As the Trump administration begins to roll out changes to the nation’s nutrition policies, such as Wednesday’s announcement that whole milk will once again be served in schools, understanding Kalayjian’s insights, and the history of the bias against animal fats, becomes more essential than ever. 

Today, Kalayjian is one of the co-founders of Toward Health, a medical programme available in all 50 states that offers holistic, diet-focused health care for weight loss and other conditions, with minimal medications and medical interventions. He now weighs 215 pounds, and like everyone on staff, he says, has lost weight and kept it off by following a combination of techniques that included a high-animal-protein, low-carb diet (meaning, yes, whole milk and yogurt, in addition to red meats, dark-meat chicken and other fatty cuts). Trial results for Toward Health’s weight-loss programme, after one year, he says, are very similar to the results for patients on Ozempic. 

In other words: the old food pyramid was all wrong, and the new guidelines are much better advice for losing or maintaining weight, including the controversial advice around meat, cheese and whole milk.  

Kalayjian is on one side of the intense medical debate surrounding diet and health that lay behind the recent inversion of the food pyramid by Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s Department of Health and Human Services. The establishment side believes that the traditional low-fat, low-calorie diet, pushed upon Americans since the Sixties, is better for weight loss and overall health. This side is supported by much of the medical establishment, and various anti-meat interests, including vegetarians, environmentalists, religious objectors, and the processed-foods and synthetic-meat industries. It’s why schools were, until Wednesday’s reversal, only allowed to serve skim and low-fat dairy products. 

On Kalayjian’s side are the healthy-fat doctors and scientists, whom Kalayjian calls “the metabolic-lifestyle camp”. They claim that the satiating effects of animal fats have a series of positive impacts on weight loss, from making a person feel full sooner to preventing the kind of blood-sugar spikes and crashes that lead to overeating. This camp believes that the other side is “bad science” and that — tragically — “everyone who is overweight is essentially being gaslighted by the medical profession”, as Kalayjian says. 

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By all accounts, the new guidelines are a victory for the metabolic-lifestylers — the directives to avoid processed foods and “eat real food”, and the inversion of the food pyramid to promote full fats and animal proteins, represent a renunciation of the previous high-carb, low-fat advice. This is good news, since most health-conscious Americans — and anyone who has eaten a pint of ice cream for dinner, then been hungry 45 minutes later — have already intuitively felt the perils of the blood-sugar spike. It’s also worth noting that in the era prior to easily available high-carb, low-fat processed foods, people were thinner and much healthier, and they ate their meat and two veg, whole fat dairy and so on, with no problems.  

So how did we get here? 

American fear of saturated fat started in the Sixties, according to Nina Teicholz, a journalist with a doctorate in nutrition science who is a leading authority on the topic. It all began with an enterprising physiologist named Ancel Keys, who put forth the “diet-heart hypothesis”, based on bombshell scientific findings with high intuitive appeal. Keys studied people’s diets and rates of heart diseases in seven countries, with the apparent discovery that people who ate little saturated fat and cholesterol were less likely to die from heart disease. The general public was captivated by the research, Keys became TIME magazine’s Man of the Year for 1961, and the American Heart Association adopted his findings, issuing its first exhortation for Americans to avoid saturated fats and dietary cholesterol.

Teicholz tells the story in her 2014 book, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat, and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. From there, the AHA expanded the mandate in 1970 to suggest that the public cut back not just on saturated fat but all fat, based, Teicholz says, on an idea that was “completely untested”: that this diet could prevent obesity, since fat has nine calories per gram, versus the four calories in protein or carbohydrates. In 1980, when the US Departments of Agriculture and HHS co-issued the first dietary guidelines for the general population, these agencies adopted the entire roster of anti-saturated-fat ideas. The high-carb, low-fat diet jumped from a precaution for the prevention of heart disease to a general guideline for all Americans.

However, Keys’s research, according to Teicholz, was never any good. He cherry-picked his countries, avoiding those like Switzerland and France, where he knew people ate plentiful meat and cheese but still had low rates of heart disease. He also elided complicating factors: for example, he studied the Greek diet on the island of Crete during Lent, when the healthy, heart-disease-free population was eating a meat-free diet — but only temporarily. 

