Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent much of his public life warning Americans about environmental damage hidden in plain sight. He’s sued polluters. He’s denounced the ways powerful companies use their influence to shape laws, regulations and institutions. And he’s spoken passionately about ecological collapse — including at the hands of the meat industry.
So when the Trump administration released its new dietary guidelines for Americans on Wednesday, with an emphasis on animal-based proteins and fats and a food pyramid featuring images of a roasted bird, juicy steak, ground beef and cheese at the top, it felt a bit like a magic trick: Now you see an environmental crisis, now you don’t.
Food pyramids may seem quaint, but they shape the content of a great many meals — school lunches, military rations, federal nutrition programs, hospital menus. Mr. Kennedy has endorsed a framework that recommends Americans eat up to twice as much protein as previously advised, despite little evidence that most Americans are short on protein. Whereas earlier guidelines recommended limiting red meat, the new advice explicitly includes it, ignoring the input from an official committee of scientific advisers that called for prioritizing plant-based proteins over animal-based. In extolling meat and dairy, Mr. Kennedy’s not just offering lifestyle advice, but signaling approval for some of the most climate-intensive industries on earth.
Eating less meat remains one of the fastest, easiest and cheapest ways to cut emissions. It requires no new technology, no congressional approval, no subsidies or tax credits. And right now, it’s especially important as many other climate solutions become more expensive, politically fraught or simply unavailable amid a federal retreat from environmental regulation and support for clean energy.
Some people might prefer to divorce environmental considerations from dietary advice, but amid accelerating climate change, it’s not possible to separate our own health from that of the planet. Indeed, other countries are already incorporating sustainability factors into their dietary guidelines. By contrast, our nation’s new food pyramid will mean environmental and health burdens for Americans, even as it benefits the very industries Mr. Kennedy once warned us about.
And the environmental arithmetic isn’t subtle. According to the World Resources Institute, poultry converts only around 11 percent of the energy contained in livestock feed into human food. Beef converts only 1 percent of feed energy into human food.
This inefficient system contributes to deforestation, devours water in an increasingly thirsty world, gobbles up vast tracts of land and drives tremendous greenhouse gas emissions — largely through animals’ digestion and manure, as well as energy-intensive feed production. Chicken wings may be cheap and look modest on a plate, but their environmental shadow stretches across continents.
If Americans increased their protein intake by just 25 percent in response to the administration’s new recommendations, maintaining their current ratio of animal to plant protein, it would require about 100 million acres of additional agricultural land each year — an area larger than Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania combined — and increase annual emissions by hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to the World Resources Institute.
Mr. Kennedy himself once articulated the meat industry’s heavy toll with striking clarity. In a blurb for a 2004 book, “The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America’s Food Supply,” he wrote, “The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of U.S. citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.” In this country, 99 percent of livestock are raised on factory farms.
The new guidance didn’t emerge from the longstanding Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee made up of scientists. Instead, the Trump administration handpicked a new review panel — the existence of which wasn’t even reported until Wednesday — to “correct deficiencies,” it said, in earlier recommendations. The result was that the original committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based foods were rejected, while meat and dairy were elevated.
Beyond the environmental damage that could arise from more Americans potentially increasing their meat consumption, which is already well above the global average, the guidance also represents a dangerous divergence from mainstream public-health consensus. For decades, leading medical and nutrition organizations, including the American Heart Association, have noted that plant-forward diets — rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains — are associated with lower risks of heart disease, type 2 diabetes and premature death. Meat-heavy diets, by contrast, have repeatedly been linked to worse outcomes.
“The new food pyramid is simply bananas,” Michael Greger, a physician and founder of NutritionFacts.org, told me. “If nutrition guidelines were medicine, this would be malpractice.”
As Dr. Mehmet Oz, a top Trump health care official who was part of Wednesday’s news conference announcing the new guidelines, said when he was the host of “The “Dr. Oz Show,” plant-based diets can be “easily and effectively” adopted and “have a major impact on how you feel and your overall health.”
However illogical the administration’s recommendations may be, they become a bit less baffling when one considers the members of the new review panel: According to disclosures buried in a 70-page U.S. Department of Agriculture report published alongside the guidelines, two-thirds of the reviewers had financial or other ties to the beef, dairy or pork industries — including research funding, consulting fees or leadership roles with industry groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Dairy Council and the National Pork Board. The panel even included an adviser to the company that owns the meat-focused Atkins diet brand. All of which feels hypocritical given Mr. Kennedy’s claims that prior guidelines were driven by industry interests.
Ultimately, the pyramid isn’t about policing individual diets. People will continue turning to vegan and vegetarian diets or reducing their meat and dairy anyway, while others do neither. But that doesn’t mean that our leaders should endorse eating patterns that worsen climate change and threaten people’s health.
Mr. Kennedy’s earlier warnings about meat were cleareyed. His current enthusiasm for it is not. You can’t fight climate collapse or heart disease with sleight of hand, and a food pyramid that hides the cost of meat doesn’t make the problem disappear; it just makes the reckoning harder.
Matt Prescott is the author of the cookbook “Food Is the Solution: What to Eat to Save the World.”
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