The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) recently released Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2025–2030. Among the guidelines are suggestions about how food can promote your health, prevent diet-related chronic diseases, and meet your nutrient needs.
“There's a focus on whole foods and less processed foods, which is a good idea as long as you take a flexible and reasonable approach that is doable for your personal schedule and preferences,” says Hannah K. Brilling, RD, a clinical dietitian at The Walter and Carol Young Center for Digestive Health.
Also among the recommendations is an emphasis on gut health.
But health is impacted by many factors, including your and your family’s individual needs, say nutritionists and dietitians.
Here are six points that experts suggest you keep top-of-mind when considering what diet modifications to make.
1) Make a distinction between processed and highly or ultra-processed foods.
10 Ways to Eat Vegetables
By Jean Copeland, RDN, LD, Dartmouth Health's Heart and Vascular Center
1.Think about color
Print out this color-coded guide and pick one color of vegetables to eat more often for three months. After that, choose another color to eat more often for the next three months.
2. Add vegetables and water to a can of low sodium soup
Add an extra can of water. Add 1/2 package of frozen vegetables. Easy! And it makes two servings instead of just one. Add a tablespoon or two of lemon juice to pick up the flavor. This makes a nice evening meal or a snack.
3. Try vegetable pasta
Having noodles? Replace them with zoodles, which are zucchini cut with a spiralizer into noodle shapes and are a great way to add more vegetables. Put your usual sauce over them, just like they were noodles. Here's one way to cook them. Having rice? You can replace that with riced cauliflower.
4. Try them raw
Cooked vegetables taste different than raw vegetables. Raw turnips are spicy, just like raw cabbage and raw parsnips. Raw pepper strips are delicious with a bean dip or stuffed into sandwiches. Raw celery can be used to scoop food like tuna or chicken salad, or sardine pate. Cucumbers can hold sandwich fillings.
5. Add canned pumpkin (NOT pumpkin pie filling) to tomato sauce or chili.
You can make canned pumpkin into a sauce for pasta. Here's a video on how to make it.
6. Eat them canned
Try canned collards and turnip greens. They're usually cooked and seasoned, so you just need to heat them up. They are high in sodium, so be sure to drain and rinse first and keep in mind how much sodium you already have in your diet.
7. Add sweetener
Adding a sweet-and-sour dressing to bitter-tasting cooked vegetables like kale, broccoli, and spinach cuts the bitterness and can make the difference between something you can tolerate or not.
8. Drink a vegetable
Just one-quarter to one-half cup daily of vegetable juice diluted in 12 ounces of water is a powerful and easy way to boost your health. Yes, you're missing the fiber from eating the whole vegetable, but vegetable juices can be a healthy addition to any diet.
9. Try putting one cold vegetable and one hot on your plate
Ideas include chilled vegetables such as a cold beet salad, coleslaw or sliced tomatoes or cucumbers. Ideas for hot vegetables include cooked green beans, broccoli, or spinach. And then there’s starchy vegetables like peas, corn, potatoes, winter squash, lentils served warm or chilled, and lima or butter beans.
10. Stuff them
Many vegetables can be scooped out and stuffed with protein fillings. Stuffed squashes can be delicious with either winter squashes (acorn, hubbard, etc.) or summer squashes (zucchini, yellow, pattypan, and others).
More than half of what most Americans eat comes from ultra-processed or highly processed foods, reports this article from Dartmouth Health.
Eating less processed food can benefit your health, but cutting out all processed food can be difficult in today’s food landscape.
To help you figure out which processed foods are most harmful, make a distinction between what is considered processed versus ultra-processed.
Technically, processed means altering food from its original state through methods like cooking, freezing, or adding simple ingredients, such as salt or sugar.
Ultra-processed or highly processed foods are usually industrially processed and made from mostly refined ingredients and additives. These foods are designed for convenience, shelf life, and hyperpalatable taste, and include chips, instant noodles, frozen meals, and sugary cereals. They are also the ones you should avoid.
The distinction is important because for most people, cutting out all processed foods is not a realistic goal.
“I wish everyone had access to non-processed or minimally-processed foods,” says Linda L. Julian, a clinical dietitian at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC). “But socioeconomic status, which includes food access, affordability, genetics, location, and transportation, affects a person’s daily food choices.”
A simpler way to limit processed foods is to incorporate foods into your diet as close to their natural state as possible.
2) Getting more protein doesn’t have to mean eating more red meat.
