People should start following a heart healthy diet at age 1 – prioritizing protein from plant-based sources
There are nine steps heart experts say you should follow to stave off life-threatening disease – and several contradict Health Sec. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s new “MAHA” dietary guidance.
While the Trump administration’s January guidelines promote eating animal meat and full-fat dairy products, new guidance released by the American Heart Association calls for more plant-based protein sources.
And despite Kennedy’s pledge to end what he claimed was a “war” on protein and saturated fats, the AHA says people should still choose low-fat or fat-free dairy products and replaced saturated fats with sources of unsaturated fats, such as nuts, avocados and seeds.
The new guidance is aimed at lowering Americans’ risk of cardiovascular disease and other chronic health conditions, the AHA, which is supported by 30,000 scientific, medical and healthcare professionals, said.
Both Kennedy and the AHA can get bent. They’re out here promoting the fallacious concept that some mythical universal diet exists that will be healthy for everyone.
Different people have different dietary needs, and even thesame person will have different dietary needs and tolerances throughout their lifetime. I appreciate that AHA is theoretically trying to “follow the science,” but dietary studies are practically pseudoscience, what with their correlation studies, imbalanced populations, results averaging, and industry sponsorships (remember the food pyramid?). Meanwhile Kennedy’s dietary advice is an obvious knee-jeek reaction to this (e.g. AHA’s long-time insistence that “eggs (esp. yolks) are unhealthy”), but it’s reactionary, too much a case of “well if established dietary science says A is bad, A must be excellent!” with a heaping dose of toxic masculinity (steak and bacon and other manly foods are good, whereas weak, feminine foods are bad).
Frankly the AHA and their ilk make areas of health science where the research is valid, like vaccines, look bad by association, which is only going to promote more anti-science opinions and Kennedy types. Because whenever someone says “I was following dietary ‘science’ for years, but after I cut down on ‘good’ foods like brown rice* and started eating ‘bad’ foods like eggs and red meat*, I had more energy and fewer digestive issues, plus it tastes so much better than that ‘healthy’ crap,” their obvious conclusion will be, “what else is ‘science’ lying to me about?” Next thing you know, they’re out here insisting windmills give you cancer.
*Used for example purposes only; plenty of people digest brown rice just fine and would suffer on a high-animal protein diet, which is exactly the point I’m trying to make about humans and futile attempts at finding a universal diet.