Editor's note: All opinions, columns and letters reflect the views of the individual writer and not necessarily those of the IDS or its staffers.
Americans are now not only distrustful of fluorinated tap water like they’re rabid, but also seed oils, or plain ol’ vegetable oils like canola, soybean or corn. The catalyst for this fear is this administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: the puppeteer behind this misinformation movement called Make America Healthy Again.
“My message is clear,” Kennedy said at the rolling out of the new USDA Dietary Guidelines on Jan. 7.“Eat real food.”
With that purposefully vague phrase, “real food,” he refers to red meat and dairy. What he means, though? I don’t know, because research shows those are the exact wrong foods to prioritize. Yet this announcement and its rhetoric come as no surprise after the anti-scientific changes Kennedy made to national health policies in the past year.
Such is the state of American health in 2026. Our supposed health experts spread misinformation while health conspiracies are trending online, and everyone is confused. The throughline between these trends is RFK Jr. and the disproven conspiracy theories he espouses, shrouding his lies under the guise of enlightenment. But he and his MAHA farce are the ones poisoning Americans, not the fluoride in our water.
Amid this confusion, the USDA — with RFK Jr. at its head — just regressed the MyPlate (a now deactivated website) dietary guideline of the 2010s to the 1990s’ food pyramid. More than that, they inverted it. What resulted was an oversimplified hierarchy that idolizes animal protein in the name of recommending more “Real Food.”
By doing so, they’ve relegated whole grains from the spotlight to backstage, de-emphasized vegetables and fruits and rendered a simple system convoluted. On one hand, MyPlate easily visualized important food groups in the context of how we actually eat — that is, on a plate. On the other hand, the pyramid categorizes food on a superior-inferior spectrum, moralizing dietary choices and making the recommendations more difficult to apply to the everyday nutrition of an average American.
This haphazard social prescription is supposed to rebuild a “broken system from the ground up with gold-standard science and common sense,” the USDA states on its Real Food website. But this sentence is oxymoronic; science thrives not when we rely on what seems correct, but when we test these assumptions through logic and empirical experimentation. The Trump administration obviously favors the former; only a quarter of the 2025 Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee — externally appointed by HHS and USDA and comprised of PhDs from various universities — recommendations were integrated into this newest "Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2025-2030." Instead, the USDA threw out previously decided upon metrics that dietary guidelines should follow. They threw out the rule book.
The Trump administration explained the departure from this guidance by saying they “determined that adopting the DGAC Report would not meet the American public’s need for objective, evidence-based nutrition guidance.” But this is another contradiction. The DGAC report was itself formulated for guidance based on evidence. Apparently, it just wasn’t the evidence they wanted, and that’s how good science is done, right folks? But what, besides ignoring scientific evidence, better characterizes the Trump administration?
When the icon for the Real Food website in my browser tab is a piece of broccoli, but its recommendations lead with “Protein, Dairy, & Healthy Fats” like “eggs, seafood, meats, full-fat dairy, nuts, seeds, olives, and avocados” I might start to wonder if the goal really is to Make America Healthy Again. Especially when the DGAC recommends to “limit consumption of red and processed meats, foods high in saturated fat.”
How can RFK Jr. and his lackies confuse the literature when the evidence is so clear? The USDA recommends more meat and dairy for protein and healthy fats, yet Harvard Medical School suggests limiting saturated fats — found in “red meat, whole milk and other whole-milk dairy foods, cheese” — which, consumed for over 10% of daily calories, can raise bloodstream levels of harmful LDL cholesterol to outweigh beneficial HDL cholesterol.
The USDA wants to reduce chronic diseases, but the recommended animal protein “contains saturated fat and cholesterol, which can increase the risk of cardiovascular disease,” unlike plant proteins, which lower risk. They’ve demoted whole grains in their recommendations when, in reality, they “offer a ‘complete package’ of health benefits,” packed with healthy fats, bran, fiber, vitamins, minerals and antioxidants.
We’re all mixed up and confused, but this muddle is contrived by a health department which doesn’t seem to be looking out for our health in the slightest. RFK Jr. has fallen from his heyday, fighting for the underdog against agricultural chemicals company Monsanto, to a peddler of misinformation.
His department’s message is not clear at all, and what counts as a “real food” is even murkier. What is crystal clear, however, is that this new food pyramid is unsupported by scientific evidence and functions simply a tool for the MAGA agenda, no matter what letter of the acronym you change.
Odessa Lyon (she/her) is a senior studying biology and English, pursuing a minor in European studies.
