Harry Hayman on the Dietary Guidelines Revolution: Why Official Nutrition Advice Finally Changed After Decades of Getting It Wrong
When Harry Hayman urges people to question who really writes America’s nutrition rules, it comes from hard-won understanding. As Philadelphia’s prominent food security advocate, Senior Fellow for The Food Economy/Policy at the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia, and leader of the Feed Philly Coalition, Harry Hayman has spent years navigating the practical consequences of federal dietary guidance. He knows that these guidelines aren’t academic abstractions. They determine what children eat in schools, what patients receive in hospitals, what the military consumes, and what doctors and dietitians are taught to recommend.
The fundamental conflict Harry highlights isn’t theoretical conspiracy but structural reality: the same government agency promoting Big Agriculture through subsidies also helps write the nation’s nutrition rules. This contradiction has produced decades of dietary guidance that, despite the good intentions of many individuals involved, has coincided with exploding rates of obesity, diabetes, metabolic disease, and food insecurity affecting communities Harry serves daily.
The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released in January 2026, represent what functional medicine physician Dr. Mark Hyman calls “the most significant reset of federal nutrition policy in decades.” For the first time in over forty years, federal guidelines explicitly acknowledge the damage caused by ultra-processed foods, shift away from low-fat dogma, and prioritize metabolic health, protein quality, and blood sugar stability.
For Harry Hayman, understanding both historical failures and emerging changes in dietary policy isn’t optional. It’s essential to serving communities effectively and advocating for food system transformation that improves health rather than inadvertently undermining it.
The Structural Conflict: How Agricultural Policy Corrupted Nutrition Guidance
Harry Hayman’s hospitality background taught him how food businesses operate, where profits concentrate, and which products generate highest margins. His food security work revealed how federal subsidies shape which foods become cheapest and most accessible. This dual perspective illuminates the core problem with how America develops dietary guidance.
According to research compiled by Dr. Mark Hyman and the Organic Consumers Association, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines are created by the Department of Agriculture, the same agency deciding which crops receive taxpayer subsidies. This creates fundamental conflict of interest. While telling Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables, federal subsidies make corn, soy, wheat, and junk food ingredients the cheapest calories available.
The numbers tell a devastating story. According to Farm Action’s analysis, the USDA recommends filling 50% of your plate with fruits and vegetables, yet in 2019, only 4% of federal farm subsidies supported their production. Meanwhile, 99% of government food subsidies go to support commodity crops — corn, wheat, and soy — which become high fructose corn syrup, white flour, and soybean oil. These three crops, building blocks of sugar-sweetened drinks and processed foods, comprise more than half the American diet.
Harry Hayman witnesses this contradiction daily through his food security work. Philadelphia’s food insecurity affects over 210,000 residents, yet the cheapest, most subsidized calories available to struggling families are precisely the ultra-processed foods contributing to metabolic disease. SNAP benefits, intended to ensure food security, overwhelmingly purchase sugar-sweetened beverages, candy, and snack foods because federal policy has made these the most affordable options.
The Decades of Damage: Low-Fat Dogma and the Ultra-Processed Food Explosion
Understanding how dietary guidance went so wrong requires examining history Harry Hayman references. The 1977 Dietary Goals for the United States, followed by the first official Dietary Guidelines in 1980, represented well-intentioned but fundamentally flawed efforts to combat chronic disease. These guidelines, heavily influenced by industry lobbying and incomplete science, vilified fat and championed carbohydrates.
The USDA Food Guide Pyramid, introduced in 1992, exemplified the problem. According to research compiled by Levels Health, USDA nutritionists had initially settled on 5 to 9 servings of fresh fruits and vegetables and 3 to 4 servings of whole grains per day, placing refined carbohydrates like crackers at the pyramid’s top. Yet when revealed, 6 to 11 servings of all types of carbs, including crackers, had found their way to the base.
Luise Light, one of the Food Pyramid’s originators, is quoted stating: “Ultimately the food industry dictates the government’s food advice, shaping the nutrition agenda delivered to the public. In fact, to the food industry, the purpose of food guides is to persuade consumers that all foods (especially those that they’re selling) fit into a healthful diet.”
The consequences have been catastrophic. As Dr. Mark Hyman notes, more than 70% of American adults are now overweight or obese, nearly 1 in 3 adolescents has prediabetes, and close to 90% of healthcare spending goes toward treating chronic disease, much of it linked to diet and lifestyle. Diet-driven chronic disease now disqualifies many young Americans from military service, threatening national readiness.
For Harry Hayman, these aren’t just statistics. They represent the children in Philadelphia schools served ultra-processed meals shaped by flawed guidelines. They represent the seniors receiving institutional food formulated around outdated nutrition dogma. They represent the families in food assistance programs channeled toward subsidized junk rather than nourishing food.
