F*ck the Food Pyramid, Meet The RING Diet model by The Sioux Chef.

The USDA’s new upside down food pyramid.

Need I say more? My first emotional response was, “this is sooo lazy and should really have NASCAR style sponsorship logos to show who is spending money to control what you eat”. If you aren’t familiar with this work, let’s talk about it.

On January 7, 2026, the USDA and HHS stood at a podium and flipped the food pyramid upside down. Here in Minneapolis that happened to be the exact same day our brave community member Renee Good was murdered in cold blood by ICE agent Jonathan Ross who still remains at large. It took me some time to comprehend, let alone process the ridiculousness of the revamped federal food guide, while simultaneously navigating a team through the authoritarian debacle of Operation Metro Surge. Still I woke up one morning in March with a vision, and wrote out what I thought a real nutritional guide should look like.

And so I’m finally introducing my response, The RING Diet. (RING = Regional Indigenous Nutritional Guide)

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Brooke Rollins called their food guide a “historic reset.” There are millions of people in the USA and even within the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement who are genuinely hungry for something better than the industrial garbage we’ve been sold our whole lives. I’ve built an entire career on pushing back on this colonial and capitalistic based food system.

But to me, the new diet is the same old chart. A single national image, meant to apply to everybody in every place, no matter where they come from, their regions or their ancestry. They turned the pyramid over and shook it, and out fell the same assumptions that have been baked into federal nutrition since the beginning. The notion that there is one right way to eat for Americans, that it can be printed on one poster, and that Washington and all of its corporate sponsors get to decide what it looks like. I could give Kennedy the benefit of the doubt that he really wants to change the system, but actions speak louder than words, and you still end up with the same homogenous diet built for eurocentric palates.

Let’s be clear about what the federal guidelines have always been, no matter which party has been in charge– a food guide with good intentions for health especially kids, but tainted by corporate dollars and a lack of love for food itself. Food should be healing and something to connect to, and a healthy diet should be built on understanding the individual, their tastes, their ancestry, their regions, dietary preferences, and health concerns.

The USDA Dietary Guidelines are not written in a vacuum, and they are not designed in a scientific lab. They are written inside the same building that exists to move American commodity crops. Corporate Agribusiness spent a record $178 million on federal lobbying in 2023 (roughly $523 million from 2019 through 2023). There are 22 USDA-overseen programs pulling in around $885 million a year to sell you commodities through campaigns you can probably still hear in your head. “Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” Independent research found that 95% of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee had ties to the corporate food or pharmaceutical industry.

This doesn’t mean a particular executive personally dictated the guidelines. It means the whole thing flows from a pool of corporate money. When the people advising you on what to eat are paid, one way or another, by the people selling it, you don’t get nutrition. You get marketing with a federal seal of approval on it.

And a glaring part that never changes, no matter who’s at a RED or BLUE podium in America. The whole American Food System is dated. It’s still pushing an immense lack of diversity and comes off as heavily Eurocentric which only covers part of the national population. The commodity crops it’s built around, the dairy it can’t stop pushing, the idea that “protein” means a feedlot cow– all of this a colonial diet dressed up as national guidance for everyone. It has never once included the massive diversity of Indigenous foods and this new upside-down version is no better.

I’m not blaming European foods by any means, I love the foods of Europe and the rest of the world, but having a government food system crafted by corporate dollars is detrimental to all of us. You can read the results in our bodies. Just go to any mall, concert, state fair, or convention and we can see for ourselves the state of our health trends through obesity. Some groups are worse off than others, but it still affects every group.

Native communities carry some of the highest rates of diabetes, heart disease, and diet-related illness in the world. That’s not bad luck or poor diet choices. It’s a part of perpetual oppression, lack of resources, and means to get access to real nutrition. For instance, personally grew up on the over-processed foods handed out to our communities through the FDPIR and Commodity Foods programs on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

I don’t want you to take my word for it. I want you to look at facts. Because when people picture the folks writing the nation’s nutrition advice, they might picture doctors and scientists in white coats. The reality is that it looks a lot more like a boardroom.

Follow the food-lobby money. These are 2024 federal lobbying totals– all of which are legal, disclosed, and public, showing what each player spent in a single year to shape food and nutrition policy:

• Dairy — roughly $7–8 million across the industry. The sector that keeps cow’s milk enshrined as a required food group in federal guidance, even though most of the world’s adults including many Indigenous, African, Asian, and Latino populations can’t fully digest it.

• Coca-Cola — $4.93 million. The world’s largest seller of sugar-sweetened beverages, lobbying at the table where “added sugars” limits are debated and decided.

• PepsiCo — $3.92 million. Soda, chips, and a full aisle of ultra-processed products.

• Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) — $3.65 million. One of the grain giants and a major refiner behind high-fructose corn syrup.

• McDonald’s — $2.95 million. The single largest fast-food spender; the National Restaurant Association lobbies for the sector on top of that.

