US Dietary Guideline Reforms Are Coming, and Health Experts Are Concerned
December 17, 2025 | Source: Civil Eats | by Rebekah Alvey
In September 2024, shortly after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dropped his bid for president and backed Donald Trump’s campaign, Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) held a “second opinion” nutritional roundtable that platformed ideas now tied to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.
The meeting—attended by many people who would later fill Trump’s Cabinet—marked a political shift in how Republicans were talking about health, and it set the agenda for what the Trump administration would later prioritize, from pesticides to ultraprocessed foods. Included in the conversation was a pointed critique of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA).
“The food pyramid was a document created by the cigarette industry through complete corporate capture,” Calley Means, who is now a senior adviser at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said at the event. The pyramid, he said, was “an ultraprocessed-food marketing document saying that we need to eat a bunch of carbs and sugar.”