Only nine scientists were asked to advise on the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and Dr. Tom Brenna was one of them. In this conversation, he pulls back the curtain on how dietary guidelines are actually made, why the process has never been the same twice, and what it was like to watch a decades-old saturated fat recommendation get carried forward despite a lack of evidence supporting it at the level of total mortality. This is the dietary guidelines conversation the internet has been missing: straight from someone who was actually in the room.




