I don't understand people freaking out over this - outside of a purely political reflex - hell hath no fury like taking away nerds' Mountain Dew and Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.
Personally I'm not a fan of any diet that recommends high meat consumption and I say that as someone who eats everything.
Cattle outweighs the total livestock on this planet by a 10 to 1 factor.
While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment, they seem to always ignore the extreme cost on the environment and pollution caused by cattle. Even focusing on CO2 emissions by industry avoids the elephant of the room of the insane levels of methane produced by cows, a gas that's 200 times more harmful.
There is little evidence that a meat heavy diet is good for people, but there's plenty of evidence of the contrary.
So, to be honest, while I don't freak out and I'm all for freedom, there has to be also some kind of consciousness into how do we use the resources on this planet, and diet is by far more impactful than the transport of choice.
> While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment, they seem to always ignore the extreme cost on the environment and pollution caused by cattle.
While governments and politicians generally like to portray themselves as being driven by morals, they are actually driven almost entirely by economic interests.
> So, to be honest, while I don't freak out and I'm all for freedom, [...]
Well, I would like the freedom to live on a planet with an intact ecosystem. I also think that animals would like the freedom to live a life free from unnecessary exploitation.
> [...] and diet is by far more impactful than the transport of choice.
Both are high-impact areas, but changing your diet is much easier than changing your choice of transport - in some countries. Transport emissions account for about 25% of all emissions, 60% of which are caused by individuals' use of cars.
And after all of this, we haven't even touched on what fishing is doing to our oceans.
Not the one that put out that statement
If we phrased it from a carbon perspective that would probably help it be more popular, at least for beef which is a huge methane emitter.
It seems odd not to include cattle in total livestock.
You could add all the squirrels, elephants, lions, cats, birds, all of those, and you're not even at a fraction of mass of the cows we grow.
https://youtu.be/sGG-A80Tl5g?si=yFnHO9cX3apu1yBh
I think cows get to much blame
I think that incredibly biased channel and extensively criticized video gets too much credit
The issue is that "Ultra-Processed" does not mean "candy and sugary drinks" and even "sugary drinks" is overly broad. Can SNAP pay for sugar-free Coke but not classic coke? What about Gatorade?
SNAP already had reasonable restrictions. This very much feels like a "middle management style" project. Dedicating resources to a nebulously defined BIG project regardless of whether or not it actually improves outcomes.
So yea, how about drinking water as your primary source of hydration?
If you are poor, the last thing you need is Diabetes, Cancer, Hypertension, Cardiovascular disease, etc.
The problem also is there is a huge amount of fraud with SNAP with people claiming benefits for multiple people and then reselling their SNAP cards to just make cash. The people buying the endless cases of Mountain Dew often have just bought a 50% discounted SNAP card off some other person who isn't starving at all.
And where is the evidence of widespread fraud? The MAGA crowd keep pretending everything government is full of fraud, but they keep faring abysmally at finding said fraud. The problem is not fraud, but wasted effort. Most things government involve a lot of duplication of effort because everyone wants a piece of the pie. And all too often they spend a dollar to save a dime. A pair of examples illustrates the problem:
1) My wife tried to buy what turned out to be a 31 pound watermelon. Oops, has to be weighed on a properly certified scale to be allowed to sell it--and every such scale they have only goes to 30 pounds. Once the problem was identified the manager proposed a simple solution: sell it to us for the price of 30 pounds of watermelon. Not even a minute.
2) DMV. They made a field too short, two people used different abbreviations to fit into the field, the registrations didn't match and the unused portion of the old registration that should have transferred over didn't. By the time it was fixed IIRC 4 people had been involved, something like an hour passed. Over what turned out to be $6. (Not that I knew the number when I squawked.) The vast majority of that time was spent trying to document to the system that it was proper. Nobody with the authority to simply say moving this money is proper, do it.
And the related problem of politicians always wanting to visibly do something. Lots of duplicated effort because of this. Locally, several professional type fields require a separate business entity for every licensee even if they are part of something else that is licensed. A few hundred dollars a year per person for absolutely no benefit to society.
You are proposing eliminating fraud by eliminating the system. "You can't have failing tests if you have no tests"
Might as well tell people they also just need to eat plain rice for every meal too.
I get there is some fraud on SNAP. I know people on SNAP. Most of them use every single cent on decent food. I've seen fraud, though. In Chicago I would place a bet that most non-chain convenience stores will sell you cigarettes on SNAP. Some of them absolutely sell weed on SNAP.
