RFK Jr to urge Americans to eat more saturated fats, alarming health experts

Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health and human services secretary, is planning to issue guidance encouraging Americans to eat more saturated fats, contradicting decades of dietary recommendations and alarming experts.

“My response and sort of counsel to myself was to stay calm, and let’s see what happens, because there was no indication given as to how, why, when this potential shift would occur,” said Cheryl Anderson, an American Heart Association board member and professor at the University of California, San Diego’s school of public health and human longevity science.

“The recommendation around saturated fat has been one of the most consistent recommendations since the first edition of the dietary guidelines.”

While Ronald Krauss, a professor of pediatrics and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco who has researched saturated fats extensively, found that saturated fats may be less harmful than previously thought, he believes if “[Kennedy] is actually going to go out and say, we should be eating more saturated fat, I think that’s really the wrong message”.

Kennedy has indicated that new dietary guidelines will “stress the need to eat saturated fats of dairy, of good meat, of fresh meat and vegetables … when we release those, it will give everybody the rationale for driving it into our schools”, according to recent reporting in the Hill.

Krauss’s research shows that “saturated fat is relatively neutral” compared with what scientists have believed in the past.

His studies have shown that reducing saturated fat intake is only beneficial if you replace it with the right things. Replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats, like olive oil and “polyunsaturated fats from other plant sources can really improve metabolic health and reduce heart disease risk, but that’s not saying that saturated fat is necessarily harmful”. His research also found that replacing saturated fats with sugars and carbohydrates can actually increase heart disease risk.

Krauss said that guidelines that create a particular cutoff point for saturated fats, like the current guideline of 10%, tend to be arbitrary.

But, Anderson explained, “if you don’t focus so much on where the line might be drawn around how much saturated fat, what you can see is that the more saturated fat that’s consumed in the population, the higher the risk for elevated cholesterol, the more people develop cardiovascular disease”.

While Anderson agrees with Krauss that what people choose to eat instead of saturated fats matters, she does not agree that saturated fat is itself “neutral”.

“When you look at the current American diet, there’s too much saturated fat in it, and so, currently, it’s not having a neutral impact on our population,” she said.

Still, Anderson and Krauss agree that nutritional guidelines should move away from focusing on specific nutrients like saturated fats.

“People don’t eat nutrients. They eat foods,” Anderson explained. “When you ask someone what they had to eat, they don’t tell you: ‘I had fat, or I had carbohydrates, or I had protein.’

Focusing on foods rather than nutrients is not only less confusing for the public, it’s also more scientifically sound, Krauss says. For example, there is plenty of evidence that meat intake, especially processed red meats, is associated with elevated heart disease risk.

“Now the question is, is that due to saturated fat, or is it due to other properties of these meats? And we really don’t have the answer to that,” Krauss said.

Nutrition science is complex to tease out, in part because of ethical and practical issues with conducting clinical trials.

“One couldn’t really justify to any institutional review board asking people to consume high levels of foods containing high levels of saturated fat for 20 years to determine whether that has an impact on heart disease,” Krauss said. Because of this, nutrition researchers must tease out years of observational data, which can be more difficult to interpret.

Typically, Anderson said, nutritional guidelines are years in the making. It’s not normal for the HHS secretary to change them overnight. Every five years, the dietary guidelines advisory committee publishes the Dietary Guidelines for Americans report based on rigorous review of the latest research. The latest version of that report has yet to be released, but “would have been expected to produce guidance for 2025 through 2030”, Anderson said, adding that the current administration does not appear to be following the usual protocol.

Krauss said it appears that report is “being overruled, in a sense” and he’s not sure what Kennedy’s recommendation will end up looking like. He noted it could have a direct effect on the nutritional makeup of school lunches and military rations, specifically if saturated fat levels in those meals go up to 18% or 19%.

According to the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Institutes of Health, the recommended percentage allowed in both school lunches and military rations are currently less than or equal to 10% of total calories from saturated fat.

“That could certainly have an adverse effect on the population’s cholesterol levels, and that would be predicted to impact heart disease risk,” he explained.

Krauss continued: “The guy is looking at evidence in a very cherrypicking kind of ways. There’s certain things that he says that sort of fit what I would consider responsible recommendations regarding processed foods, etc, but then it’s mixed up with this other thing, which makes it sound like the whole recommendation is evidence based, but it’s just not true.”