Q&A: As RFK Jr. moves toward radically simplified nutritional guidelines, a scientist looks back at their history

Medical Xpress August 29, 2025
Rosa Norton, University of California - Berkeley

With Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services under the second Trump administration, a new “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda proposes to radically simplify nutritional guidelines, with news outlets reporting since the spring that a new guideline may be four pages long (as opposed to over 160) and stress that Americans should “eat whole food.”

This comes as Trump recently announced reviving the presidential fitness test, which the Obama administration had retired, in another move to return Americans to a seemingly simpler time.

In a recent Annual Review of Nutrition paper, Kevin Klatt, an assistant research scientist and instructor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences and Toxicology at UC Berkeley, examines the history of...

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