Lifestyle Sports: Latest from Food Politics: Is the Dietary Guidelines' prioritizing of meat about industry lobbying or personal ideology?

By Marion Nestle

February 12 2026

Is the Dietary Guidelines’ prioritizing of meat about industry lobbying or personal ideology?

In my post last week, “The government is actively promoting meat and dairy intake,” I said

The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans actively promote meat and dairy intake, especially full-fat dairy. The USDA has long acted as a marketing arm of those industries through its research and promotion (checkoff) programs.

I then noted that this government takes promotion to new levels through its milk mustache ads and pronouncements that we have ended the war on protein (protein has long been understood as a euphemism for meat).

I ended with this comment: “I chalk all this up to the extraordinary lobbying power of the meat and dairy industries.”

Whew. Did that ever get a response.

Readers raised two issues:

I. The guidelines and inverted pyramid give equal weight to plant foods.

That’s not how I read them. I see them as giving lip service to plants but prioritizing meat. They visually present meat most prominently in the interactive graphic at realfood.gov. Subsequent statements of the USDA and HHS secretaries also support this view. And then there are the authors with financial links to beef industry groups who wrote the scientific reports relevent to meat.

II. This is not about meat industry lobbying; it is about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr’s ideology. Well, yes. That too. “Ideology” refers to belief systems that structure views of the world. Everybody has them.

I, for example, am ideologically in favor of the dietary guidelines’ advice to eat real food and avoid highly processed food, but ideologically opposed to advice to prioritize animal protein over plant protein. I would argue that the vast preponderance of research supports that view.

People holding other ideological views disagree, evidently. They pick different studies to read and come to different conclusions.

Two members of the nine people writing scientific reviews for the guidelines assure me that their reviews are unbiased. But those reviews invariably reflect the ideology of the people who wrote them.

As I often point out, nutrition research is impossible to control rigorously, unless you lock people up for extended periods of time. That is why the best controlled studies, those done in monitored metabolic wards, can only be done for a few weeks at most. Diets are complicated; eaters are complicated; research is complicated. Complicated research requires interpretation. Interpretation depends on the interpreter’s particular ideology.

That is why appointing a diverse committee to look at research questions has its benefits; people with differing ideologies have to work out points of agreement.

I will say this for RFK, Jr. He makes his ideology clear. It prioritizes personal experience over science.

My ideology: We need science to distinguish anecdote from fact.

Let’s agree that on the meat priority issue, RFK Jr’s ideology fits well with meat industry objectives.

The meat industry has a long history of lobbying around dietary guidelines (see my book, Food Politics).

I have not seen specific reports of meat industry lobbying around the new dietary guidelines. Apparently, no lobbying was necessary.

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