We live in a heyday of meat. Americans ate $45 billion of beef in 2025, up more than 10 percent from the previous year, according to Beef Research, an industry marketing group. Ground beef is driving sales — McDonald’s recently released its new half-pounder, the Big Arch — but steak sales remain robust. In a February interview at CattleCon, the beef industry conference, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed that his favorite beef cut was strip steak. He eats beef every day — “usually twice a day,” he said, to applause.
Americans have always been among the world’s most enthusiastic carnivores, but this boom is about more than mere preference or taste. Once maligned as the culprit in a nationwide epidemic of cardiovascular disease, beef has come to be regarded in some circles as a cure-all. Today’s customers say that when they choose beef they are thinking about its health benefits: They appreciate its vitamins and minerals as well as its role in maintaining energy and building muscles and strength, Beef Research says.
Kennedy, whose purview is American public health, has said that his own diet of “meat and ferments” — steak, sauerkraut, yogurt — has enhanced his mental clarity and improved his word recall. His policies reflect his personal choices. Meat is a crucial weapon in the American battle against chronic disease, Kennedy has said. When, in January, he unveiled the U.S.D.A.’s new food pyramid, it emphasized meat protein, showing a fatty steak near the top. In March, at the Annual Meat Conference, Kennedy said that “a large number of the cabinet” were on the meat and ferments diet, including Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and Vice President JD Vance.
Online, influencers with and without scientific or medical expertise make proven and unproven claims about the health benefits of meat-forward diets. They promise improvements in diabetes, mental illness, testosterone levels and autoimmune disease. Joe Rogan, the podcaster and bowhunting and elk-meat enthusiast, has participated in the annual World Carnivore Month. Eating just meat improved his vitiligo, a chronic condition of skin depigmentation, he has said.
Many of these claims resemble superstition more than science. Paul Saladino, a psychiatrist with nearly 3 million followers on Instagram and a line of supplements with such labels as “Beef Organs” and “Whole Package,” proclaims that a person who eats mostly meat and cooks with beef tallow requires neither store-bought sunscreen nor toothpaste. He prefers to build up sun resistance over time, he has said, using his own recipe of zinc and tallow for skin protection if necessary. He calls this base tan his “solar callus.”
Certain pro-meat influencers even treat plants as hostile combatants. “Plants are trying to kill you,” the influencer Anthony Chaffee says, repeatedly. Chaffee, who received his bachelor’s degree in medicine, surgery and obstetrics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, has compared the long-term health risks of eating salad to smoking cigarettes. Kennedy hasn’t gone that far, though at the Annual Meat Conference, he denigrated vegetables. “Most plants do not have the complete chain of amino acids that we need,” he said.
Among MAHA adherents, a love of meat is presented as a revolutionary rebuttal of established nutrition science that has, for decades, upheld plant-forward eating, such as the Mediterranean diet, as the optimal route to good health. In public, Kennedy presents himself as the rebellion’s leader, his tanned abs attained through eating meat and moving metal. In a January interview he conceded he had partaken of numerous health fads. But “one thing I’ve gotten enormous benefit from is going to the carnivore diet,” he said. “I lost 20 pounds in 20 days and in 30 days 40 percent of my visceral fat.”
Kennedy has dismissed old nutrition science as “dogma.” When he does this he is more than just lumping all past discoveries together, discrediting them in one rhetorical sweep. He is using meat to divide Americans further; he is putting blood in the water.
In American politics, meat holds a meaning far beyond a mere grocery list item or a menu choice. It is a culture-war gauntlet, as it has been for millenniums, even before Paul the early Christian evangelist suggested that the Jewish dietary laws might not apply to the followers of Jesus. Thus meat — which types of animal flesh, slaughtered and prepared in what ways — divided some of the earliest Christians from Jews.
Today, the meat debate centers on this question: Does it promote optimal health or impede it? If “food is medicine,” as Kennedy repeatedly says, and individuals can control health outcomes according to what they ingest, then the rewards of good health accrue to those who make “right” choices. If, in the MAHA view, meat is healthy and healthy is “good,” then meat eaters can regard their dietary choices as virtues. (The same can be said of all doctrinaire eaters, including vegetarians, vegans and “raw” diet adherents.) Kennedy has called his role in the Trump Administration “providential.” .
Jordan Rosenblum, a religious studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies dietary laws, and the ways food can become a proxy for values and social identity. Individual, family or cultural preferences or habits around food can be cast as the boundaries between “us” and “them,” as he puts it. “If you are what you eat,” then “I eat this way, that makes me better. You eat that, you are bad.”
‘Flesh Foods’ and ‘Animal Propensities’
MAHA is not the first American movement to regard meat as exceptional. “Americans have always considered it their birthright to have access to sources of affordable, abundant meat,” said Hannah Cutting-Jones, a food historian at the University of Oregon.
Meat eating has long been associated with an Old West-style masculinity and patriotism, a symbol political candidates have ignored at their peril. On the campaign trail, President George H.W. Bush ordered a T-bone steak, charred on the outside and rare in the middle, and he famously loathed broccoli. By banning broccoli from the menu on Air Force One, Bush turned his childlike distaste into strength. President Trump likes his steak well done and considers any garnish or green accouterment to be “garbage,” as he has said.
Political opponents ridiculed President Barack Obama for his appreciation of vegetables, calling him an “arugula eater,” and casting him as a snob and lightweight. In addition to greens, he liked the “hard-to-find organic brew Black Forest Berry Honest Tea,” as John McCain’s campaign manager pointed out in a 2008 memo.
