Updated January 7, 2026 at 10:09 AM CST
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is expected to release new dietary guidelines at a press conference today, which is the government's official advice on what Americans should eat to promote good health.
And based on the secretary's public comments, a major revamp is likely, including a focus on limiting highly processed foods and changes to recommendations on high fat dairy, including cheese and yogurt, meat and saturated fats overall.
The guidelines are updated every five years following a scientific review of nutrition evidence by a committee of experts. Typically, they follow many of the recommendations of a scientific advisory committee that spends about two years reviewing the evidence and compiling a dense scientific report.
But Kennedy has strong views about food and has made no secret of his disdain for the existing guidelines. In public appearances, he has disparaged the process for developing them, even though the most recent guidelines were issued in 2020, during President Trump's first term.
Though most Americans don't actually read the Dietary Guidelines, they are highly influential in determining what's served in school meals and on military bases, as well as what's included in federal food aid for mothers and infants, as the guidelines set targets for calories and nutrients.
The guidelines have long emphasized consumption of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, as well as limiting alcohol, added sugars and saturated fat, and many nutrition experts say the science behind limiting saturated fats remains strong. But there's increasing evidence pointing to the potential benefits of high fat dairy, including yogurt, milk and cheese which Kennedy is expected to emphasize.
So, cue the sound of sizzling beef tallow and check out what might be in store.
Saturated fat and meat could get another look
Overhauling standard advice on saturated fat would be controversial.
The guidelines have long advised limiting saturated fats, like those found in red meat, to less than 10% of daily calories because of evidence showing that this kind of fat can increase cholesterol, which can increase heart disease risk.
"I would say that the evidence is moderate to high linking excessive saturated fat intake with negative outcomes," says nutrition scientist Alison Steiber, who is a Registered Dietician Nutritionist (RDN), and Chief Mission, Impact and Strategy officer at the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. She points to evidence from published studies.
And the 2025 review of the evidence by the committee of experts on the Dietary Guidelines advisory committee came down squarely behind the current guidelines, issued five years ago.
But Kennedy has made no secret of his affinity for meat and the saturated fat that comes along with it, describing his own eating habits as "a carnivore diet."
He has touted Thanksgiving turkey fried in beef tallow, and in March he sat down for burger and fries at a Steak 'n Shake in Florida to highlight the chain's switch from cooking with vegetable oil to beef tallow. At a July meeting with governors in Colorado, he said the new guidelines would be "common sense" and "stress the need to eat saturated fats," including dairy, "good meat, fresh meat and vegetables."
Thought leaders in the MAHA movement argue that animal products have been vilified, and some advocate for low-carb, higher-fat diets like the ketogenic diet or the carnivore diet.
And in recent years, researchers have started looking into low-carb, higher-fat diets, with some studies finding improvement in markers of cardiovascular health, though more research is still needed.
The evidence for the link between saturated fat and cardiovascular disease began with studies in the 1950s, when Americans ate more red meat. Then in the diet craze of the 1980s, marketers pushed a lot of low-fat snack foods that were high in refined carbohydrates and sugar. But swapping fat for sugar and empty carbs is also problematic, and it has been complicated to untangle the effects of ever-changing dietary patterns.
Instead of saturated fat, the current guidelines encourage eating foods that are high in unsaturated fat, including nuts, avocados and olive oil, which are linked to lower cardiovascular risk.
At this point, Harvard's Hu doesn't see a rationale to "make a major shift" in dietary recommendations.
"Has the science really changed that much in the last 20 years in terms of saturated fat? Not really," he says.
Whole-fat dairy vs. skim milk
Alongside his embrace of meat, Kennedy has also championed full-fat dairy products, saying he plans to end the "attack on whole milk, cheese and yogurt" in the new guidelines.
That comes after decades of the American public being told to opt for fat-free or low-fat dairy, largely out of concern for the amount of saturated fat in these foods.
But nutrition science has evolved, says Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist, public health scientist and Director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.
"It's pretty clear that overall milk and cheese and yogurt can be part of a healthy diet," he says. He points to research suggesting milk lowers blood pressure and the risk of stroke, and says yogurt seems to be linked to a lower risk of diabetes.
"What's quite interesting is that the fat content doesn't seem to make a big difference. So both low fat and whole fat dairy versions of milk, cheese and yogurt have been linked to lower cardiovascular risk," Mozaffarian says.
The process of parsing out the complex relationships among dairy fat, cholesterol and cardiovascular risk is ongoing.
Richard Bruno, a professor of human nutrition at Ohio State University, says there's evidence suggesting that "consuming saturated fat from dairy foods doesn't seem to be behaving the way we think it should behave, based on the historical evidence that [it] is linked to heart disease."
Bruno is among the researchers who argue that the data doesn't support the existing recommendation to favor low-fat dairy.
Because dairy is such a broad category, it's challenging to make sweeping statements, argues Benoît Lamarche, who directs the Nutrition, Health and Society Center in Quebec. He was part of a recent effort to gather experts and review all the data on dairy fat and cardiometabolic health. He says they concluded there's not enough evidence to support an exclusive recommendation for either type of dairy.