With America’s adoption of this diet has come the obesity epidemic. The government guidelines aren’t the only factors affecting how people eat, but as Teicholz demonstrates in her book, our diet has, in effect, changed nearly in lockstep with government recommendations. The medical establishment and most medical professionals uniformly dispense the government line, which affects people down to the family-practitioner level. And everyone who eats through a government programme, including schoolchildren, the military, and the poor, are getting offerings in compliance with the guidelines. By Teicholz’s estimate, one in four Americans is affected by them directly.  

At the same time, the American population has grown ever “fatter and sicker”, as Kalayjian puts it. According to a 2018 estimate, 88% of American adults have one or more chronic diseases; they are 50% heavier than comparable countries with similar food supplies; and they die four years sooner, on average. The resulting quality-of-life loss is immeasurable. 

The National Institutes of Health has spent billions of dollars over decades testing Keys’s hypothesis, as Teicholz has documented both in her book and in a separate, peer-reviewed academic paper. But the agency has been unable to confirm Keys’s basic tenets. These studies include the $725 million Women’s Health Initiative, the largest clinical trial in the history of nutrition science, whose results, published in 2006, failed to prove that the low-fat diet had any significant benefit for weight maintenance, and also failed to show any benefit for the prevention of heart disease, type-2 diabetes, or cancer of any kind.

On the flip side, as Teicholz has written, more than 200 clinical trials now show that low-carb diets are superior to low-fat diets for weight loss, and can prevent and treat chronic diseases such as type-2 diabetes, obesity, and heart disease, among others, “often within just weeks”. Moreover, dozens of scientists have reviewed the data, published papers, and come to the conclusion that saturated fats have no effect on heart attacks or death. A review of all these papers was included in the HHS release as part of the guidelines.

And yet, the mythology surrounding saturated fat lives on, fuelled by institutional bias among health authorities and aggressive lobbying efforts on the part of processed-food companies.

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A cursory internet search calls up cautions against saturated fat on websites like Medline Plus and Harvard Health. And newspaper headlines in both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, concurrent with the release of the new dietary guidelines, sounded an alarmist note, with the Times trumpeting in a headline that “Kennedy Flips the Food Pyramid to Emphasize Red Meat and Whole Milk”, and writing in the ensuing story that the decision was “despite the fact that scientific evidence does not support doing so”. As far as protein goes, the Times writes “most American already get enough”. 

The prejudice is so fierce that HHS itself, has, to some extent, caved in. The new guidelines fail, in an essential point, to stick to the metabolic-lifestylers’ best practices, and to the stated convictions of champions such as RFK Jr, and Food and Drug Commissioner Marty Makary. While the government graphics suggest that meat and whole-fat dairy should now be the basis of a healthy diet, in the fine print, the percentage of the daily diet that can come from “saturated fat” (i.e., fatty meat and full-fat dairy) remains unchanged at 10%.

Teicholz claims that “a top adviser to Kennedy” told her that removing the saturated-fat cap would have been too controversial, and would have “overshadowed” the “wins” on sugar and grains. Kalayjian says that the overall direction of the new guidelines is “beyond great”, and cautions that there are some legitimate scientific reasons for concern on saturated fat. “I understand why they punted on it,” he says. There is some evidence that merely adding saturated fats to the traditional American diet, without decreasing carbs, can be worse for health. 

“I think it would have been scientifically appropriate,” he adds, “if they said, ‘We don’t know the answer to this, and that’s why we’re going to remove’” the 10% cap. “That would have been the correct scientific approach. I understand why they didn’t do that, but I think it’s more political than scientific.” 

The new guidelines are an enormous step in the right direction, and should be celebrated. Their only flaw is that they don’t go far enough. Americans must end their irrational fear of saturated fats, especially when it comes to treating obesity and related health conditions. 

“Every day of my life, every part of my body hurt, my back hurt, my joints hurt, I was tired all the time,” Kalayjian says, “I had brain fog. I certainly was not at 100% for myself.” 

Whole foods, including whole milk, saved him; that it will now be available to schoolchildren is a welcome change. 

And, yet, on the surface at least, D.C. is uncharacteristically calm. Some anti-abortion groups are agitating about Trump’s decision to nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr to head up the Department of Health and Human Services, but on the Right, nothing inside the conservative movement resembles a “freak out” at all right now.

“It’s the end of Trump Derangement Syndrome,” says one insider, reflecting on the feverish resistance movement that sprang into action after the President-elect’s 2016 win, creating an arms race for anti-Trump donor cash and media attention. While there’s some “grumbling” about Kennedy and Trump’s pro-union pick for Labor Secretary, nobody wants to “step on the vibes”, one senior activist tells me.

