Texas wrote its own dietary guidelines today. Six lines, one sentence we'd keep, and a rule for medical schools.

The Texas Nutrition Advisory Committee, created by a 2025 state law, published the first Dietary Guidelines for Texans today. There are six: fill half your plate with vegetables and fruit; eat three or more servings of healthy proteins a day; include healthy fats; eat foods for healthy bones and teeth; when you choose grains, choose whole grains; drink water when you are thirsty. The committee's report puts the stakes in two numbers from federal data — about 53% of American adults' calories and about 62% of children's now come from ultra-processed food — and the state's banner for the effort is "Eat Real Food, Y'all." We will leave the politics of who said what to others. Two things in the document are worth every reader's attention, whatever state they live in.

The sentence, and the rule. The sentence is the one on the banner, and the six guidelines are a plain-language version of it that a ten-year-old could follow; we would not change a word of the first five. The rule is less visible and more consequential: the law behind the guidelines requires nutrition instruction for medical and other health-professional students in Texas, and continuing education on it for practicing clinicians through the state's licensing boards. We wrote last August that US medical students average about nineteen hours of nutrition training, and in February that federal officials had promised an announcement about more. Texas has now written a requirement into law. For schoolchildren the report is quieter: nutrition education in Texas public schools is described as still optional, with state boards to use the guidelines in future curricula. The committee says it will revise the guidance every year.

Loree’s take

I trained in clinical nutrition after medical school because it was not in medical school. A state requiring it for the next generation of clinicians, and for the current one through continuing education, is the single most useful line in this document — more useful than the guidelines themselves, which most patients already know and cannot act on. The test, as always, is implementation. I will be watching what the licensing boards actually require.

Ben’s take

Guidelines are cheap and curricula are expensive, which is why we get many of the first and few of the second. The interesting thing about Texas is that it did both in one law. The report also cites, and labels, an industry-supported estimate of what obesity costs the state's economy — a small thing, but the labeling is the habit we keep asking for. Hold the state to the sentence and the rule, not the banner.

Why it matters to a recovering optimizer. Six lines are enough. The reason they are not enough for most people has nothing to do with the lines and everything to do with the structures around them — which the medical-education rule starts to address, and which school nutrition, still optional, does not. The guidelines are the message. The law is the institution. Watch the institution.