Meat is on the top, grains are at the bottom, scientists are concerned. Nutrition expert Jennifer Sacheck deconstructs the controversial new food pyramid, what it means for your health—and your wallet. She breaks down the new dietary guidelines, how much protein Americans actually need and how the beef lobby may be reshaping everything from SNAP benefits to cafeteria trays.

[00:00:25] Megan Hall: Every five years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services publishes an extensive guide about what you should be eating. It's called the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Normally, this document gets published, recommends some small changes to our diets, and it doesn't get too much attention. But this year the document suggests some big changes to what we eat, and it comes with a new food pyramid that's catching people's attention.

[00:01:01] Megan Hall: A big, bright red steak is at the top of the food pyramid.

[00:01:11] Megan Hall: This is Jennifer Sacheck, a professor at Brown University who studies nutrition. We're looking through the new food pyramid together.

[00:01:35] Megan Hall: If you haven't seen this new food pyramid yet, let me paint you a picture. It's a triangle made up of drawings of food, but it's upside down. The widest part of the pyramid is on the top and it narrows to a tiny point at the bottom.

[00:01:57] Megan Hall: Jennifer is the chair of the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown's University School of Public Health, where they look at all aspects of health: including alcohol and drug use, physical activity and diet.

So I turned to her to help us understand what's going on with this new food pyramid. Is it a significant change from the old guidance? What will it mean for how Americans eat? And maybe most importantly, should we follow its advice?

[00:02:35] Megan Hall: So let's go back to the nineties. Tell me about that food pyramid. What did it say and how was it supposed to shape our behaviors? I remember in school coloring the bottom, there were a bunch of, you know, pictures of bread and grains, and then at the very top there were just little specks that represented sugar and salt and oils.

[00:03:16] Megan Hall: The idea was that the food pyramid would help people understand how much they should eat of different categories of food.

[00:03:28] Megan Hall: The pyramid got updated as dietary science changed, and then to make it easier to understand, it was replaced in 2011 with something called MyPlate.

It was a circle divided into sections that represented different food groups. About half of the circle was filled with fruits and vegetables, and then the other half was split between grains and proteins. You also had a little cup of milk on the side.

[00:04:00] Megan Hall: What does the food pyramid actually accomplish? Does anyone really look at it to make decisions about what they eat?

But those guidelines really help shape our national food programs: thinking school lunch, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP), anything that's federally run or regulated, Meals on Wheels, Women, Infants and Children's programs, WIC, as we know as WIC. All these programs will be influenced by the relative proportions of what's being promoted by the new dietary guidance.

[00:05:00] Jennifer Sacheck: Absolutely. So they're gonna have to change their guidelines around school meals for instance. And that will take a long time. So now if we're really promoting meat and protein, you know, animal sources of protein, that could subtly shift how a child's plate can look. And if the guidelines aren't specifying colorful fruits and vegetables and they're just saying vegetables, they might be able to get away with more potatoes.

But you can see how different programs, depending on funding, might be able to shape what a plate looks like for a child in a school meal. It's sort of the unintended consequences of something like this that's gonna influence all of us.

So if the food industry knows protein is all the rage, they're gonna think about those processed packaged foods and say, okay, how can I get more protein in there? 'Cause now Americans are hearing protein loud and clear, we need more of it. So they're gonna tap into that.

These guidelines are much more detailed than a bunch of drawings of foods. They explain the number of servings of different foods you should have. They break down the recommended calories you should be eating, and they make specific recommendations for young children, older adults, pregnant people, and other groups.

[00:06:41] Megan Hall: But this year, that process looked different.

[00:07:00] Megan Hall: Instead of using the more than 400 page report written by scientists and dietary experts, the Trump administration handpicked 10 people to write the new guidelines, and those people ignored a lot of the conclusions from the report.

[00:07:26] Megan Hall: That gets us to the guidelines and food pyramid that came out earlier this year, and actually a lot of the guidelines that informed the food pyramid didn't change that much.

The serving sizes for fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and dairy all stayed the same. And the recommendation that saturated fats only make up 10% of your calories stayed the same too.

But the recommendations on proteins, specifically animal-based proteins, did change. The amount we're supposed to eat every day, almost doubled.

And then there was the emphasis on "Real Food." The new food pyramid was unveiled on a website called realfood.gov, and at the top of the guidelines was this statement in bold---"The message is simple: eat real food."

[00:08:18] Jennifer Sacheck: So I think what they mean by real food, that it's food that you can recognize in its whole form. You see a tomato, you know it's a tomato. You call it a tomato.

You put the tomato through a conveyor belt and you squash it. You add things to it, you put it in a tube. You don't know that that really was a tomato to become tomato sauce or ketchup. That is no longer real food. So the real food is whole food in the real form, that hasn't been heavily processed.

