{"id":18002,"date":"2026-02-13T10:16:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T10:16:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/13\/rfk-jr-carnivore-diet-maha-social-media\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T10:16:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T10:16:10","slug":"rfk-jr-carnivore-diet-maha-social-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/13\/rfk-jr-carnivore-diet-maha-social-media\/","title":{"rendered":"RFK Jr. follows a carnivore diet. That doesn\u2019t mean you should."},"content":{"rendered":"
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Americans have a new set of diet guidelines. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has taken an old-fashioned food pyramid, turned it upside down, and plonked a steak and a stick of butter in prime positions.<\/p>\n

Kennedy and his Make America Healthy Again mates have long been extolling the virtues of meat and whole-fat dairy, so it wasn\u2019t too surprising to see those foods recommended alongside vegetables and whole grains (despite the well-established fact that too much saturated fat can be extremely bad for you).<\/p>\n

Some influencers have taken the meat trend to extremes, following a \u201ccarnivore diet.\u201d<\/strong> \u201cThe best thing you could do is eliminate out everything except fatty meat and lard,\u201d Anthony Chaffee, an MD with almost 400,000 followers, said in an Instagram post.<\/p>\n

And I almost choked on my broccoli <\/strong>when, while scrolling LinkedIn, I came across an interview with another doctor declaring that \u201cthere is zero scientific evidence to say that vegetables are required in the human diet.\u201d That doctor, who described himself as \u201c90% carnivore,\u201d went on to say that all he\u2019d eaten the previous day was a kilo of beef, and that vegetables have \u201canti-nutrients,\u201d whatever they might be.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to spend much time on social media to come across claims like this. The \u201ctraditionalist\u201d influencer, author, and psychologist Jordan Peterson was promoting a meat-only diet as far back as 2018. A recent review<\/a> of research into nutrition misinformation on social media found that the most diet information is shared on Instagram and YouTube, and that a lot of it is nonsense. So much so that the authors describe it as a \u201cgrowing public health concern.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s new is that some of this misinformation comes from the people who now lead America\u2019s federal health agencies<\/strong>. In January Kennedy, who leads the Department of Health and Human Services, told a USA Today reporter that he was on a carnivore diet. \u201cI only eat meat or fermented foods,\u201d he said<\/a>. He went on to say that the diet had helped him lose \u201c40% of [his] visceral fat within a month.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cGovernment needs to stop spreading misinformation that natural and saturated fats are bad for you,\u201d Food and Drug Administration commissioner Martin Makary argued in a recent podcast interview<\/a>. The principles of \u201cwhole foods and clean meats\u201d are \u201cbiblical,\u201d he said. The interviewer said that Makary\u2019s warnings about pesticides made him want to \u201cavoid all salads and completely miss the organic section in the grocery store.\u201d<\/p>\n

For the record: There\u2019s plenty of evidence that a diet high in saturated fat can increase the risk of heart disease.<\/strong> That\u2019s not government misinformation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The carnivore doctors\u2019 suggestion to avoid vegetables is wrong too, says Gabby Headrick, associate director of food and nutrition policy at George Washington University\u2019s Institute for Food Safety & Nutrition Security. There\u2019s no evidence to suggest that a meat-only diet is good for you. \u201cAll of the nutrition science to date strongly identifies a wide array of vegetables \u2026 as being very health-promoting,\u201d she adds.<\/p>\n

To be fair to the influencers out there, diet is a tricky thing to study. Much of the research into nutrition relies on volunteers to keep detailed and honest food diaries\u2014something that people are generally quite bad at. And the way our bodies respond to foods might be influenced by our genetics, our microbiomes, the way we prepare or consume those foods, and who knows what else.<\/p>\n

Still, it will come as a surprise to no one that there is plenty of what the above study calls \u201clow-quality content\u201d floating around on social media.<\/strong> So it\u2019s worth arming ourselves with a good dose of skepticism, especially when we come across posts that mention \u201cmiracle foods\u201d or extreme, limited diets.<\/p>\n

The truth is that most food is neither good nor bad when eaten in moderation. Diet trends come and go, and for most people, the best reasonable advice is simply to eat a balanced diet low in sugar, salt, and saturated fat. You know\u2014the basics. No matter what that weird upside-down food pyramid implies. To the carnivore influencers, I say: get your misinformation off my broccoli.<\/p>\n

This article first appeared in The Checkup,\u00a0<\/em>MIT Technology Review\u2019s\u00a0weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,\u00a0<\/em>sign up here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Americans have a new set of diet guidelines. Robert F. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18002"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18002\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}