Corporate Influence Over the Dietary Guidelines

Food companies have long attempted to influence the guidelines, and over the past several decades, the number of committee members with food industry ties grew. However, an analysis of the current 2025 committee, done by advocacy organization U.S. Right to Know (USRTK), found that this time around, only nine of 20 members had significant food industry links. USRTK identified no industry ties for seven members, which they described as “signs of progress.”

In response to criticism, the USDA and HHS also made changes to increase transparency, although mandatory disclosure of conflicts of interest is still not required.

Chamberlin said that the committee’s work is now the most transparent part of the process. “If that whole group gets together, it has to be a public meeting. If more than a few of them are talking, it has to be viewed by the public. They have to post their protocols. They have to post their preliminary findings. They have to post their final report publicly,” she said. “What’s not as transparent is the stage we’re in right now, which is where the secretaries are actually writing the guidelines. Historically, that’s when interference has come into play.”

For example, the 2015 committee recommended stronger language on cutting back on red meat and processed meats that was ultimately not included in the guidelines written by the agencies, after significant lobbying by the meat industry and Congressional pushback led by Republicans.

This January, with the advisory committee report in hand, HHS and USDA employees held a public meeting to take comments on the report before they began the process of writing the actual guidelines.

Seventy-nine individuals spoke at the meeting, including plenty of concerned private citizens and advocates for healthy eating. But 32 of the speakers, about 40 percent, had obvious, direct links to the food industry. Meat companies sent the most representatives by far: 15 of the speakers represented beef, egg, dairy, and other meat interests.

Representatives of the Beef Checkoff and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (NCBA), a contractor to the Checkoff, both spoke, and the NCBA also submitted written comments of its own and on behalf of the Beef Checkoff. In its comments, the organization pushed back hard on provisions in the guidelines that might recommend swapping in beans, peas, and lentils for servings of red meat.

“This substitution, and the anti-red meat language scattered throughout the report, is nonsensical given beef’s proven nutritional value and clear place in a healthy diet,” it read.

Similar Nutrition Controversies, New Attention

One of the longest-running disagreements in nutrition is the role of red meat, and particularly saturated fat, in healthy diets. Trendy high-meat diets are continually rebranded—Atkins became South Beach became Paleo became Keto and Whole 30—but all the while, most nutrition scientists maintain that the body of evidence shows limiting red meat and saturated fat is a healthier dietary pattern for most people.

Harvard professor Fung was part of the chronic disease subcommittee tasked with looking at evidence on this front. Rather than just focusing on reducing red meat, the researchers tackled a specific, more nuanced question. Because every dietary choice involves a swap, cutting a serving of red meat might mean adding a serving of chicken or fish or beans. So, they wanted to know: Does the substitute matter? For instance, is tofu a better choice than beef but not as good as fish?

What they found is that any swap in place of red meat produces a health benefit in terms of reducing heart-disease risk. That led to one of the December report’s most significant recommendations: Change the guidelines to promote more plant protein and less animal protein, especially red meat and processed meats.

“It does not mean that somebody cannot eat red meat at all,” Fung said. “But if you look at the science, the good science especially, what it is pointing towards is plant protein.”

There is an entire world of health-conscious people, however, who believe that conclusion is wrong and point to high-meat diets as the best solution for weight loss and chronic disease prevention. Many of those people are prominent in Kennedy’s MAHA movement: At a MAHA roundtable last fall, podcaster Mikhaila Fuller talked about curing her multiple health issues through an all-red-meat diet, which she now promotes as The Lion Diet.

At the launch of the MAHA Institute in May, Montana rancher Bryan Mussard told attendees he’d been talking to Kennedy since last summer about the topic. “I sent him so many text messages and emails on saturated fat that when I met him for the first time last September, I just introduced myself as ‘saturated fat,’ and he knew who I was,” he said.

Seed oils present a similar challenge. Many in the MAHA movement, including Kennedy himself, have pointed to seed oils—soybean, corn, safflower, sunflower, cottonseed, and canola—as a likely cause of various health issues. The MAHA Commission Report cites as potentially problematic the change from animal-based sources of fat like butter and lard toward industrially produced seed oils.

“Industrial refining reduces micronutrients, such as vitamin E and phytosterols. Moreover, these oils contribute to an imbalanced omega-6/omega-3 ratio, a topic of ongoing research for its potential role in inflammation,” it reads. Nearly all experts agree that American diets contain too much omega-6 vs. omega-3 oils and that minimal processing of oils is better, but mainstream nutritionists say the science isn’t there to warn against seed oils specifically.

