> I don't understand people freaking out over this

Personally I'm not a fan of any diet that recommends high meat consumption and I say that as someone who eats everything.

Cattle outweighs the total livestock on this planet by a 10 to 1 factor.

While governments pretend to do stuff for the environment, they seem to always ignore the extreme cost on the environment and pollution caused by cattle. Even focusing on CO2 emissions by industry avoids the elephant of the room of the insane levels of methane produced by cows, a gas that's 200 times more harmful.

There is little evidence that a meat heavy diet is good for people, but there's plenty of evidence of the contrary.

So, to be honest, while I don't freak out and I'm all for freedom, there has to be also some kind of consciousness into how do we use the resources on this planet, and diet is by far more impactful than the transport of choice.

> Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible

The issue is that "Ultra-Processed" does not mean "candy and sugary drinks" and even "sugary drinks" is overly broad. Can SNAP pay for sugar-free Coke but not classic coke? What about Gatorade?

SNAP already had reasonable restrictions. This very much feels like a "middle management style" project. Dedicating resources to a nebulously defined BIG project regardless of whether or not it actually improves outcomes.

Pure partisan spite. The gov't not spending money on candy and sugary drinks is good. Just like when Michelle Obama pushed for better school lunches.

The negative reactions to the new SNAP restrictions are because much of it make no sense. In the states that have implemented there has been mass confusion at many stores as people can't figure out what is eligible and what is not.

For example at one store there was confusion as to why a ready to eat cup of cut fruit packaged with a plastic spoon from the store's deli department was ineligible, but a slice of cake packaged with a plastic fork from the store's bakery was eligible. Apparently the cake being made with flour makes it OK, regardless of how much sugar is in the cake and the icing.

> Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.

I can think of one issue here. Ultra-processed foods, candy, and sugary drinks are cheap and shelf-stable. They're cheap because they're subsidized. Fruits and vegetables are more expensive, and they don't last very long. So a person on a very limited SNAP budget will get less food under the new restrictions.

The answer, of course, is to make it so that fresh produce and other healthy options are cheaper than the junk food. I have a hard time seeing that happening, given how susceptible the administration is to being "lobbied".

Restrictions on SNAP are tricky business. You can't ask someone on SNAP to spend time preparing food. Prepared meals are expensive, often not accessible, and sometimes difficult to prepare for people with certain disabilities. It might seem strange, but I have known people, very poor people, who rely on "foods in bar and drink form" out of necessity. I have known poor people for whom eating fruit is physically challenging.

SNAP changes like this may be better on a population health level, to be sure. On this I have no evidence. But each restriction placed on food for people living in destitution may mean some people go hungry. (And this excludes issues of caloric density.) I would like to see better data, but sadly, there is none.

Nutrition science has come up with acceptable macronutrient distribution ranges (AMDR). The recommendation for adults is 45-65% of total calories from carbohydrates, 20-35% from fat, and 10-35% from protein. That is definitely not low carb.

The sources of those macronutrients also matter. The ideal range for saturated fat is 5-10% of total calories. Meat consumption, especially red meat, is associated with higher risk of colorectal cancer. Dairy consumption is associated with higher risk of prostate cancer.

I haven't read the new guidelines in detail but if they're recommending red meat and whole milk as primary foods, then they are not consistent with the research on cancer and cardiovascular disease risk and I doubt that people following them would meet the AMDRs or ideal saturated fat intake.

mostly because of the destruction of American science, public health and public safety the admin pushed through in order to publish this set of guidelines, instead of just hiring a professionally trained RD to write it up.

That sounds more like the fad Atkin's weight loss diet that said you could eat unlimited meat/fat/protein, but no carbs.

This new JFK Jr diet has something in common with the Paleo "cave man" diet, which at least makes some sense in the argument ("this is what our bodies have evolved to eat") if not the specifics. I'm not sure where the emphasis on milk/cheese and eggs comes from since this all modern, not hunter-gatherer, and largely unhealthy, and putting red-meat at the top (more cholesterol, together with the eggs), and whole grain at the bottom makes zero sense - a recipe for heart attacks and colon cancer.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/07/rfk-jr-nutrition-guidelines-...

