RFK Jr. May Encourage Eating More Saturated Fats. Experts Say He's Missing the Point.
Story by Rachael Robertson
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is expected to unveil new dietary guidelines encouraging more consumption of foods high in saturated fats, but nutrition experts told MedPage Today this goes against established science -- including the recommendations of a substantial scientific report Kennedy has chosen to ignore.
The Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC), a 20-person panel of volunteer nutrition and obesity experts, meets every 5 years to parse through the latest nutrition research and offer recommendations for how the government should update the dietary guidelines. For the current cycle, DGAC submitted a 400-page report with a 1,000-page supplement of the committee's findings. The government doesn't have to follow every recommendation, but it usually considers them.
Back in August, Kennedy caused a stir when he called this scientific report "bloated" and said the dietary guidelines released under his purview would only be "four, five, or six pages long."
DGAC members told MedPage Today this was a drastic deviation from the established process and a misunderstanding of the point of the report and guidelines. They also warned that if Kennedy ignored their report, his administration would miss critical updates to frameworks for understanding dietary fats.
Presentations based on DGAC's scientific report were pulled from a major nutrition conference earlier this year, including a review of food sources of saturated fat and risk of cardiovascular disease. Christopher Gardner, PhD, an expert in diabetes and nutrition at Stanford University in California, was one of the DGAC leads on this topic.
"As a member of the DGAC panel, I really did not want to do saturated fat as a nutrient again for the 100th time. That's like kicking a dead horse," Gardner told MedPage Today.
He explained that there's been a movement in nutrition science the past few decades "from nutrients to foods to patterns." In other words, it matters what kind of food something is and how it pieces into the diet beyond just the nutrients the food contains. The idea of DGAC analyzing saturated fat through this food-sources framework was more interesting, he said.
"We were looking at all kinds of substitutions, and the ones that made the biggest difference were when you swapped out the dairy and the meat for the plant foods that not only had less saturated fat, but also had fiber and antioxidants," Gardner said. "Americans don't go to the grocery store to shop for saturated fat."
Gardner noted that while Kennedy has some good goals on nutrition, the implementation is off; frying french fries in beef tallow instead of vegetable oil is not the issue from a health perspective, and won't change Americans' health for the better. It's clear that Kennedy's approach to saturated fats is not considering the holistic perspective on saturated fats -- taking into account food sources and substitutions -- that was outlined by DGAC, he noted.
In August, Kennedy also said he'd release the dietary guidelines by the end of September -- months earlier than usual -- which did not happen. An HHS spokesperson told MedPage Today that they "remain on track to release this year the final 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans" but did not specify exactly when. HHS didn't answer MedPage Today's specific questions about what the guidance will say about saturated fats.
"I'm guessing that it turned out that the idea of four or five simple pages wasn't as simple as all that," said Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, professor emerita of food, nutrition, and public health at New York University.
When asked if there is any science that says eating more saturated fats and more red meat is good for Americans, Nestle was conclusive: "Absolutely not."
"We can argue about how much of a risk it is and where you do the cut point on how much meat raises risk -- those are legitimate arguments, because those are very difficult to define," Nestle told MedPage Today. "But I don't know anybody who is citing evidence that people are healthier if they eat red meat, unless they're desperately poor and don't have any variety of food in their diet."
She said that since the 1950s the science has been settled: If you substitute unsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids for saturated fatty acids, blood cholesterol levels and heart disease risk goes down. In 2017, the American Heart Association issued a presidential advisory on dietary fats and cardiovascular disease -- high-level guidance that goes beyond issuing a scientific advisory that considers a breadth of research.
"Taking into consideration the totality of the scientific evidence, satisfying rigorous criteria for causality, we conclude strongly that lowering intake of saturated fat and replacing it with unsaturated fats, especially polyunsaturated fats, will lower the incidence of CVD [cardiovascular disease]," it stated.
RFK Jr. May Encourage Eating More Saturated Fats. Experts Say He's Missing the Point. |
