Every five years, America’s top nutrition experts jockey to be part of a rite of passage in the field. The federal government chooses a small group of researchers to serve on a committee that spends months poring over scientific literature to answer questions such as: What is the relationship between sweetened beverages and risk of type 2 diabetes? And how does eating saturated fat influence a person’s chance of heart disease? The end result is something called the Dietary Guidelines for Americans—in other words, the government’s official nutrition recommendations. The whole process might seem a bit excessive, if not pointless. Presumably, few Americans even know about this document, and even fewer intentionally use it to guide what they eat. But the recommendations touch the diets of tens of millions of Americans, affecting what food is served in schools and in the military. They also influence the food industry. After the dietary guidelines began more explicitly warning about the risks of added sugar, several major food companies committed to reducing added sugar in their products.
每五年，美国最高营养专家Jockey成为该领域通过的一部分。联邦政府选择了一小群研究人员在一个委员会任职，该委员会花了几个月的时间在科学文献上回答诸如：甜饮料和2型糖尿病风险之间的关系是什么？食用饱和脂肪如何影响一个人的心脏病的机会？最终结果是美国人的饮食指南，换句话说，是政府的官方营养建议。整个过程似乎有些过分，即使不是毫无意义。据推测，很少有美国人甚至知道这份文件，甚至更少有意使用它来指导他们吃的东西。但是，这些建议触及了数千万美国人的饮食，影响了学校和军队中的食物。它们也影响食品行业。在饮食指南开始更明确地警告添加糖的风险之后，几家主要食品公司致力于减少其产品中添加的糖。
Those guidelines are now on the brink of getting MAHA-ed. It just so happens that 2025 marks five years since the previous version, so they’re now due for an update. Much of the work has already been completed. In December, the Biden administration released the scientific report that is supposed to undergird the guidelines. But Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has since promised to start from scratch and remake the recommendations to match his convictions about how Americans should be eating. Last month, he told Congress that the new dietary guidelines could be released “before August,” teasing big changes. The current version of the document is 149 pages. The forthcoming update, he said, will stand at just four pages that tell people to “eat whole food; eat the food that’s good for you.”
这些准则现在正处于获得Maha-Ed的边缘。碰巧的是，2025年以来是自上一个版本以来五年的标志，因此现在可以进行更新。大部分工作已经完成。去年12月，拜登政府发布了应该遵守准则的科学报告。但是卫生部长罗伯特·肯尼迪（Robert F. Kennedy Jr.上个月，他告诉国会，新的饮食指南可以在“八月之前”发布大幅变化。该文档的当前版本为149页。他说，即将到来的更新只会站在四页上，告诉人们“吃全食；吃对你有好处的食物”。
Beyond that, RFK Jr. hasn’t given any more specifics on what his dietary guidelines will include. (A Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.) It’s a reasonable bet that RFK Jr. will come after his least-favorite foods, such as seed oils, ultra-processed snacks, and synthetic food dyes. If so, he will pave the way for the MAHA diet to become part of many more people’s lives. Kennedy’s dietary guidelines could have a much larger impact on what Americans eat than anything else he has done to date.
除此之外，RFK Jr.还没有更多关于他的饮食指南所包含的内容的细节。（卫生与公共服务部发言人没有回应置评请求。）合理的赌注是，RFK Jr.将在他最不喜欢的食物（例如种子油，超中产品的零食和合成食品染料）之后出现。如果是这样，他将为Maha Diet成为更多人生活的一部分铺平道路。肯尼迪的饮食指南可能对美国人的饮食产生更大的影响，而不是他迄今为止所做的任何事情。
For all of his big talk about how Americans are eating unhealthy food that’s making us sick, RFK Jr. has had only middling success so far at enacting change in his short tenure as health secretary. Take food dyes: Kennedy has tried to rid the food supply of most dyes through a handshake agreement with the food industry. The agreement allows food-company executives to decide for themselves whether and when to phase out these products. But by formally discouraging food dyes in the dietary guidelines, Kennedy could effectively block their use in millions of school lunches. Although the lunch program does not need to follow the guidelines word for word, it must be “consistent with the goals” of the government’s official recommendations.