The debate over meat as a health food can be traced back at least to the mid-to-late 1800s, a period, like the current one, of extreme social, economic and technological upheaval.
During the Civil War, physicians prescribed minced beef for strength, and patients who could not afford whole cuts of meat — animal flesh was expensive and difficult to store without refrigeration — might instead purchase health-giving elixirs derived from meat. In print ads from the 1870s, Valentine’s Meat Juice was promoted as a tonic for “sustaining and strengthening the weakened vital forces.” In these ads, physicians testify that they prescribe Valentine’s for pneumonia and flu.
Vegetarianism began to flourish at this same time, its proponents positioning themselves, and their values, in opposition to those who made meat eating a show of social dominance. Satirical cartoons from the era showed rich men at groaning tables laden with meats. One, from Cincinnati magazine in 1878, depicted a portly pater in a top hat presiding over an excessive Thanksgiving dinner. Dishes are labeled “Pied Bull,” “Blue Boar,” “Swan With Two Necks” and “The Lamb.”
Like today’s environmentalists and animal rights defenders, social reformers from the temperance, suffrage and abolition movements often aligned themselves with vegetarians. Corn Flakes, invented in the 1890s by William Kellogg, a Seventh-day Adventist and vegetarian, were intended as a healthful alternative to the bacon, ham and sausages so many Americans ate for breakfast — and to quell the violent, sexual urges some reformers believed were stimulated by eating meat.
Kellogg and his brother John Harvey Kellogg, a prominent physician, ran an upscale sanitarium — a health spa — in Battle Creek, Mich. Ella, John’s wife, ran the test kitchen. The Kelloggs encouraged clean-living in their elite guests, prohibiting meat, tobacco and alcohol and scheduling, as part of the treatment, mealtime marches and yogurt enemas. “Flesh foods,” Ella wrote at the time, were overstimulating. They spread disease, clogged up the system, putrefied within the body and developed “animal propensities” in young people. The Kelloggs also created early meat-substitute prototypes: they called these Protose and Nuttose.
Meat as Medicine?
Many of today’s meat evangelists deploy scientific language without the complications of science: proof and doubt. That’s not scientific, it’s scientistic. Because scientistic language sounds smart and unassailable, it can function as religion in a secular culture that values knowledge, said Elizabeth Currid-Halkett, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California who has studied American culture and social aspiration. Scientism appeals to a society that pursues good health via readouts from apps. The obsession around meat, Currid-Halkett adds, is linked to “the rise of longevity experts and reaching your potential.”
How to sort the science from the scientistic, the true health benefits from the ideologically inflected dogma? In 2026, broad claims about meat’s special powers are communicated, by scientists and nonscientists alike, in a language so closely resembling science that anyone might understandably be confounded about what to eat.
With the terminology of high school chemistry teachers, influencers explain how meat works in the body. It is more “bioavailable,” they say, its nutrients more efficiently absorbed in the bloodstream, and its chemical elements — vitamin K, carnitine, creatine, taurine, heme iron and retinol — more strength-giving. Plants, they continue, contain lectins, oxalates and phytates that impede the absorption of nutrients.
These micro-claims are, largely, factual, but also incidental: They do not amount to evidence of the universally transformative properties of a carnivorous diet. They do not show that meat makes an individual “all extra,” as Currid-Halkett put it. That it can cure disease and make athletes from weaklings. That it can extend life.
But even within peer-reviewed science, the evidence on meat is contradictory and perplexing. Meat eating has long been associated with cardiovascular disease, as well as certain cancers, but a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet has also been shown to help with weight reduction and in the treatment of Type 2 diabetes.
Even as he boosts meat, Kennedy is ever mindful of the “catastrophic” health effects of ultraprocessed foods and refined sugars and flours, as he has said. “If you live in this country, you ought to be able to buy a Coca-Cola if you want one or eat a Krispy Kreme doughnut, but we’re going to tell you it’s not good for you.” he said at the Heritage Foundation in February.
The healthfulness of any individual’s meat intake is dependent on a multiplicity of factors, which are difficult to measure or control in a double-blind study. These include whether that person is sick or well; whether she has a predisposition to disease; the meat she eats (quantity, variety and in combination with what other foods); and how much she exercises. It also depends on what she has access to and can afford. For his own health, Kennedy prefers grass-fed meat, which, he said in a 2024 podcast, “tastes completely different” from what’s available at Walmart. A grass-fed strip steak costs northward of $25 per pound, but with beef prices soaring because of high demand and small U.S. cattle herds, even conventional beef steak costs nearly $13 per pound, up more than 17 percent from last year.
If meat is “medicine,” it may be out of reach for many. In February Kennedy said that if a porterhouse was too costly, a consumer might try “cheap cuts” or liver.
More recently, in March, he downplayed affordability. The problem with the American diet is not cost, he said, but that Americans have forgotten how to cook. “We don’t need more money to make sure people can eat well. We just need to buy smarter.”
He went on to position home cooking, with protein (presumably meat), as a remedy for what he called “spiritual malaise”: the loneliness, social fragmentation and suicidality among American youth. “We are engaged in spiritual warfare,” he said, “and the malevolent forces want to drive us apart.” He advised Americans to acquire cutting boards and cutlery.
Lisa Miller is a Times reporter who writes about the personal and cultural struggle to attain good health.
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