I'm glad to see this announcement and despite the leadership in Washington right now I don't think these adjustment will be seen as too controversial by the American public. The recommendations are based on a lot of good nutritional science that's been out there for years, but the buck seems to stop at the conversation around fat.
They went to great lengths to remove the debate around good fat vs bad fat from this discussion. Even reading the report, emphasis is put on the discussion of why we use so many pressed oils in the food chain, but not why we phased lard and shortening out of the American diet.
"Eat real butter" is ostensibly a recommendation presented at the bottom of the webpage, but butter is not a healthy fat. Same with some people's obsession with frying in beef tallow, but the report doesn't want to dig into this distinction for obvious self interested reasons. They even recommend:
> When cooking with or adding fats to meals, prioritize oils with essential fatty acids, such as olive oil. Other options can include butter or beef tallow.
Which is a good recommendation. But no, you don't want to replace olive oil with butter or beef tallow. There's a lot of good nutrition science to back this up, but the report would prefer to not go there. Maybe "eat some butter" is appropriate, but unless the FDA wants to have an honest conversation around HDL and LDL cholesterol and saturated fats, I don't see this inverted pyramid doing too much good for overall population health (besides raising awareness)
Regarding fat I think "eat real whole unprocessed food" is a simple way to cover it. These guideliness recommend using less added fat including avoiding deep frying, and if one must use fat to use a minimally processed (i.e. pressed or rendered) form like olive oil or coconut oil or butter or animal fat. Though they failed to mention the distinction between refined and unrefined olive oil - today much of it is refined i.e. highly processed.
But regardless I have it on very good authority that with the BBB some within the Republican party wanted to limit EBT to only be able to purchase healthy food. No soda, no candy, no chips, etc. A couple calls from Coke, Pepsi, etc lobbyists shot that down.
The success of SNAP comes despite its inherent inefficiency, friction, and the indignity of its limitations. We structure the program the way we do in order to mollify voters who twitch at the idea of the poor ever enjoying anything.
Inequality isn't just about healthcare costs, biological metrics, etc. It is also deeply corrosive socially and psychologically, and this side of things is systemically underappreciated in policy circles.
To be sure, our food and diets are bad. Americans broadly should eat healthier. But are society's interests really better served by insisting that a poor child not be allowed to have a cake and blow out the candles on his birthday, the way all of his friends do?
Fucking hell, if this is true, I don't know how those people sleep at night. Really, It's a failure if my imagination, but I don't imagine how people like this function. I'm sure I've done my share of indirect harm in this world, one way or the other, but being so on the nose about it would make me absolutely nauseous.
Most liberals I know think they shouldn't but that its stupid to police this aspect of people's behavior if they are on EBT. Most liberals might even feel more comfortable regulating everyone's behavior by taxing unhealthy foods than they would just bothering poor people with it.
I can think of one issue here. Ultra-processed foods, candy, and sugary drinks are cheap and shelf-stable. They're cheap because they're subsidized. Fruits and vegetables are more expensive, and they don't last very long. So a person on a very limited SNAP budget will get less food under the new restrictions.
The answer, of course, is to make it so that fresh produce and other healthy options are cheaper than the junk food. I have a hard time seeing that happening, given how susceptible the administration is to being "lobbied".
For example, hot dogs are ultra-processed. Obviously hot dogs are not the healthiest food but also obviously "franks and beans" is a pretty good meal for a tight budget and is something you should be able to get with SNAP.
For the most bang for your buck you want to be eating less expensive real protein like chicken and pork and filling up on salads. Limit carb intake from beans and other starches. Prefer fruit for carbs because it has fiber and vitamins you can't get anywhere else.
I'm confused by these statements. How are you deciding to measure the quantity of "food"? If you see food as a means to deliver nutrients, fresh produce is already far cheaper than junk food.
From the perspective of your body, you can sustain yourself much better on a smaller amount of nutrient dense calories than a larger amount of empty ones. Obesity is not merely an overconsumption of calories or a measure of food or body mass.
For example at one store there was confusion as to why a ready to eat cup of cut fruit packaged with a plastic spoon from the store's deli department was ineligible, but a slice of cake packaged with a plastic fork from the store's bakery was eligible. Apparently the cake being made with flour makes it OK, regardless of how much sugar is in the cake and the icing.
SNAP changes like this may be better on a population health level, to be sure. On this I have no evidence. But each restriction placed on food for people living in destitution may mean some people go hungry. (And this excludes issues of caloric density.) I would like to see better data, but sadly, there is none.
