Agriculture secretary says new dietary guidelines are ‘a whole flipping of the narrative’
Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins speaks with ABC News, Jan. 7, 2026. ABC News
(NEW YORK) — U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins said she wants to “get Americans away from the highly processed packaged foods,” saying those foods are driving the obesity epidemic in America, following the release on Wednesday of new federal dietary guidelines.
“This is a whole flipping of the narrative,” Rollins said in an exclusive interview on “Good Morning America” that aired on Thursday. “It’s a flipping of what we’ve known over the last couple of decades.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the new federal dietary guidelines on Wednesday, encouraging Americans to limit highly processed food and reduce refined carbohydrates.
The new recommendations essentially turn the old food pyramid upside down, encouraging Americans to eat whole foods like fruits and vegetables, to incorporate healthy fats, to prioritize protein-rich meals including red meat and to consume full-fat dairy and whole grains with no added sugars.
“Today was a reset of all of that in these dietary guidelines focusing on eating real food, nutrient dense foods, saturated fat, meats, fruits and vegetables, whole milk, all of that now becomes front and center,” said Rollins. “And that’s real, that’s unprecedented.”
Other recommendations include limiting added sugars and highly processed foods like potato chips or cookies, as well as sweetened beverages like energy drinks, soda, and diet sodas due to their artificial sweeteners.
The guidance puts a new focus on what the administration is calling “healthy fats,” such as full-fat dairy like yogurt and cheese, and using olive oil, beef tallow or butter as a cooking oil, a recommendation that Kennedy Jr. has championed This is in contrast to the American Heart Association recommendation to “limit high-fat animal products including red meat, butter, lard and tallow, which are linked to increased cardiovascular risk.”
“Our goal is to get Americans away from the highly processed packaged foods, which is the driver in the obesity epidemic that’s facing our country right now,” Rollins told “GMA” on Thursday.
Some of these choices, however, could be costly for many Americans as they face rising grocery prices, including ground beef, which has risen 16% over the past year, according to officials.
“This is just about a general awareness amongst America on what is healthy and what we should be eating,” Rollins continued.
The guidelines also say Americans should “limit alcoholic beverages.” Previously, the dietary guidelines said adults ages 21 and over should stick to two drinks or fewer per day for men and one drink or fewer per day for women.
“The recommendation is just minimize, minimize, minimize, minimize,” Rollins said. “We’re not saying everyone should stop eating sugar and stop drinking anything. That’s not it. It’s just working to trend away from where we’ve gotten to in the last couple decades.”
The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are updated every five years, come as Kennedy has made nutrition policy a cornerstone of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
“Let’s focus on these good, nutritious foods,” Rollins said. “This will change everything.”
Jeffrey Epstein is seen in this image released by the Department of Justice in Washington, December 19, 2025. (U.S. Justice Department)
(WASHINGTON) — Attorneys for hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein’s survivors told ABC News that names and identifying information of numerous victims appear unredacted in the latest disclosure of files on the late sex offender by the Department of Justice, including several women whose names have never before been publicly associated with the case.
Three million pages from the DOJ’s files on Epstein were being released to the public Friday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a press briefing this morning.
Several categories of pages were withheld from the release due to their sensitive nature, Blanche said. These items include personally identifying information of the victims, victims’ medical files, images depicting child pornography, information related to ongoing cases and any images depicting death or abuse.
“We are getting constant calls for victims because their names, despite them never coming forward, being completely unknown to the public, have all just been released for public consumption,” said Brad Edwards, an attorney for some of the victims, in a telephone interview with ABC News. “It’s literally 1000s of mistakes.”
ABC News has independently confirmed numerous instances of victims’ names appearing in documents included in the latest release.
Shortly after the new material appeared on Friday morning, Edwards said he and his law partner, Brittany Henderson, began receiving calls from clients.
“We contacted DOJ immediately, who has asked us to flag each of the documents where victim names appear unredacted and they will pull them down,” Edwards said. “it’s an impossible job. The easy job would be for the DOJ to type in all the victims’ names, hit redact like they promised to do, then release them. “
“They’re trying to fix it, but I said ‘the solution is take the thing down for now. There’s no other remedy to this. It just runs the risk of causing so much more harm unless they take it down first, then fix the problem and put it back up.'”
ABC News had reached out to the DOJ for comment.
