OXON HILL, Md. — US Health and Human Service Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. addressed a packed house March 2 as the keynote presenter at the 2026 Annual Meat Conference.

"We have the highest chronic disease burden in the world," Kennedy said, adding that this public health crisis costs the US $4.3 trillion a year. "Virtually all these diseases are diet induced."

The recently issued Dietary Guidelines for Americans — which inverted the USDA Food Pyramid to put meat, poultry and other animal proteins at the top in addition to other whole foods such as full-fat dairy products along with fruits and vegetables — marks a new direction in US federal nutrition policy and a key public health priority under Kennedy's tenure leading HHS. The new guidelines will inform public health nutrition messaging and change priorities for federal feeding efforts ranging from income-based food assistance to school lunches and military commissaries.

"A week after I came in in January of last year, I was given the Dietary Guidelines that had been developed over four years in the Biden Administration, and they were 453 pages long," he said. "They were incomprehensible, and they had been written by food industry lobbyists."

Kennedy said HHS threw out those guidelines and brought in nutritionists from a dozen top US universities, who worked on the new Dietary Guidelines for 11 months.

.A  key part of the revamped guidelines — one that has won praise from the meat and poultry industry — was ending the war on the crucial role animal proteins and fats play in healthful diets. Minimzing intake of saturated fats has been a dominant message of food and nutrition policy dating to the 1950s, which Kennedy said was built on a foundation of inaccurate research.

“The biggest battle was over saturated fats,” he said. “We looked at the science. There was no science that linked saturated fats to heart attacks.”

Animal proteins are vital in ensuring that Americans’ diets focus on nutritionally dense, minimally processed foods that satisfy hunger. 

“The reason we want people to eat more proteins is that they have a higher complement of amino acids that we want in our food,” Kennedy said. “They are much more nutrient dense than any other food.” 

“People need the calories,” he said, adding that under the previous Dietary Guidelines people replaced meat in their diets with carbohydrates and other nutritionally incomplete foods.

“Seventy percent of the calories our kids are getting come from ultraprocessed foods and highly refined carbohydrates, which are just poison,” he said, which is directly linked to higher rates of childhood obesity and diabetes. “We are doing now the best that we can to ensure that protein is affordable and available to every American. The Dietary Guidelines have the capacity to drive a transformation of dietary culture in this country.”