Here’s a Thought: Real Food Isn’t Radical

The Daily Beast called Vance's diet of protein, dairy, and vegetables "weird." Jenna McCarthy traces decades of dietary misinformation back to its source.

✍️ By Jenna McCarthy

The Daily Beast recently published a headline so unintentionally hilarious that it deserves a place in the Smithsonian: “Vance Admits He’s on Weird RFK Jr.-Approved Diet.” The ludicrous nutritional experiment in question? According to the vice president, it’s a mix of protein, dairy, fruits, vegetables, and fermented foods like yogurt and cheese.

That’s it. No crystal-infused glacier water. No ceremonial cacao circles. No juice cleanse involving activated charcoal harvested during a lunar eclipse. No thirty-seven-dollar wellness powder made from mushrooms that grew on the north side of a Tibetan yak. Vance’s “weird” diet is a literally historic menu of whole, unprocessed foods.

Clearly the Daily Beast continues to practice the ancient faith of Pyramidism, whose central doctrine holds that six to eleven daily servings of carbohydrates are the path to robust health and enlightenment.

The article explains that Vance adopted this insane way of eating after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled his “inverted food pyramid,” which prioritizes protein, healthy fats, fruits, and vegetables while deemphasizing refined carbohydrates and heavily processed foods. You know, the sort of eating pattern that sustained human civilization for roughly all of history.

“I’m very disappointed in the new pyramid that features red meat and saturated fat sources at the very top, as if that’s something to prioritize,” moaned Stanford University “nutrition expert” (and hard-core vegan) Christopher Gardner, according to NPR. “It does go against decades and decades of evidence and research.”

Those “decades and decades of evidence and research” are likely referring to the work of mid-century physiologist Ancel Keys, whose Seven Countries Study largely convinced America that saturated fat was the dietary equivalent of chain smoking while juggling machetes.

Keys looked at populations in seven carefully selected countries and found a compelling relationship between saturated fat intake and heart disease. The graphs were elegant. The conclusion was tidy. The implications were enormous. Overnight, butter was suspicious, eggs were reckless, chicken skin was basically a cry for help, and Americans were encouraged to replace traditional animal fats with margarine, seed oils, cereal, pasta, skim milk, and all manner of low-fat edible engineering projects.

NARRATOR: What could possibly go wrong?

For starters, critics later pointed out that Keys never explained why he chose the countries he did, and that when subsequent researchers looked beyond Keys’ curated lineup, the beautiful straight-line relationship between fat and heart disease got a lot messier. France, for example, had high saturated fat intake and relatively low heart disease, which was one of those inconvenient facts that simply didn’t make it into the PowerPoint. (To be fair, maybe Keys wasn’t deliberately cooking the books. Maybe he genuinely believed he had cracked the cardiovascular code. But if your research launches a half-century war on red meat, eggs, and common sense, people are eventually going to revisit the receipts.)

Rather than pausing to consider the whole complicated nutrition picture, Big Food and America’s public health gatekeepers high-fived each other and proceeded to promote the highly lucrative idea that fat was bad and carbohydrates were dietary superheroes, so long as the cereal box featured an athletic-looking celebrity and enough fiber to patch drywall.

This is how we got decades of egg-white omelets, watery lattes, franken-products like the optimistically-named I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter (trust me; we can), and an entire generation of people earnestly believing that a bagel the size of a catcher’s mitt was a health food but a simple egg—widely considered nature’s perfect food—was a deadly cholesterol grenade.

I’ll point out here that I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter contains water, soybean oil, palm kernel oil, palm oil, salt, soy lecithin, natural flavors, lactic acid, beta carotene, and vitamins E, D2, A, and B12. Actual butter, on the other hand, contains cream. That’s it. Sometimes salt. (Also, the ICBINB website is packed with sketchy info about how their products can “help support a GLP-1 friendly diet,” because that’s where we’re at right now.

Here’s the funny part: After everyone’s grandmothers had dutifully traded their jars of homemade tallow for plastic tubs of neon industrial spread, the official position quietly began to shift—but nobody bothered to tell us how it happened or why we should trust them this time.

It wasn’t one study. It was a slow-motion pileup: Gary Taubes calling out the Big Fat Lie in the early 2000s. Nina Teicholz’s The Big Fat Surprise in 2014. The 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee admitting that cholesterol was “not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” The 2016 revelation that Harvard researchers took sugar industry money to demonize fat. The eventual avalanche of “ultra-processed food” research that made the old advice look ridiculous.

Even more awkwardly, a growing body of evidence keeps vindicating the exact foods the establishment spent decades vilifying—and Kennedy is encouraging. Large international studies like PURE (Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology) have found that saturated fat is not associated with higher cardiovascular mortality and is even linked to lower stroke risk, while low-carbohydrate diets repeatedly improve markers like triglycerides, HDL, and insulin sensitivity. Others, like the Minnesota Coronary Experiment, found that replacing saturated fat with corn oil successfully lowered cholesterol but actually increased death rates. A massive Cochrane analysis of 15 randomized controlled trials that included 59,000 participants determined that limiting saturated fat had no effect on mortality. That’s right. None.

To be clear, the scientific consensus hasn’t suddenly become “everyone should immediately start drinking bacon grease through a bendy straw.” Saturated fat in large quantities can carry real risks for some people. But it does make it a lot harder to argue that steak belongs in the same category as asbestos.

Big Food, of course, never cared whether fat was good or bad. Their job was and is to process cheap ingredients into profitable products and then slap whatever health claim is currently fashionable on the packaging. The same companies that sold America Crisco, SnackWells, and TCBY have rebranded themselves as champions of today’s biggest buzzwords: protein, probiotics, healthy fats, and everyone’s favorite, “clean.” The result is collagen-infused energy drinks, keto cookies, probiotic gummies, and cauliflower-crust pizzas with more additives than a deep dish from Pizza Hut. (The cash registers can’t tell the difference.)

While corporations were changing their labels, the “experts” were busy changing the subject. Nobody apologized for the margarine era. Nobody explained why Americans spent decades treating egg yolks like radioactive waste. Nobody reimbursed the nation for its collective suffering through fat-free cheese. Instead, the dietary guidelines were quietly updated, colorful new graphics were rolled out, and everyone pretended the science had merely evolved rather than completely reversed itself.

Which is exactly why I find headlines like this so funny. Because calling food that humans have eaten since the dawn of time “weird” is embarrassing. Weird is convincing an entire generation that a cookie dough-flavored “energy bar” with more sugar than a Snickers was a wellness product. Weird is treating breakfast cereal as a nutritional sacrament while regarding raw milk as a public health threat. Weird is spending fifty years warning people away from foods they could grow in their backyards while filling grocery stores with products that require a chemistry degree to pronounce.

Actually, weird isn’t even the word I’d use. It’s wicked.

What do you think about Kennedy’s “weird” diet? I know you’ll let me know in the comments. :)