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President Ronald Reagan had it right when he said that “I’m from the government and I’m here to help” was a frightening phrase. Yet sometimes the American government succeeds in “helping,” or remedying, past mistakes. Flipping the food pyramid is one of those successes.
The Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., just replaced decades of “health science” with one simple phrase: “Eat Real Food.” Instead of pushing highly processed, sugary foods, the government’s food-focused website, realfood.gov, promotes minimally processed proteins, vegetables, and healthy fats as the baseline for a good diet. The inversion of the food pyramid of the 1990s recognizes the dangers of highly processed foods.
Until the recent pivot, the HHS’s dietary guidelines were shaped by the research of a physiologist named Ancel Keys. In the 1950s, Keys analyzed data from seven countries, claiming to demonstrate that diets high in saturated fats — meat, butter, cheese, etc. — caused high cholesterol levels, leading to heart disease. The only problem? Keys omitted data from 16 countries that didn’t fit his model. A nutritionist named John Yudkins identified a link between sugar consumption and health problems like cavities, Type 2 diabetes, and obesity, but his studies were sidelined. Corporations like the Sugar Research Foundation funded studies that agreed with what was quickly becoming a mainstream opinion: Saturated fats were dangerous.
The federal government’s stance on food influences what ends up on our shelves, in schoolchildren’s cafeteria lunches, and what thousands of Americans on SNAP or WIC benefits can buy. The US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration, buying into studies like Keys’s, allowed companies to substitute fat in dairy or meat products for sugar, soy protein, artificial flavor, and polyunsaturated seed oils. High-carb, nutritionally dead foods were promoted as “healthy” because they didn’t have saturated fat or cholesterol. The food pyramid and MyPlate diagram of the past represented those decisions, and the American people suffered for it.
Failing to pay attention to a policy doesn’t eliminate its impact. Since 2025, 19 states have enacted legislation keeping soda and candy off the list of products that SNAP programs will subsidize, and the FDA has pledged to work with food manufacturers and retailers to phase petroleum-based food coloring out of the food supply.
These are improvements, but the new food pyramid doesn’t solve everything. American farmers feed commercial livestock corn and soybeans, giving them diabetes, and the chemicals farmers use to fertilize our fields are poisonous. Until we address those problems, and others, it’ll be hard to call any food that we haven’t grown ourselves truly healthy.
But despite all of the steps we still need to take, one thing about the new food pyramid, and the administration’s stance on health, is different from a month ago: It’s a little closer to reality.
Evelyn Kniffen is a freshman studying the liberal arts.
