The Two Sides of America’s Health Secretary

Since he was confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary early last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previewed big changes to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans—the government’s go-to guide on what to eat, and how much of it. Rewritten only every five years, the dietary guidelines are ubiquitous in American life: The food pyramid, launched in the 1990s, is a result of the document. The guidelines determine what millions of kids eat in school cafeterias every day.

Chief among those supposedly forthcoming changes Kennedy that has promised is a dramatic rethinking of how the United States deals with saturated fat. For decades, the dietary guidelines have recommended that people get no more than 10 percent of their daily calories from these fats because they increase bad cholesterol. But Kennedy is a saturated-fat evangelist. The health secretary, who has said that he follows a “carnivore diet,” once famously prepared a Thanksgiving turkey by submerging the raw bird in a vat of beef tallow.

Surprisingly, the new guidelines, which were released earlier today, retain the exact same recommendation about saturated fat that the health secretary seems to loathe. During a press briefing, Kennedy declared that the guidelines “end the war on saturated fat.” The guidelines do plug beef tallow as a “healthy fat” and say that Americans should get some of their protein from red meat. (The previous version says that a healthy diet includes “relatively lower consumption of red and processed meats.”) But all of that is hardly a dramatic change in how Americans should approach saturated food.

What happened? Despite all of Kennedy’s bluster, the revisions appear to be built much more around incremental change than any all-out war on established health wisdom. Kennedy and his staff appear to understand that an embrace of saturated fat is controversial. “It was our goal for this report to not be ‘activist’—and only make statements that are widely accepted by the latest nutritional research,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, told me in a statement. “No universal nutrition recommendation will be agreed on by everyone in the nutrition research field—nor should it,” he added. Indeed, there is little evidence to back up the adoption of an explicitly pro-fat diet. The American Heart Association, for example, recommends that fewer than 6 percent of daily calories come from saturated fat.

Overall, the new dietary guidelines focus on a much less controversial take-home message than “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again.” The takeaway, as Kennedy put it in a post on X, is “EAT REAL FOOD.” One of the biggest points of emphasis is on the importance of eating more protein—which already is a popular message among Americans. The release of the new guidelines was paired with a new inverted version of the food pyramid that’s meant to stress that a healthy diet consists of a majority of fruits, vegetables, healthy fats, and proteins. Few people follow the dietary guidelines to a T, but those who actually want to keep their saturated-fat intake to a minimum while upping their protein consumption will have to look to leaner options, such as beans and tofu. The carnivore health secretary may have inadvertently encouraged more Americans to embrace the “soy boy” lifestyle.

For the first time, the guidelines explicitly recommend against eating ultra-processed foods, which they refer to as “highly processed foods.” An accompanying scientific report that was released today notes that processed foods have been “consistently associated with increased risk” for a number of conditions, including type 2 diabetes and obesity. And the guidelines also take a particularly strong stance against added sugar. Both the 2020 and 2025 guidelines stress the need to limit added sugar, but the new guidelines add that “no amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners is recommended or considered part of a healthy or nutritious diet.”

These new suggestions come with some controversy. Ultra-processed foods constitute a broad and amorphous category, as I’ve previously written, and whether recommending that people stay away from all ultra-processed foods is feasible or desirable remains to be seen. But the guidelines are largely being well received by major health and nutrition groups. The American Medical Association said in a statement that the guidelines “offer clear direction patients and physicians can use to improve health.”

[Read: Coke, Twinkies, Skittles, and … whole-Grain Bread?]

The average American won’t necessarily change what they eat because of these new recommendations, but the guidelines do play a central role in determining what food can be served by a number of programs that provide food to millions of Americans. The lunch menus offered in schools, for example, legally must be “consistent with the goals” of the dietary guidelines. Kennedy has pledged to remove processed food from schools, and these new guidelines could pave the way for this to happen by giving the Trump administration justification for such a ban. That said, doing so would be hard given the ubiquity of these foods and the limited resources that schools have to make all of their meals from scratch. Any such change would require formal regulation and could take years to finalize, and it’s not actually Kennedy’s call: The rules for school lunches are set by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

Regardless of the challenges ahead, the release of the guidelines is a milestone in Kennedy’s tenure as health secretary, and it’s indicative of the way that he’s approached food regulation generally. Kennedy came into office pledging radical reform, yet he has seemed content with small steps. Before taking office, the health secretary, for example, implied that he thought a number of chemical additives in foods should be banned. But so far, he’s settled for companies’ promises that they will voluntarily phase out certain synthetic dyes over the course of several years.

The strategy marks a sharp departure from Kennedy’s willingness to impose his own beliefs on another major priority area: vaccines. On that front, Kennedy initially pledged to be a moderate, although he has been anything but. Just this week, the CDC removed six shots from its list of recommended childhood vaccines—after Kennedy told Congress during his confirmation hearing that he would “support the CDC schedule.” In other words, America’s health policy seems like it’s being led by two health secretaries with very different approaches.