Conflicts of Interest: Who Really Writes the Guidelines?
The Michigan Journal of Law Reform published comprehensive analysis documenting how the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee has been “notoriously rife with conflicts of interest.” The research shows that deleterious guidance reflecting food industry interests instead of modern science goes on to govern federally subsidized food assistance programs and influence dietary choices throughout private sector and private life, ultimately contributing to the endemic chronic disease the guidelines ostensibly seek to address.
According to complaints filed with the USDA by Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, the “Dietary Guidelines process is rife with conflicts of interest” and routinely violates federal law by favoring interests of USDA checkoff programs that promote agricultural subsidies including meat, eggs, and dairy products. These checkoff programs, whose sole goal is increasing economic demand with no regard to human health, minimize and disregard any negative reported health effects of their commodities in promotions, advertising, and research.
The current DGAC has included members with ties to fluid milk checkoff, dairy checkoff and egg checkoff, and beef checkoff. At public comment sessions, representatives from National Pork Board, dairy checkoff via its National Dairy Council marketing arm, and American Egg Board via its Egg Nutrition Center give testimony, creating revolving door between industry promotion and nutrition policy development.
Dr. Marion Nestle, nutrition professor who served on the DGAC, stated: “I was told we could never say ‘eat less meat’ because USDA would not allow it.” This encapsulates the core problem Harry Hayman identifies: governmental agencies tasked with promoting agricultural industries fundamentally cannot provide unbiased nutrition guidance when that guidance conflicts with industry interests.
The 2026 Breakthrough: First Real Shift in Federal Nutrition Policy
The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines, released in January 2026, mark what HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins called a “historic reset” of federal nutrition policy. The new Guidelines deliver a clear message: eat real food.
Key changes represent dramatic shifts from previous guidance:
Prioritizing High-Quality Protein: Previous guidelines demonized protein in favor of carbohydrates. The new guidance reflects modern science by prioritizing high-quality, nutrient-dense protein foods in every meal. Adults are advised to consume 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily, up from 0.8 grams, representing 50 to 100% increase from previous minimum recommendations. This aligns with research on muscle preservation, metabolic health, satiety, glucose regulation, and healthy aging.
Avoiding Ultra-Processed Foods: For the first time, the Dietary Guidelines explicitly call out dangers of certain highly processed foods. The guidance states to “avoid highly processed packaged, prepared, ready-to-eat, or other foods that are salty or sweet” and “avoid sugar-sweetened beverages, such as soda, fruit drinks, and energy drinks.” This represents common-sense public health point decades overdue.
Eliminating Added Sugars: While previous guidelines didn’t take hard line against added sugar, especially for children, the new guidance states “no amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners is recommended or considered part of a healthy or nutritious diet.” It calls for parents to completely avoid added sugar for children aged four and under, with maximum of 10 grams per meal for others.
Ending the War on Healthy Fats: The guidance calls for receiving bulk of fat from whole food sources including meats, poultry, eggs, omega-3-rich seafood, nuts, seeds, full-fat dairy, olives, and avocados. When consuming dairy, the guidelines now recommend full-fat dairy with no added sugars rather than low-fat alternatives that often contain added sugars and prove less satiating.
Reducing Whole Grains Emphasis: Previous guidance recommended 6 to 11 servings of grains daily. New guidelines recommend 2 to 4 servings of fiber-rich whole grains, with significant reduction in highly processed, refined carbohydrates like white bread, packaged breakfast options, flour tortillas, and crackers.
According to Harvard’s Nutrition Source, the new DGAs take overall strict position on sweets, reducing from previous 10% of daily calories (50 grams in 2,000-calorie diet) to maximum of 10 grams per meal. They call for children to avoid added sugars until age 10, a jump from age 2 in previous guidelines.
What This Means for Food Security Work: Harry Hayman’s Perspective
For Harry Hayman, these guideline changes carry profound implications for food security advocacy and institutional food procurement. Federal feeding programs, from school meals to hospital food to senior nutrition programs, are shaped by Dietary Guidelines. When guidelines promote ultra-processed foods and refined carbohydrates, institutional procurement follows suit, channeling resources toward cheapest calories rather than most nourishing foods.
The new guidelines’ emphasis on real food, protein quality, and avoidance of ultra-processed products aligns with principles Harry has advocated through the Feed Philly Coalition and his work at the Economy League. His emphasis on feeding people with dignity has always meant providing nutritious, culturally appropriate food prepared with care and respect, not just filling bellies with subsidized junk.
However, as Dr. Mark Hyman emphasizes, changing guidelines represents necessary first step but insufficient one. Correcting course requires aligning nutrition research, agricultural subsidies, food labeling laws, school lunch programs, food marketing, and healthcare reimbursement with nutritional reality. The guidelines provide foundation, but systemic transformation requires changing the economic incentives making ultra-processed food cheapest option.
