Washington, D.C. — The U.S. Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services today released its long-awaited update to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Consumers were promised “a concise, user-friendly format”—a challenging task given the complex trade-offs guiding what we choose to eat. The new guidelines are indeed concise—just over 6 pages as compared to the 2020-2025 Guideline’s 164 pages. As a result, they omit many helpful guardrails, like limiting added sugars to 10% of calories. How federal officials will translate this more qualitative advice into Federal nutrition policy and programs—the primary purpose of the Guidelines—remains uncertain.

The Guidelines have also created uncertainty as to the process leading to their creation. They depart from the recommendations of the expert Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) by, for example, prescribing “1.2–1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day, adjusting as needed based on your individual caloric requirements.” The prior Guidelines set a minimum of 0.8 grams and the DGAC did not revisit that floor, although it did “emphasize the health benefits of increasing beans, peas, and lentils while reducing red and processed meats” as part of a shift to “include more plant-based Protein Foods.”

But the new Guidelines undoubtedly get a couple things right. For the first time, the DGAs recommend limiting “highly processed foods,” “refined carbohydrates,” and “foods and beverages that include artificial flavors, petroleum-based dyes, artificial preservatives, and low-calorie non-nutritive sweeteners.” In other words, watch out for ultra-processed foods (UPFs), or most UPFs anyway. By addressing “added sugars,” the previous DGAs had distinguished foods on the basis of processing before, but for the most part, the old Guidelines gave equal treatment to foods with the same macronutrients. The overwhelming scientific evidence contradicts that treatment, yet the DGAC declined to recommend an update without a “more rigorous definition of ultra-processed foods.” The new Guidelines correctly depart from the DGAC’s timid approach to the UPF question.

An even more incontrovertibly accurate piece of advice within the new Guidelines: “Consume less alcohol for better overall health.” This advice is consistent with the previous Guidelines’ statement that “at all levels of consumption, drinking less is generally better for health than drinking more.”  It should put to rest any doubts about the health benefits of “moderate” drinking raised by the opaque, conflict-ridden, methodologically flawed report from the National Academies of Sciences and Engineering (NASEM). Unlike the previous DGAs, the new Guidelines do not recommend limits for those who choose to drink alcohol, raising concerns that clinicians and others will continue to cite the prior Guidelines—e.g. 1 drink per day for women, 2 drinks for men. Recent studies suggest these limits are too high. For example, Canadian government researchers concluded that “3–6 standard drinks per week” increases “risk of developing several types of cancer, including breast and colon cancer,” while a report from the U.S. Interagency Coordinating Committee on the Prevention of Underage Drinking found that drinking more than 7 drinks per week on average leads to over a 1:1000 lifetime risk of dying from an alcohol-attributable accident or condition like cancer.

The Guidelines’ treatment of alcohol exhibits other deficiencies. While cautioning that pregnant women and consumers “recovering from alcohol use disorder” should completely avoid alcohol, they say nothing about underage drinking. And by singling out “those with a family history of alcoholism” as susceptible to “addictive behaviors,” they suggest consumers bear the blame for the nation’s alcoholism epidemic and broader harms. Twin studies suggest that genetic factors indeed may account for 45-65% of the risk of developing alcohol use disorder. However, the ongoing U.S. public health catastrophe—excessive alcohol use alone is now responsible for about 178,000 deaths in the country each year—speaks volumes more about the alcohol industry’s rapacious greed than any deficiencies in the gene pool.

Fortunately, consumers are getting the message despite Big Food and Big Alcohol’s efforts to inundate our environment with unhealthy, addictive products and advertising. Fewer Americans (54%) than almost ever before say they consume alcohol. Seven in ten Americans want to avoid UPFs. The Administration deserves credit for acknowledging alcohol and processed foods’ harms, and advising consumers accordingly, but their message could be clearer, and they could do much more to protect consumers from the multi-billion dollar transnational corporations profiting from our ill health.