The Making of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines and What They Mean for You with Christopher Gardner

James Hill:
Welcome to Weight Loss And, where we delve into the world of weight loss. I'm Jim Hill.

Holly Wyatt:
And I'm Holly Wyatt. We're both dedicated to helping you lose weight, keep it off, and live your best life while you're doing it.

James Hill:
Indeed, we now realize successful weight loss combines the science and art of medicine, knowing what to do and why you will do it.

Holly Wyatt:
Yes, the “And” allows us to talk about all the other stuff that makes your journey so much bigger, better, and exciting.

James Hill:
Ready for the “And” factor?

Holly Wyatt:
Let's dive in.

James Hill:
Here we go.

Holly Wyatt:
Jim, every five years, the U.S. government releases new dietary guidelines. That's what we're going to be talking about today. These guidelines, they shape everything from school lunches to health care advice to what people think they should be eating. But there's a problem. A lot of people trying to manage their weight feel more confused than ever with these guidelines. Should they focus on protein? Should they cut carbs? Which carbs should they cut? Should they avoid processed food? Should they follow a plant-based eating pattern?

James Hill:
Oh, Holly, this is going to be a fun episode because at this time, the 2025 to 2030 guidelines, which just came out, created a lot of discussion because some of the final recommendations diverged from what the Scientific Advisory Committee actually recommended.

Holly Wyatt:
Wow. So today we're going to break down what the guidelines actually say, what they got right, what they may have missed, and most importantly, what this means for people trying to manage their weight in real life.

James Hill:
To help us unpack all this, we're joined by someone who's been at the Center of Nutrition Science for decades. Dr. Christopher Gardner is Professor of Medicine at Stanford University and Director of Nutrition Studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. His research has shaped how we think about diet quality. Plant-based eating, whole foods, and the role of nutrition in weight management and metabolic health. He's led some major clinical trials comparing low-fat, low-carb, and other dietary approaches, and his work has consistently focused on one of the big questions in nutrition, what actually works in real life. But for this conversation, more importantly, Christopher served on the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. Now, this is a group of nationally recognized science tasked with reviewing the evidence and helping shape the 2025 to 2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. This means he had a front row seat both to the science and the process behind these recommendations. Christopher, we're thrilled to have you with us today on Weight Loss And.

Christopher Gardner:
And I'm thrilled to be here. I think we'll have some fun talking about this topic.

James Hill:
I hope so.

Christopher Gardner:
Let's make it spicy.

Holly Wyatt:
[3:06] I love it. All right, Jim, do you want to kick us off? Let's talk a little bit about how the guidelines were made. Let's give a little, I don't know if our listeners may understand that piece of it.

James Hill:
Yeah. How did these, how does these get developed? And now what's the process, Christopher?

Christopher Gardner:
Let's go, let's go back. Actually, where I'd really like to start as two different committees. So we actually have dietary reference intakes. Most people have heard of those as the RDAs, the recommended dietary allowance. And those are numbers. Like you need this many grams of protein and you need this many milligrams of a vitamin or a mineral. And long ago in 1980, a separate group said, “Oh, if you were going to get all those nutrients, which foods would you get them from?”

Christopher Gardner:
And from the onset of 1980, that task was shared by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services. For many years, they've been criticized because, while they have always promoted veggies and fruits and whole grains, some of the recommendations about food tended to focus on eating less meat and drinking less soda. And actually, the Department of Ag represents the corn growers and the cane sugar growers and the cattle beef ranchers. And they were in a hard position to say, eat or drink less of something because that's who they represented. So there's always been a conflict of interest there. But they're joined by Health and Human Services. And so, yes, in 1980, they started doing this. They're supposed to update them every five years. And interestingly, what got built into that federally from the beginning was, hey, there's probably going to be new evidence. Let's update them every five years. And an interesting component of that was two years before the update, let's get a panel of scientists to look at all the new evidence and see if we should change anything from the old recommendation. And every time that's happened, there's been a lot of criticism that they picked people with conflicts of interest. And they did that this time. I'm going to bring that up later. To be honest, it would be really hard to pick a panel of experts who never had any involvement whatsoever with food groups.

Holly Wyatt:
Well, if you're an expert in foods, probably you've had some, I mean, by that definition, you're going to have some kind of conflict.

Christopher Gardner:
For me, I just want to tell a personal story that I think is hilarious because I got nominated by the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, the Center for Science in Public Interest. A whole bunch of totally credible foundations and other things. And to get selected for this, you can't volunteer. You have to be nominated by people. And after being nominated by like 10 folks, the soy industry nominated me. And that was picked apart like, “Oh my God, this guy, he's connected to soy.” And this was something a really long time ago. It was a one-time deal.

Christopher Gardner:
And I felt like, “but did you, did you see who else nominated me?” Some really credible, yeah, you know, folks. Now, all right so they do this and I have to say that I had criticized the process in the past having been on the outside and I actually wanted to be in on this dietary guidelines advisory committee in 2015 and I was nominated but not not selected. 2020 nominated but not selected. I kind of given up. In 2025, they said yes.

Christopher Gardner:
You can be on this. I said, oh, now that I look like I'm being volunteered here, what is it? I said, well, get ready for this. You are going to start two years in advance. It's going to be 10 hours a week for two years. You're going to have to be on Zoom calls twice a week. You're going to have to read hundreds of research papers. You're going to have to coordinate with a whole bunch of people. And after all these years of doing this, in order to avoid criticism, everything has to be extremely public. You can't meet separately with any of the team members. You have to have federal representatives. Anytime you meet outside of these Zoom meetings, you're going to have six public meetings. You're all going to have to fly to Washington, D.C. And have a full day of public updates of what you did. We're going to pick the questions ahead of you because in the past, the committee members picked the questions and it upset some people. So they said, wait, we want to have a little more control over this. We're going to pick a group to pick the questions for you. And as we first got there, they said, we have 80 questions that you're supposed to answer in two years.