Nutrition professor and author Marion Nestle, who served on the 1995 committee and has been a frequent critic of the guidelines since, wrote recently that while it seems like a given that Americans consume seed oils in excess, in fried and junk foods, “I cannot find convincing data that seed oils are any worse for health than any other high-calorie food, and the evidence for their benefits as compared to animal fats seems strong and consistent.”

Perhaps the most anticipated aspect of the guidelines is what, if anything, they’ll say about ultra-processed foods. Of all the MAHA movement’s goals, Kennedy has pushed hardest, so far, on getting additives out of the food supply and focusing attention on ultra-processed foods as a primary source of Americans’ poor health.

His focus has been so intense that the leading researcher, Kevin Hall, at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), who was responsible for establishing some of the strongest evidence of ultra-processed foods’ health harms, left the agency because he felt like Kennedy’s HHS wouldn’t allow him to communicate unbiased study results unless they continued to back that conclusion up, regardless of what the research found. (HHS spokespeople have disputed his assertion.)

According to the law, changes to the dietary guidelines must be based on what is called a “preponderance of evidence.” The committee conducted a systematic review of research on the relationship between eating ultra-processed foods and risk of weight gain and obesity. The researchers did conclude that diets high in ultra-processed foods were associated with more body fat, higher body mass indexes, and a higher risk of obesity in adults, with a similar finding for children.

But it rated the evidence as “limited.” Since that didn’t meet the standard of a “preponderance of evidence,” the committee declined to recommend limits on ultra-processed foods in the guidelines.

Fung said that makes sense, since the definition of ultra-processed foods was only developed in 2009. In her mind, it still needs work. And these changes take time: It took ages for nutrition science to evolve to recognize healthy fats instead of cautioning against all fat in the diet, for example.

“It is a hot-button topic, and people want answers,” CSPI’s Chamberlin said. “We want to know what’s going on and what’s making us sick. But honestly, the advisory committee not being able to put forth a strong recommendation is a testament to how scientifically rigorous their process is. Their guidance can only be as strong as the underlying science.”

Not everyone agrees with that. Nestle, for one, who is also a stickler about the science, thinks it’s high time to tell Americans to eat fewer ultra-processed foods.

Either way, members of the Trump administration have mischaracterized how the advisory committee evaluated ultra-professed foods—and how the current guidelines currently handle them. In the Megyn Kelly interview, for example, Makary said, “No longer are we going to say, ‘You have these calories, it doesn’t matter how you get them, it doesn’t matter if it’s all ultra-processed foods.’”

In fact, the 2020 guidelines recommended “nutrient-dense” foods, which means it’s not just calories that matter.

In the end, Fung said the best dietary advice hasn’t changed much over time. Based on the review, she’d give this advice: “Eat more fruits and vegetables, whole grains. Eat a wide variety of foods. Mostly plant-based, especially the proteins, and choose whole foods and minimally processed [foods].”

She—and pretty much any nutrition expert—will recommend sticking most to whole and minimally processed foods. “We do not need the term ultra-processed to help us differentiate between healthy versus unhealthy foods,” she says.

Kennedy and those around him see it differently. They want to emphasize the ultra-processed nature of the foods. “Ultra-processed food is comprised of three ingredients primarily that did not exist 120 years ago,” said Kennedy advisor Calley Means at the MAHA Institute launch, citing refined grains, added sugar, and seed oils.

Some experts, including Nestle, disagree with many of the nitty-gritty details but understand where the arguments and frustration are coming from: She’s been pointing to corporate influence on dietary advice for decades, while others have documented how a food system driven by corporate profit transformed the way Americans eat in less than a century, while chronic disease rates ticked up.

It can start to feel like splitting hairs, but the tension between what conclusions can be drawn from the observable reality at hand, the scientific evidence available, and the desire to make change right away has existed for as long as nutrition has been studied. It’s hard to do controlled trials that isolate what humans eat. It’s hard to boil down complicated studies into simple advice on which foods to eat for optimal health. Kennedy doesn’t seem to agree.

“We are going to have four-page dietary guidelines that tell people, essentially, ‘Eat whole food,’ ” he told members of Congress in May. “ ‘Eat the food that’s good for you.’ ”