Healthy Food for Everyone: Health Equity and the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines

Despite not using the term "health equity," the new Dietary Guidelines are an important step in that direction.

The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, just released last week, are the first ever in American history to prioritize natural, whole foods and take a strong stance against highly processed foods and added sugars. In a recent news article for Acres, I describe how these guidelines, despite their overemphasis on meat, are the closest thing the USDA has ever issued to what the organic movement was recommending in the 1930s.

As I was digging into the scientific background document behind the new guidelines, I discovered that this isn’t at all what the original vision was for the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines. The initial scientific report, released in 2024, recommended framing the  guidelines through a health equity lens. This suggestion was rejected. “We recognize and share concerns regarding the affordability and accessibility of healthy food, particularly for disadvantaged populations,” the new committee explained. “However, these challenges are best addressed by first establishing clear, unbiased scientific guidance on the optimal diet for Americans. That science can then serve as the foundation for effective downstream policy solutions.”

The new guidelines’ emphasis that an “optimal diet” should be the goal for all Americans—not just wealthy ones—is nearly as unprecedented as telling people not to eat processed foods. That’s because health inequity has been baked into USDA dietary guidelines since the 1930s. In a 1933 USDA bulletin titled Diets at Four Levels of Nutritive Content and Cost, the “moderate cost” and “liberal” diets had more vegetables, milk, eggs, and meat than the “minimum cost” diet, which was predominately white flour and potatoes. The implication was clear—poor people can’t afford to eat the healthiest diet possible.

This division continues today. Currently, the USDA has four different budget levels of food plans—thrifty, low-cost, moderate-cost, and liberal. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits are based on the cost of the items in the newest version of the Thrifty Food Plan. The people who rely on SNAP are the “disadvantaged” people that the 2024 scientific document was supposedly focused on getting “health equity” for. But intriguingly, that document didn’t mention the USDA food plans or their impact on dietary choices at all.

The Thrifty Food Plan was substantially improved in 2021, emphasizing nutrient-dense foods for the first time ever. But it still contains some assumptions about what poor people should eat that aren’t in line with what nutritionists consider to be an optimal diet. In the 2021 Thrifty Food Plan, for example, “starchy vegetables are provided in an amount greater than the other vegetable subgroups, reflecting the relatively lower price of the foods within this category and their efficiency at meeting the model’s nutrient and cost constraints.”

The Thrifty Food Plan is required by law to reflect the newest version of the Dietary Guidelines. That means it’ll have to be revised within the next year or so to reflect the new “Eat Real Food” guidelines. Since the new guidelines, for the first time in many years, don’t suggest different diets for different socioeconomic levels, will that mean that the Thrifty Food Plan will finally be forced to recommend a nutritionally optimum (instead of minimally adequate) diet? If that actually happens and SNAP benefits are raised enough for people to purchase the foods they need for a truly healthy diet, the new guidelines will have made a huge step toward “health equity” without ever using that term.