If Americans increased their protein intake by just 25 percent in response to the administration’s new recommendations, maintaining their current ratio of animal to plant protein, it would require about 100 million acres of additional agricultural land each year — an area larger than Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania combined — and increase annual emissions by hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to the World Resources Institute.

Mr. Kennedy himself once articulated the meat industry’s heavy toll with striking clarity. In a blurb for a 2004 book, “The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America’s Food Supply,” he wrote, “The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of U.S. citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.” In this country, 99 percent of livestock are raised on factory farms.

The new guidance didn’t emerge from the longstanding Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, made up of scientists. Instead, the Trump administration handpicked a new review panel — the existence of which wasn’t even reported until Wednesday — to “correct deficiencies,” it said, in earlier recommendations. The result was that the original committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based foods was rejected, while meat and dairy were elevated.

However illogical the administration’s recommendations may be, they become a bit less baffling when one considers the members of the new review panel: According to disclosures buried in a 70-page U.S. Department of Agriculture report published alongside the guidelines, two-thirds of the reviewers had financial or other ties to the beef, dairy or pork industries, including research funding, consulting fees and leadership roles with industry groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Dairy Council and the National Pork Board. The panel even included an adviser to the company that owns the meat-focused Atkins diet brand. All of which feels hypocritical, given Mr. Kennedy’s claims that prior guidelines were driven by industry interests.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/opinion/food-pyramid-meat-industry.html