The new food pyramid rolled out in US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) places animal-based proteins, including cheese and red meats high in saturated fats, above plant-based proteins, which has raised alarm bells among health and environmental experts.
This rejiggered food pyramid is in line with Kennedy’s previous signals that he will recommend increasing saturated fat in US diets as part of the “Make America healthy again” movement.
Dr Cheryl Anderson, an American Heart Association board member and professor at the University of California San Diego, said she was eager to read the new guidelines because “they came out much later than they were supposed to. Typically, the guidelines are released within six months of the secretaries receiving the dietary guidelines advisory committee’s report,” which should have meant they were released over the summer.
Anderson said she was pleased to see that some things appeared to be in line with the DGA committee’s report, including an emphasis on eating “real food”, decreasing the amount of processed food in the diet, and decreasing added sugars. But she “grew concerned” when she saw the visual of the food pyramid with images of steak and cheese higher, larger and overall much more prominent than images of plant-based proteins like nuts. This visual contradicts the written guidelines on saturated fats.
“I think it will be a challenge to keep saturated fat intake within 10% of overall kilocalories. Now, that, to me, is a confusing message for the American public,” Anderson said.
Chloë Waterman – a senior program manager at Friends of the Earth who focuses on school lunches as well as the connection between diet and the environment – also said that the guidelines are contradictory and lack clarity. She suspects the confusion stems from an attempt to “please all stakeholders” – both public health experts and the Maha movement.
Waterman said the guidelines are unclear because of the contradiction between the text and the visuals and also because “previous iterations of the guidelines were hundreds of pages long, and these guidelines are 10 pages. So, there’s only so much clarity you can fit into 10 pages.”
Increased meat consumption would negatively impact the environment as well, Waterman added.
“Americans already eat more protein than is recommended, and we’re one of the highest meat-consuming countries in the world. That level of meat consumption has a disastrous impact on the planet, because industrial animal agriculture is extremely resource intensive,” Waterman said.
“When we are getting our calories from animal products, we are getting along with that a bunch of deforestation,” to create space to grow animal feed, as well as “emissions from the animals themselves. Beef and lamb especially have really high methane emissions,” Waterman added. Methane emanates from the poop, burps and farts of cows and other animals, and is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide.
If Americans would consume more plant-based foods and proteins and less meat, Waterman said it would accomplish two goals at once.
“We’re fortunate that those things actually align with each other, that if we shift our diets toward more plant-based foods, that’s going to be better for the environment and for health,” she said, noting that the new guidelines move in the opposite direction.
It’s unclear how big an impact the guidelines will have on US adults’ behavior. Waterman said Americans have tended to ignore past iterations of the DGA that encourage more fruit and vegetable consumption, but “this could be different in the sense that people want to eat more meat and dairy”.
Waterman is most concerned about how the guidelines will affect school lunches, as children who consume them don’t have control over whether to follow the guidelines or not. She said that the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) must create rules to bring school lunches in compliance with the DGA. However, that process can take years, and Waterman imagines that it would be difficult to increase the amount of meat in school lunches, which are already “dominated by animal products” without also going above the 10% calories from saturated fat limit.
If the USDA does somehow interpret the guidelines so that school lunches contain even more meat, “we’re going to see a devastating increase in diet-related chronic diseases for children,” like diabetes and metabolic syndrome, Waterman said. Kennedy has said that fighting childhood obesity is a major component of his Maha initiative. But, Waterman continued: “Promoting full-fat dairy and red meat, as depicted in the food pyramid, is going to have the opposite effect on childhood obesity as Kennedy intends.”