The threat to K Street lobbyists is more obvious, but you wouldn’t know it from the outside. The Chamber of Commerce put out a polite statement congratulating Trump on his victory — after which the incoming President immediately started filling top posts with sworn enemies of the special interests the chamber represents. One long-time lobbyist I spoke with on Monday afternoon said K Street is “scared to death and not saying anything” for fear of retribution.

“The angel of death is hovering and they just want fucking lamb’s blood on their door,” the person added. Everyone is hoping the incoming administration “has bigger fish to fry” than their particular industry.

There is no modern precedent for these nominees. Trump’s first cabinet ruffled no feathers in the Republican Party as he surrounded himself with known quantities with conventional worldviews. Remember Tom Price? Alexander Acosta? How about David Shulkin and Sonny Perdue? Most people certainly don’t, though it’s hard to imagine anyone will have forgotten about RFK Jr in 10 years’ time.

Even Trump’s more disruptive picks in 2016 were solidly on the Right, from the longtime donor and activist Betsy DeVos to Rex Tillerson, who was first recommended to Trump by Condoleezza Rice and Robert Gates. Tillerson’s nomination even drew support from Dick Cheney.

But with a win in the popular vote and demographic winds shifting in his favour, Trump did the unthinkable this time around. This cabinet is a mix of bomb-throwers and GOP foot soldiers — slotting a fierce critic of government surveillance like Tulsi Gabbard next to John Ratcliffe, who is a staunch defender of controversial spy powers. If confirmed, Kennedy will rub elbows with Russell Vought, a longtime proponent of deregulation and cultural conservatism, and Chris Wright, a fracking executive.

Gabbard herself has said that Marco Rubio — nominated to lead the State Department — represents “the neocon, warmongering establishment of Washington, D.C.” As Director of National Intelligence, Gabbard’s sphere of influence would overlap significantly with Rubio’s. While Trump’s prior disagreements with his own nominees have been hashed out — and this is good enough for the GOP base — their disagreements with one another have not. How long the collective bunch will hold the peace is anyone’s guess.

But there is one thing that knits these characters together: their loyalty to Trump. It would be foolish to assume this will necessarily prevent discord and chaos. But perhaps these aren’t obstacles to success. During his first term, Trump openly said internal conflict was “the best way to go”, as news of fights between advisers such as John Bolton and John Kelly leaked into the press.

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“It’s tough,” Trump said. “I like conflict, I like having two people with different points of view, and I certainly have that. And then I make a decision. But I like watching it, I like seeing it, and I think it’s the best way to go.”

This is not the way either major party has viewed presidential cabinets in the past; they were always considered places to park supportive ideologues. Even Barack Obama, elected on the mandate of “hope and change”, shied away from nominating Kennedy to head up the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008. Described by Politico at the time as a “well-respected climate lawyer”, a Chamber of Commerce lobbyist told the outlet that “a Kennedy appointment is as liberal as you can possibly get. There is no one [candidate] based firmer in extremes.”

Trump’s Republican Party today, in contrast, is one where Russia hawks Rubio and Michael Walz will have to share the stage with Moscow-friendly Kennedy and Gabbard. Pete Hegseth, a decorated veteran, activist, and Fox News host, will oversee the gargantuan Pentagon budget if he’s confirmed as Defense Secretary. He is a bitter opponent of the department’s bureaucracy who would gladly wave a wand and clean house. He will sit alongside Lori Chavez-DeRemer, Trump’s Teamsters-friendly Labor pick who is one of the only Republicans to have co-sponsored sweeping pro-union legislation and Kennedy and Gabbard, lifelong Democrats.

It’s hard to exaggerate how unusual it is for Democrats to find their way into a Republican cabinet, accept nominations alongside GOP ideologues, and be met with such little protest by most of the conservative movement. In the case of Kennedy and Gabbard, both were invited into Trump world not despite their unorthodox politics but because of them.

Not all of Kennedy, Gabbard, Chavez-DeRemer, and Hegseth’s views are truly subversive, though, and most of Trump’s nominees are ho-hum conservative standardbearers flavoured with a dash of MAGA. Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi followed Matt Gaetz as nominee to head up the Department of Justice. Former GOP Reps. Sean Duffy and Doug Collins were tapped to lead the Departments of Transportation and Veterans Affairs respectively along with a handful of other Republican loyalists. Scott Bessent and Howard Lutnick will be familiar faces to Wall Street at Treasury and the Commerce Department.

