Today's big nutrition story broke in South Park — South FREAKING Park — years ago.
Now, Politico is all snippy that it's a fake episode, but it's just RFK Jr. edited into a real South Park episode from some time ago. And here it is. The Food Pyramid? Turn it over!
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) January 7, 2026
The crazy thing? They're right. That's exactly what's happening.
Now, I've been writing about diet at PJ Media since, I think, 2008. No, I'm not going to dig it out; that's close to 20 years, and it's just too depressing. In the meantime, after being diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, I've been tracking diet and the medical science involved with diet for the whole time. And, in all humility (stop laughing), I've been pointing out for quite a while that the scientific consensus on diet was, in the immortal words of Doctor Frederick Frankenstein, "doo-doo."
With, of course, a lot of help, most importantly from Gary Taubes in his many books. I wrote about it at some length a few months ago in my PJ Media article "Everything You Know About Diet Is Wrong." As I said then,
I tried, I really did. For months, I ate high-carb, low-fat, and I was race walking up to 30 miles a week. I lost some weight, but not much. I was a vegetarian for something like six years, and vegan for about a year of that, basically to no avail.
That was the scientific consensus at the time. High carbs, low fat, like Entenmann's no-fat pastry, which replaced the fat with, you guessed it, more carbs.
(Just as an aside, when someone talks about "consensus" in science, put your hand on your wallet and back away slowly. They're selling something and they're not overburdened with ethics while doing it.)
JD and RFK Jr. had some fun with it.
Caution! Do not take dietary advice from this guy https://t.co/uRH86kGuIH pic.twitter.com/6za1U65WOC
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) January 8, 2026
Taubes and others looked at the actual science, rather than the "consensus" science, and discovered that the actual science was actually saying the opposite of the consensus. The food pyramid as pushed by the FDA and the Department of Agriculture was not just wrong. It was actively harmful, and the best diet for at least obese people or people with Type 2 Diabetes was a high-protein, high-fat, low-carb diet, with only whole grains, and with few highly processed foods.
When I changed my diet, I lost around 100 pounds and brought my diabetes under strong control.
Now, I went into this at some length in my "Diet Wrong" article, and Taubes, Nina Teicholz, and a number of others have written extensively on how it ended up that the consensus best diet was in fact pretty much the worst diet. Or at least the worst diet that could be proposed without actively urging smoking tobacco as a weight loss strategy.
The Trump Administration seems to have made it an overall strategy to look at the dumb things done in Washington, D.C., in the last 50 years, and then do the opposite. In particular Robert F. Kennedy Jr., as the secretary of Health and Human Services, has been a radical iconoclast, and just this week, the food pyramid is one of those icons he's clasting. The result is now the official dietary guidance, which you can find out about in a flashy presentation at realfood.gov.
Summarized, it's really pretty simple: if your great-grandfather would have eaten it, the new food pyramid says go ahead.
Protein. The new food pyramid has lots more protein — 1.2–1.6 g per kg of body weight, or something like 0.5 to 0.75 grams per pound.
Dairy. Whole milk. Cheese. Butter. Which brings up —
Fats. Stop worrying about saturated fats. Butter, lard, beef tallow. Avoid trans-fats, and things like Crisco are highly processed, so limit them.
Grains. Stick with whole grains, and limit the amounts.
Processed Foods and Sugar. Basically, don't. Oh, I know you can't give them all up — cookies? ice cream? — but don't make a big habit of them.
The thing that really strikes me about this is it's a whole lot like the the recommendations I saw as a kid in first and second grade: a quart of whole milk every day; meat and eggs with breakfast, oatmeal with cream, all those things we've been told not to eat for the last 50 years. In The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, Nina Teicholz explores in detail how that went wrong.
So, the new advice is a lot closer to those "quack" fad diets, like Atkins, than what people have been telling you for years.
And the South Park doctors have it right: "Have some steak with your butter, Mr. President."
