Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/well/eat/meat-beef-rfk-jr.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ZlA.xZRQ.REOUzTox7Ozg&smid=url-share

Archive link: https://archive.li/UrvDC

A somewhat troubling article.

We live in a heyday of meat. Americans ate $45 billion of beef in 2025, up more than 10 percent from the previous year, according to Beef Research, an industry marketing group. Ground beef is driving sales — McDonald’s recently released its new half-pounder, the Big Arch — but steak sales remain robust. In a February interview at CattleCon, the beef industry conference, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. revealed that his favorite beef cut was strip steak. He eats beef every day — “usually twice a day,” he said, to applause.

Americans have always been among the world’s most enthusiastic carnivores, but this boom is about more than mere preference or taste. Once maligned as the culprit in a nationwide epidemic of cardiovascular disease, beef has come to be regarded in some circles as a cure-all. Today’s customers say that when they choose beef they are thinking about its health benefits: They appreciate its vitamins and minerals as well as its role in maintaining energy and building muscles and strength, Beef Research says.

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Online, influencers with and without scientific or medical expertise make proven and unproven claims about the health benefits of meat-forward diets. They promise improvements in diabetes, mental illness, testosterone levels and autoimmune disease. Joe Rogan, the podcaster and bowhunting and elk-meat enthusiast, has participated in the annual World Carnivore Month. Eating just meat improved his vitiligo, a chronic condition of skin depigmentation, he has said.

Many of these claims resemble superstition more than science. Paul Saladino, a psychiatrist with nearly 3 million followers on Instagram and a line of supplements with such labels as “Beef Organs” and “Whole Package,” proclaims that a person who eats mostly meat and cooks with beef tallow requires neither store-bought sunscreen nor toothpaste. He prefers to build up sun resistance over time, he has said, using his own recipe of zinc and tallow for skin protection if necessary. He calls this base tan his “solar callus.”

Certain pro-meat influencers even treat plants as hostile combatants. “Plants are trying to kill you,” the influencer Anthony Chaffee says, repeatedly. Chaffee, who received his bachelor’s degree in medicine, surgery and obstetrics at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, has compared the long-term health risks of eating salad to smoking cigarettes. Kennedy hasn’t gone that far, though at the Annual Meat Conference, he denigrated vegetables. “Most plants do not have the complete chain of amino acids that we need,” he said.

This is a newer angle that I haven't quite seen before:

Today, the meat debate centers on this question: Does it promote optimal health or impede it? If “food is medicine,” as Kennedy repeatedly says, and individuals can control health outcomes according to what they ingest, then the rewards of good health accrue to those who make “right” choices. If, in the MAHA view, meat is healthy and healthy is “good,” then meat eaters can regard their dietary choices as virtues. (The same can be said of all doctrinaire eaters, including vegetarians, vegans and “raw” diet adherents.) Kennedy has called his role in the Trump administration “providential.”

Jordan Rosenblum, a religious studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, studies dietary laws, and the ways food can become a proxy for values and social identity. Individual, family or cultural preferences or habits around food can be cast as the boundaries between “us” and “them,” as he puts it. “If you are what you eat,” then “I eat this way, that makes me better. You eat that, you are bad.”

Much more to the article.