The department has reviewed and redacted “several millions of pages” of materials related to the investigations of Epstein and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, and expects to publish “substantially all” of the records “in the near term,” according to a letter filed Tuesday by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year sentence prison.
Blanche said Friday’s release, which follows the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, will include 2,000 videos and 180,000 images related to the Epstein case.
Blanche said in total there were 6 million documents, but due to the presence of child sexual abuse material and victim rights obligations, not all documents are being made public in the current release.
Epstein died by suicide in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges that he “sexually exploited and abused dozens of minor girls at his homes in Manhattan, New York, and Palm Beach, Florida, among other locations,” using cash payments to recruit a “vast network of underage victims,” some of whom were as young as 14 years old.
The measles virus. (BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
(SOUTH CAROLINA) — The record-breaking measles outbreak in South Carolina continues to grow with 89 new cases reported since the last update on Friday.
This brings the total number of cases in the outbreak to 789.
At least 557 people are currently in quarantine across the state, including students from various schools.
This is South Carolina’s largest measles outbreak in over 30 years, a spokesperson for the state’s health department told ABC News.
There have been at least 416 confirmed measles cases across the United States so far this year, the latest CDC data shows.
CDC data shows that the majority of cases occur among people under 19. About 2% of all measles cases in the U.S. have been hospitalized.
Dr. Kristin Moffitt, an infectious diseases physician at Boston Children’s Hospital, previously told ABC News she is “very alarmed” by the increase in measles cases in the U.S. over the last year or two.
“I’m very worried about our current year already,” she told ABC News. “Exceeding 2,000 cases in the last year is indeed alarming [and] … I am worried that even our current year is off to a very concerning start.”
Moffitt said that declining vaccination rates across the U.S. are behind the recent increase in measles cases.
“This is entirely due to declining vaccination rates,” she said. “It’s very clear based on where these outbreaks are occurring.”
The CDC currently recommends that people receive two doses of the MMR vaccine, the first at ages 12 to 15 months and the second between 4 and 6 years old. One dose is 93% effective, and two doses are 97% effective against measles, the CDC says.
However, federal data shows vaccination rates have been lagging in recent years. During the 2024-2025 school year, 92.5% of kindergartners received the MMR vaccine, according to data. This is lower than the 92.7% seen in the previous school year and the 95.2% seen in the 2019-2020 school year, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
The national trends mirror those see in counties across the U.S. A recent map from ABC News — a collaboration with researchers from Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard School of Medicine and Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai that allows people to type in their ZIP code and see the measles risk in their area — found a wide range of risks in areas across the U.S.
Some counties and ZIP codes fell into the “lowest risk,” with 85% or more of children under 5 years old receiving one or more measles vaccine dose to “very high risk,” with fewer than 60% of children under age 5 receiving one or more measles vaccine doses.
ABC News’ Mary Kekatos and Dr. Richard Zhang contributed to this report.
(NORFOLK, Va.) — The mother of Angelina “Angie” Resendiz, the 21-year-old Navy sailor whose body was found near her Norfolk, Virginia, base on June 9, days after she was reported missing, is pushing the Navy for accountability as the suspect charged in her daughter’s murder awaits his trial.
Esmeralda Castle spoke with “ABC News Live Prime” from her home in Brownsville, Texas, where she reflected on her grief and healing journey and claimed that the Navy mishandled her daughter’s disappearance and the investigation into her death.
“There is an injustice happening in the way that service members are treated and the way the family is treated,” Castle told ABC News on Thursday, alleging that a culture steeped in silence has prevented her from getting answers about her daughter’s case.
Asked about those allegations, the Navy declined ABC News’ requests for comment.
“I’ve been thinking about Angie and her service. What she represented was something good,” Castle said, reflecting on her fight for justice. “She represented service at its highest. She’s giving herself and all that she is, all her talents and strengths and abilities, her mind, her youth, to the military, to this branch — for us. And that’s an honorable thing.”
Angie’s disappearance
Resendiz, who was from Mexia — a city in central Texas that is located about 30 miles outside of Waco — was a culinary specialist stationed at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.
“She comes from a family of service members. My brother and sister, they’re in the Army. Her father was a Marine,” Castle said, adding that her daughter loved to cook and wanted to be a chef, so joining the Navy in a culinary role was a dream.
“It was ‘a calling’ is what she said, like recruiters were at the high school and they talked to her and she felt it,” she added.
