During CattleCon 2025, Senior Farm and Ranch Broadcaster, Ron Hays, caught up with the Executive Director of Nutrition Research at the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, Dr. Shalene McNeill, to follow up on a previous discussion about USDA’s recommended dietary guidelines.
Coverage of CattleCon 2025 is powered by Farm Data Services of Stillwater, Oklahoma.
The scientific committee has made its dietary guideline recommendations to USDA and has stepped back. It is now up to the new Trump administration to review the recommendations and decide whether or not to use them in the final guidelines to be released at the end of 2025.
Dr. McNeill noted that the initial report was both surprising and disappointing. She said, “This committee wasn’t as transparent as committees that we have seen in the past, so we got some surprises towards the end about how far they were going to go with this idea that the American population would be better off if we swapped meat out for beans, peas, and lentils.”
From her perspective as a registered dietitian, these recommendations don’t make any sense to Dr. McNeill. “They are different foods,” she said. “A high-quality protein in beef isn’t the same as the protein in beans. Beef has iron; beans don’t have iron. It doesn’t really make sense to use them interchangeably.”
To ensure that the outlandish recommendations don’t make it into policy, McNeill said that they must ensure that scientific facts remain the focus of the discussion. “One of the things that this committee did is they made really strong recommendations about beef on very weak evidence,” she said. “They didn’t even look at the clinical trials where we can document cause and effect relationships between higher beef eating and positive health outcomes.”
During the oral comment period, stakeholders, such as ranchers and beef advocates, weighed in on their concerns. “We even saw people that we didn’t know were going to be submitting comments,” Dr. McNeill said. “For example, in Oklahoma, a dietician who works with the tribes talked about how important beef eating is to her population and how there would be nutritional consequences for cutting back on beef.”
The Beef Checkoff has documented decades of research about heart health, diabetes, weight management, and healthy growth and development in children. Repeatedly, the findings have reported that people who eat higher amounts of beef will be just as healthy or better off than people who do not.
“We don’t really see that eating beef as part of a healthy diet does anything negative for your health,” Dr. McNeill summarized.
A recent Beef Checkoff Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis – the highest form of scientific evidence – proved that beef doesn’t increase risks of cardiovascular disease. “We want the dietary guidelines to look at this evidence and acknowledge the health benefits of beef eating as part of a balanced diet,” Dr. McNeill insisted.
The final report expected at the end of the year will be a joint effort between Health and Human Services and the United States Department of Agriculture. “They have to agree on what that final report is, and they jointly issue it out to the public, so we have the course of this year to continue to inform the new staff that is coming in to re-look at that science,” Dr. McNeill said.
The Beef Checkoff is also expanding its message to other scientific communities to keep the focus on what science has proven.
“As we have had nutrition advice, we have seen obesity go up and diabetes go up, so we are obviously headed in the wrong direction,” Dr. McNeill pointed out. “We have seen more ultra-processed foods in the diet, so we do need to examine the advice that we are given and maybe reset a little bit.”
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