Several of Kennedy’s dietary advisers have ties to meat and dairy interests

WASHINGTON - Soon after Mr Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was sworn in as the nation’s health secretary, he promised to overhaul the federal nutrition guidelines. A key step, he said, would be to “toss out the people who were writing the guidelines with conflicts of interest”.

His own panel, he said, would “have no conflicts of interest”. But the new guidelines, which were released on Jan 7 and emphasise protein, meat, cheese and milk, were informed by a panel of experts with several ties to the meat and dairy industries.

Three of the nine members have received grants or done consulting work for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association; one of those also received a research grant from and serves as an adviser to the National Pork Board.

At least three members – including two of the same ones who have done work for red meat groups – have financial ties to dairy industry organisations, such as the National Dairy Council.

Another is a co-creator of a high-protein meal replacement product. The experts did not write the guidelines but produced reviews of scientific evidence on which the guidelines were based.

Such conflicts have been a problem “for a very long time”, said Ms Marion Nestle, an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, who was on the guidelines committee in 1995.

Mr Kennedy and his allies were right to criticise previous versions for being influenced by industry, she said, but their actions since then have been hypocritical.

“They’ve just done the same thing,” Dr Nestle said, adding of Mr Kennedy, “If he views the members of previous committees as being sold out to industries, it’s very difficult to understand why the same designation doesn’t apply to these people, except that these people are associated with the meat and dairy industries, and they like that.”

Mr Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that the guidelines were based on “rigorous scientific review and independent oversight” and that it was “absurd to suggest that anything other than gold standard science guided our work on this presidential priority”.

Unlike in previous editions, the experts’ ties were clearly enumerated in a scientific report that accompanied the new guidelines, and Nestle commended the authors for that. Some experts also praised the guidelines for being far tougher on the processed food industry than previous editions were.

“This is the first dietary guidelines I’ve seen in my lifetime that really throws the gauntlet down to industry,” said Dr Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.

But other experts said the guidelines appeared to benefit different industries. And organisations including the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the American Society for Nutrition criticised the lack of transparency during the process of developing the guidelines, saying it compromised public trust in the document.

Disclosing conflicts of interest at the end of the process “isn’t really going to cut it,” said Mr Mark Kennedy, the senior vice-president of legal affairs for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which supports plant-based diets and has filed a complaint with the government saying it should withdraw the guidelines.

“Because if nobody ever had a chance to weigh in, and nobody other than the government behind closed doors had a way to assess it, there’s no way to ensure there’s fair balance.”

Mr Kennedy is not related to the health secretary.

In late 2024, the Biden administration released detailed recommendations for new guidelines, developed through a two-year process with public meetings and opportunities for public comment.

But when the Trump administration came in, it questioned those recommendations and sought advice from other experts through a quicker and less transparent process, which did not include the standard opportunities for public comment before the guidelines’ release.

It also did not follow standard procedures for reviewing evidence in a transparent and systematic way. And it didn’t appear to have safeguards to ensure that no one person had outsize influence over a given portion of the guidelines, one way to minimise the impact of conflicts of interest.

Some parts of the guidelines represent such a departure from previous versions that it seems like the administration “handpicked” scientists likely to support those conclusions, “versus undertaking a neutral review of the science,” said Dr Lindsey Smith Taillie, a professor of nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. NYTIMES