RFK Jr’s new diet guidelines pose risks for health and the environment, experts say

Key Highlights

• 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. Tortilla, broccoli, ‘a piece of chicken’: US agriculture secretary mocked for ‘money-saving’ mealRead moreAnderson 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.