But if I had an empty kitchen, lacked the funds to invest in bulk purchases, and had 30 minutes to cook and eat, I'd be eating very differently.
I'm not sure if you mean buying pre-prepared meals is expensive. If that's what you are saying, I agree.
But if you're stating that preparing meals (at your own place from raw ingredients) is expensive. That's simply not true, at all.
The sources of those macronutrients also matter. The ideal range for saturated fat is 5-10% of total calories. Meat consumption, especially red meat, is associated with higher risk of colorectal cancer. Dairy consumption is associated with higher risk of prostate cancer.
I haven't read the new guidelines in detail but if they're recommending red meat and whole milk as primary foods, then they are not consistent with the research on cancer and cardiovascular disease risk and I doubt that people following them would meet the AMDRs or ideal saturated fat intake.
Your point about the sources mattering isn't tangential; it's the entire point. The reason the AMDR exists is to encourage good sources. A diet of 65% white sugar and 25% butter isn't exactly what it had in mind though, and it's those sources you want to scrutinize more heavily.
Even for red meat though, when you control for cohort effects, income, and whatnot, and examine just plain red meat without added nitrites or anything, the effect size and study power diminishes to almost nothing. It's probably real, but it's not something I'm especially concerned about (I still don't eat much red meat, but that's for unrelated reasons).
To put the issue to scale, if you take the 18% increased risk in colorectal cancer from red meats as gospel (ignoring my assertions that it's more important to avoid hot dogs than lean steaks), or, hell, let's double that to 36%, your increased risk of death from the intervention of adding a significant portion of red meat to your diet is only half as impactful as the intervention of adding driving to your daily activities.
The new guidelines seem to be better than just recommending more steaks anyway. They're not perfect, but I've seen worse health advice.
I would agree that with proper knowledge and planning, it's possible to reduce carbs and increase protein/unsaturated fats while maintaining adequate fiber and micronutrients. But in practice, I think it's much more common to see people taking low-carb diet recommendations as a license to eat a pound or more of meat per day, drink gallons of milk per week, and completely ignore fiber intake, which is objectively not healthy.
Maybe different areas of expertise aren’t equally valid, and even good experts often can’t see the forest for the trees in terms of developing actionable advice.
The only recommendations to limit fish that I have seen are due to mercury exposure risks:
https://www.fda.gov/food/consumers/advice-about-eating-fish
Coal burning and incidental industrial releases drastically increased the amount of mercury in surface waters over the past century. The released mercury gets transformed by bacteria into organomercury compounds which are lipophilic and concentrate up the food chain, meaning that predator fish like tuna and swordfish can contain orders of magnitude more mercury than the water they live in.
There are plenty of fish with much lower mercury levels (like salmon, trout, and sardines):
https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/mer...
You can eat all the salmon you want without worrying about mercury, and I haven't seen government advice to the contrary.
Those people are worse than Astrologers.
At least astrologers stick to their fantasy, while, since I remember being old enough to count, I already lost track of how many times they've told us that "eggs are bad" and then "eggs are good" again, and then bad, and good, and... I've lost track.
Then they told us to eat cereal at breakfast, and that bread and potatoes are the basis of a good diet, then that fat is the killer and then that we should replace butter with plant based alternatives and the list goes on.
Nutritionists aren't scientists. They aren't even good at basic logic and coherence. So, no, I don't want them in charge of dictating policies.
This new JFK Jr diet has something in common with the Paleo "cave man" diet, which at least makes some sense in the argument ("this is what our bodies have evolved to eat") if not the specifics. I'm not sure where the emphasis on milk/cheese and eggs comes from since this all modern, not hunter-gatherer, and largely unhealthy, and putting red-meat at the top (more cholesterol, together with the eggs), and whole grain at the bottom makes zero sense - a recipe for heart attacks and colon cancer.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/07/rfk-jr-nutrition-guidelines-...
With regards to dairy, it's more about a person's individual reaction to it. It's a similar argument with nutrient density (since milk is intended for growing offspring, obviously it's going to be very nutrient dense). The downside is potential inflammation or not having the enzymes to process it.
I would definitely not lump eggs and dairy as "bad" in any way though.
Also, the "cholesterol" thing is a very bad thing to focus on. Cholesterol is not bad! You need cholesterol. (What do you think cell membranes are partially composed of?
Whole grains are not as good as you think. Often, they're made from strains that are optimized for growing and robustness not nutrition. Also, unless you're exercising a lot you really don't need much in the way of carbs.