Christopher Gardner:
And we realized that you're probably, we've done this in the past. You're not going to get to all of them. So let's rank them. So we all ranked them high, medium, and low. And they said, okay, let's focus on the high and maybe we won't get to the low. And the very next process was really slow and tedious. We had to follow the PICO guidelines and the PICO guidelines tell you how to do a search for any possible literature that you'd want to consider. So PICO meant P for population, I for intervention, C for the comparison group.

Christopher Gardner:
O for the outcome that you were looking at, and T for the duration of time the study was there. So we said about this for all of the 60 questions that we had isolated, and we spent months on this. And just for kicks, I'll just give you something that took many, many hours. In some cases, we were looking at diet studies that had an impact on blood cholesterol or blood pressure, and they said the minimum time should be 12 weeks. And I said, wow, I've done some 12-month studies, six-month studies, but I've done some four-week studies. That means my studies aren't gonna be counted. Are you sure it needs to be 12 weeks? Let me show you some data that show that if you've changed your diet from A to B, after about four weeks, the change in lipids and blood pressure pretty much plateaus. I think you'd be eliminating some studies that could provide valuable information. So we all had to gather and discuss the pros and cons of this. And this took hours and hours.

Christopher Gardner:
And we had to mention in public that we were doing this. We were not using 12 weeks, which had been used in the past. We were using four weeks as a cutoff. And really what was fascinating was how public it was. If you're going to change anything from the past, or if you have an idea how you want to pursue this, the public needs to know, health professionals need to know so that they could push back and say, wait, that's not right. That's not fair. So anyway, that took months and months. And the fascinating part here, Jim and Holly, was we had 30 federal staff that once we developed these PICO guidelines, they did the search and they did the data extraction. And they put it in these amazing Excel sheets where you could filter on different kinds of comparison groups, different outcomes, different race and ethnicity, different socioeconomic position, different countries. Oh, these are the dietary guidelines for Americans. Maybe we should focus on U.S. studies. Anyway, the federal staff was helpful beyond belief. So even though we were doing this, basically, 1,000 hours of volunteer work, I think 10 hours a week for two years.

James Hill:
And by the way, you got paid a lot of money for this, right?

Christopher Gardner:
So much money. Thank you for bringing that up. We actually had to sign a document that said, we are federal contractors who are volunteering.

James Hill:
Yeah, that's what people don't realize. You devoted months of your life as a volunteer, not as a paid person.

Christopher Gardner:
Oh, thanks for rubbing it in. That really helped a lot right there. But truly, it was an honor. And as we got into it, wow, the 20 people that got selected, we all got along really well. It was really a fascinating process. So after getting these guidelines set and having the staff find the papers for us for every one of the 60 questions, there were two committee members selected to be the lead and two to be sort of the backup lead. And everybody else in the end had to agree after we made a recommendation about a conclusion. So everyone was involved in every single question.

James Hill:
Wow.

Christopher Gardner:
And I'd love to give you one example just to show you. And it was actually, I was thrilled. I got picked for the question. Now, this isn't going to sound like a question at first. The question was food sources of saturated fat. And I'll tell you why it's important that it's framed that way, because if you're really looking at saturated fat itself as a question, what you're going to want to do is isolate the saturated fat, make sure all the other variables are the same, and the only thing we've varied is the saturated fat content. And to be honest, that's really great, rigorous, isolationist nutrition science. But if you were a doc and you told somebody to go to the store and lower their saturated fat, you wouldn't tell them, go buy low saturated fat. You would say, have skim milk instead of whole fat dairy. Don't have so much cheese. Try to get the leaner cuts of beef. Try to have lentils, beans, and peas because they don't have much saturated. So this is fun. We were supposed to focus on the food sources. And the main three food sources are meat, dairy, and tropical oils. And one of the things you have to do is populations. So you could look at kids or adults or the elderly. And then if you wanted to look at the comparators, picture for dairy that was sort of a no-brainer it could have been whole fat dairy or low fat skim. For meat it could have been the higher cuts of fat versus lean beef but it also could have been peas lentils and beans and it could have been whole grains and it could have been vegetables.

Christopher Gardner:
So there were a whole bunch of things that could have been compared to when it was food sources of saturated fat and so i thought this was really practical that this opened it up instead of just comparing two cuts of beef or two kinds of dairy, you're comparing, okay, let's get rid of the dairy and the beef altogether and have something else that would also have fiber and antioxidants in it. In which case, if you did see a benefit in the literature, you couldn't actually pin it on the saturated fat.

Christopher Gardner:
Because the beans, peas, and lentils also had fiber and antioxidants, and it might have been those. So it's not really a saturated fat question. It's a food source of saturated fat. And I thought, what a great idea, because we've done saturated fat in the past, in all the years in the past. What a neat idea to do this. And what we found were some really interesting studies outside of the U.S. where the meat was actually lamb, not beef. And there was one study where they substituted chicken for beef and somehow the chicken had the same level of saturated fat as the beef and it was industry funded. To be honest, I actually thought they manipulated it so that the beef industry could say, look, chicken isn't any better than beef. They had the same outcome. And as I dug into the details, because I was the leader of this group, so I was supposed to look at all the details of the studies, I said, well, that's not fair. Chicken doesn't really have as much saturated fat as beef. So if somehow outside of the chicken, they manipulated the sauces and the other things the chicken came in and it wasn't concentrated animal feeding operation beef from the U.S. it was lamb. And it was like this incredible Spanish, whatever variation on red meat. So it was really hard but it was really fun looking at all those different questions.

Holly Wyatt:
Wow I've learned I don't want to do this. There's a lot into this, right?

