Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of health and human services, has spent much of his public life warning Americans about environmental damage hidden in plain sight. He’s sued polluters. He’s denounced the ways powerful companies use their influence to shape laws, regulations, and institutions. And he’s spoken passionately about ecological collapse — including at the hands of the meat industry

So when the Trump administration released its new dietary guidelines for Americans on Wednesday, with an emphasis on animal-based proteins and fats and a food pyramid topped with images of a roasted bird, juicy steak, ground beef and cheese, it felt a bit like a magic trick: Now you see an environmental crisis, now you don’t.

Food pyramids may seem quaint, but they shape the content of a great many meals — school lunches, military rations, federal nutrition programs, hospital menus. Kennedy has endorsed a framework that recommends Americans eat up to twice as much protein as previously advised, despite little evidence that most Americans are protein-deficient. Whereas earlier guidelines urged limiting red meat, the new advice explicitly includes it, ignoring input from an official committee of scientific advisers that called for prioritizing plant-based proteins over animal-based ones. In extolling meat and dairy, Kennedy is not merely offering lifestyle advice; he is signaling approval for some of the most climate-intensive industries on earth.

Eating less meat remains one of the fastest, easiest and most cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It requires no new technology, no congressional approval, no subsidies or tax credits. And right now it matters especially, as many other climate solutions grow more expensive, politically fraught or simply unavailable amid a federal retreat from environmental regulation and support for clean energy.

Some people might prefer to divorce environmental considerations from dietary advice, but amid accelerating climate change, it is no longer possible to separate our own health from that of the planet. Other countries have already begun incorporating sustainability into their dietary guidelines. By contrast, America’s new food pyramid is likely to impose environmental and health burdens on the public, even as it benefits the very industries Kennedy once warned us about.

The environmental arithmetic isn’t subtle. According to the World Resources Institute, poultry converts only about 11% of the energy contained in livestock feed into food that humans actually eat. Beef converts just 1%.

This inefficiency fuels deforestation, devours water in an increasingly thirsty world, consumes vast tracts of land and drives enormous greenhouse gas emissions — largely through animals’ digestion and manure, as well as energy-intensive feed production. Chicken wings may look modest on a plate, but their environmental shadow stretches across continents.

If Americans increased their protein intake by only 25% in response to the administration’s new recommendations, while maintaining the current ratio of animal to plant protein, it would require roughly 100 million additional acres of agricultural land each year — an area larger than Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania combined — and increase annual emissions by hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to the World Resources Institute.

Kennedy himself once articulated the meat industry’s toll with striking clarity. In a blurb for the 2004 book “The Meat You Eat: How Corporate Farming Has Endangered America’s Food Supply,” he wrote, “The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty.” Today, 99% of livestock in this country are raised on factory farms.

The new guidance did not emerge from the longstanding Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which is made up of scientists. Instead, the Trump administration handpicked a new review panel — the existence of which was not even reported until Wednesday — to “correct deficiencies,” it said, in earlier recommendations. The result was predictable: The original committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based foods was discarded, while meat and dairy were elevated.

Beyond the environmental damage that could follow if Americans increase their already high levels of meat consumption, the guidance also represents a sharp break from mainstream public health consensus. For decades, leading medical and nutrition organizations, including the American Heart Association, have found that plant-forward diets rich in fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains are associated with lower risks of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and premature death. Meat-heavy diets, by contrast, have repeatedly been linked to worse outcomes.

“The new food pyramid is simply bananas,” Michael Greger, a physician and founder of NutritionFacts.org, told me. “If nutrition guidelines were medicine, this would be malpractice.”

Even Dr. Mehmet Oz, a top Trump health care official who appeared at Wednesday’s news conference announcing the guidelines, has previously acknowledged this reality. As host of “The Dr Oz Show,” he said plant-based diets can be “easily and effectively” adopted and can have “a major impact on how you feel and your overall health.”

However illogical the administration’s recommendations may seem, they become less baffling when one considers the composition of the new review panel. According to disclosures buried in a 70-page US Department of Agriculture report published alongside the guidelines, two-thirds of the reviewers had financial or other ties to the beef, dairy or pork industries. These included research funding, consulting fees and leadership roles with groups such as the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Dairy Council and the National Pork Board. The panel even included an adviser to the company that owns the meat-focused Atkins diet brand — a striking irony given Kennedy’s claims that prior guidelines were driven by industry influence.

Ultimately, the pyramid isn’t about policing individual diets. People will continue adopting vegan and vegetarian diets or cutting back on meat and dairy, while others will not. But that does not absolve leaders of responsibility for endorsing eating patterns that worsen climate change and undermine public health.

Kennedy’s earlier warnings about meat were clear-eyed. His current enthusiasm for it is not. You can’t fight climate collapse or heart disease with sleight of hand, and a food pyramid that hides the cost of meat doesn’t make the problem disappear — it only makes the reckoning harder.

Prescott is the author of the cookbook ‘Food Is the Solution: What to Eat to Save the World’

The New York Times