Wellness That Matters: Black Health News & Community Care
- Alleged "secret panel" by HHS and USDA had conflicts of interest and bypassed established guideline processes.
- PCRM asks the court to withdraw current guidelines and require reissued guidance compliant with the FACA.
- Neal Barnard, MD accused the meat and dairy industries of ghostwriting and influencing the recommendations.
- DGAC's extensive report was largely ignored; experts called the released guidelines error ridden, sloppy, and cherry picked evidence.
- DGAC members, including Fatima Cody Stanford and Christopher Gardner, warned the process lacked transparency, had conflicts, and risks public confusion.
A physician group filed a lawsuit against HHS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), alleging that the government botched the most recent dietary guidelines.
The suit was brought by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit founded in 1985 that advocates for plant-based diets and alternatives to animal-based research. The group has a long history of using legal pressure to further their goals.
In their legal complaint, PCRM argues that HHS and USDA assembled a “secret panel” that was “rife with conflicts of interest” and did not follow the long-established process for updating the guidelines.
Ultimately, the group is asking that the court withdraw the current guidelines and issue new ones that follow a process that is compliant with the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA).
“The government allowed the meat and dairy industries to ghostwrite the Dietary Guidelines,” PCRM President Neal Barnard, MD, said in a press release. “They put money in industry’s pocket and cholesterol in Americans’ arteries.”
The dietary guidelines are usually based on the work of the volunteer Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC). Every 5 years, 20 nutrition and obesity experts comb through the evolving evidence over the course of 2 years and write a report on how they advise the government to update national guidelines. After they submit the report, DGAC’s role is over and they have no say in what actually changes. While HHS and USDA are not required to follow DGAC’s advice, the government usually heavily considers the recommendations.
DGAC submitted their extensive, 400-page scientific report right as the second Trump administration took over with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the helm of HHS. This leadership worried some DGAC members, but others hoped for the best.
However, last August, abstracts related to work done by DGAC were retracted from a major nutrition conference, sparking concerns that 2 years of work producing a robust scientific report may be disregarded, sources told MedPage Today at the time.
Kennedy subsequently said that the updated guidelines would only be a few pages long, which further worried DGAC members who feared their report would not be considered and that complicated topics would be overly simplified.
When the 2025-2030 U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans were released in January, including the infamous inverted food pyramid, DGAC members told MedPage Today that the guidelines were full of errors, sloppy language, and cherry-picked evidence.
PCRM’s lawsuit further alleges that HHS and USDA violated the FACA when they hand-picked nine members for a second panel to review the evidence and update the guidelines without notifying the public or adequately vetting conflicts of interest; several panelists are known to have strong ties to the beef, dairy, and egg industries.
“This is the first time in history since 1980, when the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee began informing the guidelines, that we saw this lack of transparency,” said Fatima Cody Stanford, MD, MPH, an obesity medicine physician at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who served on the most recent DGAC.
“I think this really speaks volumes to what we’re seeing under this current administration,” she told MedPage Today.
When the guidelines were released, Stanford said that she was “very disappointed to see that the almost 2 years of work that we put into the scientific report” was not represented.
Christopher Gardner, PhD, a nutrition expert at Stanford University in California, who also served on the most recent DGAC, told MedPage Today that he’s glad a group sued the government over the guidelines.
“Standard scientific and political procedures are not being followed, and you can’t let that lie. Somebody has to show outrage,” he said. “People have spent decades setting that process up so that it’s as transparent as possible, and they’re bypassing all of it.”
Gardner noted that some of the transparency measures that DGAC were expected to uphold felt excessive at times, but were important for the integrity of the work. For instance, in the final stretch of putting together the scientific report, Gardner and another DGAC member wanted to meet on the weekend to try to finish. They were told they could not do that because multiple federal staff members needed to be present for discussions.
What is most odd, he added, is that Kennedy bothered to create the second so-called “secret panel” in the first place.
“It’s well known that [they] don’t have to take our advice … they could have dismissed the whole thing and said everything they said,” Gardner noted. So, he wonders, why did the administration bother creating a second group that bypassed the usual process and violated laws?
Beyond this situation, Gardner said that he fears that the public will get more confused about who to listen to about nutrition and think that there isn’t scientific consensus. There is consensus, he added, but like much in the field of nutrition, it is nuanced and granular.
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