Christopher Gardner:
So here's the punch line of this for the one question that we were asked that I was the lead on for food sources of saturated fat, Holly, there were 31 sub questions.

Holly Wyatt:
Oh my gosh.

Christopher Gardner:
Right? That makes sense, because if you go for the different population and the different source and the different comparator and blood lipids versus mortality and epidemiology versus randomized trials, 14 of the questions didn't have enough evidence to answer. 17 of the sub-questions did have enough to answer. At that point, once we read the literature and came to a conclusion, we had to grade it. And we had to grade the level of evidence in terms of generalizability, consistency, risk of bias, precision. I'm missing one category here. And we had to grade the studies as being strong for the conclusion or moderate or limited.

James Hill:
Take us through what your committee, what your output was, and then what happened from there.

Christopher Gardner:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we put this all together, 60 questions with lots of sub questions, we had a 423 page report.

James Hill:
Wow.

Christopher Gardner:
We had a 10, 12 page executive summary. And in that 10 or 12 pages, there were two pages at the end where we said, okay, so what's sort of the overarching advice we would like to bring to the attention of the Secretaries of Ag and Health and Human Services. Because after two years, we saw a couple of things pop up again and again and again in different areas that could have been, sort of compiled. And then there was a thousand page supplement. The thousand page supplement was like every step of the way along what we did here. And keep in mind, this started in 2023 under the Biden administration. And as we finished up at the end of 2024, the election had happened and it was clear that the administration was turning over. And so we learned that we were turning this over not to Secretary Becerra, but to Secretary RFK Jr. I thought, wow, never saw that coming back when we did this and said we would do this in 2023. And right away, RFK Jr. was very vocal, saying, wow, this thing is too long and too complicated and too biased. I don't think we're actually going to consider this at all.

James Hill:
All this work, all these hours, 423 pages, and they're basically saying, thank you, but it's not useful for us.

Christopher Gardner:
And interestingly, it is published, so it will never go away. It's already out there, right? It's on the website. And a lot of this was through social media. And so it was very hurtful and very frustrating. And I could probably come out with stronger words than that to say that all that work was going to be dismissed. But I want to pause here and just say, every time this is done, it's the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee that provides an advisory report. The secretaries are never forced to follow the advice. If I can give a couple of classic examples, in 2015, that committee suggested adding coffee and caffeine to the guidelines. And there was a really interesting one that got a lot of headlines that the Dietary Guidelines of 2015 said three to five cups of coffee is okay as part of a healthy diet. So the secretaries took that advice. There was another recommendation. They said, and we should link it to the environment.

Christopher Gardner:
And Secretary Vilsack said, no way, we are not linking diet to the environment. That one's out. Two other quick ones in 2020, they said, wow, the added sugar recommendation for a limit has been too high for a long time. We really needed to go to 10%, no more than 10% of calories. And then the subsequent, I guess that was 2015, the 2020 advisor group said it should have been even lower than that. It should have been 6%. And the secretary said, we'll buy the 10% thing. It used to be 25, and that's way too much. So 10% is okay, but not willing to go to 6%. So it is an advisory committee providing an advisory document. It's up to the secretaries and their staff to take it or not. So at one level, you really can't complain. You were told up front they would consider what you found and take it under advisory, but it was up to them to bring it into the dietary guidelines. And so what was interesting was RFK Jr. seemed to conflate some of the reports. This was really frustrating. He seemed to be calling the advisory committee report the dietary guidelines, which they're not, or the dietary guidelines, the advisory report. So the previous dietary guidelines of 2020 had been about 165 pages. And he said they were 420 pages. So he's actually talking about the advisory report, not the guidelines. But he did say, now they're going to be four.

Christopher Gardner:
160 is too long and 420 is too long. They're going to be short and simple so that people can understand them. That was really frustrating up front because once the guidelines are established, all kinds of public facing spinoffs are done. There was a five-page version of the dietary guidelines if this was going to be public facing. But if you were in charge, and let's get to this pretty soon, if you're a safety net program in the U.S., that's actually the place where these guidelines have the biggest effect. Because to buy the foods to support kids in school lunch or school breakfast for women, infants, and children, SNAP is a little bit different. But anytime the federal government is spending money on a safety net program for food, they have to look to the dietary guidelines to do that.

Christopher Gardner:
No Americans have ever been forced to follow the dietary guidelines. And part of our report, Jim and Holly, was to look at National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data and say, okay, by the way, we have data on what Americans are eating. How close is it to the dietary guidelines? And it has never been close. It has been way off which is really funny for all the people who say, boy, the dietary guidelines have never worked. We've had those since 1980 and people are overweight and obese. So clearly they have failed. And anybody who's been involved in the process, the first response is, that's not really fair to say because hardly anyone follows them. So you'd have to test people following them.

James Hill:
That's a good point. I want to follow up a little on that. So talk to our listeners, why should they care about dietary guidelines? They're out trying to manage their weight, and some of them may be on the supplemental programs, but maybe not many of them. So why should they care about these?

Christopher Gardner:
This might be too much of a little twist, so you may edit this out. If you look at the dietary guidelines, what they have always said in the beginning is these are intended for healthy people. This is not someone with heart disease or diabetes or chronic kidney disease. There's some special recommendations for diet for them. These are meant for healthy people. And a couple rounds back, they said, well, it looks like most Americans are overweight or obese. And so actually these are healthy and overweight people.

James Hill:
Ah.

Christopher Gardner:
So they did actually change that language in an important way because it had always just said healthy. They said, well, this isn't really fair. That means it hardly applies to anyone in the US according to the definitions. So they should care because a team of scientists looked at this and said, here's all the evidence that there is. And here's an overall pattern of how you should eat. It's not one specific nutrient. It's not one specific food. One of the things you look at is, can you get all the vitamins and all the minerals and all the requirements from this combination of foods? This is what we have found.