The new guidelines call for greater consumption of protein, represented in the guidelines as an upside-down triangle, with high-quality, nutrient-dense protein at the top.
But as the guidelines point out, high-quality, nutrient-dense protein can be both animal- and plant-based.
Common plant-based proteins include chickpeas, lentils, and beans. Nuts and seeds are also good sources of protein.
Animal-based proteins include fish—especially fish high in omega-3 fatty acids (such as salmon or canned tuna)—and lean meat.
The guidelines also include red meat, which should be consumed in moderation, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). Among other recommendations, the AHA points out that red meats, such as beef, pork, and lamb, contain more saturated fat than skinless chicken, fish and plant proteins. Saturated fats can raise your blood cholesterol and increase your risk of heart disease.
“What we see from decades of heart health research is that saturated fat increases the risk for heart disease and worse outcomes with heart disease and other chronic diseases,” says Brilling. “Red meat is a source of saturated fat, and I wouldn't recommend it as a place to focus.”
She also notes that while the guidelines specifically mention red meat as a healthy source of protein, they did not change the recommendation to limit saturated fat to 10% or less of total calories per day.
“Protein should be consumed gradually throughout the day for best absorption,” says Director of Sports Medicine Neal B. Goldenberg, MD, Cheshire Medical Center in this article on how much protein you need.
3) Boosting gut health is important, but studies are still being done.
The new guidelines recognize the value of whole-food and plant-predominant diets to increase the microbial diversity in your gut.
To help your gut health, you can eliminate highly processed foods and added sugars, increase your fiber intake, consume fermented foods, and focus on diverse plant foods, say the guidelines.
Nutrition-packed foods that are considered good for your gut health include vegetables, fruits, grains, and fermented foods like yogurt.
But while studies like this one in Nature Magazine note an association between the foods you eat and your gut health, it also notes that studies are still being done on how health is impacted by micro-organisms in the gut that are part of the microbiome.
“There's a new focus on the microbiome, which is really important and something that is emerging with scientific evidence that's not very clear yet. We know it's important for health,” says Brilling, while at the same time stressing that more needs to be discovered.
4) You can be creative when thinking about putting more vegetables into your diet.
Vegetables and fruits are essential to a healthy diet, according to the new guidelines. “Eat a wide variety of whole, colorful, nutrient-dense vegetables and fruits in their original form, prioritizing freshness and minimal processing,” say the new recommendations.
Heart and Vascular Center Registered Dietitian and Nutritionist Jean M. Copeland, RDN, LD, agrees, but notes that incorporating only fresh vegetables into your diet can be difficult to do. “Knowing you should eat more vegetables is one thing, but doing it is something else,” she says.
To help you consume more vegetables, she recommends varying how and what you eat. Among her suggestions are integrating canned vegetables, vegetable drinks, and even stuffed vegetables into your diet.
5) Don’t forget fiber.
While fiber now is at the bottom of the new inverted triangle, the guidelines still suggest it is important.
According to the AHA and nutritionists, fiber can help protect against heart disease, diabetes, diverticulitis, inflammatory bowel syndrome, obesity, and colorectal cancer. Fiber can also help flush toxins from the body and lower cholesterol.
While how much fiber you should consume may be debated, Brilling and others stress that fiber remains an important part of any diet, no matter where it sits on the new food pyramid.
High-fiber foods include beans, lentils, whole grains, berries, nuts, seeds, and vegetables like broccoli and brussels sprouts.
6) Healthy eating does not have to be expensive.
Cooking with fresh ingredients can sometimes be expensive and impractical in today’s world.
Nutritionists stress that incorporating frozen vegetables and fruits into your meal planning can be a convenient yet nutritious option.
They also point out that not all canned foods need to be avoided. Canned tuna, canned beans, and canned chickpeas are examples of minimally processed foods that are good for you and more affordable than fresh foods. The same goes for boxed grains, such as brown rice, which are low-cost and nutritious.
So don’t be afraid to work within your budget and make accommodations where you need.
“We use our low-cost foods to balance the plate, and we do the best that we can. That's all anyone can do when feeding themselves and feeding their family,” says Brilling.
She also stresses that it’s important to eat on a regular schedule, balance food groups in meals and snacks, be flexible in how you approach your diet, and manage your expectations of what is realistic for you.
“Healthy behaviors matter over a lifetime, so make changes that are sustainable,” she says.
