DIET - Senator R F Kennedy's revolution

This is about some good news. I haven’t picked up my pen at all recently. As I’m normally ranting about some piece of nonsense, this must be a relief. But here we are, in the New Year, maybe worrying about all sorts of horror, now faced with some common sense, coming - perhaps surprisingly - from Washington DC in the shape of Donald Trump’s appointed Secretary of Health, Senator Robert F Kennedy Jr.

I normally see RFK, and of course his boss, demonised, so perhaps that’s why I’ve only spotted this piece of good news in the Daily Sceptic. Let me explain what it’s about.

Americans’ diet

The good news relates to diet, specifically the diet of Americans. But it applies to us too, obviously.

For years we have been told that fat is bad. Even though, many years ago it became known to anyone who chose to look into the boring detail that, counter-intuitively, it wasn’t fat that made you fat, but rather - I’m probably over-simplifying a bit - carbohydrates.

Despite this, we still see things on the supermarket shelves congratulating themselves on being “low fat”. Semi-skimmed milk is often perceived to be more virtuous than the full cream version.

“Low fat”

Apparently these ideas have been part of American food policy since 1977 when it was of course thought that fat was the killer. The so-called Dietary Guidelines for Americans (the DGAs), first put out some 50 years ago, say that one should limit fats to 30% of calorie intake and the dreaded saturated fats to 10%. This meant that, after taking account of proteins and other good things, necessarily carbohydrates had to represent up to 50% or over. You don’t have to look too far to see the results of that.

Reset of policy

But now Senator RFK Jr (“Bobby” to his friends) steps onto the scene. The DGAs have to be

re-issued every five years. RFK has published the new version on 7 January last week. He says that “it marks the most significant reset of federal nutrition policy in our nation’s history”. He goes on:

“The message is simple: eat real food”. But getting down to the detail, it reverses the fat/carbs story. There are no limits on fat consumption; and bread, grains and cereals are right at the bottom of the things we need, only limited amounts recommended.

All very interesting. Not so much the content of the recommendations, as some of us have supported them for many years, as the fact that it has taken all this time - and Donald Trump’s election and then his appointment of RFK - to get them into official government policy.

The Daily Sceptic

It’s also interesting to me - wearing my sceptical hat - that I have to read about it in the Daily Sceptic. I’d be delighted to hear that I’m wrong and that it’s been widely publicised elsewhere, but my rather limited researches haven’t found anything in the mainstream press. Why, frankly, is this? Are we so reluctant to believe that anything the Orange Man and/or his appointees do is sensible that we prefer to look the other way?

What about us?

I should add that it is all spelt out with great clarity in the Daily Sceptic (the free online newspaper set up by Toby Young) by a Cambridge PhD called Dr Zoe Harcombe. She is a dietary expert and has her criticisms of some of the detail, but notes that the new American guidelines are “infinitely better than the UK dietary advice” in the NHS’s so-called Eatwell Guide. Perhaps our NHS dietary

operatives should take a look across the Atlantic.

Tony Herbert

12 January 2026