Christopher Gardner:
So in theory, it would represent a healthy diet for anyone in the U.S. who isn't suffering from a disease that's so significant that you would very specifically have to focus on sodium or you'd very specifically have to lower protein for chronic kidney disease, something like that. That's why they should care because they were looked at in that regard.

Christopher Gardner:
But what has always been, and this will be fun to follow up on for this new round, what's always been the biggest challenge is that the American food supply does not reflect what the dietary guidelines recommends. People have said for many, many years, if all Americans ate the guidelines for veggies and fruits, we'd have to be importing all kinds of veggies and fruits. We don't grow enough. Focus has been corn, soy, and wheat. Most of it goes to feed for livestock. So there really isn't enough. If you really wanted, the federal government wanted to support this, they would change the incentives for what we grow and raise for food in the U.S. And so that's never happened. So I actually think that is the more important issue. It's not just that Americans don't follow the guidelines. It's that after setting them, the federal government has never moved forward in that way and said, “Ah, okay, so now we're going to have fewer subsidies for corn, soy and wheat. We're not going to allow these concentrated animal feeding operations to raise that many cattle and slaughter them that way. So we're going to back up the guidelines this way.” That would be huge.

Christopher Gardner:
And interesting in theory, that's what Maha said they were doing when they were dismissing the old guidelines. And it is funny, the language that they use, Jim and Holly, is often not that they were upset with the advisory committee's report. It really was that in the past, the secretaries of health and human services and ag had said no to going to 6% sugar and had given lip service to eating less red meat and giving lip service to having fewer sodas. I don't know how many of these reports or interviews that you listen to, they said this is the most radical change in the dietary guidelines since 1980s, since they were first established. And if we have time I'd love to have a rebuttal to that.

Holly Wyatt:
So much we could unpack here and I like that we kind of talked about the process and I think it's good to see it's a big process. There's lots of layers to this. We could probably talk about that all day. I like that you kind of said why it should matter but let's also get into what the current guidelines say or kind of it sounds like maybe you made some recommendations and then two years later they came out um for those who maybe aren't familiar what are the current guidelines say what did the committee recommend and then what did the guidelines say.

Christopher Gardner:
Absolutely.

Holly Wyatt:
Top layer. I mean, you don't get all thousand pages, but you get just the first, the high points for us.

James Hill:
Executive summary.

Holly Wyatt:
Yeah, there we go.

Christopher Gardner:
Yes. So in the executive summary, so let's get to that in particular, but not quite yet. So they have a set of sort of very public facing dozen guidelines. And one is eat more veggies and fruits, yawn, boring.

James Hill:
Right. And that's really worked over the years, that advice.

Christopher Gardner:
Eat whole grains, not refined grains. Cut back on added sugar. Eat healthy sources of fat. As you go through the 12, you'll find that most of them are carried over from the past. So it was odd that they said, this is so radical. It's never been done before. And the parts that were radical, okay, let's start with the first one, which is the easiest one in my mind, whole fat dairy, not just three servings of dairy. And that didn't change. It's always been three servings of dairy and americans actually on average don't eat three servings of dairy but it was very specifically whole fat dairy. And in the world of saturated fat, dairy actually is a little different especially if it's milk not so much if it's ice cream or butter, which you have to separate it out into but dairy deserves being looked at a little differently what I thought was intolerable actually was that there was no qualifier to go with that that says except for the large proportion of the world that is lactose intolerant.

Christopher Gardner:
Pretty insensitive to say part of a healthy diet is three servings a day of dairy that is whole fat. And it could have easily just said, provided that you're able to tolerate dairy. So that gets back to a health equity issue that I hope we can end on.

Christopher Gardner:
Let me set that aside just for the moment. The next one was the protein. The protein was the most bizarre thing that I've seen the most agreement on among professionals. A lot of health professionals. A lot of us are just scratching our heads. It was a recommendation to prioritize protein at every meal. So let's talk about the sources in just a minute. But that statement is really bizarre. I have to say that I was privy to a Maha pre-release and they had four of us on a Zoom. And they said, just so you know, this is what we're thinking of releasing.

Christopher Gardner:
We're going to keep the cutoff of 10% saturated fat in there even though Maha and RFK Jr. Had made a lot of noise about abandoning the previous 10% no more for saturated fat cutoff But then they said, and clearly there's something wrong here So we're going to prioritize protein every day, And the four of us on the call scratched our heads and said, really? Why? Do you think there's a protein problem in the U.S.? They said, oh, yes, absolutely. And we were all scratching our heads because there really isn't any evidence of that at all. If I could summarize the way I see it, because I've done probably 50 podcasts on protein. If you really want to get my whole view, just Google Gardner Stanford protein rant.

Christopher Gardner:
One of them has a million and a half views. So we have these guidelines. If you go back to the dietary reference intakes that have a number, that's the group. The National Acadies of Medicine sets the number of 0.8 grams per kilogram per day. and if you're really not a metric person, it's 0.36 grams of protein per pound of body weight, not kilogram. Okay, it all works out to 50 or 60 grams of protein a day for the average person. Now, we also have this National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Day that says what Americans really eat and there's something called What We Eat in America and you can look that up and it says the average adult eats 1.2 grams of protein. Per kilogram body weight per day, which is 50% more than the 0.8. And interestingly, sort of in the new range, because Maha said, not only should we prioritize it, but we should go for this range of 1.2 to 1.6. Technically, that's not the purview of the dietary guidelines. That's the purview of the national academies who just subsidized two major reviews of protein that both concluded there isn't enough evidence to change the 0.8 number. Those reviews actually didn't say 0.8 is the perfect number. It actually just said there isn't enough evidence to pick another number.

