The New Dietary Guidelines: Eat Real Food and Avoid Highly Processed Food

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are updated every five years, and the current edition, for 2025 to 2030, brings a clear change in tone. For the first time, the official guidance is to avoid highly processed food. Here is what the new guidelines say and how to put them into practice.

The main points

• Eat real food. Build meals from whole foods and avoid highly processed products.
• Make protein a priority at every meal, from both animal and plant sources. The guidelines set a target of 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day.
• Eat vegetables and fruit every day: about 3 servings of vegetables and 2 of fruit.
• Choose fiber-rich whole grains, about 2 to 4 servings a day, and cut back sharply on refined carbohydrates.
• Get healthy fats from whole foods such as eggs, seafood, meat, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives and avocados.
• Skip added sugars. They are not recommended at all; natural sugar in whole fruit and plain dairy is fine.

What counts as highly processed?

Think of products made mostly from refined ingredients and additives rather than recognizable food: sugary drinks, packaged snacks and sweets, many breakfast cereals, and processed meats and frozen meals. A short ingredient list of foods you recognize is a good sign. Frozen vegetables, canned beans, plain yogurt and whole grain bread are processed in a small way and remain good choices.

Putting it on the plate

• Start with a protein, such as eggs, fish, chicken, beans or Greek yogurt
• Fill half the plate with vegetables
• Add a whole grain or a starchy vegetable in a modest portion
• Drink water, unsweetened tea or coffee, or milk
• Cook at home more often, and keep fruit and nuts for snacks

Guidelines are a starting point

National guidelines are written for the population. If you have kidney disease, heart disease, diabetes or another condition, your own targets for protein, fat, sodium or carbohydrates may differ, and nutrition experts still debate parts of the new edition. Your provider can help you adapt it.

Nutrition support at Hope Integrative Medicine

If you want help turning the guidelines into meals that fit your health, we can plan them with you. Our lifestyle medicine and primary care teams build nutrition plans around your health conditions, your schedule and the food you like, in person in West Ashley or by telehealth across South Carolina. New patients are often able to be scheduled within a week of requesting an appointment. Request an appointment.

Sources: RealFood.gov, Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025 to 2030; RealFood.gov, the guidelines; DietaryGuidelines.gov; Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, The Nutrition Source, on the new guidelines; DietaryGuidelines.gov, 1980 edition.

This article is general health information and does not replace advice from your own provider.