This new pyramid is obviously FAR healthier than the previous one. The reason it's being opposed is partisan politics.

I think the zeitgeist is starting to turn on the high-protein diet recommendations:

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2025/11/looking-to-bu...

There was a story about this in the NYT recently (can't find it) and IIRC, it basically said protein is out and fiber is in. It wasn't that simple, but that was my takeaway.

If the current government gave me 500 dollars and told me the sky was blue I'd start checking to be sure it wasn't a scam, yeah? Even if they say something that sounds true you want to look for the trick.

Yep. I switched to this sort of diet a few months back and there's been no downsides. I've gotten needed weight loss, more energy, better skin, and better mood.

There was a temporary period where I had some GI issues from changing what I ate very abruptly, but that wore off as my gut bacteria adapted

This is not consistent with multiple doctors over the years recommending eating less meat (specially beef), less cheese. The only part that is consistent with most doctors is the base thesis of eating more whole foods.

Based on the science appendix it seems like the inclusion of a "low carb diet" is more toward disease treatment and not health promotion. This would be antithetical to the DGA in years past and is kind of useless. The appendix itself acknowledges that the long term effects of a "low carb diet" are muted in the long term, which is probably why you would never hear it hawked by a nutrition professional as a healthy eating pattern.

The restrictions on SNAP are insidious because SNAP is supposed to enable one to live a normal life -- and that includes occasionally buying things that are not "healthy" in a bubble. The mantra that many health professionals will use is "there are no unhealthy foods, only unhealthy diets". Combine all that background with traditional stigma associated with SNAP/food stamp benefits and a picture starts to emerge of why policy was to embrace more foods and how this administration is often called the "administration of harm".

> Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible.

Because poor people should be allowed to enjoy some of life's pleasures as well.

> Nor do I understand the negative reactions to new restrictions on SNAP - candy and sugary drinks are no longer eligible

My understanding is that it adds a complex layer of regulation where one did not previously exist. Large retailers and grocers have the systems that can accurately track this. (Essentially: does your POS have the ability to sync with the Federally Approved Foods For Poors list or not.)

Smaller convenience stores (more common in places where poor people live) are less likely to have the resources be able to comply. Rather than get sanctioned for accidentally selling a Gatorade on SNAP, they will simply pull out of SNAP altogether. This means that even the non-sugary foods they have will no longer be available to people on SNAP.

The net effect is expected to be to remove SNAP purchasing ability from entire geographies. I understand the effect is expected to be most pronounced in rural and dense urban areas.

I freaked out when I realized I had to change my diet. "What do I eat then?" was my constant mantra for six months. Looking back, it wasn't that bad but something in me really freaked out at having to change a habit (that I wanted to change...)

I think it's just what democracy does, make people to turn off their brains and instead decide if something is good/bad, right/wrong based on whether they like the person saying it.

All you have to do is look at this food pyramid and the old food pyramid and ask "if I had to feed one of these a week to my kid which would I pick".

It's clearly superior and it's just sad that people are so just defiant to good, for who knows what reasons.

> I don't understand people freaking out over this

Its not like it is a tan suit.

There is no public health consensus advocating for widesoread adoption of the diet RFK Jr is pushing here. There are significant parts of this that if anything the consensus suggests is unhealthy.

It's a fad diet being recommended, and parts of the advice being good don't make it good overall.

A lot of red meat is probably one angle I can’t get behind. They are very high in cholesterol and triglycerides which are deadly for the heart over the long haul.

This department is led by an insane person who constantly says ridiculous things. It's not a "purely political reflex" to have an initial bad reaction to anything he puts out. The fact that this is fairly sensible is quite surprising. I'm sure it won't last, and we'll soon be back to saying Advil causes schizophrenia or whatever the next round of madness is.

While I despise this administration, as a celiac I’m very hopeful for any cultural shift away from grains. People truly do not realize how often they will reach for some processed bread for nearly every single meal.

"hell hath no fury like taking away nerds' Mountain Dew and Flamin' Hot Cheetos"

Its an addiction. Try taking away an alcoholic's alcohol and sit back and enjoy the infinite rationalizations about how its heart healthy and lowers stress and its just a couple a night, etc etc.

