@Alecmcq Thank you kindly for sharing this content.
Throughout the recent US presidential election my greatest fear was that either one of them would win. As it turns out, my fear is now reality…
And so when the new FDA-HHS-NIH-USDA team take the wheel I expect we’ll have the same clown car with new drivers. 
Would love to be proven wrong - but given the tremendous $$$US at stake, I strongly doubt it.
I am also highly skeptical, but maybe a tad more optimistic than you. What I see is a MUCH stronger recognition of some basic issues amongst those in real power. I also see the almost pathological desire to piss the other side off. For these reasons I think there is a higher likelihood of some progress in a positive direction than in the last 50 years.
However, your point is very well made…. The inertia driven by the $$$s at stake is formidable.
Yeah, I totally get that. I’m hoping those big fat business men (mostly men) secretly like a big fat streak 
Where I come from a “streak” is running around with no clothes on 
🫣. By chance, did you mean a “big fat steak”??
Given that the billionaires have worked hard to be in full control of the nation, I am sceptical about how much progress can be made. Keeping people sick means repeat customers for health care, among other things. 
I guess my concern is that the middle of the country mostly voted Republican (not trying to introduce politics, simply a fact). This is where wheat, soy, corn etc is grown. Give the FDA’s dual mandate, I still see the processed middle of the supermarket getting lots of support. I am also noticing a lot of low carb foods made with avocado oil in my local supermarlet. This is still processed.
It is processed foods that are pretending to be as good as simply eating non starchy veggies and meat (I am guilty of the occasional keto treat as well). While every once in a while ok, but I get the feeling that people will start eating potato chips or some ersatz keto version kettle cooked in avocado oil and consider that healthy and eat more
If the world thinks it has a methane problem now from cattle, just wait until 7 billion humans are eating more beans.
Yeah, beans do it. I never had problem with gas and it’s zero without plants, even with a little plants but beans have some superpower 
Still super tasty and somewhat satiating (very satiating per weight but it brings so much carbs and some fat too that overeating is still easy for me. I need high protein food and that’s about it)…
It’s still individual how bad is the effect. We are lucky. And we barely ever eat beans anyway… Not even my SO for some reason. The reason is probably me. He eats whatever he wants but beans aren’t vital for him. As he started to accept meat in most days, even the usual split peas had disappeared as I can just feed him some easy carni food (that he eats with grains, of course). And I lost my beloved green peas somewhere on keto years ago…
We eat plenty of legumes but that’s mostly peanuts 
I have lived most of my life as a pretty conservative bloke: brought up in a well-to-do middle class family, attended grammar school, held various middle and senior management jobs in large corporate organisations. I have fundamentally believed that the powers-that-be in government and The Establishment had my best interests at heart, and they were on my side. And I was on their side.
In the last 5 years I have changed my view. This whole diet thing started the ball rolling, and this started me going down various rabbit holes and wherever I looked I did not like what I saw… corruption, self interest, censorship, conflicts of interest, very poor decisions being made (in my opinion).
I am no longer an Establishment supporter. I am a conspiracy theorist. I admit it. I now see conspiracies everywhere. I am not entirely sure what to do about some of them.
Nina’s new piece on the Dietary Guidelines scientific report. I particularly liked the key recommendations that this report makes: I would struggle to find worse things that you could do for your health than what they are recommending in this report. I am doing the exact opposite.
NINA TEICHOLZ
DEC 11 
The highly-anticipated scientific report for the 2025 U.S. Dietary Guidelines was finally released yesterday by the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services (USDA-HHS). The 421-page tome is meant to inform new guidelines due next year, although the task of writing the guidelines policy itself will fall to USDA-HHS political appointees.
Typically, the scientific report is released in early fall, allowing the mandatory 60-day public comment period to conclude before the outgoing administration finalizes the guidelines. However, in this case, the comment period will extend beyond the Biden administration into the Trump era, shifting responsibility for drafting the guidelines to the newly appointed Secretaries of the USDA and HHS.