But if Trump is their unifying belief, Trumpism will be defined by their clashing ideas. For outsiders, that’s an exciting prospect. For insiders, who’ve spent decades building the system and building their livelihoods around it, the prospect is deeply unsettling.

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They fear that Trump and his deputies are plotting “retribution” and “mass” layoffs across the federal workforce. Brian Stelter reported this week that some journalists are genuinely anxious “about newsrooms being raided and media owners being audited”. At a recent gala for the Committee to Protect Journalists, Stelter notes one media CEO said, “journalists are being forced to hire their own security, for themselves and their families. And publications are setting aside massive legal budgets for the challenges we know are to come. It’s chilling.”

Journalists may not need private security, but legal protection could be critical. Trump has a long history of calling for leaders to pull the broadcast licenses of outlets that, as he sees it, report egregiously false information. Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to head up the Federal Communications Commission, tweeted shortly after the announcement to say: “Broadcast media have had the privilege of using a scarce and valuable public resource — our airwaves. In turn, they are required by law to operate in the public interest. When the transition is complete, the FCC will enforce this public interest obligation.”

Trump, it is clear, has remade the GOP in his image, priming the party institutions to absorb “climate lunatics” such as RFK Jr — as one nonprofit leader told me this week — and to make peace with the politics of revenge. The transformation took eight years of pressure from the man and his voters. If anything, that level of compliance coupled with the utter demoralisation of the Democrats suggests Trump’s pledge to “drain the swamp” of his enemies is more serious than ever before.

Within 24 hours of Trump’s landslide victory, while the Dow soared on the so-called Trump Trade, anticipation of a Kennedy health coup sent pharmaceutical markets into a doom loop. Covid MRNA vaccine providers Pfizer and Moderna were both down around 2% while BioNTech was 2.5% lower.

RFK Jr has promised to bring MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) to MAGA. Putting all venal political ambition to one side, the ex-environmental lawyer is an odd appurtenance to Trump, who gorges upon McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish and has phenylalanine on tap (aka, Diet Coke). RFK Jr blithely ignores such failings, along with the bothersome fact that during his previous tenure in the Oval Office, the Trump EPA ascended the heights of toxic chemical de-regulation by halting bans on a triumvirate of virulent chemicals. Not to mention Trump’s brilliant McDonald’s drive-thru stunt, in which he secured his victory in America’s electoral college by pretending to be CEO of the fryolator — chief villain of the MAHA universe.

Yet despite their dietary differences, Trump has promised to let Kennedy “go wild on food”.  “The key that President Trump has promised me is control of the public health agencies which are HHS and its subagencies: CDC, FDA, NIH and a few others, and also USDA,” Kennedy rasped in a post-election video posted by Newsmax reporter Alex Salvi. That’s a lot of initials, a lot of agencies, and a lot of money, as Congress allotted more than one-and-a-half billion dollars for Health and Human Services in 2022.

Fears abound that Kennedy will send America’s regulation of food and drugs swirling into a chaos of contradictions. RFK and transition team co-chair Howard Lutnick are infamous for their aversion to vaccines, and are apparently already drafting 30-, 60-, and 90-day plans to end chronic diseases. Of course, the alt-Right Twittersphere is agog with the prospect that fluoride in the drinking water, the longstanding hobbyhorse of the conspiracy theorists, may at last have met its match.

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In many ways, RFK Jr presents a paradox, as no one in their right mind can ignore America’s addiction to fast-food and cheap calories promoted by genetically modified insecticides and ever-abundant harvests of food porn. Amid a supersized obesity crisis, RFK Jr has tapped into our collective obsession with what shall or shall not pass the most holy threshold of our mouths. He embodies our national addiction to diets, from vegan to paleo. MAHA’s gospel of personal purity channels the spirit of long-lost digestive heroes such as the mid-19th-century Samuel Larned, who left society behind to live in a perfectionist community called Fruitlands. There, he spent one year of his life eating nothing but crackers. Another year he subsisted entirely on apples.

