January 8, 2026 — Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. yesterday announced muddled new Dietary Guidelines for Americans in which everyone can find plenty to love or hate – or both. These are the perfect guidelines for our era. TikTok nutrition influencers can spin them any way they want. RFK can tell everyone that he’s owning the so-called nutrition […]
July 28, 2025 — It is easy to find advice to cut red meat consumption for quite a variety of reasons – including to reduce a person’s risk for weight gain and obesity. AARP advises that “meat is particularly problematic for putting on pounds because it contains protein and saturated fat, both of which promote weight gain.” Obesity is […]
April 6, 2025 — Get ready. A few months have passed since the Scientific Report of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Committee became final. But honestly, it seems like another lifetime when that was published. That was before the installation of the MAHA regime at HHS that is de-emphasizing vaccines, firing scientists, and promoting cod liver oil and “healthy” fries. […]
May 6, 2024 — Sometime in the 1960s, economist Ronald Coase, a Nobel laureate, advised colleagues that torturing a set of data can always yield a confession to serve the purpose at hand. As if to prove this adage, a new publication in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology shows us 1,208 ways to analyze NHANES data on all-cause mortality […]
October 25, 2023 — It’s a popular cause. Red meat production is a problem for the climate. Add that to ethical concerns some people have about consuming meat, and the push to reduce red meat consumption makes total sense. But when people start spinning misleading narratives about observational research and using them to promote this otherwise worthy idea, they’re […]
September 10, 2022 — Is it possible to have objective dialogue about red meat and health? Is it easy to find? The simple answer is yes and no. In Lancet this year, a pair of letters tell the story of why it’s so hard. These letters concern weaknesses in a massive analysis of the global burden of disease from 2020 […]
August 13, 2020 — Do you want to take a whack at expert opinions on the 2020 Dietary Guidelines? Then today is your last chance. USDA is accepting comments until midnight tonight. So far, it has a mere received 22,434 comments. Believe it or not, this reflects relatively little controversy. The main headlines from this round are all about […]
February 4, 2020 — A red meat issue is inflammatory and political. This particular definition doesn’t have a separate entry in Merriam-Webster yet, though they are thinking about it. But on the subject of red meat, medical journals just can’t let it go. So today we have a new paper in JAMA Internal Medicine to revisit the question – […]
January 29, 2020 — It seems we can’t quit bickering about dietary recommendations. Especially about red meat. The squabbling continues this week as Frank Hu and colleagues fire back on the subject, publishing a new commentary in Diabetes Care. With appreciation to the Fred Hutch News Service for sharing, we offer the following perspective on where we’ve gone wrong, […]
January 24, 2020 — We didn’t think the meat mayhem reported last week could get any nastier. We were wrong. That’s because John Sharp, Chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, is now requesting an investigation of actions by Walter Willett, Frank Hu, David Katz, and the True Health Initiative related to this big mess. He calls their reported […]
