Eat Like Grandma Again – America Reclaims Its Food Pyramid

Last week I wrote about Seven Things to be Happy About This New Year. Thanks to President Trump, we now have an eighth: the new dietary guidelines for Americans.

It is no longer quite so socially unacceptable to admit you rather like Trump. In some circles he is still regarded with horror, of course, but those are not my circles. And whatever you think about the politics, the hair, or the grabbing-the-pussy faux pas, one thing is hard to deny: his administration is putting the nation’s health first.

Even The Guardian doesn’t entirely hate it.

Eating real, healthy food — the kind your grandmother would recognise rather than something engineered by a Fast Moving Consumer Goods giant — should not be controversial. And yet here we are.

The new US food pyramid announcement begins with some sobering statistics. More than 70% of Americans are overweight or obese. Around 50% have diabetes or prediabetes. A staggering 75% live with at least one chronic condition.

The new US food pyramid.

Across the Atlantic, we have nothing to feel smug about. While only about a fifth of UK adults are diabetic or prediabetic, around two thirds of us are overweight or obese, and over 40% live with at least one chronic condition.

So when did the Obesity Epidemic start?

In the UK, obesity increased almost tenfold between the 1970s and 1999 – from 2.7% to 25%. Tenfold. Human biology does not change that fast on its own — well not without the help of a top down policy.

We changed the official dietary advice. Or more accurately, we did a spectacular U-turn. Carbohydrates became king and fat was cast as the foe. Natural butter was replaced with man-made hydrogenated spreads. Yuck.

As the US announcement bluntly puts it: “Junk food became the foundation of the nation’s diet.”

Quite.

As Dr Zoe Harcombe, who completed a PhD examining the evidence base for dietary guidelines and author of The Obesity Epidemic explained to me:

“We demonised fat back in the 1950s to seventies. The low-fat diet was born, which is inevitably a high carb diet as those are the interchangeable macro nutrients. Out went real nutritious foods such as meat, fish, eggs, and dairy and in came calorie counted ready meals, low-fat dairy and beige food galore.”

This was not evidence-based nutrition science, but ideology dressed up as public health. The results are visible in every supermarket aisle and every GP waiting room.

Robert F Kennedy Jr and the Trump administration are now following through on their promise to Make America Healthy Again by reclaiming the food pyramid itself.

The previous US food pyramid, introduced in 1992, prioritised processed carbohydrates — bread, cereals, pasta, crackers. Think about that for a moment. How can cereal in a box, or a cracker, be foundational to human health? We hardly evolved to eat them. These foods have existed for the evolutionary blink of an eye, alongside the obesity and diabetes epidemics that now dog us.

The old US food pyramid.

Today I noticed a Swiss nutritional therapist share the Swiss food pyramid online on X. It somehow manages to be even more insane than the old US pyramid and our own UK Eatwell – or Eat Badly – Plate. The bottom layer is water, tea and coffee. I invite you to imagine our ancestors sourcing two litres of Evian a day while foraging on the savannah. More shockingly still, it contains no red meat at all — one of the most nutrient-dense and evolutionarily consistent foods in the human diet. Again, you can rewrite policy, but not biology.

The Swiss food pyramid. This is not a joke.

The most significant change in the new US guidance is disarmingly simple: eat normal food again. Isn’t that extraordinary?

The new US food pyramid is a long-overdue correction to decades of evidence-light, ideologically-driven nonsense that made millions of people fat, and unhealthy.

Meanwhile, here in the UK, our nanny-staters fiddle at the easy edges — sugar taxes that do not work, bans on fast-food advertising after 9pm that will not work — while refusing to confront the dietary dogma at the heart of the problem.

If America really does become healthy again, will the rest of the world follow?

One can only hope.