Food

RFK Jr.’s New Food Pyramid Has Some Good Advice—Until You Remember What He’s Really Doing

Jan 08, 20265:45 AM

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On Wednesday, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who works out in jeans, presented an overhaul of the tried-and-true nutritional pyramid. You know the one. It was probably pinned up in your elementary school science class, advising how much of each food group you ought to be eating. The health secretary’s edit represented a total inversion of the classical structure. Americans, Kennedy asserted, should be consuming gobs of red meat and dairy, and comparatively smaller amounts of bread, cereals, and pasta. Flour tortillas, he proclaimed, are out. Same with “packaged breakfast options” and “crackers.” And also, when you cook your protein—an item that, according to Kennedy, we should be serving at every meal—we ought to first coat our pans with healthy fats. You know like, um … “butter” or, barring that, “beef tallow.”

Given the many crimes currently fouling up the Department of Health and Human Services—the institutional harassment of trans people, the slash-and-burn defunding of vital medical research, the ongoing vaccine calamity—this gym-bro remix of the prescribed American diet is far from the most heinous affront in the Trump administration’s “health” agenda. And, frankly, I think that’s because Kennedy isn’t entirely wrong* *here. In fact, a lot of the advice in the pyramid is sound. Many experts have been enthusiastically warning us away from processed foods for years. And while our ongoing protein obsession is a fad, more protein certainly does help build muscle and strength, and there’s at least some evidence it can aid in weight loss. On those facts alone, this is one of Kennedy’s more legitimate ventures to Make America Healthy Again. The problem, of course, is the way in which the secretary has managed to mangle those nonpartisan recommendations into yet more grist for the rabidly peasant-brained MAGA coalition. Everything, even our daily allowance of olive oil, has morphed into a turf war.

I must reiterate: Have you looked at the original 1990s American food pyramid lately? It’s completely deranged. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. The bottom rung—the foodstuff we are ostensibly supposed to be eating all the time—is fucking bread, rice, pasta, and cereal. I am not a dietitian, but I know that the best way to drop pounds, reduce sodium intake, and improve blood pressure is not to stuff a sandwich or a plate of spaghetti into your face at every meal. Replacing that rung with a tasteful plate of protein and fiber is something many sensible experts are on board with. In fact, in “MyPlate,” the visual formulation that during the Obama years replaced the old-school ’90s food pyramid, grains take up just over a quarter of the space in a recommended meal. Kennedy could have iterated on MyPlate. (Perhaps by coming up with a better name? Does anyone ever say MyPlate in conversation?) But in a characteristically MAGA-ish turn, Kennedy designed his own pyramid. And in his pyramid, he asks us to get that protein by prioritizing animal products: beef, eggs, poultry, and, most brazenly, three servings of full-fat dairy products a day. Three! One of the items enshrined on the pyramid pictograph is a carton of whole milk, which contains about 150 calories per glass. This might be a good idea if you are an offensive lineman or a CrossFit psycho who does pullups for a living, but here is my expert analysis for everyone else who gets even moderate exercise considering this regimen: If you are washing down a T-bone steak with an ice-cold glass of whole milk for dinner every day, you’re not gonna like where RFK Jr. is taking you.

It goes on like this. There is a lukewarm call to tamp down alcohol consumption and some baffling nutritional mandates in the fine print. But what’s most important to remember is why Kennedy has issued these changes. A carnivore diet has become something of a status symbol within Trumpworld, particularly among alpha lifestyle influencers with Grecian statues in their profile photos. (The Liver King comes to mind.) Our health secretary cares far more about playing to the base than the biological integrity of his constituents. His thesis is supported by the likes of Jordan Peterson, the anti-woke Canadian psychology professor who seems to be perpetually on the brink of death. Kennedy is a proud booster of the baffling all-meat lifestyle, to the point of breathlessly espousing its mythic healing capabilities to a befuddled Elon Musk during the 2024 campaign.

Beef tallow, too, has become an Ivermectin-like totem among Republicans. Steak ’n Shake, the burger restaurant that has desperately attempted to carve out a niche as the country’s preeminent MAGA fast-food option, recently announced that it would be cooking its french fries in tallow, “the old-fashioned way.” (Here is where I must mention that beef tallow is supercharged with saturated fat, and no matter what Kennedy says, there is no conclusive evidence that it is healthier than, say, canola oil.)

If we lived in a better world—if everyone on planet Earth didn’t get leagues more certifiable after the pandemic—Kennedy’s new food pyramid would have encouraged Americans to avoid sugar and processed foods, while recommending that they meet their daily allotment of protein, perhaps even a little more than recommended before. There would be no controversy (except maybe with known contrarian website Slate.com, on which some of us do occasionally argue in favor of processed foods). This is an opinion that can be cheerfully shared by everyone from Michelle Obama to Tucker Carlson. And if you drill past the artifice—all the sly dog-whistle signaling toward a population of too-far-gone Americans who seem to believe that the government has implanted nanomachines in the produce aisle—those conclusions are basically what Kennedy has decreed. Unfortunately, all information that comes from the government must be deep-fried—using beef tallow, probably—in the diction of those same turbo-online MAGA hard-liners. There can be no shared reality, even among the things we all know are true. Cholesterol itself has become politicized. And, friends, that is just not a healthy place to be.

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