For months, nutrition experts have been anxiously waiting to see whether the new U.S. dietary guidelines would follow through on health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s pledge to end the war on saturated fat. The guidelines’ longstanding recommendation to cap saturated fat consumption at 10% of daily calories in order to reduce the risk of heart disease seemed likely to get the axe.
But when the much-ballyhooed new guidelines finally dropped on Wednesday, their stance on saturated fat was decidedly muddled.
The recommendation to limit saturated fats remains intact. Yet the guidelines also encourage people to eat foods higher in saturated fats, including full-fat dairy and red meat, and list butter and beef tallow as options for cooking with “healthy fats.”
The new food pyramid, which replaces the MyPlate graphic and effectively turns the carbohydrate-heavy 1992 food pyramid upside down, features a ribeye steak at the top, almost as large as the nearby turkey. (Agriculture secretary Brooke Rollins said Thursday that staff debated details like “how big the ribeye should be” until the last minute.) Smack in the middle of the pyramid glows a stick of butter alongside nutritionally uncontroversial sources of polyunsaturated fats like salmon, vegetable oil, and walnuts.
“In this new guidance, we are telling young people, kids, schools, you don’t need to tiptoe around fat and dairy,” Kennedy said at a press conference Wednesday. “You don’t need to push low-fat milk to kids, and we are maintaining the 10% of calories as saturated fat in the guidance.”
If that messaging sounds confusing, nutrition experts say it sure is.
“It’s almost laughable that they kept the 10% limit for saturated fat while really pushing red meat and dairy,” said Caitlin Dow, senior nutrition scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Good luck trying to circle that square.”
Lindsey Smith Taillie, a nutrition epidemiologist at UNC Gillings School of Public Health, called the messaging on saturated fat “bizarre and contradictory.” Jerold Mande, head of the nonprofit Nourish Science, said in a statement that it would be “nearly impossible” for people to follow the guidelines’ suggestions on protein and dairy while staying under the 10% limit.
The conflicting advice also rankled Donald Layman, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana who served on a committee behind the new guidelines — though for a different reason. He told STAT on Thursday that while he was happy with “90%” of the final product, particularly the emphasis on more protein and healthy fats and reduced carbohydrates, “the 10% saturated fat number has got to go.”
“It has no scientific relevance,” Layman said at a supporter event hosted by the Department of Health and Human Services. He helped gather the scientific basis for the protein recommendation, along with fellow committee member Heather Leidy of the University of Texas at Austin. Tom Brenna, another committee member based at UT Austin, wrote the fats and lipids piece, Layman said.
The 10% cap on saturated fat is “simply there because all the medical people want to see it,” Layman said. “They’re not ready to swallow that bullet yet.”
In other words, the opposing recommendations on saturated fat reflect an attempt to compromise with the health advocacy groups and medical societies that have long backed the idea of capping saturated fat, said Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and director of the Food is Medicine Institute at Tufts University.
The American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics both issued statements supporting the new guidelines, and the administration appears pleased with the overall guidelines’ reception from the medical establishment. “Even the critics are saying, ‘This is one thing they got right,’” Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary said Thursday.
Kennedy thanked the AAP for its support on Thursday, though he noted that they don’t always see eye to eye and are “suing each other” on other issues (that would be vaccines).
The American Heart Association, however, offered a mixed review. “We are concerned that recommendations regarding salt seasoning and red meat consumption could inadvertently lead consumers to exceed recommended limits for sodium and saturated fats, which are primary drivers of cardiovascular disease,” the AHA said in a statement.
Kennedy shot back at the AHA at the Thursday event, saying that the group had long perpetuated unfounded fears about saturated fat while accepting money from “the biggest processed food makers in this country,” such as Coca-Cola.
In response to Kennedy’s comments, the AHA said Thursday it stands by its public statement and asserted that its scientific peer-review processes and corporate policy protections “ensure undue influence from any individual or organization cannot occur.”
“The lion’s share of the Heart Association’s revenue — nearly 85% — comes from non-corporate sources, including individual donors, foundations, and estates, as well as investment earnings and revenue from the sale of our educational materials. The remainder comes from a broad cross-section of businesses nationwide — from community banks to national consumer brands — led by people dedicated to the fight against heart disease,” the statement sent to STAT said. “The ability of any private corporation to extend inappropriate influence over the work of the American Heart Association is neither practical nor possible.”