Much like Larned, when faced with real problems, MAHA offers absurd solutions. Lurking beneath Kennedy’s appeal lies the long-standing issue of the sanctity of the American body — not simply the body politic, but the actual bodies of Americans which have been eviscerated by junk food, GMOs, and pharmaceuticals. Into the polluted battlefield gallops RFK Jr on his white horse, promising to stop the FDA’s suppression of sunshine (yes, sunshine. Check X feed @RobertKennedyJr). He has vowed to make America safe for psychedelics, hyperbaric therapies, horse tranquilisers, and of course raw milk — the vaunted cure for ailments as varied as hypertension, heart disease, chronic gastritis, eczema, and psoriasis. As for the concomitant risks of salmonellosis, brucellosis, listeriosis, tuberculosis? Nothing but fright tactics of the Deep State, co-opted by dairy-industry stooges to ensnare lacto-fermentation scofflaws.

Kennedy exploits a fear of impurity that has always haunted America — and more often than not has been centred around the gut. In the 17th century, puritan divines, led by Cotton Mather, were firmly convinced that the cure for a cough, dropsy, nightmares, and “bloody flux” (whatever that might be) was a gentle vomit. Mather’s list of enteric aphorisms included the dire warning: “Look after thy stomach.” And long before the great Satan was diabetes-inducing breakfast cereal, it was that demon, hasty pudding. “Few things are more deceptive to children or adults, than these soft lazy dishes,” food philosopher Dr. William Andrus Alcott warned in 1838.

RFK channels the days when America was truly Great — when frontier eating raged and nothing was safe from our imperial mouths, not bear, skunk, rattlesnake, nor alligator, nor, as legend has it, the natives themselves, whom Davy Crockett scalped with his teeth. Liberals were stunned at the rumour that Kennedy had devoured a dog. What would they have made of the great Henry Hudson, who in 1609 sat down for a solemn feast with some upstate New York Wappingers for a feast of fatted canine? Much like Trump, Kennedy has positioned himself as the chosen one, promising to return us to the golden age of American consumption and re-invigorate our long-lost notion that we are the city on the hill, sacrosanct, strong in our isolation, confident in our direct relationship with the great god, the stomach.

It’s a trick that goes back to the days of Trump’s strongest presidential antecedent, Andrew Jackson. While the old general duelled on the White House lawn, the great American diet guru Sylvester Graham was the first to rail against store-bought processed foods, thus anticipating RFK Jr’s favourite political talking points. Ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1829, Graham soon became an advocate of extreme temperance. The harsh physical regimen he championed — proscribing meat, hard liquor, wine, coffee, tea, and tobacco — would have impressed the staunchest of contemporary podcasting bros (except, of course, that part about no sex).

Above all, Graham believed in the transcendent wonders of bread — that is, bread created from unsifted and unbolted flour. He scorned the professionally baked varieties with their immoral additives, such as alum and chlorine. Thousands attended his histrionic lectures, which gained credence the more they were threatened by throngs of apoplectic butchers and bakers. Naturally, he would have been appalled by the sugar content of his modern, eponymous cracker. Though oddly enough, like so many health gurus who came after him, Graham did not live to be old. He was 58 when he succumbed to what his physician cited as a superfluity of warm baths and an overdose of mineral water.

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Two centuries later, the American cult of the body and body-image has grown even more pervasive. As is clear from TikTok and Instagram, the online Right is not only obsessed with micromanaging ingestion, but with muscle mass, protein packs, anabolic protocols, and Popeye forearms. The MAGA male body can and will be remade by any means necessary, to hell with the heart palpitations and suicidal ideation. The result has been the newest entry into the taxonomy of body dysmorphia, Bigorexia.

When it comes to Kennedy, the swole American’s idol, all this eating and not-eating and buffing and vomiting may be moot, as Trump officials have recently expressed doubt that the Senate will confirm a man for a Cabinet-level position who has been known to deposit dead bear cubs in Central Park. Then again, new Chief of Staff Susie Wiles may give the go-ahead for an appointment as some sort of hazy “Health Czar”, which only requires a wave of Trump’s royal hand.

The problem with America is not sexism, racism, inflation, immigration, or boys playing girls’ volleyball. It’s not income inequality, China, or the price of gasoline. The real crisis is and always has been dyspepsia — which way back in 1830, the Encyclopedia Americana declared the most common of all American ailments. And RFK Jr, a man who possesses not a single scientific or medical credential, has at long last arrived as the saviour of the American stomach. He has railed against the threat of Froot Loops — and in these parts, that’s enough.