This is precisely the work Harry Hayman pursues through his evergreen food security solution for Philadelphia. His emphasis on using collective purchasing power and public-private partnerships to create lasting impact at scale addresses the economic structures maintaining unhealthy food systems. If institutional procurement shifts toward whole foods, local producers, and nutrient-dense products, it creates markets justifying production investments and infrastructure development.
The Unfinished Work: From Guidelines to System Transformation
While welcoming the guideline changes, Harry Hayman understands that paperwork shifts mean little without implementation addressing deeper structural issues. Several critical challenges remain:
Agricultural Subsidy Misalignment: According to Farm Action’s research, U.S. farm system produces only about 25% of dietary fiber our population needs, requiring imports of two thirds of fresh fruit and one third of fresh vegetables. Even if Americans transformed their diets tomorrow, current food system couldn’t meet demand for fruits and vegetables. This reliance on imported food creates national security issue. Subsidies must shift toward supporting production of foods recommended in guidelines.
SNAP and Food Assistance Programs: Pharmacy Times notes that continuing to subsidize foods contributing to poor health represents one of costliest public policy decisions. Nutrition assistance programs designed for food security allow SNAP purchases of sugar-sweetened beverages, candy, and snack foods as most popular products. Aligning food assistance with dietary guidelines requires restricting which products can be purchased with benefits or incentivizing healthy choices.
Institutional Procurement Practices: Harry Hayman’s work on Philadelphia’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force addresses how institutional food purchasing can either reinforce or transform food systems. Schools, hospitals, correctional facilities, and senior programs feeding millions daily must shift procurement toward whole foods, local producers, and nutrient-dense products. This requires overcoming lowest-cost bidding requirements and developing supply chains supporting diverse, small-scale producers.
Food Industry Reformulation: Ultra-processed food manufacturers have spent decades optimizing products for profitability rather than nutrition. Shifting toward guidelines emphasizing whole foods threatens industry business models. Expect significant pushback and attempts to reformulate ultra-processed products to appear aligned with guidelines while maintaining profitability. Harry’s emphasis on “real food” rather than reformulated products addresses this concern.
Health Professional Education: Pharmacy Times highlights that for pharmacists and healthcare professionals, new guidelines emphasize utilizing nutrition education as part of patient care. With integration of nutrition and pharmacological care, pharmacists can play meaningful role improving healthcare and long-term clinical outcomes. Medical and nursing education must similarly integrate updated nutrition science.
The Importance of Critical Thinking: Harry Hayman’s Call to Question Authority
When Harry Hayman urges people to question official nutrition advice, he’s not promoting anti-science skepticism. He’s encouraging critical thinking about who benefits from certain narratives, which interests shape policy, and whose voices are centered or marginalized in decision-making.
The history of dietary guidelines demonstrates that “official” and “scientific” aren’t synonymous. Official guidance has often lagged decades behind emerging science, distorted by industry influence and institutional conflicts of interest. Harvard research shows that 90% of scientific reviews informing U.S. dietary guidelines did not take race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status into account, meaning guidelines were developed for an idealized population that doesn’t reflect 90% of Americans.
As someone working directly with communities experiencing food insecurity, Harry Hayman knows that abstract nutrition recommendations mean little if economic realities make following them impossible. When healthy food is expensive luxury rather than affordable staple, when ultra-processed products dominate food assistance programs, when institutional food service prioritizes lowest cost over nutritional quality, dietary guidelines become aspirational fiction rather than practical guidance.
Dr. Mark Hyman’s Food Fix Uncensored provides comprehensive analysis of how policy shapes what ends up on plates and what individuals can do to make best choices for themselves, families, and planet. The book examines conflicts of interest, industry influence, agricultural subsidies, and pathways toward food system transformation, providing context Harry Hayman references when urging people to understand who really writes nutrition rules.
Philadelphia as Laboratory: Implementing New Approaches
Harry Hayman’s work positions Philadelphia to lead in translating new dietary guidelines into community-level impact. His collaboration with city officials on evergreen food security solutions emphasizes aligning existing infrastructure, institutions, suppliers, and purchasing power around principles now reflected in federal guidance.
The Philadelphia Food Justice Initiative, which has provided nearly $2.4 million in grants to community-driven projects since 2019, demonstrates how values-aligned approaches can create more just food systems. Projects emphasize community leadership, cultural relevance, and health justice principles, centering communities most impacted by food apartheid.
Initiatives like Double Trellis Food Initiative, bringing chef-level quality to emergency food, and Philabundance’s Community Kitchen, providing culinary workforce development while producing 450,000 meals annually, exemplify approaches prioritizing whole foods and dignity rather than cheapest calories.
