Hundreds of doctors and nutrition researchers have called for a return to science-based recommendations in the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
The new US dietary guidelines prioritize an inverted food pyramid and place high-impact animal products like red meat and dairy alongside vegetables and fruit, despite conflicting with almost all messaging from scientists and health experts.
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In an open letter to the US Health Secretary Robert F Kennedy Junior, known as RFK Jr, and Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke L Rollins, 210 health and science professionals highlighted multiple internal inconsistencies within RFK Jr’s new guidelines, and also called for an immediate return to science-based guidance.
“We are deeply concerned that the advice in the recently released 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) is, at best, confusing, and, at worst, harmful to public health,” the letter said.
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) previously concluded that eating more plant-based proteins and less processed meat and animal products would support positive health outcomes. However, the DGA disregarded these findings and instead prioritized reviews from the newly created Scientific Foundation.
‘The majority of authors had relevant conflicts of interest’
“The majority of the Scientific Foundation’s evidence reviews were narrative reviews, largely authored by one person,” the open letter explained. “Given that the majority of authors had relevant conflicts of interest and were largely reviewing the scientific literature in a non-systematic way, the risk of bias across the Scientific Foundation’s reviews is much higher compared to the DGAC’s reviews.”
“We call on the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) – as well as professional medical and nutrition associations – to issue science-based dietary guidance that truly promotes health and prevents chronic disease,” the letter said.
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New Dietary Guidelines for Americans described as ‘contradictory and often unscientific’
In February, a separate paper published by The Lancet described the new US dietary guidelines as “a recipe for poorer health.” The authors noted how this year’s DGA “upended” a rigorous and transparent process and replaced it with a “conflicted and compromised” version, producing “contradictory and often unscientific” guidelines.
Some advice from the new guidelines, such as prioritizing beef tallow and butter over seed oils, has likely come directly from RFK Jr. Experts have predicted that if even a modest number of Americans follow the meat-heavy guidelines, it would require hundreds of millions of acres of new agricultural land.
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