Christopher Gardner:
[30:38] And a lot of us over the years have said, yeah, it sounds like maybe it could change someday to be 1.0 or 1.2, but we're really not worried because that's what Americans get anyway. We have bigger issues to address. We've got ultra processed foods. We've got added sugar. We've got food insecurity. Why are we worried about protein when people seem to be getting enough already? And I tell you why it really worried me is they made a big deal of this. And a lot of media coverage said, oh, my God, they took that 0.8 number and 1.6 is double and 1.2 is 50 percent more. This is radical. And this is at a time, unless you've been living under a rock, you can't go into any store right now without seeing protein water, protein Pop-Tarts.

James Hill:
I was going to say the food industry is putting protein everywhere. And the public has the idea that they're not getting enough protein. When in fact, you're telling us that most Americans are getting plenty of protein.

Holly Wyatt:
Well, wait, Jim. Now, I'm going to push back on this because I don't think that's why we're seeing the protein push. I think the big protein push is coming from the GLP-1s. It's coming more from people losing weight. It's coming from, you know, the quality of the weight loss. I'm not saying we have a lot of data to support that yet in terms of how much we need and And if are we really losing weight and with the GLP-1s and losing lean muscle mass. But I think that's more about it. And so what the general population needs versus someone losing weight versus someone losing weight on a GLP-1, I think those are just different animals.

Christopher Gardner:
So, Holly, I would agree. We could circle back to the GLP-1, but the rise in protein in those products, I think, preceded the GLP-1s. That's been going on for years and years.

Holly Wyatt:
Maybe, but now it's everywhere.

James Hill:
Well, the GLP-1s accelerated, I think, the interest in protein. But the food industry was looking for ways to sort of push products that they could sell more of. And I think they had looked at protein earlier. But the GLP-1s really accelerated that.

Christopher Gardner:
So let me hit three points here that I think are the most important take-homes. So one, I think Americans have been seeing protein in everything. And if they see that the new dietary guidelines have increased by 50% or 100%, the recommendation, that must have been because of new evidence showing it was wrong. And I am going to buy the Pop-Tarts and I am going to buy the bar. And then the next line will be, actually, did you see how much RFK Jr. said, eat real food?

Christopher Gardner:
That was a huge push to say, this isn't junk food. We really want to get rid of ultra-processed foods. We want to get rid of the added sugar. Eat real food. Most Americans associate protein with meat. So I see them first going to buy the Pop-Tarts and then saying, oh, wait, I realized that was the wrong way to get the protein. I know that meat is the best way to get real whole food protein. And yet Americans eat more meat than any other country in the world. And it has horrific environmental consequences. And if you eat the fatty meat, you can't really actually meet that 10% cutoff for saturated fat if you're eating fatty beef. It's coming out of those concentrated animal feeding operations, so it's only going to perpetuate those. The guideline actually says, coming out of MAHA, that it could be animal sources and it could be plant sources. So as you read the animal sources it could come from, I'm going to circle back to our advisory report. It says chicken and fish and dairy and things like that and red meat.

Christopher Gardner:
Or it could be beans, peas, and lentils and some other things. To be honest, this was the biggest slap in the face for all of us, because when we got, remember I said that there was an executive summary with a two-page finish that said, wow, if we want to bring any issues to the attention of the secretaries, here's one of the ones that came up again and again and again. Beans, peas, and lentils instead of red meat.

Holly Wyatt:
Pulses, that's what they call it. That's the group, right?

Christopher Gardner:
Okay. Oh, Holly, let's do this. Oh, oh, oh. So I'm into this so much that I, Americans don't know what the worm legumes are and they don't know what pulses are. So here's a quick 101. Legumes botanically is the hierarchical best name. So legumes is fresh beans and peas and soy and peanuts and pulses, as you just said, and pulses is dried beans and dried peas and lentils and chickpeas.

Holly Wyatt:
And not peanuts and not soybeans.

Christopher Gardner:
But that's legumes.

Holly Wyatt:
It's not, well, no, I don't think pulses is peanuts.

Christopher Gardner:
o, pulses is not peanuts. Buds, holly. So pulses falls under legumes. So pulses are legumes.

Christopher Gardner:
Peanuts are not. Basically, all of those from an agricultural perspective are nitrogen fixing crops. From an agricultural perspective, all of those are great crops to grow because they create less need for synthetic fertilizers. They're all good sources. Every one of them is a good source of protein and every one of them is a good source of fiber. So you could be getting your protein and your fiber and your antioxidants at the same time which is why this ended up in our executive summary is hey let's have less red meat and more beans peas and lentils a funny quick story on top of this is sometimes it was legumes in the paper sometimes it was pulses sometimes it was chickpeas and we kept tripping over our tongues trying to say this in the 420 page report and that communications folks said use beans peas and lentils. And we said, but it wasn't always beans, peas, and lentils. And they said, get over it. You're just confusing everyone. Don't use the word legumes. Americans won't know what that is. And don't use pulses. Just say beans, peas, and lentils. So that ended up in our summary report. And it went head to head with eat less red meat. So when the MAHA report came out and said red meat is one of the good sources of protein, and when the upside down frigging pyramid came out and plopped this massive stake in the upper left corner of the pyramid.

Christopher Gardner:
All together, that made us all go cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Like, where the heck is this coming from? We just said less red meat, and you planted this huge thing in the upper left-hand corner. I have to say my impression of that pyramid is very sensationalist. So, I know that the Maha folks are trying really hard to say, wow, we're doing what no one has ever done before. It's never been like this.

Holly Wyatt:
That's taking the pyramid and turning it upside down.

Christopher Gardner:
Yes.

Holly Wyatt:
Okay.

Christopher Gardner:
So, if you went through, oh, more veggies and fruits, yawn.

Holly Wyatt:
But I mean, that's a big change, right? It was this way and now it's completely different. So, you're saying that's kind of sending that message.

