Whole milk is back! The war on protein is over! Mainline meat!
Derek investigates the new inverted pyramid and everything lacking in the new dietary guidelines.
Show Notes
The New Dietary Guidelines and the “Flipped Pyramid”
Several of Kennedy’s Dietary Advisers Have Ties to Meat and Dairy Interests
Carotenoid bioavailability is higher from salads ingested with full-fat than with fat-reduced salad dressings as measured with electrochemical detection
Human health effects of conjugated linoleic acid from milk and supplements
Enhancing the fatty acid profile of milk through forage-based rations, with nutrition modeling of diet outcomes
Dietary Fats and Cardiovascular Disease: A Presidential Advisory From the American Heart Association
Reduction in saturated fat intake for cardiovascular disease
Effect of Interventions Aimed at Reducing or Modifying Saturated Fat Intake on Cholesterol, Mortality, and Major Cardiovascular Events : A Risk Stratified Systematic Review of Randomized Trials
Omega-6 fats for the primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular disease
Butter and Plant-Based Oils Intake and Mortality
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On Wednesday, the White House held a press conference so that Donald Trump could overturn part of the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which required the USDA to update school meal nutrition standards.
Starting in 2012, the USDA required schools participating in federal lunch programs to offer only fat-free or low-fat milk.
Full-fat and 2% were banned.
While this kind of seems random, there's context for why schools switch to lower-no-fat options.
There's saturated fat intake because full-fat milk contains more saturated fat, which guidelines recommend limiting for children.
You have the rising childhood obesity rates, which prompted a focus on reducing calorie density in school meals.
And so scientific recommendations called for low-fat or fat-free dairy for children over age two.
Trump's entire circus that day didn't just happen out of nowhere.
And yes, there are money to interest involved in both cases I'm about to discuss.
So first, as of 2012, flavored milk was allowed in schools using federal lunch programs, but it had to be fat-free.
Jump ahead to Trump's first administration.
In 2018, his administration snuck 1% flavored milk back in under USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue, who was a bit of an RFK Jr. prototype.
He was very meat and dairy friendly, coming himself from a family that owned a grain and fertilizer business, and he also founded Purdue Inc, which is an agribusiness trading company that deals with a wide range of agricultural commodities.
And then he was installed at the USDA.
Now, unsurprisingly, major dairy industry organizations strongly supported Purdue's move, which at the time, honestly, mostly went unnoticed.
But it's 2026 and little about food goes unnoticed in RFK Jr.'s HHS.
And despite his constant claims of using gold standard science conducted by uncompromised experts, his new inverted food pyramid, ironically called the Scientific Foundation for the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, is very loose on science and heavy on compromise, including with the dairy industry.
Today, I want to go over some of the problems with the 90-page document that they produced.
I'm Derek Barris, and you're listening to a Conspirituality Brief: Maha's Selective Skepticism.
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During the same period that whole milk was regulated out of lunchroom, rates of childhood obesity and diabetes rose significantly.
Removing whole milk did not improve health, it damaged it.
What talk about grasping?
Kennedy is the king of spurious correlations, but this is a stretch even for him.
The title of a recent New York Times article puts everything into perspective, however.
Quote: Several of Kennedy's dietary advisors have ties to meat and dairy interests, because of course they do.
I'm not going to pretend this revelation is shocking.
Kennedy fired everyone on ACIP, the vaccine advisory board, then installed a number of his anti-vax affiliates.
I mean, pretty much every Maha accusation is a confession.
Here's what the New York Times found regarding why beef and dairy is being heavily weighted in the new guidelines.
However, quote: Three of the nine members have received grants or done consulting work for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association.
One of those also received a research grant from and serves as an advisor to the National Pork Board.
At least three members, including two of the same ones who have done work for red meat groups, have financial ties to dairy industry organizations such as the National Dairy Council.
Another is a co-creator of a high-protein meal replacement product, obviously.
The experts did not write the guidelines, but produced reviews of scientific evidence on which the guidelines were based.
So that's how you get an inverted pyramid with beef and full fat milk featured prominently in the upper left quadrant where everyone's eyes first land.
I'll circle back to beef and saturated fat, but let's just continue with milk for a moment because during the press conference, Kennedy cited nutrients not available in low or no fat milk for the reason why kids need full fat, and this is mostly nonsense.
Yes, nutrients are removed when removing fat from milk, but in the U.S., skim and low-fat milk are required by law to be fortified with vitamins A and D, which restores or exceeds the original content.
I know wellness influencers love to claim that fortifying products isn't as good as the natural version, but that's also predominantly bullshit and speaks more to their ignorance of chemistry.
Yes, bioavailability is a thing depending on how you intake nutrients.
The idea that natural vitamins A and D are more bioavailable has not been shown to be clinically significant in human trials.
So in this case, they have tested it and they haven't found much of a difference.
So major nutrients are not missing from lower no-fat options.
And what is missing isn't consequential for health.
And yeah, they've studied that as well.