There is also not a very strong connection between dietary cholesterol and serum levels, anyway.
As far as eggs and dairy go, sure they are healthy for who is meant to be consuming them - baby chickens and baby mammals, but that doesn't mean they are good for us in excess.
There have been, and continue to be, so may flip flops in dietary recommendations and what is good/bad for you, that it seems common sense is a better approach. All things in moderation, and indeed look to what our relatively recent ancestors have been eating to get an idea of what our bodies are evolved to eat - whole foods and not processed ones and chemical additives.
Your body produces cholesterol naturally, without any meat or dairy. In my case it actually produces way more than I need, even on a vegan diet, because of genetic factors. People should test their LDL and evaluate whether eating cholesterol is healthy _for themselves_ as it’s different for everyone.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/looking-to-bu...
There was a story about this in the NYT recently (can't find it) and IIRC, it basically said protein is out and fiber is in. It wasn't that simple, but that was my takeaway.
A glass of water with psylium husk a day and you solve a lot of modern diet problems.its also super cheap,a $20 bag can last you a year.
Just because an article comes from Harvard doesn't mean it's correct -- Harvard scientists were also behind the original food pyramid, and were likely paid off by the sugar industry.
Turns out just slowing down digestion can have a lot of benefits.
Also, most Americans eat very, very little fiber. Anything is an improvement. I believe the FDA recommendation is 30 grams a day, and most Americans eat, like, 2.
However, most Americans are not deficient in protein. They eat lots of meat, and very little veggies.
I sometimes wonder if the complexity of the human body doesn't stop us from seeing things that can have great positive effect on a set of people because it's counteracted by the effect on another set of people so the result in the whole is cancelled out. I now wonder if the statistic methods used in these studies take this into account.
All this to say that I approve of controlled self-experimentation, but you need to be very rigorous and brutally honest. Most people are not.
If you're on a low-carb diet you should supplement fiber.
The entire problem is that most people in high- and middle-income countries are in fact doing something blatantly wrong - they are consistently eating vastly more calories than they use. Some of those people are ignorant of what 2000 to 2500 calories actually looks like, some are deluded, but a very large proportion know damned well that they're eating far too much and do it anyway.
The obesogenic environment that we now live in is partly due to the influence of the processed foods industry, but in large part it's simply a product of abundance. Before the late 20th century, it was simply inconceivable that poor people could afford to become morbidly obese. Agricultural productivity has improved beyond all recognition and the world is flooded with incredibly cheap food of all kinds.
We've spent the last few decades trying to push back against that with all manner of initiatives intended to endgender behavioural change, with very little success. It doesn't really matter what guidance we give people when they have shown a consistent inability or unwillingness to follow it.
If we're actually serious about the effects of diet on public health, I think there are only two credible options - extremely heavy-handed regulation, or the mass prescribing of GLP-1 receptor agonists. All of the other options are just permutations of "let's do more of the thing that hasn't worked".
There was a temporary period where I had some GI issues from changing what I ate very abruptly, but that wore off as my gut bacteria adapted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cholesterol#Medical_guidelines...
https://www.heart.org/en/news/2023/08/25/heres-the-latest-on...
"Most studies regarding cholesterol are bought and paid for by the egg industry. "
An actual steak or hamburger ground at a butcher would be a pretty gigantic step up for most people.
It's a fad diet being recommended, and parts of the advice being good don't make it good overall.
Because poor people should be allowed to enjoy some of life's pleasures as well.
All you have to do is look at this food pyramid and the old food pyramid and ask "if I had to feed one of these a week to my kid which would I pick".
It's clearly superior and it's just sad that people are so just defiant to good, for who knows what reasons.
The restrictions on SNAP are insidious because SNAP is supposed to enable one to live a normal life -- and that includes occasionally buying things that are not "healthy" in a bubble. The mantra that many health professionals will use is "there are no unhealthy foods, only unhealthy diets". Combine all that background with traditional stigma associated with SNAP/food stamp benefits and a picture starts to emerge of why policy was to embrace more foods and how this administration is often called the "administration of harm".
My understanding is that it adds a complex layer of regulation where one did not previously exist. Large retailers and grocers have the systems that can accurately track this. (Essentially: does your POS have the ability to sync with the Federally Approved Foods For Poors list or not.)
Smaller convenience stores (more common in places where poor people live) are less likely to have the resources be able to comply. Rather than get sanctioned for accidentally selling a Gatorade on SNAP, they will simply pull out of SNAP altogether. This means that even the non-sugary foods they have will no longer be available to people on SNAP.