• Mars — $2.0 million. Candy, at the sugar table.

• Tyson Foods — $1.67 million. The meat-processing giant.

• American Beverage Association — $1.53 million. The soda trade group that fights soda taxes and beverage warning labels on behalf of its members.

• Cargill — $1.4 million. The other privately held grain-and-commodity giant.

• National Cattlemen’s Beef Association — $0.38 million in direct federal lobbying

• Other players laying cash on the table: the American Sugar Alliance (cane and beet sugar), the Corn Refiners Association (the high-fructose-corn-syrup makers), and the Sugar Association all lobby on sweetener and labeling policy.

For scale: the entire food-and-beverage industry reported about $29.6 million in federal lobbying in 2024.

This highlights the climate those guidelines are written within– a waterfall of corporate money funding the research, the trade groups, and the experts, all with the same message: EAT MORE OF WHAT WE SELL. The commodities that can afford the biggest lobby are the commodities that end up as the foundation of our NATIONAL healthy diet.

Consider instead that the RING Diet considers all communities, all people of every color, their current homelands, the plant and animal diversity, and weaves FOOD AS MEDICINE into its fabric. This will offer all of the education and knowledge to eat healthy anywhere globally based on region, ancestry, or a mixture of both.

The RING Diet™ and The RING Diet logo are trademarks of The Sioux Chef. ©2026 The Sioux Chef. All rights reserved.

This last November we proudly released our latest cookbook Turtle Island. That book was a direct challenge to our colonial food system, and created a new map. Recipe by recipe, region by region, showing that the foods of this continent were never one thing. The Great Plains tribes ate differently than the Pacific Northwest coastal tribes, which ate differently than the Southwestern tribes, because the land, water, and sky in each place offered different gifts for the communities that called those spaces home. Every recipe was both a history lesson and glimpse of the future. Every ingredient was evidence that we are still here as Indigenous peoples and a glimpse of what our foods could look like if we included the ancestral knowledge of our First Nations.

I always saw the bigger picture of how much work we really need to do on our food systems not just here in the US, but globally. The work we did with Turtle Island showcasing and celebrating culinary and cultural diversity could be done anywhere globally. There are so many amazing lessons we can collectively learn from Indigenous cultures worldwide who could offer so many healthy perspectives to our future civilizations, looking beyond the capitalistic greed and globalization that has been normalized in all of our lives. Our current food systems are still a dated and direct result of settler colonialism.

The RING Diet is a living guide, and one you could actually use. You can use it to learn about your own region, its seasons, its plants and animals and the precious nutrients they offer and how they work within our bodily systems. A tool to teach your kids, to plan a week of eating, to reconnect with the specific foods of the specific place you stand on.

While diets like The Blue Zones by Dan Buettner offer insights into healthy communities, cultures and traditions where people can live to be 100+, The Ring Diet shows how this can be done anywhere in the world, with diets customized for your own ancestry and region if you choose.

Forget a pyramid scheme , The RING Diet is a fucking Medicine Wheel.

Placed in various regions to showcase the truly massive diversity of our food systems, we will be building rings everywhere for everybody, starting with our current home here in the USA, as well as its territories including Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Guam and the Mariana Islands. Each region has its own history and seasons with the broad diversity of plants and animals within them.

At the center of the medicine wheel is water, the source of all life, and the first and most important component of what we consume daily. Everything else radiates out from it, because everything else depends on it. “Water is Life: (Mní Wičoni in Lakota) was the anthem of the Standing Rock water protector’s movement and our connection to everything living.

Radiating out from the water are the plants and animals that make up our past, present and future food systems. Both plants and animals generate the necessary nutrition we consume daily, including protein, carbs, healthy fats, sweeteners, and the various vitamins and minerals necessary for a healthy diet. And what really makes this guide different is the inclusion of how plants and animals also provide natural medicinals. The natural world is our pharmacy, and understanding this helps us better understand our own bodies and how bodies work.

The ring after the inner ring of water moves into Ancestral Knowledge. This ring will open up information on all the original Indigenous sources that have nourished countless communities since time immemorial, and it will vary widely based on region and even micro-region. The wild-harvested plants, the heirloom seeds, the wild-caught animals and insect proteins, the natural fats and mineral sources. All of the things that sustained generations of humans before colonization.

The next ring is Modern Availability and Knowledge. This includes the domesticated crops, the farmed and raised animals, and all of the contemporary and global sources that a community draws from today. But we won’t be promoting GMO and corporate farming products. Instead, this is where heirloom seeds and invasive plants live, both life-giving, and a part of our modern environments.

From the center outward, the wheel tells a complete story. Begin with water. Honor what is ancestral and wild. Understand that the modern table extends from that foundation — it doesn’t replace it.

A commodity diet leans on a few crops and a narrow band of protein. The RING invites hundreds of regionally appropriate plants, an entire spectrum of proteins including the insects and wild game that Western frameworks dismissed as curiosities; plus fats, sweeteners, and minerals drawn from the land right around you.

