American dietary guidelines denounce processed food while meat lobbyists claim victory
The administration's 'most significant reset' on diet swaps one form of industry capture for another
The victory laps began before the website had finished loading. Within hours of the new Dietary Guidelines for Americans going live, the National Cattlemen's Beef Association claimed vindication. The Meat Institute applauded. The National Milk Producers Federation celebrated dairy's "rightful place" at the top of the new inverted food pyramid. The National Chicken Council circulated talking points.
These were not observers reacting to unexpected news. They were stakeholders recognising their handiwork.
The seduction of 'real food'
Strip away the politics and the message is genuinely appealing. Eat real food. Avoid ultra-processed products. Skip added sugar. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled the guidelines on 7 January with a slogan that could adorn a farmer's market tote bag: "My message is clear: eat real food."
The appeal runs deeper than aesthetics. More than half of American calories now come from ultra-processed foods. Nearly 90 percent of healthcare spending goes toward chronic diseases linked substantially to diet. The guidelines, for the first time, explicitly name highly processed packaged foods as dangers to avoid. Previous guidance had danced around this elephant for decades. The American Medical Association praised the shift. So did nutrition researchers who had long argued for exactly this.
Here is where analysis typically stops. Ultra-processed bad, real food good, progress made. But applause for what the guidelines condemn has obscured scrutiny of what they promote.
Solving a problem that doesn't exist
The new guidance nearly doubles the recommended protein intake—from 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight to 1.2-1.6 grams. That upper range approaches what sports nutritionists recommend for competitive bodybuilders maximising muscle growth. The guidance suggests protein at every meal.
One difficulty: Americans already consume roughly 124 grams of protein per person daily, according to Food and Agriculture Organisation data. That represents two and a half times the average adult requirement. American per capita meat consumption runs three times the global average. About 85 percent of protein intake already comes from animal products.
Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition at New York University and editor of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, responded with characteristic bluntness. The protein emphasis makes no sense given current consumption—unless the point is justifying more meat and dairy.
Alice Lichtenstein, senior scientist at the USDA Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University, was equally direct. She knew of no evidence suggesting any advantage to increasing saturated fat in American diets.
The chronic disease crisis is real. But its drivers are not protein deficiency. Americans lack vegetables, fibre, and whole foods. They do not lack steak. Telling a nation already consuming two and a half times its protein requirement to eat more protein solves nothing—except the problem of how to increase meat industry sales.
How capture works
Christopher Gardner knows how this process is supposed to work. The Stanford nutrition scientist served on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, reviewing studies, weighing evidence, building consensus. Months of careful analysis. His committee ultimately recommended emphasising plant-based proteins—beans, lentils, legumes—while advising Americans to reduce consumption of red and processed meats. The recommendation followed from evidence showing such diets linked to reduced chronic disease.
Then Gardner watched those recommendations disappear.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest documented the mechanics. The administration, CSPI found, convened a separate group of scientists—many with disclosed financial ties to the beef and dairy industries—bypassing transparent processes. The resulting guidance rejects more than half of the advisory committee's recommendations. Red meat and saturated fat sources now occupy the pyramid's widest section, the position of greatest emphasis.
Gardner expressed disappointment. The elevation of these foods, he said, contradicts decades of evidence and research.
This story has a precursor. In April 1991, the USDA halted publication of its Eating Right Pyramid after meat and dairy lobbyists objected to how their products appeared. The agency claimed it needed more research. A year and $900,000 later, the pyramid emerged with grain servings inflated beyond what its designers had recommended. The grain industry won that round. Meat and dairy have won this one.
The impossible mandate
The structural problem precedes any particular administration. The USDA carries dual mandates in permanent tension: promote American agricultural production while advising the public on healthy eating. Nestle has spent decades documenting this conflict. Having nutritional guidance set by the agency responsible for boosting agricultural sales, she has observed, resembles placing lung cancer prevention under tobacco growers.
The revolving door ensures outcomes. The 1990s produced a grain-heavy pyramid that fuelled carbohydrate overconsumption. The 2020s have produced a protein-heavy pyramid elevating meat and dairy. Neither emerged from nutritional science considered in isolation from economic interests. Both produced industry celebration alongside expert dismay.
Different decades. Different captured industries. Same architecture of influence.
The telling absences
Search realfood.gov for community gardens. For farmers' markets. For local food systems. Nothing appears. The guidance offers no pathway to affordable whole foods, no acknowledgement that millions live in food deserts where the nearest vegetable is miles distant, no intervention beyond individual consumer choice.
The website's framing is revealing. America's health crisis, it declares, requires restoring "personal responsibility." The system that produces the crisis—the subsidies that make corn syrup cheaper than carrots, the food deserts that make fast food the only option, the marketing budgets that dwarf public health campaigns by factors of fifty to one—goes unmentioned.
Contrast this with France, where battles over the Nutri-Score nutrition label revealed what genuine confrontation with industry looks like. When the French government proposed colour-coded labels helping consumers identify healthier products at a glance, food corporations deployed what researchers described as Big Tobacco tactics: shaping evidence, applying political pressure, destabilising scientific opponents, delaying decisions, offering substitute policies. Nestlé, Ferrero, Coca-Cola, and Unilever fought the system for years. The European Commission, under lobbying pressure, has now delayed mandatory nutrition labelling for at least five years.
The contrast is instructive. France attempted a structural intervention—changing the information environment at point of purchase. Industry fought back fiercely precisely because such interventions threaten profits. American guidance, by contrast, asks nothing that would threaten anyone's bottom line. It demands no labelling requirements, no tax incentives, no subsidy reforms. It asks only that individuals, navigating an environment engineered to extract profit from their confusion, somehow choose better.
The psychology of cover
Psychologists call it moral licensing: performing one virtuous act frees subsequent less virtuous behaviour. Institutions do this too. By loudly denouncing ultra-processed foods—a position costing industry lobbyists nothing since no particular company bears blame—the administration earns licence to advance industry-favoured positions on protein, meat, and saturated fat without equivalent scrutiny.
Kennedy himself embodies this dynamic. He describes following something close to a carnivore diet. He has promoted beef tallow as superior to seed oils, a position delighting cattle producers while lacking the scientific consensus he claims to champion. His personal preferences align precisely with the industries now celebrating.
The processed food guidance deserves its praise. But praise for one element enables uncritical acceptance of the whole package. The revolution proclaimed is partly genuine, partly theatre, partly a transfer of influence from one agricultural sector to another.
What reform would actually require
Genuine change would begin by separating agricultural promotion from nutritional guidance—ending the structural conflict that guarantees capture. It would create independent expert processes genuinely insulated from industry funding. It would examine not just what Americans should eat but how to make those foods accessible. It would consider interventions beyond individual choice: labelling, taxation, subsidy reform.
It would not dismiss an expert committee's evidence-based recommendations, then convene an alternative panel whose members maintain financial relationships with industries benefiting from the resulting guidance.
The American public needs better information about food. The chronic disease epidemic is real. The ultra-processed environment is genuinely pathological. But swapping one set of industry influences for another while placing all responsibility on individuals addresses symptoms while preserving the disease.
On realfood.gov, the cheerful inverted pyramid places protein and dairy at the widest top—the position of maximum emphasis. Vegetables and fruits occupy a smaller section alongside. Whole grains shrink to the narrow bottom. The visual message: Americans need less of everything except meat, eggs, and cheese.
Whatever the nutritional merits of that prescription, it aligns precisely with what livestock and dairy industries have sought for decades. They knew what they were lobbying for. They issued press releases claiming victory within hours. They were not confused about what had happened.
The question is whether the rest of us should be.