Christopher Gardner:
And it seems to be a little institutional amnesia here. So, we dropped the pyramid in 2011 when And Michelle Obama said, put it on a plate.

Holly Wyatt:
[37:49] Yeah, yeah. But people still think, know about the pyramid, though. It's still, they think about the pyramid. I don't know how many pyramid versus plate.

Christopher Gardner:
But I can see some, you know, I'm a marketing person saying, okay, let's flip the plate. Oh, it'll still look round. Let's see, you can't flip the plate. All right, let's go back to the pyramid and we'll flip it just to show everybody that. And if you read through the way the recommendations are written, Quite a few of them, as I started saying, are pretty consistent with old guidelines. If you look at the pyramid and the things they chose to put in it and the size of the foods that they put in it and things like there are some fruits at the very top of the pyramid and bananas are at the bottom. Does that mean I shouldn't have bananas? And there's very few beans, peas, and lentils and whole grains. You're supposed to get two to four servings a day. It's at the very bottom. them like that is it the least priority but wait it was one of the lines and so people have been taking the whole fat dairy and the red meat and a healthy fat line where the sort of the the quick version of it says olive oil beef tallow and butter well beef tallow and butter are full of saturated fat so if you're gonna have the red meat the butter and the beef tallow and the whole fat dairy.

Christopher Gardner:
[39:08] You really can't get less than 10% saturated fat. And again, I really think that was a political decision. They had sort of floated some balloons on this, and people said, boy, if you get rid of that 10% saturated fat thing, people are going to be up in arms. So they said, well, let's just keep it, but we'll tell people to have whole fat dairy and red meat and beef tallow and butter, and we'll make them do the math on their own. So the problem is a lot of the guidelines are sound. Quite a few of the guidelines are not new. they're carried forward the prioritizing protein is messing with a lot of us like that it's just not written well it's sloppy the 10 saturated fat farm dairy being whole fat not accounting for people who are lactose intolerant being hard to come up with if you put all those things together it's really hard to come up with less than 10 saturated fat that's kind of sloppy too Like there's a lack of internal consistency. So a lot of us have said most of this is good. Not all that much is new. But a couple of things are really inconsistent. And it's going to be hard for a food service director to follow this. If they're going to get all those ultra processed foods, actually they just said highly processed. They didn't go with ultra processed. They didn't say seed oils, which they'd been ranting about for a while. They kept the less than 10% saturated fat. But what I'm working actually with some schools now, with some food service directors thinking this is coming.

Christopher Gardner:
I have to do this. I'm going to have to take a whole bunch of things off my menu. And I'm not sure what I'm going to replace them with because the replacements are more expensive than this. And I don't think they're going to raise the four bucks a meal that they give us of which only two bucks goes to food. I can't afford the things that are they going to step in with bringing kitchen facilities back to schools, pushing the food industry to make foods that we could afford, making them whole foods. So the, you know, the rubber hits the road when the food service directors have to follow the guidelines and change that. And it could be a really exciting opportunity to clean up real food in schools. But if any of us remember how hard it was for Michelle Obama to push forth Healthy Hunger Free Kid Act in 2010, I think they're going to hit a lot of pushback. That they're, unless they actually push the food industry and say, stop serving red, blue, and green colors, take the artificial flavors out, take out the added sugar, take out the cosmetic additives. So from what I've seen so far, they've recommended that the food industry get rid of the colors. And I have not seen M&Ms or Skittles respond. M&Ms and Skittles that I've seen because it's a voluntary recommendation that's, Still have all the colors.

James Hill:
Okay, Christopher, you have been through an amazing experience here. And thank you for sharing that. You've also done a ton of work with dietary interventions. So you're king of the world now.

Christopher Gardner:
Yes, thank you. I've been waiting for this. I'm bizarre.

James Hill:
What would you do differently to provide dietary advice to the public? And by the way, I'm going to put in a plug that you just wrote a new book that you, yeah. So what, how would you change things to get the right nutrition advice to the public?

Christopher Gardner:
Yeah, I don't think it's going to be advice, Jim and Holly. I think it's going to be changing agriculture. I don't think you can give the advice and then have somebody living in a desert swamp or a food desert or a food swamp and say, go get fresh produce, go get beans, peas, and lentils, go do this thing. Oh, I'm sorry. I only have access to a convenience store. And I went into the hardware store and the hardware store had a whole row of candy bars and protein bars that I got on the way out. I have to grow more vegetables and fruits. We should be eating less meat, better quality meat. We'd have to put an end to concentrated animal feeding operations. We'd to stop growing so much corn, soy, and wheat. So unless we're going to change what we're producing in the U.S., I don't think the advice will carry any weight. That food has to be accessible and affordable and convenient enough. If I was food czar for the day, I would take this straight to agriculture and say, I know this is a capitalistic world. And I know so much of the money gets made by taking what comes off the farm and the ranch and then modifying it so that the middle person gets a ton of extra money. For having made it super convenient and tasty and marketed. Unless you change that, I think that people going to this store and choosing are stuck. Go ahead, Holly.

Holly Wyatt:
Well, I'm going to be devil's advocate just because I know what some people are thinking. And so I want to bring this up. You know, do people want to eat that? And how much drives what we have in our store? And I totally agree. There's food deserts and we need things like that. But in general, if we put the food that you wanted in the store and we made that what was accessible, would people eat it? So would they choose to eat it? I mean, if you didn't if you forced it, if that's all you had, okay, but but would they really choose to eat it?

Christopher Gardner:
So the first answer is no, because they've actually I know that there are municipalities that have sort of given tax breaks to put grocery stores where there was a food desert or a food swamp. And really what they've seen so far is those people go in the full-on grocery store and buy candy bars and chips. Because that's what they're accustomed to. So I have to say my new favorite research partners are the folks in the CIA. Did you know that I'm on the scientific advisory board of the CIA? And I know you fully understand that when I say that, I mean the Culinary Institute of America.

