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In 2015, the factory farming industry shut down discussions between experts and U.S. policymakers on implementing healthier and more sustainable diets. Almost ten years later, health of people, animals, and the planet is at a breaking point, and the need to protect them is more dire than ever. Now, we have a critical opportunity to eliminate industry influence and get back on track to a healthier, more ethical, and more sustainable future.
The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans are being drafted soon, providing a critical opportunity to put the nutritional, environmental, and public health impacts of excessive animal-sourced food from factory farms back on the table.
Take Action
Submit a comment to the U.S. government and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee urging them to eliminate industrial influence around animal-sourced food consumption guidance and to revisit adding climate and environmental considerations in the 2025-2030 Guidelines. Comments must be submitted via the regulations.gov portal.
Write your own comment or use the template below. Consider personalizing your message–unique comments are extremely effective.
*To prevent being marked as spam, please only submit one comment per person.
Comment Template:
Re: HHS-OASH-2022-0021-0001
Dear Dr. Booth, Dr. Odoms-Young, and Members of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee:
In 2015, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee urged the U.S. government to encourage and guide its population to consume dietary patterns rich in plant-based foods and low in red and processed meats due to significant personal health and environmental concerns. However, the recommendation was met with intense backlash from the industrialized meat industry, which forced the USDA and HHS to omit environmental considerations and obliged them to obscure the nutritional recommendations in the 2015-2020 DGAs. Almost ten years later, Americans continue to suffer greatly from diet-related disease, and calls to mitigate climate change through more sustainable diets are more prevalent and urgent than ever. Thus, I am writing to urge the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee to revisit these critical recommendations and the expanded body of evidence that supports the 2015 Committee's recommendation.
Scientific consensus has identified that excessive red and processed meat consumption is linked to cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and certain cancers. In addition, industrialized animal feeding operations, where most U.S. meat and dairy comes from today, emit significant air and water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. They also dramatically increase the risk of zoonotic disease and antibiotic resistance. These impacts further harm human health, and if left unchecked, could eclipse the benefits of a healthy diet.
The current guidance on meat and dairy consumption is also unsustainable. Research from the EAT-Lancet Commission found that global adoption of the current U.S. Dietary Guidelines would require over three Earths to support in terms of land and water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and nutrient cycling. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recently called on nations to incorporate environmental considerations into their dietary guidelines. The USDA itself has committed to One Health, which hinges on advancing human, animal, and environmental health holistically.
As I hope you agree, we cannot let private interests continue to preclude unbiased science in the next iteration of the Guidelines. Therefore, I urge you to strongly recommend that the USDA and HHS undo previous corporate influence in the Dietary Guidelines by:
- Adding explicit guidance on red meat intake maximums and explicitly recommending eating little, if any, processed meat, in line with the latest nutrition and environmental scientific consensus.
- Considering how different production methods of animal-sourced foods, particularly industrialized versus pasture-raised methods, impact the climate, the environment, zoonotic disease risk, and antibiotic resistance.
- Dividing the "protein foods" category in MyPlate into "animal-sourced proteins" and "plant-based proteins" to more accurately depict the correct portion sizes for each.
Thank you for your consideration.
Tips:
Consider personalizing your comment and adding your own thoughts. Some examples of important points to include are:
- Who you are (a student, a parent, a farmer, a teacher, an athlete, etc.)
- How federal nutrition programs or the Dietary Guidelines impact you (I receive/d meals from the National School Lunch Program, I learned about MyPlate in school, my mother receives meals from the Adult Daycare Program, etc.)
- How you are or have been impacted by food and dietary patterns
- Why healthy food production is important to you (I live near a factory farm that harms my community, I want a healthy and sustainable future for my children, etc.)
You may also review the Commenter's Checklist provided by regulations.gov.