About a year and a half after her daughter joined the Navy, Castle told ABC News that on May 29 her daughter’s friends reached out to her to express concern that they could not reach or locate her. According to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Resendiz was last seen at her barracks in Millner Hall at the Naval Station in Norfolk at around 10 a.m. local time on May 29.
Castle said that she immediately called the Navy and reported her daughter missing, but was told that her daughter was located shortly after.
“He’s like oh yeah. … we found her you know, she’s OK, we found her in another sailor’s room. Everything’s OK,” Castle said. “I believed him.”
When Resendiz didn’t show up to work the next day and her family and friends still couldn’t get a hold of her, Castle said she was worried and reached out to the Navy again. Resendiz’s friends reported her missing to police and, on June 3, a missing person’s alert was issued by the Virginia State Police. On June 6 — more than a week after she was last seen — NCIS released a statement announcing that they were investigating Resendiz’s disappearance.
“It felt like, like a punch, like a punch in your gut,” Castle said. “Like, it takes your air away. … It just brings you to your knees.”
Castle noted that after her daughter’s body was found, she “got a few messages apologizing for the silence.”
ABC News reached out to the Navy multiple times, but they declined requests for comment.
“Given the ongoing legal proceedings, we are unable to provide amplifying comments on your inquiries,” a spokesperson for NCIS told ABC News.
An individual familiar with the NCIS investigation told ABC News that they “immediately commenced a variety of investigative steps,” including interviewing family, friends and command members, after receiving a notification from the Norfolk Police Department regarding Resendiz’s disappearance on May 31.
“These actions increased in number over the next 10 calendar days and resulted in the recovery of Seaman Resendiz’s remains,” the individual added.
The suspect
Seaman Jeremiah T. Copeland, a culinary specialist in the Navy, was initially held in pre-trial confinement following Resendiz’s death.
On Aug. 22, he was charged with “premeditated murder,” as well as a slew of sexual assault charges related to several alleged survivors, according to charging documents obtained by ABC News. The charges stem from incidents that allegedly took place between July 2024 through June 2025.
Charging documents show that Copeland is also facing charges that stem from alleged actions during the investigation into Resendiz’s death. Copeland is accused of concealing a dead body on June 2, obstructing justice by hiding his cell phone on June 4, as well as making false statements to NCIS investigators on June 1 and June 3.
Copeland appeared in a Naval court in Norfolk on Wednesday for a preliminary hearing. It is unclear if he has entered a plea. ABC News reached out to Copeland’s attorney but requests for comment were not returned.
His trial is scheduled to begin next June.
The names of additional alleged victims, as well as Resendiz’s name, were redacted from the charging documents that the Navy shared with ABC News, but Castle confirmed to ABC News in September that the murder charge Copeland is facing is related to her daughter’s death.
“Heartbreak,” Castle said when asked what she is going through after her daughter’s death. “They call it grief, it’s called a process. Different emotions — overwhelming anger, sadness.”
It is unclear when the investigation into Copeland’s actions was launched. ABC News reached out to NCIS and the Navy to inquire about the timeline and ask whether the Navy was aware of other potential victims ahead of Resendiz’s, but requests for comment were denied.
“Given the ongoing legal proceedings, we are unable to provide amplifying comments on your inquiries,” a spokesperson for NCIS told ABC News.
‘I have to help my kid’
After her daughter’s death, Castle told ABC News that she is turning her pain into purpose by fighting for answers and calling for reform for all military members.
“I have to help my kid,” she said.
Castle announced on Oct. 14 that she is seeking the Democratic nomination for the District 37 seat in the Texas state House of Representatives where she hopes to push for reforms and safeguards to keep women in the military safe.
“This campaign isn’t about politics; it’s about people — about compassion, community, resilience, and hope,” Castle said as she announced her run to ABC News’ affiliate station.
When asked about why she chose to run, Castle echoed her daughter’s sentiment in joining the Navy.
“It feels like a calling,” she told ABC News.
Castle expressed her hope that her daughter’s case will be a “catalyst” for change — and that she will keep fighting at all costs.
She hopes to testify before a congressional committee in Washington, D.C., she said, to push for building protections for all service members and ensuring that the military is held accountable.
“I just remember [Angie] in the best light possible — not a victim,” she said. “She’s a victim, but I want people to remember her as someone who loved her life and lived her life and wasn’t afraid to do whatever she wanted.”