The net effect is expected to be to remove SNAP purchasing ability from entire geographies. I understand the effect is expected to be most pronounced in rural and dense urban areas.
Its an addiction. Try taking away an alcoholic's alcohol and sit back and enjoy the infinite rationalizations about how its heart healthy and lowers stress and its just a couple a night, etc etc.
Its not like it is a tan suit.
Why should I trust them with the food pyramid? How do I know if anyone who actually has expertise was consulted when his signature move has been axe experts and bring in “skeptics” with no actual background since day 1?
I’m supposed to play ball and accept health advice from the antivaxxer who has led to countless unnecessary deaths? Who walked up with the president and said “Tylenol is linked to autism” with no evidence?
No way.
Edit: it’s worth mentioning that he and a bunch of “MAHA” proponents cite the natural and healthy food in Europe but never want to use the dirty word that makes it happen: regulation. If we are serious about unhealthy additives and other food concerns, then we need robust regulations. They aren’t serious about change. It’s easy to go “we’re gonna have everyone eat healthy and natural stuff” but when it counts they won’t do what is necessary. [also toned down my heated language]
What I hate, and react against, is the package deal. We get a better food pyramid, but we also get antivax imbeciles and a resurgence in easily preventable diseases. We get an official nod of approval given to idiots who think you can treat cancer with "alternative" treatments. We get blaming autism on Tylenol with incomplete and inadequate data or, wait, maybe not, or maybe, or whatever that was.
I think it reflects a deeper problem though. The "crunchy" "natural" alt-med orbits have usually had better ideas about nutrition. They've historically been right about whole vs. processed foods, more protein and fats and less simple carbs, sugar being bad, etc. Unfortunately they've historically been wrong about most other things. They're wrong about vaccines, wrong about just how powerful and effective diets can be, mostly wrong about psych meds, and wrong about giving the nod to unmitigated quackery like homeopathy.
I also think that tends to be a common problem with any and all populism, whether left or right. The present establishment may be corrupt or broken, but replacing it is hard, especially when it tends to have a talent monopoly. "Serious" people who go into medicine go to college, then grad school / med school, then get licensed, etc., and pick up establishment views. The people who want to do medicine but don't take this path tend to be amateurs and quacks and weird ideologues.
Venezuela's been in the news lately. My understanding of what happened to their oil industry is: they had it working okay with professionals doing it, and then there was a populist revolution. Then they kicked out all the professionals. Then they had no idea how to run an oil industry. The professionals were linked to a foreign power and probably taking too much profit at the expense of the Venezuelan people, yes, but they also knew how to extract petrol.
Edit: You see more sympathy here than many other educated places for this stuff, and there's a reason for that.
I think CS people are extremely open to autodidactism, probably too open, and I think that's because CS and programming is one of the few serious fields where it is actually common for an autodidact to equal or exceed a trained professional.
The zero capital cost near-zero real world implication nature of computational experimentation facilitates this. You can just read open literature and sit and play until you get good and it harms nobody and costs almost nothing. Math is another field where there have been genius autodidacts that have made huge discoveries. The arts are obviously mostly like this, excluding those that are very hard to learn alone or have capital costs.
Medicine is definitely not a field like this. I don't think you can autodidact medicine. As a result, doctors outside the establishment are usually not good. There have been historical examples, but few, and most of them came up through the ranks of real medicine before pushing a radical idea that turned out to be right.
Also note that even in CS and math, most outsider ideas are wrong. Outsider ideas are kind of like high risk / high reward investments. It's very hard for anyone, insider-trained or not, to formulate a deeply contrarian or wholly original idea that is correct, but when someone does it makes the news because it's both rare and often high impact. The hundreds of thousands to millions of deeply contrarian or original ideas that were worthless or wrong don't make the news.
Regarding, smoking and bloodletting, the former was bought and paid for by industry, that is just fraud. For the latter, there are cases where bloodletting actually works. Medieval medicine isn't the backward thinking we often ascribe to it and many would argue that it wasn't a "Dark" ages at all. There are even modern instances where maggots are the best solution for cleaning wounds. Even given that history, the recent advances by people whose jobs I can't even begin to understand, can nuke my entire immune system to treat a cancer and bring me back to full health. That is not something an autodidactic can do.
Clearly if you eat a T-bone steak and half a dozen eggs daily combined with 25 pull-ups, you don’t need any vaccines.
My own opinion is that you should also get at least 0.5g fat to 1g protein as a baseline... more would be for energy in lieu of carbs.