The RING Diet™ and The RING Diet logo are trademarks of The Sioux Chef. ©2026 The Sioux Chef. All rights reserved.

The quadrant I’m really excited about in the medicine wheel is the inclusion of medicinal knowledge, because it’s where the RING Diet refuses the boundaries the Western diet built and keeps us in.

Countless communities worldwide have for millennia used natural plants, animals and insects to support a multitude of healthy benefits for our bodies. Eating for health to support our digestive systems, our immunity, our blood, mind and mental health, bones and joints, our skin and eyes. Food is the first and most powerful medicine. The one thing that the Western diet never embraced was acknowledging we really are what we eat, and our current Westernized system is that medicine is found at a pharmacy and food happens at a drive-through– and never the two shall meet.

The RING is built on the principle of place and is infinitely scalable. The same wheel that maps the foodshed of the Northern Plains can map the Sonoran Desert. The Pacific Northwest coast. The Andes. The Sahel. The Australian bush. Each region fills the rings with its own ancestral and modern foods, its own medicines, its own word for the water at the center.

What begins as a guide for one homeland becomes a shared method that any community anywhere can adapt to its own land. The Regional Indigenous Nutritional Guide becomes the International Regional Indigenous Nutritional Guide. One framework. Infinite numbers of localized expressions.

Even though I centered this model with Indigenous first, this is not just for Native people. The invitation is universal. If your ancestors came from Ireland, Sicily, Senegal or Oaxaca or the Mekong Delta, you have ancestral foods. You have natural medicines your great-great-great-grandmother knew about, and a modern table that grew out of them. The RING has a place for all of it, and our current federal chart could never be so inclusive because its comfort zone is creating a single national homogenous diet. The RING Diet model embraces our global diversity for all to learn and enjoy.

To make this work at a national, then global scale, we’re not just printing a chart. We’re building a digital platform for all to access. (COMING VERY SOON: www.THERINGDIET.com) and then soon after, a companion mobile app.

Here’s what it does:

You select your regional RING, then research all the plants, animals, fats, sweeteners, minerals, and medicines connected to where you live. You can learn how to source them, prepare them with recipes, learn tips on harvesting them safely, and how to preserve and store them. You can learn the nutritional and medicinal role each one plays. It’s built to serve home cooks, educators, tribal health programs, food-sovereignty initiatives, chefs, and clinicians alike, with anybody working to reconnect people to the foods of their place. It also creates a weekly challenge to consume more plant and animal diversity but is also respectful of dietary choices like choosing to be an omnivore, vegan, vegaquarian, etc. It also challenges us to source more local food to keep food dollars in our regions and eat more seasonally. Reconnecting us to nature.

This is the difference between a homogeneous federal guideline, and an opportunity to create a living relationship with the nutrients around us.

Creating an ever-evolving nutritional guide that has the ability to celebrate the wisdom of a Lakota grandmother; orto help a second-generation Vietnamese kid in Minneapolis reconnect to her ancestors; or to help a potato farmer in Idaho think more broadly about food. This tool gives them all the resources they need to understand regional, historical, and contemporary diets starting with the abundance of the land under their own feet.

The RING Diet will be led by our team at NATIFS (North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems) the nonprofit I founded to carry this work further than any one restaurant or cookbook ever could. And we’re not doing it alone, or on instinct. From the very start, we’re grounding the RING Diet model in real research and public-health expertise.

I’m honored to share that the project is funded with initial support and advice from Dr. Valarie Blue Bird Jernigan of the Center for Indigenous Health Research and Policy at Oklahoma State University, a leader in Indigenous health and food-sovereignty research, and Tara Maudrie, PhD, MSPH, Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and a former NATIFS board member, whose work lives right at the intersection of Indigenous foodways and community health.

Their guidance means the RING grows with both ancestral knowledge and rigorous science behind it, which is exactly the pairing this guide was built to hold at once. We are finding many more interested parties who wish to support this work, and I can envision a world where we have teams of people building RINGS for many regions globally and simultaneously.

This all started because our federal government flipped a tired food pyramid earlier this year and called it a revolution.

A revolution starts with connecting with people with hope for a better future, and food is our universal language.

It’s so important to do what colonial structures have never done– center Indigeneity over colonialism. We have a vast web of ancestral knowledge to teach us to be healthier and more connected humans globally. And now we’re building the tool to connect to and share it for a healthier future, a future that sees past colonial lines, leans into humanity first, and begins with a connection to the original foods of our places.

If you have suggestions for resources or connections, please come help us build The RING Diet for our collective future.

Wóphila tȟáŋka and Skoden.

— Sean Sherman

Learn more and follow the build at TheRingDiet.com. The RING Diet™ and The RING Diet logo are trademarks of The Sioux Chef. ©2026 The Sioux Chef. All rights reserved, The RING Diet is licensed to NATIFS.org, 501c3.

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