flips the old paradigm on its ear. Protein recommendations are basically doubled and are now based on body weight, not the minimum necessary to prevent metabolic collapse. Healthy fats like olive oil, butter, and beef tallow are included without apology. Sugar-packed, ultra-processed junk finally gets the public shaming it deserves, while foods that did hard time for crimes they didn’t commit—eggs, beef, cheese—are back out on the streets living their best lives.

The new, inverted food pyramid. Yes!

In other words, the guidelines now encourage… pre-pre-packaged food. Not Paleo. Not Carnivore. Not Atkins or Whole30 or the Zone. Just food the way humans consumed it before snacks had their own lobbyists and nutrition labels read like toxicology reports.

Courtesy of Calley Means on X.

Naturally, this has alarmed many experts.

Harvard’s most cited nutritionist warned that emphasizing red meat and dairy “may not be healthy for the planet,” which is an interesting pivot when discussing federal wellness policy. Others fretted that Americans might interpret “eat meat” as license to go feral with ribeyes. Some expressed concern that sugar-sweetened beverages were not condemned loudly enough, despite the guidelines explicitly advising against them. The New York Times devoted the entirety of their coverage to the fact that the update recommends “limiting alcoholic beverages” without spelling out precisely how many gin-and-tonics a day/week/month are allowed.

“It is the first time in decades that the government has omitted the daily caps on drinking that define moderate consumption—standards that are used as benchmarks in clinical studies, to steer medical advice, and to distinguish moderate from heavy drinking, which is unquestionably harmful,” the Times scolded.

Wait—we have to decide what moderate drinking is? And then distinguish it from getting totally hammered? All by ourselves? The horror! How did humanity survive thousands of years without a congressionally-blessed buzz chart?

Interestingly, a just-dropped House Oversight Report found that the previous alcohol guidelines—one drink a day for women and two for men, max—were basically Biden-administration fiction created with the exclusive help of a half-dozen anti-alcohol advocacy groups. So there’s that. (Do not hold your breath waiting for the Times to write a follow-up.)

None of this is about how much wine we should drink or whether sweet potato fries are healthier than canned pineapple in syrup, of course. It’s about who we trust to define “healthy.” For decades, that job was outsourced to a cozy ecosystem of industry-funded experts, advocacy groups with pet crusades, and federal panels allergic to oversight. The result was a nation told to fear butter, worship bread, and wonder—sincerely—why everyone felt like garbage.

The new messaging doesn’t need a caveat or a corporate sponsor: Eat real food. (Cheat sheet: If it can be picked, plucked, shucked, dug up, reeled in, or butchered, you’re good.) This will, of course, be described as radical and dangerous by the same people who brought us egg whites in a carton and $1200/month injectable willpower as a wellness intervention. Me? I’ll be too busy eating steak and eggs to notice.

Shipping NEXT WEEK! Order yours today. :)