Trump Team Unveils New Dietary Rules—But No Plan to Lower Food Costs
The great minds behind “Make America Healthy Again” just unveiled the product of a year’s work: an upside-down food pyramid and the slogan “Eat Real Food.” If only President Donald Trump would help people actually afford it.
During a White House press briefing Wednesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled new dietary guidelines and a new food pyramid that looked eerily familiar. “It’s upside down, a lot of you will say,” Kennedy conceded to the press. “But it was actually upside down before, and we actually just righted it.”
The “new” diagram is essentially the same pyramid that many are familiar with, but flipped. Now grains occupy the pyramid’s point at the bottom of the image, while “vegetables and fruits” sit at the top, accompanied by “protein, dairy, and healthy fats.”
The original food pyramid was introduced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1991, and was later replaced in 2011 by My Plate, a circle portioned into grains, protein, vegetables, fruits, and dairy. The government has never really pushed consuming “ultra-processed” foods or added sugar—but you wouldn’t know that based on Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s remarks.
“Federal incentives have promoted low-quality, highly processed foods and pharmaceutical interventions instead of prevention,” Rollins claimed Wednesday.
“Thankfully, the solution is simple and should be noncontroversial: Eat real food,” she continued. “This is the main message of the new dietary guidelines for Americans 2025 to 2030, which encourage households and schools to prioritize whole, nutrient-dense foods.”
Easier said than done. Despite Trump’s lifeless promises to lower the price of groceries, healthy whole foods still remain out of reach for average Americans.
For example, beef is currently 15 percent more expensive than it was this time last year, and experts say it will only get worse next year, an issue that may take years more to fix. That could prove problematic for the government’s recommendation to eat way more protein. While previous guidelines recommended a daily serving of 13 to 56 grams of protein, the new rules advise that protein consumption should be proportional to body weight. A 150-pound person should apparently eat between 81.6 and 109 grams a day, nearly twice as much as previously recommended.
Additionally, Trump’s disastrous tariffs and environmental factors have also taken turns making imported fruits and vegetables more expensive. A weakening job market, soaring inflation, and the rising costs of childcare and housing haven’t helped Americans at the checkout line, either. But the government wants Americans to “prioritize” oils with “essential fatty acids,” such as often-pricey beef tallow, a favorite among anti-vaxxers.
Rollins revealed that she and her team had been working on adjusting the government’s dietary guidelines “since almost day one.” Clearly, a year well spent.
The American public may still have the opportunity to hear former special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump.
Smith developed two cases against Trump: one into the MAGA leader’s alleged retention of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021, and another into Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots. But both were dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election, on the basis of a long-standing Justice Department policy that prevents the prosecution of a sitting president.
The investigator was invited by Republican Representative Jim Jordan for a closed-door session before Congress last month, giving Smith a platform that top Democrats surprisingly claim was the most advantageous to eventually charge Trump.
“Yeah, well, I left that closed-door deposition of Jack Smith, and I said that Chairman Jordan’s decision to do it behind closed doors was the best decision he ever made in his life, because it was absolutely devastating for Donald Trump and for those who still want to try to pretend as if he wasn’t guilty of these things, he was clearly guilty of these things,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin told MS NOW on Tuesday.
Raskin went on to argue that Trump had not evaded his charges because of “any kind of innocence.”
“What’s allowed him to escape, you know, Houdini-like, is the Roberts court and the fact that he’s been able to manipulate the levers of power to keep himself going,” Raskin said. “I mean, if he put, you know, a fraction of that energy into trying to actually do something for the American people, we might be in a different position in America today.
“But the economy, the society are basically in ruins because of the guy,” he continued. “But he has been able to stay afloat, even as it’s overwhelmingly clear that he engaged in an attempt to defraud the United States, disrupt this federal proceeding, and massively violate the voting rights of all Americans by stealing an election. He wasn’t trying to stop election fraud. He was trying to commit election fraud for........© New Republic

Toi Staff
Sabine Sterk
Gideon Levy
Mark Travers Ph.d
Waka Ikeda
Tarik Cyril Amar
Grant Arthur Gochin