While the Secretaries are legally required to issue dietary guidelines, the law sets few constraints on how they proceed. There’s no statutory requirement to promote the guidelines to the public, for instance, and the Secretaries can accept or reject recommendations from the scientific report as they please.
No doubt, any decisions they make will be seen as fueled by political considerations, yet there’s a far better reason to reject a number of the new recommendations: they are not based on rigorous science and, in many cases, would almost certainly harm our health.
Key recommendations in this report include:
Controversy over ultra-processed foods
The question of whether the expert committee should set limits on ultra-processed foods (UPF) has sparked controversy ever since the group’s final public meeting, when it revealed it couldn’t make a recommendation to restrict these foods, because the evidence on them was “limited.” Calls for reducing UPF have transcended partisan lines—from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly advocating for their removal from school lunches to Marion Nestle, NYU professor emerita, calling the committee’s “non-recommendation” a “travesty.”
Indeed, there is, “remarkable, strong bipartisan concern about ultra-processed food,” as Jerold Mande, a former deputy undersecretary for food safety at the Department of Agriculture under two Democratic presidents, told Time magazine.
Nevertheless, the expert committee responsible for yesterday’s report insisted that the evidence for urging reductions in ultra-processed foods (UPF) was “limited.”
It’s possible that conflicts of interest on the expert committee may have influenced this decision. Nine out of the 20 members were found to have a tie with food, pharmaceutical or weight loss companies or industry groups with a stake in the outcome of the guidelines, according to a report by the non-profit public interest group, U.S. Right to Know. The most frequently occurring conflicts were with Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, makers of weight-loss shots like Ozempic and Wegovy.
Still, it’s important to say that the committee’s assessment of the evidence on UPF as limited is correct. The USDA systematic review of these foodsfound only one small clinical trial testing the effects of these foods on health outcomes. This trial, conducted at the National Institutes of Health, involved 20 adults for only 28 days (14 days on a UPF diet and 14 days on a whole-food diet). The subjects were found to consume more calories while on the UPF diet, but even so, the test is too small and preliminary to generalize its conclusions to an entire nation. As I’ve written before, we have many more and better studies on some of the components of ultra-processed foods—sugars and starches, for instance—and should act on these, more precise and robust data first.
Marion Nestle acknowledged on her blog that the advisory committee must stick to “ evidence-based recommendations,” while giving the strong impression that she wished it weren’t so. She’s also quoted in a STAT articlethat headlines her comment about the “impossible restrictions” imposed on the guidelines by limiting recommendations to only those supported by strong evidence.
In my view, we should not be arguing for guidelines based on lesser evidence. The near-complete lack of rigorous data for the original guidelines in 1980 set in motion a Titanic of misguided advice that has coincided with our astonishing epidemics in chronic diseases. According to the best available government data, Americans have largely followed the guidelines, and despite this, we have not only become sick but very sick.
Echoing this view is a Congressionally mandated report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which concluded in 2017 that the US dietary guidelines are not currently “trustworthy,” in part due to a “lack of scientific rigor” in the process. Since then, little has changed (the USDA did not fully adopt even one of the Academies’ 11 recommendations). In this light, advocating for even less rigorous standards based on even weaker evidence seems to me misguided or possibly reckless.
Lower standards for reducing meat, poultry and eggs
Paradoxically, the expert committee was not a stickler for rigorous evidence when it came to advising reductions in meat, poultry, and eggs.
Before getting into the evidence, though, I’d like to revisit the likelihood (as I wrote in an earlier post) that these changes, if adopted, would exacerbate our disease epidemics. This advice does not consider that plant-based proteins are not as complete as those from animals and also not as bioavailable. Plant sources like peas and beans also pack a hefty load of carbohydrates and calories for the same amount of protein, making them a far less healthy option for people with metabolic conditions such as obesity and diabetes who need to be mindful of controlling their blood sugars.
The expert committee also found that reductions in meat, eggs, and poultry would lead to further shortfalls in fiber, and vitamins D and E, a significant fact given that the existing guidelines already fail to meet goals for vitamins D and E, folate, choline, and iron.