Holly Wyatt:
I did not know that, but now I do.

James Hill:
I was just with Michael Bacher. We actually talked about you. He's the CEO of the CIA.

Christopher Gardner:
He's the new president. And interestingly, Jim and Holly, he came from Google. He spent the last 12 years at Google.

James Hill:
Started Google Lab, Food Lab.

Christopher Gardner:
Started Google Food Lab. And interestingly, the Googlers from the very beginning had free food. It was sort of a famous techie thing that Google had free food. And it was amazingly tasty. And it was always free. And if you stayed long enough, you could have breakfast and lunch and dinner there for free. And really what happened is at one point, some of the Googlers started getting overweight, hypertensive, hyperlipidemic. And so the challenge was, you can't take the free food away now. The toothpaste is out of the toothpaste tube. Could you make all the choices healthier? So that it wasn't between the healthy thing and the tasty thing. The healthy things were tasty.

James Hill:
Yep.

Christopher Gardner:
And they were presented that way. So Michael Bacher spent a decade and more moving that forward. And if you've ever eaten at a Google cafe, it is mind-blowingly, obscenely beautiful and tasty and healthy. And he is now the president of the Culinary Institute of America, where they are actually undergoing a curricular shift in changing the way they're teaching. The traditional chef thing was butter and French cooking. And they really are, I mean, one of the cool things that they do that they've been working on for a decade is called the protein flip.

Christopher Gardner:
And the protein flip means that the center of the plate is not a piece of meat. The center of the plate is a global fusion of flavors with a base of legumes and whole grains and some seared vegetables on top of that with Moroccan spices or Asian spices or Mediterranean spices. And it's unapologetically delicious and it might have two ounces of meat on it or meat as a condiment or meat as a side dish. So from a culinary perspective, my answer, Holly, is there's a group that's working on the taste and the look. And instead of saying, stop eating the junk food, stop, you know, we're going to be punitive here. We're going to deprive you of the things you want. We're going to make this kick-ass food that's going to blow your taste buds away. And what did you say? Was it healthy? Yeah, but that's not what we were focused on. What did you say? Is it environmentally sustainable?

Christopher Gardner:
Well, yeah, actually it is, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about taste. This is my job. I'm a chef and I'm working in a hospital or a school or a university setting or a prison or the military. You know, most chefs that leave the Culinary Institute of America, and they've graduated 55,000 chefs since they started, very few are in three-star Michelin restaurants. And that lifestyle is not a happy lifestyle. The amount of stress to be the chef in that kind of place is only for a few people. So most chefs end up somewhere where they're cooking for a lot of people and in many cases in institutional settings. And this will be my, I don't know if we want to end on this note because this is where I would like to end as the foods are.

Christopher Gardner:
If not just the three of us and not just our friends and families go and ask for different things at the grocery store, but what if all those chefs who are ordering for all the universities, all the schools, all the hospitals say to the farmers, ranchers, and fishers, “I'm going to order some different food, I'm going to order a different thing.” So you don't have to worry about making a living. You're probably worried that people won't go in this direction. And I don't want to be the hockey player skating to where the puck is going to be, because I don't think the puck's ever going to be there. We're going to order that food. We're going to order healthier, environmentally sustainable, tasty food. As chefs, that's our craft. We are going to make it unapologetically delicious. And we'll buy your whole crop this year or your whole flock this year. If you'll be antibiotic-free instead of what you were doing before. And so that institutional power, financially, agriculturally, I think is gonna be the critical factor, not making the dietary guidelines better and not saying, hey, Americans, we have a cool new marketing message for you for healthy food. You're right, Holly. I don't think they're gonna do that until the default is beautiful and healthy and convenient and affordable. And I think the chefs are going to help us get there. That's my newest research partner.

James Hill:
I think combining the chefs with nutritionists and making healthy food taste good is a great way forward. So good luck on that.

James Hill:
Holly, let's do a couple of listener questions.

Holly Wyatt:
All right, a couple of listener questions. And I want to make sure we do some rapid fire ones too. This is going to be hard because you're going to have to just like quick, quick, quick, right?

Christopher Gardner:
Yes, no.

Holly Wyatt:
All right. First one, let's kind of get back to the weight question. What's one thing in the new dietary guidelines that matters the most for people monitoring their weight?

Christopher Gardner:
Yup. Added sugar and ultra-processed foods. Get rid of them as much as you can.

Holly Wyatt:
I like where we're going. Jim, do you want to do the next one?

James Hill:
Yeah. Do the guidelines address anything about snacking? What snacks should people look for?

Christopher Gardner:
So one of the things actually they're very specific about in school lunch is the amount of sugar a school snack can have. And it's much more stringent than before.

James Hill:
Okay.

Holly Wyatt:
Do the guidelines go far enough on ultra-processed foods?

Christopher Gardner:
They didn't even use ultra-processed foods because it's been a confusing topic. I actually think the ultra-processed food thing is a distraction. It's junk food. It's like pornography. I'm not sure what you call it. If you look at it and it's obviously crap, I don't care if it's ultra-processed.

James Hill:
I agree with you because I always say, if we go that we should avoid ultra processed foods, what would we do different than we're already telling people to avoid? It's the same. I think it's a total distraction. Anyway, Holly, hit him with the rapid fire.

Holly Wyatt:
Rapid fire. This is one of the things we like the best. Okay. Best fiber upgrade. How can we get more fiber?

Christopher Gardner:
Legumes. I'm part of the Leguminati. It's a secret society that loves beans. Join me.

Holly Wyatt:
I'm there too. That is growing on me. Most underrated protein source?

Christopher Gardner:
Oh, it's the same answer.

Holly Wyatt:
I knew.

