White House Nutrition Conference Will Be a Sham

By Jennifer Hill

Beef has spent decades unfairly and inaccurately misaligned by the nutritional powers that be as an unhealthy protein to be consumed sparingly. Meanwhile human metabolic disease in the nation has continued to skyrocket. Any normal thinking organization would take a look at all of the evidence of declining human health and realize that a change in course is required, but government is no thinking organization. When proven wrong they frequently double down, which is exactly what I expect to see at the White House Conference on Nutrition next month.

The conference is being developed by Dariush Mozaffarian, who is the Dean of the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Last year Mozaffarian authored a food scoring system. His self-titled Food Compass doesn’t leave much room for hope that the nutritional conference will be anything but lies and poor advice. According to the Compass (see below) Lucky Charms would be a better breakfast decision that eggs, and ice cream would improve your health more than ground beef. In fact, nearly all foods were ranked higher than ground beef. If it weren’t so scary it would be laughable.

Thankfully investigative journalist and author Nina Teicholz has done some digging into the Food Compass and it’s development. She found some interesting things including that the compass, “Automatically assigns negative scores to red meat and dietary cholesterol; Puts a low priority on protein, giving it equal value to fiber and phytochemicals; Makes no distinction between nutrients obtained from animal foods versus those from plants or the artificial nutrients added to enriched, fortified foods—even though most nutrients are in their most bioavailable forms in animal foods.” The dice were weighted against meat before the “study” even began.

Those who have been following my work on Burnin Daylight know that I am a big advocate of nutrition based partnerships in the beef industry and I believe the need for those strategic partnerships is growing. Authors such as Nina Teicholz and Vinnie Tortorich have been unofficially advocating for us for years from a sound, human health and nutrition based perspective. These are the people the beef industry should be promoting and working closely with, not celebrity influencers. The recent popularity of the carnivore and low carb, high protein communities should give us hope that even though the government might not ever get this right, people are waking up to the realities of human nutritional requirements and government lies. If we can’t trust them to run an election, why would we believe them when they say Coco Puffs are healthier than a whole egg? This is the moment for meat producers to stand behind the growing voices pushing back against the USDA and their nutritional advice, saving both the future of our product and the health of millions of Americans.