Want to eat healthier? Add to your diet, rather than limit it

ORLANDO, Fla. — There’s nothing like a nutrition meeting to make you want to set fire to your diet. 

Like most people who consider themselves relatively healthy, I thought I ate pretty well. Largely vegetarian, lots of fruit, minimal alcohol. Overall, my diet is probably doing what it needs to do to keep my body and bones strong. There’s room for improvement, but surely not much, right? Wrong!

At the annual American Society for Nutrition meeting that wrapped up in early June, I learned that my diet — and maybe yours, too — could be so much better. Later this year, we’ll get some new recommendations when the federal government releases the dietary guidelines for 2025–2030, which are updated every five years based on the latest science. New changes may include a stronger emphasis on eating beans, peas and lentils and less red and processed meat, according to a recent report from the guidelines advisory committee. 

The good news is making dietary improvements like these is not complicated. The bad news is most people aren’t doing it. That’s not surprising. Nutrition advice abounds across social media and beyond and parsing the good from the bad can feel like divining truth from tea leaves. Wellness influencers hawk unproven supplements, scientists offer sometimes flip-flopping findings, and federal recommendations may be swayed by political party.

Diet advice doesn’t have to be complicated

Some diet trends can seem downright odd (eating like a carnivore) or difficult to follow (eating only during an eight-hour window every day). And though researchers are testing specific foods that might have outsized effects on people’s health, they’re not always pantry staples. Some of the foods discussed at Nutrition 2025 were no exception. Krill oil? It might dial down chronic pain. Duckweed? Could be a good source of folate, a red blood cell boosting vitamin. Yellow nutsedge? Perhaps enhances male fertility.

But foods don’t have to be unconventional to benefit the body. And diets don’t need to be restrictive to be effective. Rather than simply cutting foods from people’s diets, it may be more important to focus on what we can add, said Jaclyn Albin, a culinary medicine doctor at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. “Nutrition work historically has too much been about what needs to come off the plate,” she said. Instead, we need to ask, “How do we get the missing good stuff back on?”

You probably already know the good stuff. At the meeting, audience members shouted out examples. Fruits and vegetables. Whole grains. Nuts and seeds. Legumes. “This is not rocket science,” Albin said. They’re foods that are nutrient dense and lack added salt and sugars. Scientists have hailed their benefits for decades. New research continues to support this. A daily cup of chickpeas, for example, can lower people’s cholesterol, according to a study presented at the meeting.

But there’s a Grand Canyon–sized gulf between what dietary guidelines recommend and what U.S. adults are actually eating. Just about 10 percent of us are eating enough fruit and vegetables, scientists reported in 2022. The goal is roughly 3.5 cups per day, minimum.

A lack of these foods in the diet could explain why adults aren’t hitting other key nutrition targets. Fiber’s a big one. Eat enough of it, and you may reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Adults in the United States should be aiming for 22 to 34 grams of fiber each day, depending on age and sex, according to current guidelines. But we’re getting just about half that, scientists have found.

Fiber was a topic that popped up all over the meeting; dozens of posters and presentations focused on this nutrient. Researchers reported revamping foods into high-fiber versions, supplementing diets with fermentable fiber and designing prebiotic fiber mixtures. But fiber doesn’t have to be fancy. It’s in all those different foods audience members called out in Albin’s talk.

Cooking classes can improve people’s diets

So how do you get people to eat more nutrients? It’s harder than it sounds — especially if you can’t afford or don’t have access to healthy food. In the United States, nearly 50 million people lived in households that experienced food insecurity in 2023, a number that’s been rising by millions year after year.

And even if people can afford fresh fruits and veggies, or can pick them up from local distribution programs, that’s no guarantee they’ll be familiar with how to cook them, said Jennifer Massa, a nutrition researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. During the pandemic, when teaching kitchens pivoted to distributing food, they often found fresh food dumped around the corner of the pickup site, Massa said. “They’d have a mound of leafy kale, because folks didn’t know what to do with it.”

She, Albin and other researchers around the country are working to change that via “food is medicine” or “culinary medicine” programs. These programs are built around the idea that access to nourishing food matters so much that it should be integrated into health care, Albin said. One key component is education. Researchers partner with community kitchens, local churches and other organizations to offer cooking classes. “If we don’t teach folks how to make this food taste delicious, no one’s going to eat it,” Massa said.

Her team recently wrapped up a clinical trial that had participants attend 16 weeks of intensive cooking classes. They also received the groceries needed to prepare the class recipes, researchers reported in Nutrients in January. Now, months after the classes ended, researchers are following up to see if participants have made lasting changes to their behavior and health. “People really, really loved the classes,” Massa says. They had nearly perfect attendance.

The classes created a sense of community, her team found. They also offered people the skills needed to make food at home. “There were folks that were part of the study who literally didn’t know how to boil water,” Massa said. The classes also give people a safe space to try new recipes without the risk of wasting food. For people experiencing food insecurity, Albin said, “there is no wiggle room for waste.”

Even people who have plenty of food and adequate kitchen skills can take something away from the researchers’ work. It’s about getting back to basics: cooking at home and trying to add a bit more kale or bell peppers or lentils into our daily diets. Lentils and other legumes have been something I’ve tended to skip over in my own eating habits. But I’m newly inspired to try out recipes to make beans taste delicious, like this viral dense bean salad or this chickpeas and coconut dish a nutritionist at the meeting shared with me.

Consider this a reminder of what you may have already known. But maybe it’s time give that knowledge a lot more weight. Even today, an age where we have powerful weight-loss drugs and AI-assisted meal planners, simply eating nutrient-dense foods is what nutrition experts consider important — and potentially crucial for health.