What the MAHA movement gets wrong about meat

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited West Virginia on March 28 to promote his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) agenda at an event where he cruelly criticized state Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s weight. Kennedy suggested that he would host a public weigh-in and celebration once Morrisey had shed 30 pounds, and Kennedy had an idea about how the governor could do it: “We’re going to put him on a carnivore diet,” Kennedy said.

Weeks before, science journalist and meat enthusiast Nina Teicholz argued in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “Meat Will Make America Healthy Again” that when the US government updates its dietary guidelines this year, it needs to keep meat and other animal proteins firmly at the center of the plate.

“The Trump administration can ensure that federal dietary guidelines recognize the role of high-quality protein in improving Americans’ health,” Teicholz wrote. (In her view, “high-quality protein” comes from animals, while protein from plants is “inferior.”)

Meat industry groups, such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Board, have made similar pleas. Lucky for them, Kennedy and US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins — who so far has acted in lockstep with the meat industry — are in charge of publishing the new federal dietary guidelines, which are updated every five years.

But the push to get Americans to eat more meat goes against what the government’s own nutrition experts recommend. In December, a government-commissioned expert committee recommended the federal dietary guidelines be updated to encourage Americans to eat less red and processed meat and more protein from plant-based sources, like beans and lentils.

And it’s unclear what era of meat supremacy Teicholz means to invoke when she says meat and other animal proteins will make America healthy again. Americans are eating more meat — and other animal products — than ever, and it doesn’t seem to be making us any healthier, though, as rates of diet-related diseases like cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes remain high.

Teasing apart cause and effect in nutrition research is notoriously messy and complicated, and our high levels of meat consumption alone can’t explain America’s high rates of chronic disease — other factors, like consumption of highly processed sugary and salty foods, along with rates of exercise, alcohol and tobacco intake, health care access, and exposure to pollution, also determine health outcomes. But study after study has found that high meat consumption can increase our risk of diet-related chronic diseases.

While many Americans might like to hear that our abnormally high levels of meat consumption is actually healthy and virtuous — and that we need to eat even more of it — nutrition research largely shows that we would be better off if we did the very opposite.

A significant body of research shows that when people eat more healthy plant-based foods, like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and legumes, they can lower their risk of heart disease, certain types of cancer, Type 2 diabetes, and premature death. When they eat more meat — especially red and processed meats — they can increase that risk. Two recently published studies bear this out.

Last week, a paper published in the journal Nature Medicine found that eating more plant-based foods — along with fewer animal products and ultraprocessed foods — is linked to a higher likelihood of healthy aging, defined as reaching 70 years of age without suffering from major chronic diseases and maintaining good cognitive, mental, and physical health.

“Our findings suggest that dietary patterns rich in plant-based foods, with moderate inclusion of healthy animal-based foods, may enhance overall healthy aging,” the researchers wrote. (There are many reasons to eat a fully plant-based diet, like animal welfare and environmental sustainability, but there isn’t a strong case to be made that optimal health requires forgoing animal products entirely.)

Weeks earlier, a paper published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine found that butter consumption was linked to increased risk of both cancer mortality and mortality overall, while consumption of plant-based seed oils was associated with lower overall mortality, along with lower cancer and cardiovascular disease deaths.

The general consensus that more plants and less meat can improve public health has been promoted by the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and leading medical institutions. It has also driven the EAT-Lancet Commission, a large, global committee of nutrition and sustainability experts, to advocate for a diet that would reduce the average American’s consumption of meat by about 75 percent.

For a time, going in that direction seemed like it might be possible. Americans ate less meat during the Great Recession, even if it was done primarily to save money rather than improve personal health. And through the 2010s, the term “flexitarian” rose to prominence as a significant share of Americans told pollsters they were cutting back on meat while the benefits of plant-based eating entered the zeitgeist thanks to celebrities like Beyoncé and Lizzo. By the early 2020s, the hype around new-and-improved plant-based meat and milk products from startup darlings Beyond Meat, Oatly, and Impossible Foods became inescapable.

But this all proved to be more show than substance — American consumption of meat, dairy, and eggs has only increased over the last decade.

And the proverbial vibe has shifted from the days of buzzy Impossible burgers and skipping meat on Mondays. The health halo around “plant-based” products has worn thin — in part due to flimsy science and a mass PR campaign funded by the meat industry — while meat consumption is once again culturally ascendant, as The Atlantic’s Yasmin Tayag captured last week. The signs are everywhere, Tayag notes: declining plant-based meat sales, America’s protein fixation, the rise of the “manosphere,” and the belief of some of its loudest voices that masculinity requires eating lots of meat.

Messages of moderation in the annals of American nutrition research appear to be no match against the popularity of carnivore diet devotees, protein maxxing, and MAHA-aligned health influencers who rail against cooking with seed oils while praising butter and beef tallow.

After decades of government hesitance to confront the roots of America’s biggest diet-related health crises, Kennedy and the MAHA coalition’s promises to challenge large food companies and address chronic disease head-on is refreshing. But its prescription is more vibes and anecdotes than evidence. The MAHA coalition doesn’t appear to ever question our high levels of animal product consumption, for example, but rather wants to increase it, and in supposedly “natural” forms: raw milk over nondairy milk, butter and beef tallow over seed oils, and grass-fed beef over feedlot beef.

In this way, many MAHA supporters fall prey to the same fallacy of many liberal food reformers: the belief that only what is “natural” is good. But milk is now pasteurized because raw milk can make people terribly sick, plant-based seed oils are likely healthier than butter, and grass-fed beef is worse for the planet and hardly better for you.

While beans and lentils are less protein-dense than meat — and are less easily digested, as Teicholz rightly points out in her op-ed, if only slightly — they’re also free of cholesterol, extremely low in saturated fat, and loaded with fiber, which, unlike protein, more than 90 percent of Americans are deficient in. (And they’re still a great source of protein.)

Calls to make America healthy again by eating more meat than ever may be politically popular — who doesn’t want to feel empowered to do something that for so long people have been made to feel bad about? But there is a cost to this collective dismissal of nutrition and public health research: Some research has shown that countries would save on health care costs if their citizens ate more plant-rich diets.

If the Trump administration is sincere about cost cutting, and RFK Jr. is sincere about making America healthier, they both ought to take that advice to heart.

Clarification, April 11, 12:15 pm ET: This story was originally published April 3 and has been updated to clarify the language around Nina Teicholz’s views on government dietary guidelines.