Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025

Cover of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025, featuring diverse people and healthy food.
Cover of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025, featuring diverse people and healthy food.

EXCERPT FROM REPORT

The message is simple: eat real food. To Make America Healthy Again, we must return to the basics. American households must prioritize diets built on whole, nutrient-dense foods—protein, dairy, vegetables, fruits, healthy fats, and whole grains. Paired with a dramatic reduction in highly processed foods laden with refined carbohydrates, added sugars, excess sodium, unhealthy fats, and chemical additives, this approach can change the health trajectory for so many Americans.

The United States is amid a health emergency. Nearly 90% of health care spending goes to treating people who have chronic diseases.1 Many of these illnesses are not genetic destiny; they are the predictable result of the Standard American Diet—a diet which, over time, has become reliant on highly processed foods and coupled with a sedentary lifestyle.

The consequences have been devastating. More than 70% of American adults are overweight or obese.2 Nearly one in three American adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 has prediabetes.3 Diet-driven chronic disease now disqualifies large numbers of young Americans from military service, undermining national readiness and cutting off a historic pathway to opportunity and upward mobility.4

For decades, federal incentives have promoted low-quality, highly processed foods and pharmaceutical intervention instead of prevention. This crisis is the result of poor policy choices; inadequate nutrition research; and a lack of coordination across federal, state, local, and private partners.

This changes today.

We are realigning our food system to support American farmers, ranchers, and companies who grow and produce real food— and the Trump administration is working to ensure all families can afford it.

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