RFK Jr. Inverts the Food Pyramid, at Last

T he MAHA moment is here. Last week, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s FDA put out an entirely revised “food pyramid” and new healthy eating guidelines. It almost literally flips the previous pyramid upside down, reversing decades of misguided federal advice.

Whereas previous food pyramids encouraged eight to eleven servings of grains per day as the foundation of any healthy diet, the new pyramid sticks them at the bottom, for three to four servings per day. Instead, red meat is championed along with animal proteins, including an overall target of 0.54 to 0.72 grams of protein per pound of body weight daily. “My message is clear,” the secretary of health and human services said. “Eat real food.”

This change to federal guidelines feels like a good that could have been achieved only because of the novel coalitional politics of Make America Healthy Again, which paired RFK Jr., who despises corporate lobbyists, with a Republican administration that is almost congenitally deaf to certain lifestyle groups. Only this combination would have come up with dietary guidelines that include a strict, intelligent warning to vegetarians and vegans about critical mineral deficiencies that are common to their diets. A purely left-leaning coalition would have been more vulnerable not just to the lifestyle-advocacy groups among vegans but also to environmental groups that envision the abolition of ranching. RFK Jr. is an older style of environmentalist, who likes nature and animals, not just carbon calculations on spreadsheets. He believes too much in the food chain to fall for the utopian ideas that egalitarianism would extend from humans to our food sources. European food guidelines are often just as tough on “ultra-processed” foods as our new guidelines, but they are often shyer than they should be about recommending red meat, butter, and fish.

There may be a conservative instinct to ask: So what? Nobody compels families to shop according to the food pyramid. Many families have been happily ignoring the outdated health advice from the feds for years and, instead, eating according to their family or ethnic traditions, or wherever their hunger leads them.

But the truth is that these guidelines have an enormous impact. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) are a master document that federal agencies use when designing nutrition policies. They get translated into meal patterns that define the food groups’ calorie ranges and nutrient profiles for all federally funded meals. That includes 30 million meals eaten by children daily as part of the National School Lunch Program. The prison system and the military are profoundly affected by these changed guidelines. State prison systems benchmark their menus against the DGA. So do programs like Meals on Wheels.

And this change at the federal level has a way of spreading even through private industry. Because these are the government’s guidelines for a healthy diet, they are used as a defensible standard by insurance companies, whose policies then shape how hospitals design meals for patients.

And of course, these changes profoundly influence industry itself. The new DGA will change the way all large institutional purchases of food happen in the United States. Industry will be quick to advertise that its products comply with the new standards. When the feds are recommending full-fat milk and butter, rather than demonizing them, industry has less incentive to invent alternatives from other industrial by-products. Margarine, olestra, Cool Whip, and Egg Beaters were all attempts to manufacture improvements on the “real food” that the government now endorses.

Some nutritionists have been criticizing the new pyramid at the margins. Should adult men be consuming that much dairy? Shouldn’t there be a recommendation for fermented foods, or more emphasis on small fish? But overwhelmingly there has been a sense of relief expressed by the nutritionists and science journalists who have spent decades trying to push back against recommendations that were based on a poorly designed study in the 1950s during a panic about heart disease. Those recommendations led to the explosion of shelf-stable, grain-based, ultra-processed foods and an avoidance of the fats and proteins that give people essential minerals and healthy energy sources and satiate their appetites.

The change won’t change everything. Dietary habits are hard to break and reestablish. Some will try to head-fake their way into approval under the new guidelines. Some institutional players will interpret them to suit other agendas (environmental or professional). But this was a major salutary change, and RFK Jr. was the indispensable man in accomplishing it this way. And it’s a credit to this odd, historically novel political coalition.