Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a plan for your kitchen, and he has been unusually specific about it
In a recent interview with<a href="https://health.usnews.com/health-care/articles/how-rfk-jr-s-new-nutrition-education-plans-for-medical-school-will-change-healthcare-now” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>U.S. News, the secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services laid it out. Medical students will take cooking classes, then “go out into the communities and teach people how to cook in a mobile unit.” The roughly 5,000 uniformed officers of the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps are “taking nutrition classes and developing teaching kitchens.” A new federal platform will post recipes for eating well on $10 a day, plus videos on grocery shopping and—his words—”how to use cutlery and cutting boards.” The diagnosis behind thewhole program, offered at aconferencein March: “people have forgotten how to cook.”
Maybe some have. Americans could certainly stand to cook more. But the institution volunteering to teach them has spent 46 years issuing dietary instruction with total confidence, reversing much of it, and responding to each failure by extending its reach
The current doctrine arrived onJanuary 7, when Kennedy and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins released the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The advisory committee’s 453-page report was thrown out—”incomprehensible,” Kennedy called it—and replaced with a document under 10 pages and a new food pyramid,flippedliterally upside down
Red meat, whole milk, and healthy fats now occupy the wide top. Grains huddle in the tip, where fat used to live.Butter and beef talloware back on the approved list. Added sugar is capped at 10 grams a meal. And Americans are told to shun “highly processed” food, a category the government urges you to avoid while its own Food and Drug Administration, a year into the effort, still cannotdefineit. Is canned soup processed? Yogurt? Baby formula? The document doesn’t say
Some of the new advice may even be sound. America plainly has a serious weight problem: According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 35 percent of American adults self-report beingobese, nearly twice the 19 percent average across member countries. But the institution volunteering to solve this problem spent decades giving Americans nutrition advice it now says was unsound
Washington has issueddietary guidelinesevery five years since 1980, when it first told Americans to fear fat. The food industry obliged in its fashion: “Low-fat” became the marketing seal of an era, and sugar filled the space the fat left behind. In 1992, the doctrine got its monument, the Food Guide Pyramid which boasted six to 11 daily servings of bread, cereal, rice, and pasta at the base, and banished all fats to the tip, filing olive oil next to lard. Every schoolchild in America memorized it. It aged like a tub of margarine in a hot Buick.
Thestoryof how that pyramid got built is worth slowing down for. The Department of Agriculture had a version ready in 1991. Meat and dairy producers saw where their products sat on it and objected, and the department pulled the finished graphic back and spent another year revising it. The eventual pyramid was not simply what the science said. It was what survived the room
Thirty-five years later, Kennedy arrived with a new pyramid and the opposite answer. The menu had changed but the conceit had not: that Americans’ eating habits are a problem for federal bureaucracy to manage
In between came MyPyramid in 2005, an abstract staircase nobody could read, and MyPlate in 2011, which quietly retired the pyramid altogether. Eggs were condemned, then pardoned. Fat was the killer until sugar was. And through every revision, despite all that official certainty, the country grew heavier: adult obesity ran near23 percentin the early 1990s and hit40 percentby 2021. Whatever the guidelines were accomplishing, it was not health
These guidelines determine what nearly 30 million children are served at school on a typical day. They shape the food available through the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. They govern meals served to troops and veterans. In March, theCenters for Medicare and Medicaid Servicestold hospitals to review their menus, therapeutic diets, and food purchasing against the new guidance. Washington’s nutrition theories do not remain theories for long. They materialize on lunch trays, in grocery carts, and beside hospital beds.
Supporters of the current guidance may think that’s a good thing. But the next administration will inherit the whole nutrition apparatus and can point it wherever it likes
A government that has revised its dietary doctrine every five years for half a century should be the last institution on earth building permanent machinery to deliver the current one at national scale. The department that gave us the Food Pyramid should not be trusted to patrol the menu. It can sit at the table like everyone else, and pass the salt