Plus, if you're eating a meal with other fats from meat, butter, nuts, and so on, the difference in bioavailability problem is negligible.
Specifically, two of the major nutrient profiles that are sometimes discussed in milk are conjugated linoleic acid and omega-3 fatty acids.
With conjugated linoleic acid, it only accounts for less than 5 milligrams per cup of whole milk, and potential benefits in humans is very limited and inconsistent in clinical trials.
And then you get to omega-3 fatty acids.
They're also very limited in milk regardless of the fat content.
As for Trump's claim during the press conference that milk helps cognitive abilities, well, hey, maybe he needs to drink a whole lot more than put down the Diet Coke for a minute.
The milk circus is the continuation of the new dietary guidelines, which Kennedy called Trump's food pyramid.
And well, you know what?
Fuck it.
Let him own that.
Because it's not the food pyramid that's upside down, but America at this point.
Here's a clip of Kennedy talking to Katie Miller, Stephen Miller's wife, for her podcast earlier this week, which also kind of shows you where everything originates and is heading.
Dr. Haas looked at his medical records and said he's got the highest testosterone level that he's ever seen for an individual over 70 years old.
I know the president will be happy that I repeat that.
My God, how just fucking embarrassing.
When the nightmare of this administration is over, somebody is going to compile and study the amount of kowtowing and bootlicking that has gone on in this second Trump administration.
I honestly don't know how these people look at themselves in the mirror, but it does speak to how driven they are to complete their own agendas.
So let's discuss the dietary guidelines in a little more detail.
Dr. Jessica Nurik, who was a guest on this podcast last month, published a stub stack talking about the flipped pyramid that I'll include in the show notes.
A number of dieticians, including Jessica, have pointed out something strange about these guidelines.
The messaging about them is at times wildly different from what's actually in them.
She writes, quote, interestingly, despite all the noise, many of the core recommendations in the new guidelines are not a dramatic departure from previous dietary guidance.
They still promote nutrient-dense foods, appropriate calorie intake and portion sizes.
They still recommend prioritizing fruits and vegetables.
They still recommend whole grains.
They still recommend a variety of protein sources from both animals and plants.
They still recommend limiting added sugars and sodium.
And they still recommend keeping saturated fat below 10% of total calories.
Which raises the obvious question, if the substance is not radically different, why has the messaging been so extreme and misleading?
I made an Instagram video the day the guidelines were published pointing out that Maha needs a ghost to fight.
For the past year, Maha influencers repeatedly talk about the food pyramid, which hasn't been recommended since 2011.
Plus, the guidelines are updated every five years by law.
So in reality, Kennedy and crew are battling a 34-year-old skeleton.
And it's a ripoff of Sweden's version of the food pyramid, which dates back to the 70s.
The reason they would rather fight a memory is because what they're actually saying is not, as Jessica points out, radically different from what's been recommended for years now, especially the 2020 guidelines, which I reviewed in my video.
It has an entire section about how diet affects chronic disease.
This is something Kennedy regularly says has never been discussed before, but you only need a computer to access the fact that yes, it has and it's been publicly available.
Kennedy relies on the fact that most people don't pay attention to federal recommendations for them to not realize he's mostly regurgitating the advice of past administrations.
At least what he gets right, which is something Jessica also points out.
But he also gets a lot wrong.
First, the mischaracterization of the evidence for consuming more saturated fat.
The guidelines claim that randomized clinical trials or RCTs don't support saturated fat reduction, which is completely made up.
As with his anti-vax activism, his team cherry-picks trials while excluding or dismissing major trials.
They also include trials with methodological flaws, which is something that Kennedy seems to have imported from his nonprofit Children's Health Defense because they do that all the time.
And I just want to note that all the studies that I cite moving forward are in the show notes, so you can go check out the evidence for yourself and you can also save them in case you find some wellness influencers talking bullshit like Kennedy does and then you can share them.
I don't know how well that helps, but I am always on the side of presenting good evidence to push back against their nonsense.
The 2017 American Heart Association presidential advisory concluded that lowering saturated fat intake and replacing it with polyunsaturated vegetable oil reduced cardiovascular disease by approximately 30%, similar to statin treatment effects.
Then there's the 2020 Cochrane systematic review, which analyzed 15 RCTs involving 56,675 participants.
That found that reducing saturated fat decreased combined cardiovascular events.
More recently, a 2025 Annals of Internal Medicine systematic review of 17 trials that included 66,337 participants found that for people at high cardiovascular risk, reducing saturated fat produced important absolute reductions in mortality and major cardiovascular events.
Moving on, Kennedy's guidelines include inflammatory rhetoric against linoleic acid.
Pun intended, if you caught that, because this is this old seed oil suck argument.
And to accomplish it, they portray linoleic acid as potentially harmful through oxidation, presenting the lipid peroxidation hypothesis as an established harm, even though RCTs don't show adverse clinical outcomes from dietary linoleic acid.
No, that's a lot.
Again, the studies are all in the show notes.