对于他关于美国人如何吃不健康的食物而使我们生病的所有大型讨论，RFK Jr.到目前为止在他担任卫生部长短暂任期的变化方面仅取得了中等的成功。服用食物染料：肯尼迪试图通过与食品行业的握手协议来消除大多数染料的食物供应。该协议允许食品公司高管自己决定是否以及何时淘汰这些产品。但是，通过在饮食指南中正式阻止食物染料，肯尼迪可以有效地阻止它们在数百万次学校午餐中的使用。尽管午餐计划不需要遵循《词指南》，但必须与政府官方建议的目标“一致”。
Even if Kennedy doesn’t outright use the dietary guidelines to come for synthetic dyes or any other MAHA villain, his promise to keep the guidelines to just four pages—essentially a leaflet—would mean trashing much of the existing nutritional advice. Nevertheless, RFK Jr. might be onto something, at least directionally. Consider the 2020 version of the dietary guidelines. I read all 149 pages, and at times, they left me utterly perplexed about what a healthy meal actually looks like. The word guidelines implies simple instructions that a person can actually follow. “Don’t eat Oreos” would be a useful nutrition guideline—one that I, myself, should observe more often. “Customize and Enjoy Food and Beverage Choices to Reflect Personal Preferences, Cultural Traditions, and Budgetary Considerations” is not. The report advocates, for example, that people meet their “food group needs with nutrient-dense foods and beverages,” but it struggles to explain exactly what makes a food nutrient-dense. If the concept seems self-explanatory, consider that the guidelines claim that both vegetable oil and sparkling water are nutrient-dense. (They also state that a nutrient-dense burrito bowl would have sliced avocado, but a “typical burrito bowl” would have guacamole.)
即使肯尼迪没有直接使用饮食指南来制定合成染料或任何其他Maha反派，他承诺将准则保留四页（实际上是一份传单），这意味着要浪费大量现有的营养建议。然而，小RFK可能至少在方向上走上了东西。考虑2020年版的饮食指南。我阅读了所有149页，有时，他们对健康餐的外观完全困惑。指南一词意味着一个人实际上可以遵循的简单说明。“不要吃奥利奥”将是一个有用的营养指南 - 我本人应该更频繁地观察到一个指南。“自定义并享受食物和饮料的选择，以反映个人喜好，文化传统和预算考虑”。例如，该报告倡导人们满足“养分养食物和饮料的食物群体”，但它努力准确地解释是什么使食物养分浓密。如果该概念似乎是不言自明的，请考虑该指南声称植物油和苏打水都是营养密集的。（他们还指出，营养丰富的墨西哥卷饼碗将切成鳄梨，但“典型的墨西哥卷饼碗”会有鳄梨调味酱。）
Look, nutrition can be complicated. And this is not to say that the guidelines are entirely useless. They do, for example, outline the amount of vegetables that the average person should eat in a day: two and a half cups. But clear directives like these are the exception. Part of the issue is that the dietary guidelines are not written for regular people with questions about their diet. In the early 2000s, the guidelines changed from a document explicitly focused on providing everyday people with actionable advice into a report whose stated goal, according to the heads of the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services at the time, was “to be a primary source of dietary health information for policymakers, nutrition educators, and health providers.” But the fact that the document is meant for experts doesn’t obviate the need for its overarching message to at least be decipherable to the public.
看，营养可能很复杂。这并不是说准则完全没有用。例如，他们确实概述了普通人一天应该吃的蔬菜量：两个半杯。但是像这样的清晰指令是例外。问题的一部分是，饮食准则不是为对饮食问题有疑问的普通人编写的。在2000年代初期，该准则从一份文档明确地转变为向日常人员提供可操作的建议，并根据当时的农业，健康和人类服务部门负责人的说法，其目标是“成为政策制定者，营养教育工作者和健康医疗者的饮食健康信息的主要来源。”但是，该文档是为专家提供的事实，并不能消除其总体信息至少可以对公众解密的需求。
In Kennedy’s telling, the guidelines’ increasing complexity over time is the nefarious work of the food industry. Before even being nominated to lead HHS, Kennedy posted a video decrying that “corporate interests have hijacked” the guidelines. When he promised lawmakers last month to cut the document down to four pages, he also alleged that the guidelines were “clearly written by industry.” It’s true that a sizable portion of the experts who have served on the advisory panel developing the guidelines have had ties to the food industry. One study found that 19 of the 20 experts on the advisory committee for the 2020 guidelines had conflicts of interest. (It’s common for nutrition experts to receive funding from food companies for their research.)