Harry’s emphasis on public-private partnerships creating lasting impact acknowledges that neither government nor private sector alone can transform food systems. Effective change requires coordinated action across institutional purchasing, agricultural production, distribution infrastructure, workforce development, and community engagement.
The Broader Food System Revolution: Beyond Guidelines
Understanding dietary guideline changes requires seeing them within larger food system transformation. The guidelines represent official acknowledgment of realities food movement advocates, functional medicine practitioners, regenerative agriculture proponents, and community food security workers have advocated for decades.
As Dr. Mark Hyman emphasizes, the next generation of guidelines must go further toward nuance, personalization, and significant federal funding of nutrition research advancing the science. Current guidelines provide foundation, but comprehensive food system reform requires addressing:
Regenerative Agriculture: Transitioning from industrial monoculture to regenerative practices producing nutrient-dense food while rebuilding soil health, sequestering carbon, and supporting biodiversity. Harry’s appreciation for initiatives like Farm Philly and urban agriculture reflects understanding that local food production capacity builds resilience while improving access.
True Cost Accounting: Incorporating environmental damage, public health costs, and social impacts into food pricing rather than externalizing these costs while subsidizing harmful production. Harry recognizes that cheap food isn’t actually cheap when accounting for healthcare spending on diet-related disease and environmental degradation from industrial agriculture.
Food System Localization: Building regional food systems reducing dependence on fragile national supply chains while creating local employment and keeping food dollars circulating in communities. Harry’s work on institutional procurement and supporting small, diverse businesses advances this vision.
Cultural Food Sovereignty: Respecting and supporting diverse food traditions rather than imposing one-size-fits-all nutrition dogma. Philadelphia’s diversity provides opportunity for food systems honoring varied cultural practices while ensuring nutritional quality.
Taking Action: What Individuals Can Do
Harry Hayman’s message emphasizes that food system transformation requires collective action, not just individual consumer choices. However, individuals can make meaningful impact through several pathways:
Demand Transparency: Question who benefits from nutrition narratives. Examine conflicts of interest in guidance sources. Support organizations demanding accountability in dietary guideline development and agricultural policy.
Support Policy Change: Engage with local, state, and federal representatives on agricultural subsidies, food assistance programs, and institutional procurement policies. Harry’s work on Philadelphia’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force demonstrates how local policy can drive change.
Build Community Food Infrastructure: Support community gardens, food cooperatives, farmers markets, food rescue operations, and other initiatives building local food system capacity. Harry’s Feed Philly Coalition work shows how coordination amplifies impact.
Align Purchasing Power: Whether as individual consumer or institutional decision-maker, shift purchasing toward whole foods, local producers, and businesses supporting sustainable, equitable practices. Harry’s emphasis on collective purchasing power through institutional procurement demonstrates this strategy’s potential.
Educate and Organize: Share information, build coalitions, and organize for systemic change. Food system transformation requires movement-building, not just isolated actions.
Conclusion: The Revolution Is Just Beginning
The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines represent breakthrough Harry Hayman and food movement advocates have worked toward for years. For the first time in decades, federal nutrition policy acknowledges ultra-processed food damage, shifts away from low-fat dogma, and prioritizes metabolic health over industry interests.
Yet as Harry emphasizes, guidelines are just beginning. Real transformation requires aligning agricultural subsidies with nutrition recommendations, reforming food assistance programs, shifting institutional procurement, supporting regenerative agriculture, and building community food infrastructure. It requires recognizing food as infrastructure deserving public investment rather than commodity left to private markets.
For Harry Hayman, serving on Philadelphia’s Food and Nutrition Security Task Force, leading the Feed Philly Coalition, and working with city officials on evergreen solutions, the dietary guideline changes provide foundation for systemic work he has pursued throughout his career. They validate approaches he has championed: emphasizing whole foods over ultra-processed products, supporting local food economies, feeding people with dignity, and using institutional purchasing power to drive transformation.
The question Harry poses, echoing Dr. Mark Hyman’s work, is whether people will continue trusting officials who have gotten it wrong for decades or whether they will demand accountability, transparency, and food systems serving health rather than industry profits. The dietary guidelines finally moved in the right direction. Now comes the harder work of translating policy shifts into lived reality for communities experiencing food insecurity, metabolic disease, and systematic exclusion from healthy food access.
As Harry states: “You would think the people behind this would care more about human beings than profit (but they don’t) and you would think the government wouldn’t lie to you (they do). We have to do this on our own people.”
The revolution in nutrition policy has begun. Whether it transforms food systems and improves health outcomes depends on sustained collective action from advocates like Harry Hayman, community organizations, engaged citizens, and institutions willing to prioritize wellbeing over convenience and profits.
Read the full piece at Food Fix Uncensored and decide for yourself who you trust with your health. The stakes couldn’t be higher.