Here’s what the new federal dietary guidelines mean for your meals

The Wall Street Journal – Wednesday, January 7, 2026
By Andrea Petersen, Jesse Newman, and Laura Cooper

Avoid most highly-processed foods, dramatically up your protein intake and nix added sugars.

Those are the major takeaways from the Trump administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, issued Wednesday. They mark a departure from earlier federal dietary advice—for instance, recommending full-fat dairy foods and cooking with butter and beef tallow.

Like prior federal guidelines, they define a healthy diet as consisting of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, poultry, seafood and nuts. But they also specifically shout out red meat. (Scientists advising the government had recommended that Americans eat less of it.)

Here’s what to know about the new guidelines:

Avoid most highly-processed foods, and these additives

The guidelines advise people to steer clear of packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat or other foods with added sugars and salt—say, sugary cereal and frozen pizza. They advise vigilance against additives including artificial flavors, dyes and artificial preservatives.

“This isn’t totally new advice—in some ways it’s status quo—but the food industry should certainly worry because it reinforces the message that what they’re selling is making us sick,” said Jerold Mande, an adjunct professor of nutrition at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and chief executive of Nourish Science, a nonprofit.

The new guidelines call for reducing refined carbs—think white bread—and recommend that people eat two to four servings of whole grains each day. The previous version said adults should eat six ounces of grains a day, with whole grains representing at least half.

Eat more protein. A lot more.

The new guidelines recommend Americans dramatically step up their protein consumption, to 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight a day. The current recommendations call for healthy adults to consume 0.8 grams.

The new guidelines specifically suggest red meat among recommended protein sources for Americans, and that people prioritize protein at every meal.

But Americans aren’t exactly short on protein, said Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford Medicine, who was on the scientific committee that advised the government on the new guidelines.

“America is obsessed with protein,” he said. “You can’t walk in the grocery store without seeing protein in bold letters, and it’s mostly in junk food.”

The new protein guidance could lead Americans to eat more red meat, said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University. “Of all the protein sources, that’s the least positive one,” he said.

Some studies have found that red meat consumption raises the risk of diabetes. Unprocessed red meat has been shown in some studies to be associated with heart disease and premature death, though other research shows a modest link or no connection to heart disease.

Scientists advising the government recommended in 2024 that Americans eat less red meat and more beans, peas and lentils.

Avoid added sugars

The new guidelines take a much harder line on added sugars, found in everything from cookies to salad dressing and bread. They say that no amount of added sugars is recommended and one meal should contain no more than 10 grams of added sugars. One serving of Honey Nut Cheerios, for example, contains 12 grams.

The previous federal guidelines recommended limiting added sugars to 10% of daily calories, or 50 grams for someone with a 2,000-calorie-a-day diet.

Nutrition scientists and dietitians for decades have been trying to get Americans to cut down on sugar. Studies have found that diets high in added sugars are linked to a higher risk of obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

Overall sugar consumption has decreased in recent years, but Americans still get an average of about 13% of their daily calories from added sugars, according to federal data.

Mixed messages on saturated fat

One surprise was that the government kept the existing recommended limit on saturated fat consumption to less than 10% of daily calories. For months, administration officials have talked up saturated fat’s nutritional advantages.

Some nutritionists said that limit is tough to square with other foods the new guidelines encourage. “Recommending more meat, more fat, dairy, butter and beef tallow, all of those things would fundamentally be at odds with a recommendation to limit saturated fat,” said Lindsey Smith Taillie, professor in the nutrition department at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health.

Research has found that saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol—the bad kind—and can increase the risk of heart disease. Studies, however, are mixed.

The thinking around whole-fat dairy has shifted in recent years. Some recent studies comparing low-fat and full-fat dairy consumption haven’t found much difference in health outcomes. There is also evidence that the type of fat in milk, yogurt and cheese can help with weight loss and blood sugar control.

Fewer drinks

The new guidelines reiterate that drinking less alcohol is preferable for health than drinking more. The government’s previous recommendations had said it was safe for men to have a maximum of two drinks a day, and for women, one.

The latest dietary guidelines reduced alcohol consumption to a minor mention, not specifying how many drinks a day may be safe.

A year ago, Vivek Murthy, who was at the time President Joe Biden’s surgeon general, said alcoholic beverages should carry warnings that the drinks are a leading cause of preventable cancers.

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