You could say that a lot of nutrition experts have a beef with the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans issued recently. The report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Department of Health and Human Services featured red meat and beef tallow quite prominently. This included a new pyramid scheme, so to speak, that flipped the longstanding traditional food pyramid upside down, point downwards— seemingly to make a new point. On the inverted pyramid’s upper left corner was “Protein, Dairy & Healthy Fats” along with a picture of raw beef where it might be among the first things you see in the diagram.
New Dietary Guidelines Mention The Importance Of Protein And Essential Fatty Acids
If you actually read the report, you’d find multiple mentions of red meat. One of the headings within the guidelines is “Prioritize Protein Foods at Every Meal,” under which was the following pro-protein statement: “Consume a variety of protein foods from animal sources, including eggs, poultry, seafood, and red meat, as well as a variety of plant-sourced protein foods, including beans, peas, lentils, legumes, nuts, seeds, and soy.” It is indeed important to have protein in your diet since the amino acids comprising protein do serve as needed key building blocks for various parts of your body—ranging from the cells in your blood and immune system to all your enzymes to your muscles, bones and skin.
There’s also the “Incorporate Healthy Fats” heading with the following fatty wrap: “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.” Essential fatty acids are pretty darn important, too. In fact, you could say that they are essential—being polyunsaturated fats that your body can’t produce on its own and that form key parts of your cell membranes, hormone regulation and organ functioning,
New Dietary Guidelines Mention Red Meat And Beef Tallow
While no nutrition expert should argue that protein and essentially fatty acids aren’t important to have in your diet, a big reason why so many are having a cow about all this is that there are other sources of protein besides red meat. Sure, red meat can be quite rich in protein as well as other important nutrients like iron, zinc, potassium, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12. But the relatively high saturated fat content of red meat could significantly increase your risk of cardiovascular disease. Red meat can also raise your risk of cancer due to the presence of heme iron and formation of potential carcinogens like heterocyclic amines and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons when the meat is cooked under high heat.
Therefore, the historical advice has been to limit your intake of red meat so that your saturated fat intake is no more than six percent of your daily calories, as outlined by the American Heart Association. Meanwhile, the American Cancer Society “recommends choosing proteins like poultry, fish, or plant-based proteins instead of red meat most of the time.” And let’s see who else has said something similar about red meat? Oh, that’s right, the WHO, the World Health Organization, which has emphasized that processed red meat like hot dogs bring additional health risks due to its high salt content and additional potential carcinogens.
Nutrition experts have also wondered why we’re far in the tallow now with 2025-2030 DGA. Beef tallow, as I clarified in Forbes in late 2024, is basically simmered and clarified cow fat from around their organs. It is also known as “beef drippings” and can be literally dripping with saturated fat. Plant-based cooking oils such as olive oil are comparatively lower in saturated fats while still providing the essential fatty acids. So it’s not clear what the scientific reasoning may be behind these sudden DGA “moo”-ves towards red meat and beef tallow.
It’s Not Clear What Evidence Is Behind These New Dietary Guidelines
You aren’t going to find many answers to this question from the rather brief nine-page DGA document itself, which doesn’t list the scientific rationale, evidence or studies behind either the new pyramid scheme or the prominent mentions of red meat and beef tallow. The 2017 National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine Optimizing the Process for Establishing the Dietary Guidelines for Americans report and 2020 NASEM Evaluating the Process to Develop the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025 report both offered recommendation as to how the DGA process can better build a prior scientific evidence, become more transparent and show more clearly to the public how the guidelines are linked to existing scientific evidence. But it looks like the 2025-2030 DGA process went the opposite direction—becoming about as transparent as beef stew,
In fact, food policy experts like Neena Prasad, MD, MPH, who is the Lead for Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Food Policy Program have struggled to figure out who exactly provided what for the 2025-2030 DGA. “It is interesting that when you look at the process, there is a dietary guideline advisory committee that was comprised of a group of nutrition experts that spent two years looking at the evidence, put forward that evidence in a report of recommendations in December 2024,” Prasad remarked. “In previous iterations of the guidelines, the recommendations of the advisory committee were largely followed, and if the guidelines did deviate from the recommendations of the committee, there was a solid justification for why that was.” She added, “In this case [the 2025-2030 DGA] almost half, if not more, of the recommendations of the committee were discarded.”
Some Have Claimed That The Beef And Dairy Industries Are Behind These Latest Dietary Guidelines
The other beef that nutrition and food policy experts have had about the 2025-2030 DGA is the potential influence of the beef industry on them. “We understand that HHS and the Department of Agriculture brought their own experts together in a somewhat opaque process to inform the guidelines,” Prasad said. “And it has come out that some of these individuals that they brought together have ties to the beef and dairy industries.” It is not unusual for nutrition experts to have done work with different parts of the food industry. However, the lack of transparency with the 2025-2030 DGA process in general does make you wonder who might have what ”steak” in red meat and beef tallow now being featured so prominently in the dietary guidelines.