Here are the committee’s findings on nutrients announced at its final public meeting:
A lack of essential nutrients leads to a myriad of diseases and health conditions. One has to wonder why the long-standing nutritional deficiencies in the guidelines haven’t been corrected—and are getting worse.
Studies cited do not support expert report claims
Most importantly, the evidence used to support new and existing guidelines’ recommendations is insufficient and contradictory.
Three major systematic reviews–on obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease– claim the data are “strong” to support claims that the US Dietary Guidelines prevent these conditions in adults. These reviews are also cited to support the new recommendation for reducing red/processed meats. Yet the clinical trials listed fail to support these claims.
Here are the trials listed for heart disease. As you can see, one trial shows cardiovascular benefit from red meat. Four trials show little-to-no benefit, and three are not trials but observational follow-up studies of trials published long ago. Another study was from 2017 and would had been covered in previous guidelines’ reviews. It’s fair to say that the totality of these results do not support the claim that the ability of the guidelines to prevent heart disease is “strong.”
The reviews on obesity and type 2 diabetes are much the same.
For obesity, 24 trials are listed. Among these:
Other trials did not appear to test a diet similar to the Dietary Guidelines.
For type 2 diabetes , 13 trials are listed as evidence that the guidelines can prevent this condition. Of these:
There are bound to be some mistakes in my lists above; this summary is just a first take.
Here’s the point: every step in the process that produces reviews like these is broken. The USDA office that conducts the reviews lacks rigor (as the National Academies found); the expert advisory committee doesn’t appear to have checked the evidence; and the “peer review” process for the systematic reviews was completed by federal employees with a conflict of interest (e.g., reviewers who criticize the USDA report rightly fear losing their jobs).
If you have been following my work, you know there’s a history here. When I fact-checked every single study cited in the 2015 Dietary Guidelines for a BMJ cover story, it triggered one of the largest retraction efforts in recent history—though it was ultimately unsuccessful. A key finding of my investigation was that the USDA-HHS dietary patterns were supported by “a minuscule quantity of rigorous evidence that only marginally supports claims that these diets can promote better health than alternatives.”
This paper has been largely ignored. Seven years later, in 2022, I teamed with top nutritionists , including former members of previous Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committees, to write a critical review of the guidelines that was published in a journal of the National Academies of Sciences. USDA-HHS officials responded with an article entitled, “Addressing misinformation about the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”
I’m not a fan of the term “misinformation,” but with respect to non-evidence based dietary advice, the USDA-HHS are prominent actors. The National Academies and many peer-reviewed publications have now established the faulty evidence underpinning the US dietary guidelines, in addition to the lack of transparency and many conflicts of interest in the guidelines process.
We do not need more evidence. We require only the political will to create change so that we might have a national dietary policy that we can trust—and the good health that we deserve.
My thanks to Jenni Callihan for her research contribution.
1
In these reviews, “NS” is reported to mean “not statistically significant;” The word “null” means that the results do not support the hypothesis (in this case, that a Dietary Guidelines-type diet can prevent chronic diseases.
I thought they had gotten rid of the saturated fat cap? Or maybe that was the cholesterol intake cap?
Yeah, I do exactly the opposite of the key recommendations, though I don’t attempt to track how much fat or saturated fat I’m eating. That’s (1) meaningless, because you can’t verify intake of either amount of fat or fatty acid breakdown; (2) meaningless because when I was eating a high saturated fat (AND high calorie) diet,my LDL went down. (Learned later that LDL often travels with calories: higher calories = lower LDL; lower calories = higher LDL.) And I’ve reached the conclusion that LDL is also most likely meaningless for heart disease.
I think the sat fat cap has been there all the time. They have reduced the cap slowly over time. It is one of their main pillars of the guidelines. And the one that leads to most of the wrongness, as without sat fat you have to eat seed oils and more carbs. Result? Growing sickness especially T2D and obesity.
