Get ready to eat beans, peas, lentils--as cuts in meat, poultry, and eggs are proposed for next Dietary Guidelines

Science review methods fall to new lows at USDA

As a new Trump era dawns on America, some of my friends are celebrating while many others are devastated. For the latter, I hope you can find a slim silver lining in the possibility that we might finally see real progress in reversing our epidemics of chronic disease. This kind of revolution would have been near impossible under Harris, since her party has fully embraced the government’s status quo diet. (The historic White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition & Health in 2022, for instance, did not invite a single expert versed in the established science of reversing type 2 diabetes.) By contrast, the super-fueled “Make America Healthy Again” campaign has catapulted chronic disease into the spotlight, and we can now, for the first time in 40 years, glimpse an opening for transformational change.

The immediate issue is the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the single-most influential policy determining what we consider to be a healthy diet. I realize I sound like a broken record on this topic, but there’s a good reason. Given that these guidelines drive all federal food-related programs, from school lunches to military mess halls, and are downloaded as the ‘gold standard’ by nearly all health professionals, we can’t emphasize their importance too often or too strongly. These guidelines are an important reason we’ve failed to meet recruitment targets for the military for several years now, and why childhood disease rates, especially for obesity and pre-diabetes, are now seen at unprecedented rates.

Less meat, less poultry, less eggs

Just weeks ago, we learned from a meeting of the experts reviewing the science, called the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), that they recommended reducing red and processed meats for all Americans. Further, they propose cutting all animal foods--meat, poultry, and eggs--by 3 ½ - 4 ounce-equivalents per week for people eating 2,200 calories and over, as part of a “flexible” dietary pattern.” This new versatility would allow schools to serve less of these foods to children.

A bias against animal foods has been baked into the guidelines for a long time. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) introduced a “Vegetarian Dietary Pattern” for all Americans, even though its own systematic reviews found only “limited evidence” that this diet could prevent chronic diseases "(“Limited” is two notches below the “Strong” evidence needed to codify a recommendation).¹ In this current cycle, the USDA went further by exploring a vegan option, because it was “supported by the public interest,” according to one committee member.² This inquiry hit a wall with the predictable finding that shifting from a vegetarian to a vegan diet would cause many nutrient deficiencies, including: