There's definitely some massive improvements in these guidelines. Just seeing a big steak at the top warms my heart, as someone who's seen tremendous health improvements from eating Carnivore.
But I assume a lot of compromises were made with industry groups. Because there's actually internal contradictions in them.
Nina Teicholtz (author of the mind-blowing book "The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet") has a substack article on the new guidelines: https://unsettledscience.substack.com/p/butter-is-not-back-the-broken-promise.
In it, she details some of the contradictions. Mainly, there's a recommendation to eat more beef and whole fat dairy, and use more butter and tallow (beef fat). However, the 10% cap on saturated fat remains, just like before.
...the new guidelines will be contradictory. The general public will read about tallow and butter, see pictures of red meat amply illustrated in the pyramid, and may eat accordingly—ignoring the fine print about the 10% cap. For this audience, the guidelines may actually shift behavior toward more animal fats and nutrient-dense proteins.
But there’s another audience: the roughly 30 million children eating school lunches daily, plus military personnel, and the vulnerable populations—elderly and poor Americans—who receive food through federal programs, roughly 1 in 4 Americans each week. These programs are required by law to follow the Dietary Guidelines. For them, the numerical cap will trump any contrary language about butter and tallow. Cafeteria managers and program administrators will continue to adhere to the 10% limit, because that’s what the law requires.
And here's some details on what meals would be like, still adhering to the 10% limit on saturated fats:
Here’s the fundamental problem: how can anyone eat butter, tallow, and red meat while adhering to the 10% cap? They can’t. The messages are impossible to reconcile.
The 10% cap means approximately 20-22 grams of saturated fat daily for the average 2,000-calorie diet. Here’s what that looks like in practice:
• 1 cup whole-fat yogurt for breakfast: ~5 grams
• 1 chicken thigh with skin, cooked in 1 tablespoon butter for dinner: ~12 grams
Total: ~17 grams of saturated fat
That’s nearly your entire day’s allowance in just two modest meals—no cheese, no butter on your vegetables. Add a splash of cream in your coffee and you’re over the limit.
Or consider another day:
• 2 eggs cooked in 1 tablespoon of butter: ~13 grams
• 4 oz ribeye steak: ~6 grams
• Broccoli with 1 tablespoon butter: ~7 grams
Total: ~26 grams of saturated fat
Already over the limit—and you’ve only eaten two meals. Anyone actually following the 10% cap will need to continue cooking with seed oils while limiting whole milk, cheese, and red meat.
Butter is not back. Steak is not back. Tallow will not be on the menu anytime soon—at least not for anyone trying to follow federal nutrition advice.
If you'd like to look at the guidelines directly, here's the link - https://cdn.realfood.gov/DGA.pdf.
Thats a good write-up.
In college (in the 90s) my first real "IT job" was working for the cafeteria system at university. They were just beginning to computerize their entire menu / ordering system.
The FDA guidelines basically ran everything. Meaning, menus were computed from "what percentage of food groups should a student eat in a 24 hr period", then menus were calculated to satisfy that. There was no free-form "maybe we should offer chicken and dumpling on Tuesdays....", tuesdays dinner was computed from what was allowable via guidelines from breakfast/lunch.
I bet this contradiction is based all around the economics....if they changed the actual percentage guidelines, it would likely massively affect the economics (ie. real butter is more expensive than fake butter, tallow is 4x the price of seed oils, etc).
So "real food" guidelines would wind up causing all those school systems to blow out their food budget instantly....
Really interesting, thanks for the comment. If you'd ever want to explore that in more detail, I think lots of people would be interested, I certainly would.
And...yes, tallow is much more expensive. However at a personal/home level, it can be super cheap. Far cheaper than butter.
How's that? Here's what I do. I buy beef fat trimmings from a local grocery store. I only pay $0.49 a pound, and sometimes they give it away.
I render the fat trimmings into tallow. So overall, with maybe 50 percent waste, I'm paying $1/lb.
My job wasn't that glamorous, basically I was a glorified data-entry person (only tech stuff was I had to extract and normalize the data from CSV sources). I was responsible for getting all the nutritional stats of the various food items (chicken breast = X grams fat, Y grams protein, etc). Basically had to build the equivalent of a cron job that extracted data from CSV sources and regularly updated the database.
There was another data entry group (from university accounting dept) that did same with the cost info.
The program itself acted as a filter. So the university cafeteria system directors would have a budget, which included both a nutritional and money budget. So, if their budget was $10 per student per day, when they entered their breakfast choices, then lunch monetary and nutritional budgets would be debited according to their choices, etc..
In the end the menus are computed as "what can we fit where" (to be clear, they didn't start at breakfast and work down, they usually started with dinner and worked up....so breakfast usually received the least choices).
But it got complicated because in addition to just money + nutrition, they also had to take in account religious / lifestyle choice. So each meal needed to have a "non pork" or "vegetarian" option, these mandates further constrained choice.
WIth the right market incentives (basically more people demanding real butter / tallow), no doubt we could eventually reduce the disparity in cost....as you said lots of it is considered waste.
Also no reason they couldn't have "tallow blends" (beef, poultry, pork) to achieve their price requirements.
To me, the best thing about RFK being in this position is that now people that vote Democrat are questioning the health advise handed out by a monopoly and deeply flawed system of health over-sight.
The people should not be listening to some politically appointed doctors (compromised at that) telling them what to do. It should be a market and competition based system where no one entity makes decisions for the nation.
It wouldn't be perfect but this monopoly approach has massive problems. Problems that RFK has discussed for years. But since RFK is a democrat he thinks the best action is to take over the institution instead of destroy it.
Sometimes I feel like we learned nothing from Covid. We still have all the same government systems that were able to lock down trade and free movement. Virtually no one gets that the root issue is centralize power and trust in authorities.
Even those that seem to get it don't really seem to get that if a local health department can shut down a business... they can shut all of them down...
Voting doesn't fix this. We live in a time where we already have competing ways of keeping companies responsible that are far faster acting than these old systems. But since most people don't understand market forces and have this religious belief in the state and democracy they just fall for the same trap.
I'm glad the food recommendations are better but the root issue is that we have an FDA/CDC. They should be competing with alternatives and held to account by everyone. Not politicians who sell the positions for support. Not by companies who buy their approvals.
I just talked to a friend of mine, a nurse. She actually leads "healthier living" groups at a VA hospital, trying to help people eat healthier and get more exercise.
She was pretty skeptical about the changes. "Whole fat milk!", scary!
Yes, we've had the carnivore discussion. I don't engage on that topic anymore.
I think ESPECIALLY if people work in health care - unless they're skeptical, open-minded and curious - they've had 50 years of propaganda telling them that whole milk, meat, butter, etc, are unhealthy. They're not going to turn on a dime, or indeed ever.
That 10% cap jumped out at me too.
Once you've eliminate most of the calories from grains and seed oils, you're going to be getting a lot of calories from fats and the remaining fats, whether animal or plant based, are often highly saturated.
As you point out, there's really not any good evidence that saturated fats are unhealthy.