Earlier this month, Americans were gifted a new food pyramid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., along with a slim 10-pager that urges us to "eat real food."
This is a clear echo of food author and activist Michael Pollan's sensible advice. While Pollan rightly followed that sentence with "mostly plants," the USDA − on the other hand − now says eat more meat.
The new food pyramid does make some important points. We should generally be avoiding ultra-processed foods, especially as research has illuminated links to rising colon cancer rates in young people. But in boiling down the national nutritional message to “eat real food,” the guidelines oversimplify the complexities of metabolism, ignoring the importance of how foods are broken down and ultimately stored in the body.
Take protein, for example. On the new pyramid’s website is the bold statement: “We are ending the war on protein.” To be clear, protein is part of a healthy diet, crucial for cellular functioning and muscle mass. But eat too much and that excess protein gets converted into and stored as fat. Americans eat about 20% more protein than they need. Lean proteins (like fish, beans, chicken) are routinely shown to be better than fatty meats (like steak, pork), which are rife with saturated fats. As “real” as red meat is, the findings that it increases risk for colon cancer are also real.
