Former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative and the current administration’s newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025-2030 both claim to be about public health. But they come from very different corners of the dietary change landscape.
Let’s Move!, launched in 2010, was straightforward: childhood obesity is a national problem, and policy can help families reshape the environments where kids eat and exercise. The initiative focused on schools because school cafeterias are one of the few places where millions of children can be reached daily. That meant promoting updated meal standards, increasing fruit and vegetable intake, increasing whole-grain intake and limiting sodium and unhealthy fats. These standards were coupled with a broader message about physical activity and community action. The White House framed it as a practical, pro-kids modernization project that would lead to better lunches, clearer nutrition recommendations and make healthy choices easier to attain.
Real food
Today’s new dietary guidelines, released publicly the week of Jan. 6, take a different approach. The headline slogan is not “move more” or “balance,” but to eat “real food.” The phrase “real food” appears seven times on the first page of the report. The document and the rollout repeatedly emphasize whole foods, “high-quality” protein, “healthy fats” and an explicit turn against “highly processed” foods and “refined” carbohydrates.
This begs the question. Did the science change, or did the culture?
With the growing weight of evidence and attention to processed foods and their effects on our health, science has certainly evolved. But on other core points, the recognized science looks more continuous than revolutionary. For example, the new guidelines retain the long-standing recommendation to limit saturated fat to no more than 10% of daily calories. The same language has appeared across multiple past guideline cycles. That continuity matters because it undercuts the claim made in parts of the political and wellness ecosystem that the “old science” has been fully overturned.
Carnivore ecstasy
Where things get contentious is how the new guidelines frame fats and protein, including which cultural currents they appear to be riding. The document and coverage describe a friendlier posture toward full-fat dairy and a more muscular emphasis on protein, which aligns neatly with today’s popular diet identities: high-protein everything, anti-carb instincts, carnivore ecstasy and a broader backlash to anything that smells like the low-fat era.
Critics in mainstream medical and academic circles argue that the protein emphasis is overdone and raise alarms about messaging that appears to normalize saturated fat-rich options. This, even as the numerical saturated fat cap of 10% remains in place in this administration’s guidelines. This is how you confuse the public.
Rightward shift
So here’s the rub. When the administration’s dietary guidelines recommend “limit saturated fat” while at the same time offering assurance that butter and tallow are just fine, the report sounds like a cultural compromise rather than a scientific breakthrough. It reads like an attempt to translate public distrust of processed food into a simple, movement-friendly narrative of “real food.” This, while accommodating a rightward shift in food politics that treats older public-health messaging as elitist, scolding or industry-captured.
Let us not forget that critics relentlessly pummeled the Let’s Move! initiative as an attempt by the First Lady to become a government food cop, and that the policy meddled in the private lives and daily decisions of American families. Yet today, those same critics sit like idle schoolboys in silent agreement with the new dietary guidelines.
So, did the science change? Maybe. Did culture change? Certainly.
Shorthand and codewords
Social media has turned nutrition into an identity. The public is angrier at processed foods than it was a decade ago. Trust in experts is suspect, and “protein” has become shorthand for discipline and strength. Carbohydrates (carbs), on the other hand, have become a codeword for weakness. The new guidelines arrive wrapped in a broader “Make America Healthy Again” political brand and are being sold less as a policy memo and more as a cultural corrective. In other words, the administration’s guidelines are more of a wink-and-a-nod to a cultural shift rather than adherence to peer-reviewed science.
Granted, in the end, America may benefit from louder warnings about highly processed foods. But if the guidelines also smuggle in muddled messages about saturated fat and protein-heavy patterns, then “real food” becomes less a scientific clarification than a political slogan. One that risks trading one era’s oversimplification of food science for another.
And that’s the way I see it from where I sit.
Chris Gibbs is a farmer and lives in Maplewood. He and his family own and operate 560 acres of crops, hay and cattle. Gibbs is retired from the United States Department of Agriculture and currently serves as president of the Gateway Arts Council and chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party and the Ohio Rural Caucus. He is also the president of Rural Voices USA and Rural Voices Network.