Trump administration to unveil new dietary guidelines as FDA plans sweeping 2026 food overhaul

The Trump administration is preparing to roll out new dietary guidelines for Americans in early January, a move Food and Drug Administration (FDA) officials say will kick off a broader food policy overhaul in 2026 aimed at curbing obesity, diabetes and what they call a national nutrition crisis.

"It will be streamlined. It will empower parents. And it will return to a sense of eating whole foods," FDA Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods Kyle Diamantas told "Fox & Friends," Tuesday.

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Diamantas said 2026 will be "a fundamental transformational year" for food reform under the Trump administration, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the FDA. He described the reforms as a return to common sense, criticizing previous dietary guidelines that stretched for hundreds of pages.

The first thing to change, he noted, will be the FDA's dietary guidelines, which affect school lunches and federal nutrition programs like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Diamantas said the new guidance would recommend minimizing "highly processed foods that are loaded with addictive sugar, that give us glycemic index rises, and that have these processed carbs in them that really have ballooned since the early '80s and '90s."

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Diamantas also highlighted the FDA's crackdown on petroleum-based food dyes, arguing they add no nutritional value while disproportionately targeting children.

"Products that contain these petroleum-based dyes have, on average, 140% more sugar than products that don't use these dyes," Diamantas said, adding that the dyes exist primarily to make foods more visually appealing.

The FDA is also changing the standards for what ingredients are considered Generally Recognized As Safe (GRAS), Diamantas said, advocating for more transparency than today's system, which he said allows companies to self-certify ingredient safety.

Diamantas said the reforms were spurred on by worsening health trends among the country, noting that about 70% of Americans are overweight or obese, more than half of young adolescents can't qualify for military service and about 15,000 new cases of diabetes emerge each week.