- Tension: The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans claim to be universal, but attempting to follow them on a normal budget in a normal neighborhood reveals they were written for a life most Americans don’t live.
- Noise: Defenders say the guidelines should be aspirational and science-driven regardless of economic barriers, but aspirational recommendations that are structurally impossible for 40 percent of the population don’t drive systemic change — they drive shame.
- Direct Message: When a government document titled “for Americans” functionally applies only to the Americans who already have the most, the gap between recommendation and reality isn’t a personal failure. It’s a policy one.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
On a Tuesday evening in late January, Denise Okafor stood in the produce aisle of a Save-A-Lot in East Cleveland, holding a printed copy of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans in one hand and a bag of frozen mixed vegetables in the other. The guidelines recommended she eat two and a half cups of vegetables per day, with variety across subgroups: dark green, red and orange, legumes, starchy, and “other.” The fresh broccoli rabe the document seemed to envision was fourteen miles and two bus transfers away, at a Whole Foods in a suburb she’d never set foot in. The frozen bag cost $1.89. She put it in her cart and moved on.
Denise, 38, is a home health aide earning $31,400 a year. She has two kids, a 90-minute commute that involves a city bus and a transfer, and a kitchen the size of a walk-in closet. She told me she downloaded the guidelines because her doctor mentioned them during a checkup. “I thought it would be like a meal plan,” she said. “Something I could actually follow.” Instead, she got a 150-page document that read like it was written for someone living in a different country.
I decided to try the same experiment myself. For six weeks, I attempted to follow the new dietary guidelines as closely as possible, shopping where I normally shop, spending what I normally spend. I earn a comfortable but hardly extravagant living as a writer. I live in a mid-sized city. I have access to a car and a decent grocery store within ten minutes. And still, by week three, I was spending 40 percent more on groceries than usual, throwing away food that spoiled before I could use it, and feeling a quiet, building resentment toward a document that was supposedly designed to help me.
My position is blunt: the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, as currently constructed, function as a class document disguised as a health document. They describe an aspirational diet that is economically inaccessible to the majority of the people who most need nutritional guidance. And until we stop pretending otherwise, no amount of updated science will close the gap between what Americans are told to eat and what they can actually afford to put on the table.
The guidelines themselves are genuinely well-intentioned. Updated every five years by the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services, they synthesize the latest nutrition science into broad recommendations. More whole grains. Less added sugar. Lean proteins. Plenty of fruits and vegetables. Low-fat dairy. Limit sodium. On paper, it’s hard to argue with any of it.
But paper is exactly where the problem lives.
Marcus Trujillo, a 45-year-old warehouse supervisor in Albuquerque, told me he tried to overhaul his family’s eating after his wife, Alma, was diagnosed with prediabetes. They have three teenagers. He earns $48,000; she works part-time at a daycare. “I went to the store with a list based on the food pyramid thing, the new version,” he said. “By the time I got through the produce and the fish counter, I was already at what I’d normally spend for the whole week. And I hadn’t bought anything for lunches yet.”
Marcus isn’t imagining things. A 2023 study published in the journal Nutrients found that following the Dietary Guidelines’ recommended eating patterns costs, on average, 17 to 27 percent more than the typical American diet. For families below the median household income, that premium can represent the difference between making rent and not. The USDA’s own Thrifty Food Plan, which underpins SNAP benefit calculations, has been criticized for years as unrealistically low. When the floor is already too low and the ceiling is built for someone else’s budget, the space in between becomes a kind of nutritional no-man’s-land.
There’s a concept in public health called “food environment mismatch,” and it describes what happens when official dietary recommendations collide with the physical and economic realities of where people actually live. In food deserts (areas with limited access to affordable, nutritious food), following the guidelines requires not just more money but more time, more transportation, more storage, and more cooking infrastructure. Denise’s kitchen doesn’t have counter space for a cutting board and a pot at the same time. Marcus’s nearest store that sells fresh salmon is a 25-minute drive.
During my own six-week experiment, I kept a detailed log. In a recent piece about tracking every dollar I spent for a full year, We wrote about the discomfort of seeing your spending patterns reflected back at you. This was similar, but sharper. The guidelines recommend 8 ounces of seafood per week. I bought tilapia fillets, one of the cheaper options, and still spent $7.49 for a single serving for my household. They recommend a variety of whole grains. The multigrain bread that checked the most boxes was $5.29 a loaf, while the white bread my body knew well sat there at $1.49. Every aisle was a small referendum on what I could afford versus what the government said I should want.
And the waste. The fresh produce guidelines assume you have the time and energy to cook daily. By Wednesday, the kale I’d optimistically bought on Sunday had turned into a dark, damp rag in the back of my fridge. The whole grain pasta my kids wouldn’t touch went into the trash. I started to understand something visceral: following these guidelines perfectly requires being a specific kind of person living a specific kind of life.
Lina Chen, a registered dietitian who runs a community nutrition program in Baltimore, put it to me plainly. “The guidelines are written by scientists and reviewed by committees,” she said. “The people on those committees tend to be well-educated, well-compensated, and living in areas with excellent food access. They’re not being malicious. They’re just building a house they’d want to live in, and then assuming everyone has the same lot to build on.”