Christopher Gardner:
It's hummus. So I'm a hummus slut now. I will do just about anything for hummus.

Holly Wyatt:
Hummus.

Christopher Gardner:
There are so many cool kinds of hummus, and you can dip all kinds of fabulous things in it.

Holly Wyatt:
Okay. One myth about carbs you'd erase today?

Christopher Gardner:
Oh, just this idea of just saying carbs. I had this, I was doing a webinar with somebody the other day and somebody said, “Oh my God, telling people to eat less protein, that must mean more carbs. You must be nuts. Everybody knows carbs.” And I said, “What carbs are you talking about? You're talking about sugar or lentils? What is this? Lentils or lollipops? It's not fair to just say carbs. Not fair.”

James Hill:
Agreed.

Holly Wyatt:
A food people stress about but don't need to.

Christopher Gardner:
Oh, uh, no, everybody stresses for different things. Sorry, pass. Too many, too many options there.

Holly Wyatt:
Oh, my goodness.

James Hill:
Oh, wow.

Holly Wyatt:
Wow, we got a pass on that.

James Hill:
All right, so go to the vulnerability round.

Holly Wyatt:
All right, Jim, you start that off.

James Hill:
I'll start. So, Christopher, what's your comfort food?

Christopher Gardner:
Oh, my comfort food is salad. When I say salad, I don't really mean iceberg lettuce with a not very well ripened tomato and cucumber on it. So I make a different salad all the time. I go in the fridge and it's either grain-based because I make a really great wheat berry salad or lettuce. But the first thing I put on it is something like red bell pepper and red cabbage and carrots. They make it look really colorful. Then I put avocado and nuts and olive oil. That actually makes it a really high-fat salad. Right. And then whatever veggies I had or that were colorful or from my father-in-law puts grapes in it. He puts some fruit in it with all that. So I can I can make a different salad all the time. It's super flexible depending on what's in my fridge. That's my comfort food.

Holly Wyatt:
Why do you think it's a comfort food for you? So comfort food people kind of pull to when they're stressed or when they need something, you know, in their day.

Christopher Gardner:
Oh. It's always crunchy and it's always flavorful and it's so i could just sit down and eat it at my own pace and it doesn't have to be the same thing every day.

Holly Wyatt:
Okay. All right. You convinced me. I was making sure I was kind of keep you real but I believe you now. So I like to ask this question and we ask it to a lot of our guests. What's one thing as a scientist that you got wrong You know, you thought was one way and then later data came out and you said, you know what, I thought about that wrong or I maybe interpreted the data incorrectly and now I think of it differently.

Christopher Gardner:
Grains. And I would say grains from the perspective of I moderated a debate between Loren Cordain representing paleo, Furman representing low fat vegan and somebody who was a Dean Ornish follower that was very low fat vegan. And I said, instead of bickering about what you all prefer, what are some of the things you all agree on? And what is a place that you might be, something you might be willing to give up on? And they picked grains. And I said, really? You picked grains? Even the Ornish follower and even Joel Fuhrman said it. So no grains is part of paleo. Absolutely part of paleo, no grains. And I really thought about it. And part of the problem, part of the reason I would go there, Holly and Jim is because the US eats almost all of its grains as wheat.

Christopher Gardner:
And almost all of that as a refined grain. So as much as you say, oh, I'm going to have the whole grain, except they don't have any. So I'm going to have the pizza crust and the hamburger bun and the pastry and the sandwich. And I've looked for the whole grain and it's sort of pseudo whole grain. It's not really whole grain. And the breads are marketed as whole wheat. And I've looked and there's like 25 ingredients in the whole wheat bread. Shouldn't there just be five? And protein from plant sources is pretty low in grains. It's like 10 whereas beans are 20 25 so I'm for the last 15 years I've been eating way fewer grains. I don't eat any white rice uh occasionally I'll have brown rice but I have a small portion of brown rice and I'm really trying to get more beans and veggies and less grains because they're in the cookies and the snacks and the chips. Ah, there's just grains everywhere. And I thought, oh, in the old day, that was low fat and vegan. And everybody sort of went to grains as default.

Holly Wyatt:
Well, it's almost like you're saying about carbs. You use the term carbs and really we should be specifying what carbs we're talking about. Maybe that's the same thing with grains. What kind of grains or what do you mean if you say grains and it's more complex than just putting them all together.

Christopher Gardner:
If you eat more barley and more steel-cut oats and more wheat berries and more amaranth and more taffod, oh, oh yeah, there's a lot of variety and some great nutrients we're getting there. In the U.S., that doesn't really happen. The default is even when it's whole grain, it's not great whole grain.

James Hill:
All right. Christopher, thank you. I'm going to wrap it up here. We learned a lot about the dietary guideline process. And the scientists who contribute to this, like Dr. Gardner, deserve enormous credit from the nutrition community. They gave their time and effort and really, really tried to make the guidelines as science-based as possible. We also learned that the advisory committee provides advice and the government that puts out the guidelines can take that or not take it. And in its version, things were changed a good bit. And I think we went through some of the positives and the negatives of the current guidelines. But one of the other things that Dr. Gardner points he made was that the guidelines alone aren't going to solve the problem. We've got to tie it to agriculture, to taste, involving culinary arts with nutritionists. So I think we've got a lot of work ahead, but there are a lot of good people, a lot of good science out there working on the process. So Christopher, thank you so much for being with us on Weight Loss And.

Holly Wyatt:
Yes. Thank you.

James Hill:
All right. See you next time on Weight Loss And.

Holly Wyatt:
Bye, everybody.

Christopher Gardner:
It was a pleasure.

James Hill:
And that's a wrap for today's episode of Weight Loss And. We hope you enjoy diving into the world of weight loss with us.

Holly Wyatt:
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James Hill:
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Holly Wyatt:
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