Congress Says Dietary Guidelines Needed for Americans with Chronic Disease

The House Appropriations report for 2024 includes the following language:

The Committee recognizes that the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is designed to include all Americans. Given the increase in chronic disease, the Committee directs USDA to include in the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans a dietary pattern for the treatment of diet-related diseases, including obesity and diabetes, based exclusively on rigorous data.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) is the nation’s leading policy on nutrition. It was launched in 1980 to prevent disease for “people who are already healthy.”[1] At the time, an exclusive focus on prevention made sense, because most Americans were healthy. Only 15% of the population had obesity, for instance.

Now, however, 60%[2] of adults have been diagnosed with one or more chronic disease and are in need of advice on treatment, not prevention. Therefore, the Guidelines are now inappropriate for the majority of Americans.

In early 2023, U.S Department of Agriculture (USDA) officials made clear that the Guidelines are for prevention only, declaring that the policy is “not intended to be a clinical guideline for treating chronic disease.”[3] Now Congress has followed suit by acknowledging, in its appropriation report, of the need for our guidelines to address not just disease prevention, but also disease treatment.

By not serving the majority of Americans, as the House Appropriations Committee has now acknowledged, the guidelines is likely to be currently violating its federal authorizing statute, the National Nutrition Monitoring Act of 1990, which states that the DGA “shall contain nutritional and dietary information and guidelines for the general public.”

Report language is non-binding, but it makes a powerful statement about the intention of Congress and is precedent setting. The language is important, because Congress has acknowledged for the first time that the Guidelines ignore the majority of the adult population.

The Nutrition Coalition launched awareness of this issue, starting with an op-ed in the Washington Post in 2019 written by our founder, Nina Teicholz, on this topic.

The logical next step is for USDA to create a dietary pattern for the treatment of major diet-related diseases that will “serve the general public” by addressing the treatment of obesity and diabetes, among other diet-related diseases.

[1] U.S. Department of Agriculture, Nutrition and Your Health: Dietary Guidelines for Americans, Home and Garden Bulletin, No. 232, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 1980.
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/infographic/chronic-diseases.htm
[3] 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, First Meeting: Day 1 of 2, 2/9/2023, (00:34:18)