The recommendations of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, a nutrition panel that helps update and revise federal dietary guidelines, were announced last week and are easy to parse: The panel, a collection of 14 health experts with dozens of specialists in support, emphasizes things that just about everyone agrees upon: that we need a diet more oriented toward plants, that we should reduce calorie consumption in general, and that less sugar would be a good thing. Not much new there, or surprising.

But on some levels the report is disappointing: For one thing, it’s 571 pages (not surprisingly, it stumbles over itself). And it focuses on individual nutrients at the expense of sending simpler messages. No one wants to think about “eating” (or, even worse, “consuming”) cholesterol or saturated fat or sodium or “sweeteners.” We want to think about eating food.

This is a long-term problem. For years government agencies have all but ignored the value of real food, of cooking, of well-produced, actually natural — the word must mean something, after all — food as opposed to its components or its hyperprocessed substitutes, and of eating with friends and family in a relaxed manner. (There’s a reason life expectancy in most OECD countries is higher than ours.) Agencies repeatedly ignored evidence that would have led to better advice because Big Food’s muscle prevented statements that would have cut consumption — such as “eat less meat,” or “don’t drink soda.”

The great news is that that’s changing. The report is not a paradigm shift, but it does contain significant improvements. Though it remains to be seen how many of the committee’s recommendations become official, if turned into guidelines they would constitute by far the best version ever. (They’re issued every five years.) So we should hope that the recommendations are eagerly adopted by the panel’s commissioning agencies, Health and Human Services and the Department of Agriculture.