I concur with our local nutrition experts that Malaysians should follow Malaysia’s dietary framework instead of adopting the United States’ new inverted food pyramid.
Since its first publication 45 years ago, the US guide has served as a vital reference for nations worldwide in establishing dietary policies.
This global influence is largely due to the scientific consultations provided every five years by leading experts in fields such as nutrition and public health.
The advisory committee for this latest edition is composed of 20 experts who co-authored the Scientific Report of the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.
The US government has a long-standing tradition of basing its nutritional guidelines on these scientific recommendations. Whether it is encouraging fruit and vegetable intake, restricting alcohol and saturated fats, or the recently debated recommendation to “encourage red meat consumption”, all are supposedly grounded in scientific research.
Because the promotion of red meat contradicts the established scientific consensus – which maintains that excessive consumption increases chronic disease risks – and given the questionable prominence of the large steak pictured in the new “inverted food pyramid”, I have reviewed the supporting documents, including The Scientific Foundation For The Dietary Guidelines For Americans (hereafter referred to as the Scientific Foundation) to search for the evidence used to justify the recommendation for red meat intake.
Firstly, page 38 of the report addresses the “observational associations linking meat intake with chronic disease risk”, stating that such evidence is “inconsistent”. To support this claim, the report cites three research papers.
Of these three articles, while one from the University of Glasgow suggests that red meat does not increase breast cancer risk (published February 2018 in the European Journal of Cancer), the other two – from Harvard University and Semmelweis University – actually demonstrate that long-term, high consumption of red and processed meats increases the risk of multiple types of cancer (published July 2021 in the European Journal of Epidemiology and June 2025 in Geroscience, respectively).
However, the Scientific Foundation dismisses these studies, claiming the results are “inconsistent” and may be largely driven by processed-meat subtypes, despite a lack of evidence suggesting that this is the cause of such finding inconsistency.
Furthermore, based on my rapid screening of databases including PubMed, Google Scholar and Scopus, substantial scientific evidence from numerous institutions and universities — such as Harvard, University of Toronto, University of Hong Kong, University of Edinburgh and Sichuan University (published October 2023 in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition), December 2020 in the British Medical Journal, December 2025 in Annals of Internal Medicine, July 2023 in European Heart Journal, February 2023 in Diabetes Care, July 2024 in The Lancet Planetary Health, September 2021 in Food Chemistry — was omitted from both the Scientific Foundation and its Appendices.
This excluded research includes meta-analyses and reports demonstrating that high red meat consumption increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes and various cancers, while replacing it with unsaturated fats (such as fish oil, nuts, and legumes) reduces these risks.
On page 372 of the Appendices, the new guidelines adopt two reports from Midwest Biomedical Research – a private research firm focusing on nutrition, cardiometabolic health and cognitive function – to argue that daily beef consumption does not increase cardiovascular or diabetic risks (citing Current Developments in Nutrition, December 2024, and European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, February 2023).
Additionally, the guidelines cite two other papers from Purdue University and Texas Tech University to posit that red meat intake does not elevate risks related to diabetes or obesity (the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, January 2017 and Obesity, September 2025). However, these studies still fail to provide evidence of “no association” between red meat consumption and the risks of various cancers or stroke.
Interestingly, one must ask: what happened to all the scientific papers readily available in those major academic databases? This phenomenon is known in the scientific community as “cherry-picking” – the deliberate suppression of unfavourable evidence while selectively adopting materials that support one’s own narrative.
In fact, the vast majority of high-quality research from leading experts confirms that red meat consumption is linked to various chronic disease risks, supporting recommendations to limit, rather than encourage, its intake.
Interested readers can further investigate other sections of the Scientific Foundation to see if similar “cherry-picking” issues persist elsewhere in the guidelines.
It is also noteworthy that experts involved in drafting the Report of the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee – including Stanford University nutrition professor Christopher Gardner – have publicly pointed out that the Trump administration failed to incorporate the scientific recommendations from the committee’s 400-plus page report into the new guidelines. Specifically, the content “encouraging red meat consumption” did not originate from the committee’s recommendations (see page 5 of the report).
For years, the world has looked to official US reports with great respect. However, in this instance, I strongly believe that this guide exhibits blatant cherry-picking that violates scientific methods and principles.
Consequently, it should not be taken seriously, especially regarding its emphasis on red meat intake.
Adjunct Assoc Prof Dr Song Beng Kah is a molecular geneticist at Monash University Malaysia.
- This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of CodeBlue.
