The Australian Dietary Guidelines (ADGs) are a framework for healthy eating among the general population. They provide population-level guidance on a healthy diet.

What do teens (12-13 years) need to eat each day? Our illustrated dietary guidelines make it easy to serve up the right amount from the five food groups.

What do children 4-8 years need to eat each day? Our illustrated dietary guidelines make it easy to serve up the right amount from the five food groups.

Learn more about the layers of Healthy Eating Pyramid.

Learn what dairy is, why it is important for health, and how you can meet the dairy recommendations through the foods you eat.

The Australian Dietary Guidelines (the Guidelines) provide up-to-date advice about the amount and kinds of foods that we need to eat for health and wellbeing. The recommendations are based on scientific evidence, developed after looking at good quality research.

The recommendations in the Australian dietary guidelines and Australian guide to healthy eating help us choose foods for good health and to reduce our risk of chronic health problems.

The Australian dietary guidelines group foods together that share similar nutrients, this creates the five food groups. For example milk, cheese and yogurt are all good sources of calcium, riboflavin, protein and B12. Within each food group the Australian dietary guidelines identifies the serve size of different foods that have roughly the same amount of key nutrients and kilojoules but that also reflect the amount of food commonly eaten in Australia, for example one piece of whole fruit or one slice of bread.

Guideline 2 recommends we enjoy a wide variety of nutritious foods from the five groups every day The key to eating well is to enjoy a variety of nutritious foods from each of the five food groups. These five food groups make up the Australian guide to healthy eating (see right).

The Australian dietary guidelines inform people of different ages, life stages and gender, the minimum number of serves from each food group they need to eat each day, to make sure they get the full amount of nutrients their body needs.