President Donald Trump’s administration has introduced a new, inverted food pyramid with fewer food groups.
The new three-section food pyramid is part of the administration’s new nutrition policy announced Wednesday, which encourages Americans to eat whole or minimally processed foods, which it calls “real food,” and has been a long time interest of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy.
His policy interests also shine through on the initiative’s new website, realfood.gov, which features copy that reads like a MAHA manifesto. The National Design Studio gave the website a minimalist design that takes cues from consumer companies like Chobani and Sweetgreen, with clean, sans-serif typefaces and playful illustrations.
The new pyramid
The original pyramid, released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in 1992, featured six sections. The new version is flipped and has three: protein, dairy, and healthy fats; vegetables and fruits; and whole grains. Sweets have been removed.
“It’s upside-down, a lot of people would say,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said at a White House press conference. “But it was actually upside-down before and we just righted it.”
The new pyramid graphic makes do with fewer groups by combining categories from the original food pyramid. Whole grains, once included in the base of the original pyramid, now make up the smallest portion of the new version, while old categories—fruits and vegetables, and meat and dairy—are combined.
The graphic is colorful, with eye-catching, painterly illustrations of example foods that might appear in a ’70s health food magazine. But the infographic is less successful as a piece of communication design. It’s not clear how literally the placement of foods within the graphic is meant to be. And although supporting documents about the new pyramid offer specific guidelines, like suggesting saturated fat consumption shouldn’t exceed 10% of total daily calories, the new pyramid doesn’t communicate specifics itself.
Users can hover over each section of the pyramid for additional information, but it doesn’t provide much. The pyramid doesn’t indicate how many servings dairy or healthy fats should you have. And to determine your protein target, realfood.gov asks Americans to take on the additional step of first calculating their weight in kilograms. (Quite frankly, we don’t know what that is.)
The federal government’s new guidance, which gets updated every five years, also removes specific recommendations about daily alcohol consumption and only suggests to drink less. It also calls for more protein and full-fat dairy.
Government designers have worked to improve upon the food pyramid before. In 2005, an updated graphic made the food segments slice upwards instead of dividing the shape horizontally. In 2011, it ditched the pyramid altogether for MyPlate, a skeuomorphic representation of dietary guidelines that used a circular graphic to represent portions as they’d appear on a plate.
The new 2026 pyramid represents the Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” priorities under Kennedy’s Health Department and comes two days after the agency cut its number of recommended vaccines for children, worrying medical groups.
The new recommendations are not meant to be a strict diet, according to its website, but “a flexible framework meant to guide better choices.” It’s minimalist, for sure, but whether Americans find it a useful guide to healthy living remains to be seen.