  We present the effective field theory for dark matter interactions with the
visible sector that is valid at scales of O(1 GeV). Starting with an effective
theory describing the interactions of fermionic and scalar dark matter with
quarks, gluons and photons via higher dimension operators that would arise from
dimension-five and dimension-six operators above electroweak scale, we perform
a nonperturbative matching onto a heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory that
describes dark matter interactions with light mesons and nucleons. This is then
used to obtain the coefficients of the nuclear response functions using a
chiral effective theory description of nuclear forces. Our results consistently
keep the leading contributions in chiral counting for each of the initial
Wilson coefficients.
