Dive Brief:
- A doctors' group has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn the Trump administration's dietary guidelines released earlier this year, arguing the meat and dairy industries helped "ghostwrite" the final recommendations.
- The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine said the guidelines, which inverted the food pyramid to prioritize meat and dairy, was crafted by a “secret panel” of food-industry insiders who illegally influenced the process.
- The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, seeks a court order to force the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to withdraw the guidance and to forbid the agencies from using the recommendations in future decisions.
Dive Insight:
Updated once every five years, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans influence the dietary advice physicians give to patients and shape federal procurement policy for school meals and some food benefits programs.
Drafted recommendations from independent experts in 2024 called for greater intake of plant-based foods and less consumption of red meat, a move that set off backlash from beef groups. However, the Trump administration's final guidance released in January ignored many of those drafted recommendations, and instead promoted red meat and advised Americans to cook with beef tallow. The move was part of what HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. called “the most significant reset of federal nutrition policy in history.”
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, which promotes plant-based diets, argued in its lawsuit that the Trump administration "disregarded federal law" by replacing the dietary committee's recommendations with guidance from "a hastily assembled panel of industry insiders, without any oversight or input by the public."
“The government allowed the meat and dairy industries to ghostwrite the Dietary Guidelines,” Physicians Committee President Dr. Neal D. Barnard said in a statement. “They put money in industry’s pocket and cholesterol in Americans’ arteries.”
The final dietary guidelines were shaped by a nine-person panel, with all but one having a conflict of interest, according to the lawsuit. Multiple members had financial ties to beef, egg and dairy associations, as well as food companies General Mills and Simply Good Foods.
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has repeatedly sued over previous dietary guidelines, also arguing that the food industry had a hand in crafted the recommendations. In 2000, a federal judge agreed the USDA violated conflict-of-interest laws when appointing the committee set to draft dietary guidance.
A more recent lawsuit from the committee that targeted the 2020 guidance was dismissed in 2023 after a federal judge ruled the group lacked standing since the guidelines aren't considered a final agency action.