The mythical "doctors" recommending high protein.. Yeah okay bud.

I think this is at least better than the old food pyramid, though not perfect. It's a step in the right direction.

What I hate, and react against, is the package deal. We get a better food pyramid, but we also get antivax imbeciles and a resurgence in easily preventable diseases. We get an official nod of approval given to idiots who think you can treat cancer with "alternative" treatments. We get blaming autism on Tylenol with incomplete and inadequate data or, wait, maybe not, or maybe, or whatever that was.

I think it reflects a deeper problem though. The "crunchy" "natural" alt-med orbits have usually had better ideas about nutrition. They've historically been right about whole vs. processed foods, more protein and fats and less simple carbs, sugar being bad, etc. Unfortunately they've historically been wrong about most other things. They're wrong about vaccines, wrong about just how powerful and effective diets can be, mostly wrong about psych meds, and wrong about giving the nod to unmitigated quackery like homeopathy.

I also think that tends to be a common problem with any and all populism, whether left or right. The present establishment may be corrupt or broken, but replacing it is hard, especially when it tends to have a talent monopoly. "Serious" people who go into medicine go to college, then grad school / med school, then get licensed, etc., and pick up establishment views. The people who want to do medicine but don't take this path tend to be amateurs and quacks and weird ideologues.

Venezuela's been in the news lately. My understanding of what happened to their oil industry is: they had it working okay with professionals doing it, and then there was a populist revolution. Then they kicked out all the professionals. Then they had no idea how to run an oil industry. The professionals were linked to a foreign power and probably taking too much profit at the expense of the Venezuelan people, yes, but they also knew how to extract petrol.

Edit: You see more sympathy here than many other educated places for this stuff, and there's a reason for that.

I think CS people are extremely open to autodidactism, probably too open, and I think that's because CS and programming is one of the few serious fields where it is actually common for an autodidact to equal or exceed a trained professional.

The zero capital cost near-zero real world implication nature of computational experimentation facilitates this. You can just read open literature and sit and play until you get good and it harms nobody and costs almost nothing. Math is another field where there have been genius autodidacts that have made huge discoveries. The arts are obviously mostly like this, excluding those that are very hard to learn alone or have capital costs.

Medicine is definitely not a field like this. I don't think you can autodidact medicine. As a result, doctors outside the establishment are usually not good. There have been historical examples, but few, and most of them came up through the ranks of real medicine before pushing a radical idea that turned out to be right.

Also note that even in CS and math, most outsider ideas are wrong. Outsider ideas are kind of like high risk / high reward investments. It's very hard for anyone, insider-trained or not, to formulate a deeply contrarian or wholly original idea that is correct, but when someone does it makes the news because it's both rare and often high impact. The hundreds of thousands to millions of deeply contrarian or original ideas that were worthless or wrong don't make the news.

Frankly I just don’t trust federal health info while RFK jr. Is at the helm. 2 days ago they reduced the recommended scheduled vaccines from 19->11 with absolutely no evidence or process. All vibes and conspiracies.

Why should I trust them with the food pyramid? How do I know if anyone who actually has expertise was consulted when his signature move has been axe experts and bring in “skeptics” with no actual background since day 1?

I’m supposed to play ball and accept health advice from the antivaxxer who has led to countless unnecessary deaths? Who walked up with the president and said “Tylenol is linked to autism” with no evidence?

No way.

Edit: it’s worth mentioning that he and a bunch of “MAHA” proponents cite the natural and healthy food in Europe but never want to use the dirty word that makes it happen: regulation. If we are serious about unhealthy additives and other food concerns, then we need robust regulations. They aren’t serious about change. It’s easy to go “we’re gonna have everyone eat healthy and natural stuff” but when it counts they won’t do what is necessary. [also toned down my heated language]

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I agree. This is nearly the exact diet anyone with credibility has suggested for a long long time. If you get into the bro-science(which I believe tends to front run mainstream by a long ways), this is the diet every athlete and gym rat has been doing for years and years, with AMAZING results.