That review found that lower plasma linoleic acid is associated with a higher cardiovascular risk in observational studies, yet the guidelines dismiss this as confounding without bothering to justify their position.
The most recent and comprehensive evidence supporting seed oils comes from a 2025 JAMA internal medicine study, which analyzed three large cohorts with 24 years of follow-up.
This happened when I debated Dave Asprey about seed oils at Eudaimonia Summit.
And I've heard it before from wellness influencers.
They say there's no long-term data on seed oils.
It's just absolute bullshit.
There's a lot of long-term data.
So the JAMA study found that higher intakes of specific plant-based oils, they looked at canola, soybean, and olive oil, were associated with lower total mortality.
Every 10 gram a day increment in total plant-based oil intake was associated with 11% lower cancer mortality and 6% lower cardiovascular disease mortality.
Then we get to Maha's processed food fetish, which is all over the new guidelines.
According to Kennedy, every previous dietary guidelines just loved processed foods.
Dr. Jessica Nurik addressed this as well in her Substack.
She writes, quote, the 1992 pyramid did not promote ultra-processed foods.
It recommended grains, fruits, vegetables, animal and plant proteins, and dairy.
It emphasized variety and moderation, and it explicitly placed fats and added sugars at the top with a clear use sparingly label.
Just like Kennedy regularly conflates obesity and overweight statistics, he regularly confuses processed foods with ultra-processed foods.
Processing food could mean anything from cutting vegetables and drying beans to baking bread and canning vegetables.
Fermentation is definitionally a process.
Pressing olives into oil creates a processed food.
Maha's fetish with the idea that all food should just be pulled from the soil or shot really clouds the issue with how most people get most of their nutrition.
Ultra-processing means combining extracted ingredients and adding cosmetic additives.
No guidelines have ever advocated for them.
They generally don't mention them at all.
But this is Kennedy's sleight of hand.
These are the first guidelines that tackle them head-on and honestly, great, but the false dichotomies are rampant throughout the document.
Their ultra-processed food evidence is entirely observational with severe confounding risks.
And some more heavily processed foods like fortified cereals actually improve nutrient intake.
But since Kennedy and crew refuse to actually grapple with the social determinants of health, they never discussed the reasons why people might need to use their limited food budget on buying things like fortified foods.
The new guidelines minimize the benefits of grains, which I covered more in depth during last week's Monday bonus episode.
I mentioned Kennedy's repeated citation of Japan's wonderful health profile and low obesity rate, which is true, but in reality, they eat 50 to 66% of calories from grains and only 15% from protein.
So if you want Japanese health profile, why are you advocating for the opposite of what they eat?
And this brings us to the last absolutely bonkers claim of the new guidelines, or at least of the messaging around the new guidelines.
The so-called war on protein.
Seriously, you've probably seen it.
A lot of the late night talk show hosts have talked about it.
You can find it on realfood.gov or the guy, which is the guideline site.
The White House posted a dark, weird photograph of Kennedy earlier this week claiming he's ending the war on protein in America, which consumes more protein than almost every other nation on earth and consumes more animal protein per capita than every other country except for Iceland.
Maybe we're going to take them over next though.
We'll make them Americans, so we'll be number one there as well.
Besides the fact that around 99% of Americans meet or exceed the RDA of protein already, high protein intake requires increased animal product consumption.
In fact, eating real meat is a specific Maha demand.
Yet Kennedy, the supposed environmental steward, never mentions the environmental trade-offs such a diet entails.
Still, this mindset fits perfectly with the individualistic focus of health that wellness profiles are so good at marketing.
It's wild that they repeat natural at every turn when their prescribed actions are destroying nature at such a rapid pace.
The fundamental problem with these guidelines and with Maha overall is their selective skepticism.
They apply rigorous standards to evidence that contradicts their preferred conclusions while accepting weaker evidence that supports them.
Their recommendations appear science-based, but as we're well aware, they actually reflect Kennedy's predetermined viewpoints.
These new guidelines are written for wannabe biohackers who eat like fucking children, not for functional Adults are actually concerned about their health.
And let me just say, I actually know children who ate way better than what I see on fucking Paul Saladino and Dave Asprey's feed.
No matter how many times Kennedy repeats gold standard science, a truly evidence-based approach would acknowledge uncertainty honestly, apply consistent evidentiary standards, prioritize RCTs with clinical endpoints, avoid inflammatory language about specific nutrients, consider implementation barriers and actually address the social determinants of health,
and recognize limitations of all evidence, not just evidence against preferred positions.
You know, all the things that actual experts already do, but Kennedy has never been concerned with evidence.
He's trained as an activist lawyer, and he's applying the same standards as he has throughout his career, just like his boss.
Growing up in Jersey in the 80s, we all knew Trump was morally bankrupt.
He was a fucking punchline.
And this led him to bankrupting most every business he touched.
And somehow, through the forces of modern-day America, Trump saw Kennedy and thought, yeah, game recognized game.
Tragically, for us, the game that Kennedy is playing is going to bankrupt the health of this nation.