Nutrition advice from the Trump administration is colliding head-on with climate concerns. The Guardian reports that guidelines rolled out by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. push Americans toward a meat- and dairy-heavy diet that would nearly double current protein intake, featuring an "inverted" food pyramid loaded with steak, ground beef, poultry, and whole milk. Kennedy says previous advice wrongly demonized saturated fat, and that the US is "ending the war" against it. Environmental researchers, however, say following that advice at scale would carry a steep planetary tab.
The World Resources Institute estimates that even a 25% protein bump from animal sources could require roughly 100 million more acres of US farmland a year—about the size of California—and add hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases. That pressure would be especially felt in places like the Amazon, with beef already far more land- and emissions-intensive than plant proteins such as beans. Experts also note that Kennedy once took a very different stance, blasting factory farming in his role as an environmental lobbyist. "At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry is an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden," the Guardian notes.
The Verge reports that it isn't necessarily time to panic, as Americans generally don't adhere too closely to the government's nutrition recommendations anyway. Public health experts and nutritionists tell the Hill, however, that they're also leery of the new food pyramid's apparent dismissal of worries over saturated fats, as well as the Trump administration's removal of pointed limits on daily alcohol use from nutritional guidelines, replacing those with the much more vague "consume less alcohol for better health" directive, per the Hill.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
