The dust is still settling after Wednesday’s release of the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA), and while there’s plenty to unpack, the blueprint for healthy eating is already drawing scrutiny over its recommendation to include animal protein at every meal.
Critics are also scrutinizing the process by which the guidelines were derived, accusing federal regulators of bypassing recommendations from the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and instead taking their guidance from the meat and dairy industry.
The guidelines specify animal sources such as eggs, poultry and seafood, which are standard recommendations from nutrition experts; but it was the suggestion promoting red meat consumption that is causing blowback.
Doctors and other nutrition experts criticized the recommendation because of the potentially harmful saturated fat in red meat.
Experts on red meat
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine released a statement praising the guidelines for limits on saturated fat, or “bad fat,” but noted that the guidelines need “serious improvement” in other areas.
“The guidelines are right to limit cholesterol-raising saturated (’bad’) fat,” said Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine President Neal Barnard. “But they should spell out where it comes from: dairy products and meat, primarily. And here the guidelines err in promoting meat and dairy products, which are principal drivers of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and obesity.”
Barnard’s group, which claims 17,000 doctor members, recommends that the DGA modify its guidelines to “eliminate confusion on saturated fat, specifying that it is in dairy products and meat and promotes heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.”
“The guidelines have unjustly condemned highly processed foods and exonerated meat and dairy products,” Barnard said. “They should have done the reverse.”
The Plant Based Foods Association and Plant Based Foods Institute released a similar response, noting that the guidelines “do not fully reflect the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s evidence-based scientific recommendations, particularly with respect to the role of plant-forward dietary patterns in supporting health across the lifespan.”
Nonprofit organization Food System Innovations also released a statement criticizing the guidelines, with CEO Max Elder noting they “raise serious concerns about regulatory capture and the erosion of evidence-based policymaking in the US.”
“The document lacks the rigor expected of federal guidance and appears to prioritize ideology and industry influence over public health,” Elder said. “Treating it as a serious policy framework is a fool’s errand, and that’s especially tragic given the current state of the American diet.”
Industry’s influence on DGA
Criticism of the guidelines stems in part from the USDA and HHS bypassing recommendations developed by the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a panel of scientists and medical professionals who spent two years developing the recommendations.
“That report was very well researched. It was very thorough, and it recommended moving plant proteins to the top of the list for the protein section because of the health benefits and having meat and dairy products a little bit lower. And then this new administration decided not to use that report,” explained Anna Herby, a dietitian and nutrition education specialist with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.
That committee recommended moving legumes, beans, peas and lentils to the top of the food pyramid, she said.
“That was flipped on its head with this new committee that had strong financial ties to the meat and dairy industry,” she said.
The Physicians Committee is fighting the guidelines by filing a petition to recall them due to the conflicts of interest from the food industry, according to Herby. She noted that eight of the nine guideline authors have ties to the meat and dairy industries, and the guidelines were written without public input.
“It was all done behind closed doors,” she said. “The original process that took two years with the first committee was done in public. They took public comments, and they were nominated publicly and then decided on and all of the meetings were available, live-streamed for anyone to join and listen into.
“It was just very transparent, and this basically was the opposite of that. No one knew who the committee was, and then they just come out all of a sudden with this report.”
Do guidelines matter?
Most US citizens disregard the guidelines or have no awareness of them in the first place – less than 10% of Americans consume a diet consistent with the DGA, according to a report published in 2017 by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
The guidelines are likely to have an impact on public institutions such as public schools and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC), according to Herby.
“It does then raise the question of who’s going to follow these guidelines individually, but on a public health level, with schools and with WIC and these federal nutrition programs, it does make a difference there,” she said.
