RFK’s New Dietary Guidelines Delayed Again, Amid Concerns

The latest update to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans has been delayed yet again, the New York Times reports, and won’t be released until after the new year. The government is legally required to update the influential document every five years, and this latest delay means that the Trump administration will miss that deadline. But will there be any consequences?

The dietary guidelines may sound like a bland informational packet, but they’re enormously influential. Many significant government policies that involve food, from military meals to food purchases by government institutions, are steered by the document’s recommendations. School lunches are required to abide by its recommendations, as are the foods eligible for SNAP funds. All in all, it influences over $40 billion in federal spending every year.

The guidelines are issued jointly by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The next set of guidelines may contain more changes than usual, as Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has indicated that they’ll look very different from previous iterations.

It’s unclear when the new guidelines will see the light of day, but the administration has given some hints as to what they’ll look like when they are finally published.

Yes to Saturated Fat, No to Ultraprocessed Foods

When it’s time to release a new version of the guidelines, a federal advisory panel reviews the latest food and nutrition research for about two years and issues a report recommending certain changes. The latest panel recommended eating less red meat and more plant-based proteins, specifically beans, peas and lentils. The panel also advised moving legumes from the “vegetable” category to the “protein” group to make it clearer that they are excellent sources of protein.

However, Kennedy announced that the administration will reject the recommendations of the advisory panel and rewrite the guidelines from the ground up. In August, a panel expert told Sentient that its members were “ghosted” by HHS.

In June, 134 physicians signed an open letter to Kennedy and USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins urging them to include the panel’s recommendations to eat more legumes in the new guidelines. Beans, peas and lentils are good sources of protein and fiber, whereas meat lacks fiber, the letter explained.

According to Kennedy, the new guidelines will “stress the need to eat saturated fats” and recommend full-fat dairy products, like whole milk. These potential changes, which would be a dramatic departure from previous recommendations, have proven highly controversial. The guidelines, in accordance with medical experts, have long discouraged overconsumption of saturated fats, which can raise levels of LDL, or ‘bad’, cholesterol and lead to poor cardiovascular health. The federal government’s own website calls unsaturated fats “unhealthy” and warns that consuming too much of them can increase the risk of heart disease.

Kennedy has also said that he intends for the new guidelines to advise against eating ultraprocessed foods. Ultraprocessed food is a nuanced topic, because it’s a broad category that encompasses foods with wildly different nutritional profiles: from candy and Lunchables to plant-based meats and whole-grain grocery store bread. Some ultraprocessed foods are perfectly nutritious to eat, and experts say that it’s inaccurate to write all of them off as unhealthy.

This battle of opposing recommendations between Kennedy and health experts suggests that the new guidelines will be worse for public health than the existing ones.

Will There Be Legal Consequences for the Delay?

This is the third time the new dietary guidelines have been delayed. In May, Kennedy said that HHS and the USDA would unveil the new guidelines by the end of September. When that didn’t happen, he said the update would “probably” be released by the end of October. After that didn’t happen, Kennedy pledged to have the new guidelines out by the end of December.

But according to the New York Times, the administration will blow that deadline as well, blaming the latest delay on the recent government shutdown.

However, the federal government is required to update the guidelines every five years under the National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act of 1990. The current guidelines were published on December 29th, 2020, so the administration has until December 29th of this year to release the new guidelines, or it will be in violation of the statute.

In theory, breaking the law should lead to penalties, fines or other legal consequences. But that’s unlikely to happen in this situation, for several reasons.

First, the law “does not contain a built-in penalty structure or other enforcement mechanisms” to ensure that HHS and the USDA comply, according to Hira Jaleel, assistant professor at Lewis & Clark Law School.

“The statute does not specify monetary penalties, administrative sanctions, or other direct consequences for non-compliance,” Jaleel tells Sentient in an email. “Given the lack of statutory enforcement mechanisms, the primary legal [or] judicial remedy would be to try and have a court compel the agency to publish the guidelines.”

However, DHS and HHS already intend to publish the guidelines, so such an order wouldn’t be terribly meaningful. Jaleel writes that federal courts “usually refuse to impose sanctions for agency failure to meet statutory deadlines unless Congress has expressly specified consequences,” which isn’t the case here.

“In my opinion, a lawsuit would likely be able to, at most, compel publication of overdue guidelines,” Jaleel writes. That’s assuming, of course, that “the guidelines aren’t published while the lawsuit is pending.”

Secondly, there’s the question of who would have standing to file a lawsuit in the first place. Any potential plaintiff “would have to establish that [they] suffered a concrete injury from the missed deadline, not just a generalized grievance,” according to Jaleel.

If the guidelines are delayed, will this cause “concrete injury” to anybody? It’s an unanswerable question: Even though Kennedy has announced broadly what he intends to publish, we don’t yet know for sure what the guidelines will contain, so it’s impossible to determine what kind of damages might result from their delay.

The Bottom Line

Regardless of when the guidelines are released and what they contain, their newest iteration will play a huge role in shaping what Americans eat, and thus have a massively positive — or negative — impact on Americans’ health. The content of school lunches is directly tied to the guidelines’ recommendations, as are the foods eligible for SNAP benefits.

By all indications, school lunches, SNAP benefits and other areas of federal food policy will look dramatically different after the new guidelines are released. But exactly when that will happen is anybody’s guess.