They definitely removed the cholesterol intake cap (10 years ago?). That was totally ridiculous to begin with: even the evil Ancel Keys knew dietary cholesterol makes absolutely no difference to health outcomes because the liver makes 90% of your cholesterol. It is amazing to me that the medical establishment have convinced themselves (using very poor evidence) that a human body organ can get it wrong in vast swathes of the population, and create too much of a chemical that is ultimately going to kill them. I just believe that the human body is way smarter than that.
There’s no relationship between saturated fat intake and much of anything. I know that if you feed individual fatty acids to people, you can get LDL to go up or markers of inflammation to go up, but the problem is that we don’t eat individual fatty acids. We eat food.
Let’s say that Palmitic acid is bad (it’s generally considered to be bad) and Stearic acid is good (it supposedly lowers LDL; not sure what it does for inflammation). You eat a steak having both. Assuming that LDL going up is bad, what happens to your LDL? Especially since you’re also eating other fats, protein, nutrients, etc. And I was just reading a Master’s thesis where he was discussing studies looking at saturated fatty acids (and MUFA/PUFA too) for both grass-feed and lot-fed beef, and they were all over the map. You have no idea what you’re getting.
But even if you did some type of analysis and could figure out what the fatty acid content was, the chances that what happens to you will be the same as what happens in a study are basically zero.
And Nina has a ton of studies looking at saturated fat with no evidence saturated fat is bad. Ugh.
And as if by magic, the Dietary Guidelines committee can’t find these studies. All they can find is the epidemiology that falsely demonises sat fat. Makes me mad 
. They have an agenda: they want us all eating plants only, which will be terrible for our health, terrible for animals overall, and terrible for the environment. They are so wrong it is embarrassing.
That’s a very stupid idea. Legumes aren’t just incomplete protein, they don’t have much protein but very much carbs and who eats beans all the time anyway? Even my high-carber SO who can afford legumes and carbs and don’t need so much protein eats legumes with some animal protein on top, legumes have too little for him.
I could replace the protein (just the mere protein grams, not the completeness, of course) from my meat and eggs with ~500g beans a day… Okay, depends on the day but it wouldn’t be low. If I wanted to eat plant-based, legumes wouldn’t be my number one protein source, I would need something more protein rich and less carby. They would be in the picture but not in excessive amounts.
And eggs are totally irreplaceable. The only food group I really can’t imagine living without and why would I?
It will be always weird to me some guidelines are against all kinds of meat (and eggs). Ours aren’t THAT bad and they are bad. They want us to eat much more fish though and yeah, that won’t happen with the fish prices (and variety. it’s tiny!) here.
It’s amazing how insanely wrong guidelines can be. We don’t know everything but we do know enough not to make so huge mistakes… Yeah, I know, money and power and interest and some human stupidity, ignorance, denial… Still. In 2024, guidelines are shockingly horrible and unrealistic… Who will follow them? Hopefully not many people. People don’t eat like that. People aren’t even interested in their own health much. But if a health-conscious one follows these things, that’s easily can become tragic.
It doesn’t seem realistic to me (even the part where people actually try to follow the advice… surely most of them would feel sick and hopefully stop. you can’t expect normal people putting in all the work the smartest, most serious and health-conscious vegans do and even the latter rare type has bad experiences in many cases as far as I know) but I live in a very different country. We will stop eating fatty pork when the French will stop eating butter and cheese and stop drinking wine We barely brought back the Mangalica, let us enjoy it at least for a few hundreds of years (if possible), seriously… (I almost never eat any, it’s much more expensive than normal pork and tastes similar to me. But I still can be happy it didn’t disappear! And they look interesting The piglets are often striped! 
I love pigs, I can’t help they are tasty, not just adorable, playful and smart… Sigh. But give me cheap crickets, affordable seafood without overfishing and maybe I can eat less of them…? No, legumes can’t help but they are tastiest with some smoked pork hocks if you ask me, the more the better… And we have a dish called Bean Goulash, I think I never had it but sounds tasty… And too carby as well. The normal one is already carby…)
