Priya Fielding-Singh is director of policy and programs at the Global Food Institute of the George Washington University and the author of “How the Other Half Eats: The Untold Story of Food and Inequality in America.”
This month, the Trump administration released the latest Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a set of recommendations that influence everything from nutrition advice to school meals. The new guidelines call for children to avoid added sugar until their 11th birthday — an expansion from prior guidance, which advised against sugar through age 2.
As a researcher who studies how American families eat, I’m excited by the scope of this shift. Children consume far too much added sugar, with mounting evidence linking high intake to poorer diet quality, tooth decay, obesity, and type 2 diabetes.
But as a parent of a 6-year-old, this guidance feels impossible. Having seen firsthand how pervasively added sugar is woven into everyday childhood, I know that cutting it from kids’ diets through age 10 would be extraordinarily difficult — not because parents don’t care or understand the health benefits, but because we are raising children in a food environment where added sugar is almost always the default.
Following the new guidelines would go far beyond saying no to birthday treats and Halloween candy, which is already a tall order. It would also mean largely avoiding processed foods altogether — sound nutrition advice, but impractical given the foods most families rely on. Added sugar hides in staples like bread, sweetened non-dairy milks, and tomato sauces. Even the tortilla I use for my daughter’s quesadilla has sugar. Flavored yogurts, sweetened snacks, and breakfast cereals served in schools and child-care facilities also contain sugar.
Parents’ ability to limit their kids’ sugar intake is also constrained by cost, access, and time. Eating a diet centered on whole, minimally processed foods is increasingly unaffordable. For lower-income households, following this guidance will be harder because of recent cuts to federal nutrition benefits — policies that clash with the very health goals the guidelines promote.
But the fact that most families can’t follow this advice today doesn’t make it wrong. It underscores why such an ambitious target must be paired with structural support to succeed. Left to parents alone, it’s likely to fail. But by changing the food environment — what children see marketed and what schools and child-care centers serve — it’s possible to turn good nutrition advice into something families can actually do.
Moving forward, the Trump administration should focus its efforts on three policy areas.
First, it should restrict the marketing of sugary foods and beverages to children. The food, beverage, and restaurant industry spends roughly $2 billion each year advertising to children, most of it for high-sugar foods and drinks. As long as children are aggressively targeted, asking parents to counteract this on their own is unrealistic. Other countries offer clear examples to learn from: The United Kingdom restricts junk food advertising on TV before 9 p.m., recognizing that voluntary industry pledges are not enough.
Industry marketing also targets parents through misleading “healthy” or “kid-friendly” claims on high-sugar products. Regulations should require front-of-package claims to be accurate so parents can make informed choices.
Second, policy makers need to strengthen and fully support healthy school and child-care meal programs as a cornerstone of any effort to reduce kids’ sugar intake. With such programs reaching more than 30 million children each day, they are among the most powerful levers to shape kids’ diets.
To succeed, schools and child-care centers need adequate funding and flexibility to serve meals kids will actually eat, along with realistic timelines that give food manufacturers time to reduce added sugar in meal staples like bread, cereal, and nut butters.
This work is already underway, but it could be more ambitious. Federal nutrition programs are phasing in new sugar limits over the next two years, requiring meals to average less than 10 percent of calories from added sugars by the 2027-28 school year. California plans to eliminate ultra-processed foods from school meals by 2035.
Finally, policy makers must confront how federal policy itself makes sugar the easier choice. For decades, agricultural policy has heavily subsidized the farming of corn, much of which is used for sweeteners, while doing far less to support the production, distribution, and affordability of fruits and vegetables — the very foods federal dietary guidelines tell families to eat more of.
If reducing children’s sugar intake is truly a national priority, federal food policy must shift to actively supporting healthier diets. That means increasing support for fruit and vegetable production, strengthening and stabilizing the agricultural workforce, and using nutrition assistance programs to make more nutritious foods more affordable. Without realigning these incentives, advice to “eat less sugar” will continue to collide with the economic realities families face.
If policy makers want a future in which children consume less sugar, they must stop expecting families to navigate a system built around it and start changing the food environment itself. Policy priorities like those above can help make healthier, low-sugar foods the default for parents and children alike. Over time, they can transform dietary guidance from lofty aspiration into everyday reality.