Since he was confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary early last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previewed big changes to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans—the government’s go-to guide on what to eat, and how much of it. Rewritten only every five years, the dietary guidelines are ubiquitous in American life: The food pyramid, launched in the 1990s, is a result of the document. The guidelines determine what millions of kids eat in school cafeterias every day.
Chief among those supposedly forthcoming changes that Kennedy has promised is a dramatic rethinking of how the United States deals with saturated fat. For decades, the dietary guidelines have recommended that people get no more than 10 percent of their daily calories from these fats because they increase bad cholesterol. But Kennedy is a saturated-fat evangelist. The HHS secretary, who has said that he follows a “carnivore diet,” once famously prepared a Thanksgiving turkey by submerging the raw bird
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