Researchers who worked on the new guidelines disclosed their own financial ties to the food industry, including meat and dairy. Brenna, who Layman said wrote the section on fats, has consulted with a beef industry trade group and accepted research funding from them.
Barry Popkin, a distinguished professor of nutrition at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, said the guidelines likely maintained the recommendations to limit saturated fat in order to avoid controversy that would have swallowed up discussion of any of its other changes, like the recommendation to avoid highly processed foods. “It would have faced so much criticism, it would have discounted the whole thing,” he said.
Mozaffarian himself has conducted research suggesting that the saturated fat contained in full-fat dairy may not have harmful health effects, though when it comes to protein sources, he says the evidence suggests Americans should be eating more seafood and plants because “that’s what’s under-consumed.” He doesn’t think it’s necessary to limit the consumption of saturated fat at 10% of daily calories overall — an opinion echoed by Alice Lichtenstein, a nutrition scientist at Tufts who’s said that what matters most is “the relative amount of unsaturated fat to saturated fat” in a person’s diet.
But both Lichtenstein and Dow also noted problems with the guidelines’ interpretation of “healthy fats.”
“Implied is that dairy fat, butter, or beef tallow are good sources of healthy fats, a.k.a. essential fatty acid (polyunsaturated fatty acids). That is not the case,” Lichtenstein said via email.
“They’ve seemingly redefined ‘healthy fats’ based on their own ideas instead of rigorous evidence, recommending that people use butter and beef tallow for cooking,” said Dow. “Nutrition experts everywhere — myself included — must be feeling like they’ve stepped into the Upside Down.”
That’s because the consensus remains that, overall, it’s healthier to consume unsaturated fats from plants than saturated fats from animals.
“These guidelines take us back to the diets of the 1950s when everyone was eating lots of meat and dairy and not worrying much about vegetables, and heart disease was rampant,” nutritionist Marion Nestle wrote on her blog Food Politics. “I’m all for eating whole foods but these guidelines dismiss 75 years of research favoring diets higher in plant foods.”
The guidelines’ apparent efforts at compromise also disappointed at least one prominent advocate for saturated fats: Nina Teicholz, author of the 2014 book “The Big Fat Surprise” and head of the advocacy group Nutrition Coalition.
The positive messaging about butter, beef tallow, and red meat are “impossible to reconcile” with limitations on saturated fat, Teicholz said in her newsletter, suggesting that Kennedy and his advisers may have been reluctant to stick their necks out as the only country in the world without limits on saturated fat. They also may have been wary of challenging the nutritional establishment, she said, noting that there’s more grassroots support among their base to buck medical consensus on issues like vaccines.
The official limit saturated fat notwithstanding, the meat and dairy industries seem happy with the new guidelines. Matt Herrick of the International Dairy Foods Association called the advice to eat full-fat dairy “a significant watershed moment,” while the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the National Pork Producers Council sounded similarly celebratory notes.
Kennedy and other top administration officials, meanwhile, are having their cake and eating it too — or their saturated fat limits and beef tallow, as the case may be. Speaking at the HHS event Thursday, Makary derided the “medical dogma” that had led to decades of advice to avoid “natural saturated fats,” moving the food supply toward refined carbohydrates and ultra-processed foods. Onstage, placards with the slogan “Eat Real Food” featured pictures of milk and steak.
Looking ahead, Mozaffarian said, it will be interesting to see how the new guidelines get translated into school meals. President Donald Trump signed a law in December that permits schools to serve whole milk for the first time in over a decade, exempting it from limits on saturated fat that schools are required to follow, and he expects that full-fat cheese and yogurt will also be exempt given the guidelines’ positions.
While the health effects of full-fat dairy remain a subject of debate in mainstream nutrition circles, experts say the fundamental evidence hasn’t changed: Eating more saturated fat raises levels of LDL cholesterol, which is in turn linked with higher risk of cardiovascular disease.
The strongest evidence found by the 2025 dietary guidelines advisory committee on saturated fat was that swapping out butter, beef tallow, and lard for vegetable oils is beneficial for LDL cholesterol, said Christopher Gardner, a Stanford University nutrition scientist who served on that committee. That’s been known for 75 years, he said, adding, “How’s it going to change now?”
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