[00:08:58] Jennifer Sacheck: And I think that is part of the problem with the definition of processed foods because we process food every day for food safety and making our meals.

But it's when you have additives such as salt, sugar, fat, preservatives, things that we don't normally have in our own kitchens. That's the processed food.

[00:09:22] Megan Hall: Is there any basis for this new protein recommendation?

So that is something that we typically would see at the peak for a growing strength athlete, you know, that we might recommend at the cap of what their body can metabolically use to grow muscle mass at a time of youth. and even in aging populations where we're breaking down a lot of protein, that would be the cusp of the maximum and really has shown not necessarily to be a benefit or achievable by the average person. These are people like when you're thinking of a strength athlete, they're thinking about everything they're eating to replenish the muscle that they're breaking down and trying to rebuild. So this is a very high level.

[00:10:22] Jennifer Sacheck: I don't think it's possible or sustainable or good for our environment, and I think if we eat too much protein, just like you eat too much of any macronutrient: carbs, fat, or protein, any excess calories is gonna be stored as fat.

I think people think they eat protein, it's gonna go right to their muscle and stay there and it can't be like broken down and stored. And also, for some people that's an extra toll on your kidneys. And you need to drink a lot of water, but sure, protein is something that's really, really important. I don't wanna dismiss that. Like, and it's good to have it every meal. It's satiating. It, you know, replenishes what's lost after a workout. But not to these levels. And again, we're already consuming quite enough on average, most of us.

and it also conflicts with their guidance on saturated fat, if I'm telling you, eat more protein, but also keep your saturated fat below 10%, you might be like thinking, if I don't think about plant protein, I'm gonna have hamburger and steak, and that's gonna be a lot of saturated fat, and that's gonna sort of be in conflict with a new recommendation, or the consistent recommendation over all these years of being around 10% of your daily intake is saturated fat.

[00:11:45] Jennifer Sacheck: Yeah, I think it's a great point. I think that's where the health equity lens was initially with the guidelines – They were understanding that not everybody can afford steak or fish or culturally, you know, want to even consume those items. And so it's not taking that into consideration.

And it is, it's really consumer dependent. We know that our prices of red meat right now are astronomical, in the grocery store. And if you think about a school meal or federal programs, you know, SNAP benefits, like if we're trying to edge consumers to sort of purchase these foods, it's gonna take up most of their, allowable spending and they're gonna sort of squeeze out then fruits and vegetables and whole grains thinking that's what they have to prioritize.

[00:12:35] Jennifer Sacheck: School food will take a while to shift. And I don't know how they're gonna manage with the ‘whole food’ approach, given the infrastructure that's sort of been put in place over decades.

We don't have a lot of scratch cooked meals in schools anymore. A lot of kitchens and cafeterias are now gone and what they define as processed foods will be sort of under debate and what can actually get onto a child's plate or not, in the schools, that's yet to be seen.

[00:13:12] Jennifer Sacheck: I think there's also an enormous unfortunate lobby, in the United States for dairy and beef cattle that's been present for decades.

You look at the new scientific committee that was put onto the new guidelines, they have conflicts of interest that they disclose with cattle and dairy, and that's concerning.

So I think the protein movement that we are already living in, and knowing that we are eating a lot of carbohydrates that we shouldn't, sort of pushed us to an excuse to promote more protein, but also to benefit the livelihoods of many Americans that are invested in cattle and dairy. And that's not a bad thing to care about what our country is invested in, in terms of farming and livestock, but when it impacts health inadvertently, that's a problem.

[00:14:11] Jennifer Sacheck: I think for the majority of Americans, we absolutely probably should consider what we eat because most of us are not eating well, unfortunately.

If we're thinking about the scientific data to date and the plant-based diets and the link between fruits and vegetables and decreasing sugar. Those long-term health benefits in terms of mortality risk, cardiovascular disease risk, are just known.

And even though the science on like red meat consumption and those risks are a little fuzzier, it's much clearer that if we go plant-based, we'll be healthier. So those messages need to find creative ways to keep on getting out to the American public. And I think also this might have some unintended consequences that we see over time with changes in lipid profiles, et cetera, if we're consuming a lot more animal fats and butter and beef tallow and red meat.

[00:15:00] Jennifer Sacheck: I think that for me is number one, eat the fruits and vegetables, less sugar sweetened beverages. Watch out for the processed packaged foods on the run.

Think about eating for your body and for your health and moving as well. So I think you're fueling your body for movement and thinking.

[00:15:21] Jennifer Sacheck: Thanks for having me. It's been great.

Humans in Public Health is a monthly podcast brought to you by Brown University School of Public Health. This episode was produced by Nat Hardy and recorded at the podcast studio at CIC Providence.

I'm Megan Hall. Talk to you next month!