09/01/2026
Hallelujah!
It’s finally happened. The United States has formally recognised real food as the foundation of a healthy diet, more than a decade after people like Gary Jackson began advocating for it on the ground. Yesterday’s updated dietary guidance uses unusually direct language. Real food, nutrient density, and the effects of heavy processing sit at the centre. Ultra-processed foods are named plainly as a problem. That level of clarity is rare in national guidance and has travelled beyond policy circles.
The guidance focuses on foods that dominate modern diets. Ready meals. Sugary drinks. Packaged snacks. Products designed to be cheap, shelf-stable, and easy to consume in large amounts. It links sustained reliance on these foods to obesity, metabolic disease, and poorer long-term health. The point is to understand the structure before assigning moral meaning.
Diets reflect food environments built around speed, shelf life, cost, and convenience.
The reaction reflects that directness. Some welcome the clarity. Others raise concerns about affordability, industry impact, and uncertainty around protein and fats. The scale of debate itself is notable. Nutrition policy rarely draws this level of immediate attention.
In practical terms, the guidance amounts to the United States formally recognising real food as the recommended human diet. The public platform hosting the guidance is called realfood.gov, which shows where official thinking has finally landed.
In the UK, this logic already underpins much public health advice. Vegetables, fruit, whole grains, and balanced meals are encouraged. Sugar, refined foods, and excess calories are discouraged. What is changing is the sharper focus on industrial processing itself, not just nutrients on a label. UK research increasingly links diets high in ultra-processed foods with poorer health outcomes, even when calorie intake appears similar.
Many people recognise the difference through lived experience rather than instruction. Many people struggle to make real food choices day to day. This guidance doesn’t change that, but it makes the case clearer and gives people a reference point for what healthy eating can look like.
Gary Jackson has been advocating for real food and nutrient-dense eating for more than a decade. At Jackson’s Real Food and Eatery, attention has always been paid to ingredient quality, sourcing, and preparation, and how food is eaten day after day. Meals built from real food behave differently in the body and in daily life than manufactured substitutes. That difference has been visible on the ground long before it appeared in policy language.
Access and affordability still shape food choices. Habits do not change overnight. But the conversation has shifted. Attention is moving away from adjusting nutrients within the same system and towards questioning the structure of the system itself.
For the full guidance, follow this link: realfood.gov