Lina, 34, works primarily with families earning below $35,000 a year. She told me that when she sits down with a new client, the first thing she does is throw the official guidelines in the metaphorical trash. “I ask them what they already eat that they like. What’s available at their store. What they can cook with the equipment they have. We build from there.” She calls this approach “nutritional realism,” and it sounds less like dietary science and more like the practical wisdom that official policy should have been grounded in from the start.
The counterargument is familiar, and I want to engage with it honestly. Defenders of the guidelines point out that they’re meant to be aspirational, a north star rather than a turn-by-turn GPS. They argue that the guidelines need to reflect the best available science, regardless of current economic barriers, because they also inform institutional food programs, school lunch standards, and agricultural policy. If you lower the bar to match current access, the thinking goes, you lose the pressure to improve that access.
It’s a reasonable point. And it’s wrong, or at least dangerously incomplete.
Aspirational guidelines that are functionally impossible for 40 percent of the population don’t create pressure for systemic change. They create guilt. They create a sense of personal failure in people who are already navigating systems stacked against them. When Marcus can’t afford the salmon, he doesn’t write to his congressman about food policy. He feels like a bad father. When Denise can’t get the broccoli rabe, she doesn’t start a petition. She wonders what’s wrong with her. The psychological toll of being told the right way to eat while being structurally prevented from eating that way is real, and it compounds over years into a quiet, corrosive form of health-related shame.
This pattern shows up everywhere once you start looking. As We explored in my piece about Gen Z and Botox, we live in a culture that constantly tells people what they should look like, eat like, live like, and then markets solutions to the anxiety that gap creates. The dietary guidelines fit neatly into this machinery. They define the ideal. The wellness industry sells the bridge. And the people who can’t afford the toll just stand on the other side, watching.
The American Medical Association has increasingly acknowledged that health outcomes are shaped as much by economic and environmental factors as by individual choices. Doctors increasingly wish patients understood that barriers to health are systemic, not personal. But the dietary guidelines haven’t caught up. They remain stubbornly individualistic in their framing, as if the only variable between good nutrition and bad nutrition is willpower.
I think about Ray Watkins, a 61-year-old retired machinist in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who I interviewed for a piece about men who age fastest in retirement. Ray told me his doctor handed him a dietary pamphlet based on the guidelines after a heart scare. “It had pictures of grilled chicken with quinoa and roasted Brussels sprouts,” he said. “I looked at it and thought, this is for someone on a cooking show. I eat at the diner three doors down because a meal costs six bucks and I know the waitress.” Ray wasn’t being defiant. He was being honest about the infrastructure of his daily life.
Research on long-term health outcomes, including recent findings about how physical health impacts compound far longer than we previously assumed, makes it clear that nutritional patterns established over decades matter enormously. Which is exactly why getting the guidelines right matters so much. And getting them right means getting them real.
What would real look like? Lina Chen has ideas. “Publish two tracks,” she suggested. “One based on ideal nutrition science. One based on what’s achievable at a budget of $5 per person per day, using ingredients available at stores like Dollar General, ALDI, and Save-A-Lot.” She wants the USDA to partner with community nutritionists, not just academic researchers, during the drafting process. She wants the guidelines to acknowledge, in plain language, that the gap between recommendation and reality is a policy failure, not a personal one.
I’d go further. I think the guidelines should include regional variations. The food landscape in rural Mississippi bears no resemblance to suburban Portland. A single national document that pretends otherwise is engaging in a polite fiction. I think every recommendation should come with an accessibility score: how much it costs, how much prep time it requires, and how widely available the ingredients are across different store types. Transparency about the economic assumptions baked into the science would be a start.
By the end of my six weeks, I’d settled into a modified version of the guidelines that I could sustain. More frozen vegetables, less fresh. Canned beans instead of the variety of legumes the document envisioned. Chicken thighs on sale rather than the rotating cast of lean proteins suggested. I was eating better than before, probably. But the distance between what I was doing and what the guidelines described felt like standing at the base of a mountain someone had labeled “a gentle hill.”
Denise is still buying her frozen vegetables at Save-A-Lot. Marcus switched to canned tuna instead of fresh fish. Ray still goes to the diner. They are all making reasonable, intelligent decisions within the constraints of their actual lives. The dietary guidelines, as currently written, have almost nothing to say to them. And that silence, dressed up in the language of science and public health, is its own kind of abandonment. When the government publishes a document titled “for Americans” that functionally applies to only the Americans who already have the most, the word doing the heaviest lifting in that title is the quiet lie that everyone is starting from the same place.
As We explored in a piece about the surprisingly ordinary habits of people who age well, the things that actually sustain health over a lifetime tend to be modest, consistent, and deeply embedded in daily routine. They’re not aspirational. They’re available. The best dietary guideline for most Americans might be the one that starts by asking a question the current version never does: what do you already have access to, and how can we help you make the most of it?
That would require the people who write these documents to see the country as it actually is. Which might be the most difficult dietary shift of all.
Feature image by Kampus Production on Pexels
