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 was 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 and 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.
