PCRM sues government to cancel the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines

As anyone familiar with my work will know, I have made a career out of commenting on government dietary advice.  The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are particularly entertaining as quintessential examples of food politics in action, the latest ones in particular.

To summarize: They offered two excellent messages–Eat Real Food, and limit ultra-processed foods–but undermined them with unsubstantiated advice (double the protein), inconsistencies (eat more sources of saturated fat, but limit it to 10% of calories), omissions (salt, mentioned but no guideline), and errors (no, beef tallow is not a source of essential fatty acids).

And now the latest: The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) has sued to have the guidelines withdrawn and not used.

Guidelines Violated Federal Law Requiring Transparency, Balance, and Evidence…A “Secret Panel” of food-industry insiders handpicked by the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture illegally influenced the recommendations in the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, argues a lawsuit the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed with the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Aug. 19, 2026…“The government allowed the meat and dairy industries to ghostwrite the Dietary Guidelines,” said Physicians Committee President Neal D. Barnard, MD. “They put money in industry’s pocket and cholesterol in Americans’ arteries.”

PCRM is a Washington, DC-based group “dedicated to saving and improving human and animal lives through plant-based diets and ethical and effective scientific research.”

It particularly objects to the way the new guidelines and pyramid food guide prioritize meat and dairy foods.

Its lawsuit focuses on the unusually hasty and non-FACA [Federal Advisory Committee Act] process:

Instead of issuing Dietary Guidelines based on an internal review of the DGAC Report as had been the longstanding practice, Defendants, without any oversight or public  input, hastily assembled a handpicked panel of meat, dairy, and fad diet industry insiders (“Secret Panel”) for the purpose of attacking the FACA-compliant
DGAC Report and creating a substantially altered report entitled The Scientific Foundation for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025–2030….Although Defendants had previously vowed to “toss out the people who were writing the guidelines with conflicts of interest,” Defendants assembled a Secret Panel that was rife with conflicts of interest…Defendants then published Dietary Guidelines tha…embrace saturated fats, halve the recommended fruit and vegetable servings, remove daily alcohol intake limits, and promote fad diets.

PCRM says the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines pose dangers to

• Children, whose school food programs must adhere to the Dietary Guidelines
• Individuals with medical conditions who might follow the baseless medical advice incorporated into the Dietary Guidelines
• Americans who are at risk for diet-related diseases, including obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease, and might follow the scientifically unfounded Dietary Guidelines, which are designed to promote fatty, high-cholesterol products of industries with which the Dietary Guidelines’ authors are affiliated.

I can’t wait to see what happens with this one.  Stay tuned.