Copyright STAT
Christopher Gardner is exuberant in his distress. Wearing a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “SCIENCE” in all caps one recent afternoon, the Stanford nutrition scientist threw his arms over his head and declared: “Science is under attack.” Gardner could have been referring to any number of recent headlines. On this particular day, the shaggy-haired professor was talking about something health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promised to do by year-end: change U.S. dietary guidelines to encourage consumption of more saturated fat. Advertisement Kennedy says the new “commonsense” guidelines will “stress the need to eat saturated fats of dairy, of good meat” along with fresh fruits and vegetables, effectively categorizing saturated fat as a part of the whole-food diet that he wants Americans to follow instead of relying heavily on ultra-processed foods. But Gardner, along with other nutrition experts who spoke with STAT, say relaxing guidelines on saturated fats could cause long-term, widespread harm — particularly for the nearly 30 million children who participate in the national school lunch program. “Cardiovascular disease starts early,” said Gardner, who served on a committee tasked with helping the government develop the 2025 dietary guidelines, which are updated every five years by the departments of health and agriculture. Because which foods show up on kids’ cafeteria trays are shaped by the guidelines, he worries about the prospect of kids eating cheesier, more pepperoni-laden pizzas along with more hot dogs and processed meats. “Those plaques build early in your arteries, and they only manifest decades later when you have a heart attack.” Along with school lunches, the guidelines inform a range of federally funded initiatives, from what products can be purchased by low-income parents participating in the Women, Infants, and Children supplemental nutrition program (WIC) to the foods recommended to the U.S. military. Most Americans don’t strictly observe the guidelines in their daily lives — less than 10% follow them to the letter, consuming more sugar, alcohol, and butter than the government suggests. But doctors, nurses, and dietitians refer to the guidelines when advising their patients, and some nutrition apps use them to rate the healthfulness of different foods. Advertisement Saturated fat is far from the first issue over which the Make America Healthy Again movement is breaking from scientific consensus. (See also: vaccines, raw milk, Tylenol.) And there are legitimate debates in the nutrition field over the health effects of saturated fat in whole-fat dairy in particular. “Secretary Kennedy is committed to new dietary recommendations that are rooted in rigorous science,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services. But Gardner and other nutrition experts who spoke with STAT fear the implications of jettisoning 75 years’ worth of data that show saturated fat raises LDL cholesterol — the “bad” kind linked with higher risks of strokes and heart disease. “It’s really an insult to science, everything I’ve been trained on — evidence-based medicine,” said Gardner, who was one of two leads on the committee charged with delving into the data on saturated fat. The 20-member dietary guidelines committee met twice a week for two years to review reams of nutrition papers, and turned in a 400-page report with a thousand-page supplement supporting their recommendations. He fears the Trump administration is ready to toss all that careful research aside without providing equally strong data. “I think that’s almost as dangerous as the health implications of saturated fat.” The latest science on saturated fats in meat and dairy In MAHA’s telling, saturated fat is an innocent nutrient smeared by weak evidence and conflicts of interest on dietary guidelines committees. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary summarized the MAHA point of view when he said last month that the new guidelines were “ending the 50-year war on natural saturated fat” waged by “medical dogma,” while Kennedy said in the spring that the 2025 committee’s report “looks like it was written by the food processing industry.” “Anybody who has the stature and the background to be on this committee at some point in their life took money from someone that you could” attack, Gardner said. “Mine was Beyond Meat,” the plant-based meat substitute maker that funded one of his studies — a connection MAHA leaders like Calley Means have used to try to discredit the committee’s recommendations on saturated fat. (That said, concerns about conflicts of interest among committee members flow from all corners: The consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest expressed unease when members of the 2025 committee disclosed past financial relationships with beef and dairy trade associations.) Advertisement Many MAHA acolytes share the belief that saturated fats like butter, lard, and beef tallow are healthier, less processed alternatives to plant-based seed oils, a category that encompasses canola, corn, and soybean oils, and which they say cause inflammation associated with a number of chronic diseases. A large body of research, however, supports eschewing butter in favor of polyunsaturated fats from plant oils, including seed oils, as a way to lower the risk of cardiovascular disease and premature death. The MAHA movement also embraces red meat, which tends to be higher in saturated fat, as part of a protein-fueled, carnivore-friendly diet. (Kennedy’s diet currently consists