For the first time in my medical lifetime, the U.S. government has told the truth about highly processed food.
The 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans mark the most consequential shift in federal nutrition policy in decades. After decades of rising obesity, fatty liver disease, and diet-driven chronic illness, the federal government has finally acknowledged a basic reality: What we eat matters more than how many calories we count.
That may sound obvious. But for generations, federal nutrition policy promoted low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets, subsidized highly-processed food, and treated chronic disease as inevitable rather than preventable. The result is a population in which more than 70 percent of adults are overweight or obese, nearly one in three adolescents has prediabetes, and close to 90 percent of healthcare spending goes toward chronic or mental disease management rather than prevention.
The new guidelines represent a genuine course correction. They are not perfect. But they are historically important—and politically revealing.
The most important shift in the new guidelines is their explicit rejection of highly processed foods (which most people historically understand as junk food). For the first time, federal nutrition policy names highly processed products—those laden with refined, industrially produced carbohydrates, added sugars, chemical additives, emulsifiers, artificial sweeteners, and industrial dyes—as a central driver of chronic disease.
