This month’s Food X is brought to you by the Center’s Population and Sustainability Senior Media Specialist Kim Dinan. Kim shares the implications of the Trump administration’s new Big Ag–friendly dietary guidelines and the work we’re doing to counteract the damage.
Read on to learn about two new guides we’ve produced: a healthy rewrite of the dietary guidelines showing what the nutritional recommendations would look like if they’d actually followed scientific consensus and one that outlines the urgent environmental and health considerations suppressed during the drafting of the new guidelines.
The upside-down reality of the new food pyramid
The Trump administration’s newly released inverted food pyramid gives meat and dairy a starring role in the American diet. It’s an industry-friendly move that could cause a cascade of harm to wildlife, people’s health, and the environment.
The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee — a group of top nutrition experts tasked with providing science-based recommendations to the agencies writing the guidelines — called for Americans to eat plant-rich diets, prioritize plant sources of protein, limit saturated fats, and reduce red and processed meat consumption.
The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines ignore all that.
They prioritize meat, poultry, dairy, and eggs above plant sources of protein; recommend red meat and full-fat dairy; and push for increased consumption of protein and “healthy” fats from animal products. They also recommend cooking with beef tallow, which Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has frequently touted despite concerns from nutrition experts about excessive saturated fat.
Many people don’t realize that the dietary guidelines affect the meals served in schools, prisons, healthcare institutions, and even social programs like Meals on Wheels. The guidelines dictate the requirements for major federal nutrition assistance programs that spend more than $40 billion and serve more than 60 million people each year.
This type of government spending has enormous implications for wildlife and the environment. A recent Center analysis found that if half the annual meals served through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s child nutrition program served bean tacos instead of beef tacos, total greenhouse gas emissions from those meals would be reduced by 48.7%.
The new guidelines risk putting even more meat and dairy on Americans’ plates. A new analysis by the World Resources Institute shows that even a 25% increase in U.S. meat and dairy consumption would require agricultural land the size of California every year. And the increased focus on beef products is particularly devastating for wildlife — from wolves and bison to prairie dogs and grasshoppers — who are harmed by habitat destruction and direct targeting by the cattle industry.
Despite the Trump administration’s claims to be fighting our industrial food system, putting a big slab of steak at the top of the food pyramid doesn’t support independent farmers or ensure Americans “eat real food.” It props up the most detrimental and unsustainable parts of our food system — factory farms, monocrops, pesticides, chronic disease, and wildlife slaughter.
The Center has long worked to help people understand the connection between food and the environment and to advocate for healthy and sustainable diets. The dietary guidelines are one of the most powerful policy tools available to encourage these dietary shifts — that’s why its abandonment of decades of established nutrition science is so alarming.
But we saw this coming, which is why we cowrote the Uncompromised Dietary Guidelines, a healthy rewrite of the just-released guidelines that shows what the nutritional recommendations would look like if they’d actually followed scientific consensus.
We also wrote A Model for Healthy and Sustainable Dietary Guidelines, which outlines the urgent environmental and health considerations suppressed during the drafting of the new dietary guidelines, including how plant-rich diets are healthier for people and the planet by lowering risk of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and environmental devastation.
In lieu of real, science-based guidance from the Trump administration, these documents can help cities, states, and individuals make informed choices that benefit people and the planet — not the meat and dairy industries.
For the wild,