exclusively of “meat and fermented vegetables,” his wife Cheryl Hines said on a recent podcast, noting that he’s often up cooking steak at 6:30 a.m.) Much of the MAHA rhetoric around saturated fat in meat links it to humankind’s ancestral roots. “How could an ancient food cause modern diseases?” Nina Teicholz, head of the dietary advocacy group Nutrition Coalition and author of “The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet,” posted on the social media platform X. Or as Means said on X, “Humans have consumed [meat] since the invention of humans.” But while it’s true that people have been eating meat for millennia, it’s also true that the average life expectancy in the Paleolithic era was 33, with diarrhea and infections more likely to take a person out than the cumulative cardiovascular effects of too much bison. More broadly, said Gardner, the advisory committee’s review of research found clear cardiovascular benefits to swapping out meat for protein sources like beans, peas, and lentils, which have little to no saturated fat and more fiber and antioxidants. There are some open questions about red meat consumption. For example, the committee found few papers that compare the effects of fatty red meats versus lean red meats, and the ones that did exist weren’t that helpful from an American perspective. Two papers Gardner reviewed were about meat from highly prized goats in Spain — a far cry from American beef made from cows raised on industrial farms. Advertisement The picture is more complicated when it comes to whole-fat dairy, like milk, cheese, and yogurt, compared to low-fat and fat-free options. “I would say that the whole milk issue is probably the most contentious topic in the saturated fat conversation,” said Caitlin Dow, senior nutrition scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Kennedy has called the dietary guidelines’ recommendations for low-fat or fat-free milk over whole milk “antiquated.” This view is shared by some well-established nutrition experts, most prominently cardiologist Dariush Mozaffarian, director of the Tufts Food is Medicine Institute. Mozaffarian says research shows there’s not much difference between full-fat or low-fat dairy when it comes to cardiovascular disease and obesity rates. The proportions of fatty acids that make up the saturated fat in dairy differ from the saturated fat in animal sources, which could be part of the explanation for disparate health effects. Dow, however, said there still aren’t enough trials that have directly compared the effects of high-fat versus low-fat dairy — a position shared by the advisory committee, which found there wasn’t yet enough evidence to draw a conclusion on that front. “I think we hedge our bets now, because we know that saturated fat collectively is so harmful,” Dow said, while leaving open the possibility that guidance on dairy could change in the future. Why MAHA supports saturated fat Alice Lichtenstein, a nutrition scientist at Tufts University, served on the 2015 dietary guidelines advisory committee and on the committee that developed the most recent guidelines from the American Heart Association. She said there’s room to criticize the current advice to cap saturated fats at 10% of daily calories. What really matters when it comes to heart health, she said, is “the relative amount of unsaturated fat to saturated fat.” Just as eating more saturated fat overall raises LDL cholesterol, eating unsaturated fat lowers LDL cholesterol and the associated risks. Advertisement “It’s not that you should be eating a low-fat diet,” Lichtenstein said. In fact, people who eat diets that are low in fat and high in carbohydrates run the risk of increasing their triglyceride levels, which are themselves a risk factor for cardiovascular disease. The upshot is that both the MAHA movement and nutrition scientists agree that fat is a necessary part of a healthy diet. The difference is that most nutrition experts say data simply doesn’t support the idea that fat from animal sources is preferable to fat from plants. They’re also concerned about the possibility that guidelines encouraging Americans to eat more saturated fat could lead people to eat less of other important food groups, like fruits and vegetables. But as Dow noted, MAHA loves a contrarian narrative. And the idea that tucking into a plate of bacon fried in butter every morning might be good for you also taps into the same nostalgia for America’s farmland past that’s given rise to TikTok “tradwives” — a simpler lifestyle of eating freshly butchered meat and drinking milk straight from the barn. The truth, however, is that Americans were never all that healthy in the first place. “When people were eating a lot of butter and these foods, heart disease rates were still high,” said Andrea Glenn, an assistant professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University. “We should be eating more whole foods, but there’s nuance to the types of whole foods you should be eating.” To Gardner, the prospect of guidelines that lead American kids to eat more saturated fat feels like a personal affront. His own father died after his 10th cardiovascular procedure, including two bypasses. “He was a stodgy old New England lawyer who said, ‘I really like my steak with my butter and my salt, and that’s how I was raised,’” Gardner said. The habits that children develop while they’re young, he knows, can last a lifetime. STAT’s coverage of chronic health issues is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. 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