在肯尼迪的讲述中，随着时间的流逝，准则的复杂性日益增加是食品行业的邪恶工作。在被提名领导HHS之前，肯尼迪发布了一段视频，谴责“公司利益已经劫持了”指南。当他承诺上个月的立法者将文件降低到四页时，他还声称该准则是“行业明确撰写的”。的确，在制定准则的咨询小组中，很大一部分专家与食品行业有联系。一项研究发现，2020年指南咨询委员会的20名专家中有19名发生了利益冲突。（营养专家通常会从食品公司那里获得资金进行研究。）
But there’s another potential explanation for the bloat plaguing the guidelines. “I don’t think a conspiracy theory is needed here,” Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition at NYU who served on the dietary-guidelines advisory committee in 1995, told me via email. She added that every committee “thought it had to improve on what was done previously.” Consider the 1980 guidelines, a mere 18 pages in total. By 2000, the size of the document had more than doubled, to 39 pages. By 2010, 95 pages. The growing complexity of the guidelines is all the more perplexing because the government’s overarching advice on how to eat healthier hasn’t changed that much over the past 35 years. “They all say the same thing no matter how many pages they use: eat more plant foods; restrict salt, sugar, saturated fat; balance calories,” Nestle said.
但是，对于困扰指南的膨胀，还有另一个潜在的解释。纽约大学的名誉营养学教授玛丽恩·雀巢（Marion Nestle）于1995年通过电子邮件告诉我，他在饮食中饮食中的咨询委员会任职：“我认为这里不需要阴谋论。”她补充说，每个委员会都“认为必须改善以前所做的事情”。考虑1980年的准则，总共只有18页。到2000年，该文件的规模翻了一番，达到39页。到2010年，95页。指南的日益复杂性越来越令人困惑，因为在过去的35年中，政府关于如何健康饮食的总体建议并没有改变太大。雀巢说：“无论使用多少页，他们都说同一件事：多吃植物食品；限制盐，糖，饱和脂肪；平衡卡路里。”
One of Kennedy’s particular skills is finding messages that get through to people. So many of his views on nutrition seem to have resonated precisely because they are not full of mealy-mouthed verbiage and caveats. It’s easier to grasp that seed oils are poisonous than it is to understand the nuances of how the fatty acids in these oils are digested in the body. For Kennedy to actually benefit Americans’ health, however, his guidelines still have to reflect reality. (You shouldn’t freak out about seed oils.) Going too far in simplifying dietary messages could further degrade the credibility of the guidelines all the same, warns Michael Pollan, the writer who’s perhaps the most famous concise food messenger. “The challenge always is: How do you simplify science without distorting it?” he told me.
肯尼迪的特殊技能之一是找到传达人的信息。他对营养的许多看法似乎是因为它们不充满含糊的口语和警告。比了解这些油中脂肪酸如何在体内消化的细微差别要比了解种子油有毒要容易得多。但是，要使肯尼迪实际上使美国人的健康受益，他的准则仍然必须反映现实。（您不应该对种子油感到害怕。）在简化饮食信息方面走得太远，可能会进一步降低准则的信誉，这也许是最著名的简洁食品使者，他也许是最著名的简洁食品。“挑战总是：您如何在不扭曲科学的情况下简化科学？”他告诉我。
Kennedy’s views of individual ingredients oscillate between commonsense dietary maxims and conspiratorial musings. His views about the risks of added sugar, for example, are far more scientifically founded than his love of beef tallow. That is one of the most troubling elements of Kennedy’s tenure as HHS secretary: Especially when it comes to food, he mixes mainstream views with conspiracy theories. No one can predict exactly which of these views he will glom on to from one day to the next—or which will appear in four pages of dietary guidelines.
肯尼迪对单个成分的看法在常识性饮食格言和阴谋氛围之间振荡。例如，他对添加糖风险的看法比他对牛肉牛的热爱更科学地建立。这是肯尼迪担任HHS秘书任期最令人不安的元素之一：尤其是在食物方面，他将主流观点与阴谋理论混合在一起。没有人能准确地预测他将在一天到下一天的哪种观点，或者将以四页的饮食指南出现。