On the other hand, Hu still thinks it's wise to avoid too much full-fat dairy because it comes with more overall calories and saturated fat.
But he says the bigger problem is that many Americans eat dairy in the form of pizza, burgers and other foods that are "loaded with sodium, refined starch and processed meats."
Beans and legumes may get dissed
The 2025 scientific report recommends that the protein section of the dietary guidelines be changed to emphasize eating more beans, peas and lentils, while cutting back on red and processed meats.
Given Kennedy's stance on animal products, Christopher Gardner, the director of nutrition studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, who helped write the scientific advisory report, says he's concerned the guidelines will instead emphasize meat consumption.
That's unfortunate, he says, because the proposed change was based on a careful review of research. Gardner says if people replace some of the meat in their diet with beans and other legumes, they consume less saturated fat. "Beans are a great source of fiber — meat has none — and a great source of plant protein," he told NPR. Less than 10% of Americans get enough fiber in their diet.
In one hint at how the MAHA movement sees the issue, science writer Nina Teicholz wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal titled "Meat Will Make America Healthy Again," urging Kennedy and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins to reject the recommendation to emphasize plant-based proteins.
Teicholz founded the Nutrition Coalition, which lobbies for changes to the dietary guidelines. In her op-ed, she argues that "most plant-based proteins lack at least one of the nine essential amino acids" and are harder to absorb.
But Gardner points out you can get all your essential amino acids from a plant diet by eating a variety of plant foods. And though most plant proteins may not be "complete" in the way animal proteins are, he says, the body absorbs amino acids from different foods eaten throughout the day. Diets rich in plant proteins are linked to less chronic disease.
Ultra-processed food in the spotlight
Kennedy has been sharply critical of ultraprocessed foods, saying they're "poisoning" Americans and blaming them for the chronic-disease epidemic.
And the recent MAHA Commission report states that they've led "to nutrient depletion, increased caloric intake, and exposure to harmful additives."
The Trump administration has committed to developing a "government-wide definition" for ultra-processed food.
But in the dietary guidelines advisory report, the scientific committee didn't make any explicit recommendations on the topic.
Barbara Schneeman, who chaired the 2020 scientific committee that reviewed the nutrition evidence, says concerns about ultra-processed food are twofold: There are the ingredients, and then there's the actual processing.
"If you look at the key things in the dietary guidelines, they address limiting the intake of added sugars, saturated fat, the same with sodium," she says. "But we really have little to no information on the processing side of it."
And there are concerns about the impact of any new definition of ultra-processed foods. Susan Mayne, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health and a former Food and Drug Administration official, says such a definition needs to avoid sweeping up foods that "are actually beneficial for our health," even if they have some processed ingredients, such as certain yogurts or whole-grain breads.
Still, many nutrition experts agree it's time to take action on reducing unhealthy foods, including highly processed foods loaded with added sugar, sodium and excess fat.
"One of the biggest problems of all prior dietary guidelines has been the reluctance of the government to tell Americans to eat less of any food," Mozaffarian says. He says there are some foods that we should be eating less, or we should be avoiding, [including] sugar sweetened beverages, candy, junk food, processed meats, highly processed foods. "A recommendation to reduce highly processed foods, which is more than half of the calories in the food supply, would be a massive change," Mozaffarian says. "And a shot across the bow to industry to say that the current products and practices are not okay."
Softening alcohol guidance?
It's unclear where the new guidelines will land on alcohol, but the lead-up to weighing the issue has sparked controversy.
A growing body of research points to a link between alcohol consumption and an increased risk of cancer, stroke and premature death. What's still debatable is the exact threshold at which risks increase.
The current guidelines advise up to one drink a day for women and two for men.
In crafting the new guidelines, the federal government was expected to consider two separate reviews of the evidence on alcohol and its health effects. One found health risks start to increase "even at relatively low levels of alcohol consumption," says Katherine Keyes, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, who helped analyze the data.
Trade groups representing the alcohol industry were quick to criticize that study after the draft was released in January and called for it to be "disregard[ed]."
And that seems to have happened. Keyes says that in August the authors learned their study would not be considered for the dietary guidelines.
"To not even evaluate the evidence we have seems like a real missed opportunity," she says.
Meanwhile, the other report on alcohol — this one commissioned by Congress and done by a committee at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) — couldn't make any conclusions about alcohol with "high certainty" because of concerns about the quality of evidence.
It concluded that moderate drinking was associated with a lower risk of dying, including from cardiovascular-related events like heart attacks. It also showed, with moderate certainty, that drinking was linked with a higher risk of breast cancer.
Those findings don't support actually recommending alcohol for health, says Dr. Ned Calonge, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health, who chaired the NASEM committee, but he cautions against making blanket statements like there are no "safe levels of alcohol."
Mike Marshall, who leads the U.S. Alcohol Policy Alliance and advocates for more public awareness around the harms of drinking, worries that industry pressure will lead to a softer recommendation in the guidelines.
"This is a major crisis, and to be focused on making America healthy again without addressing alcohol is inexplicable to me," he says.
Copyright 2026 NPR
