This article first appeared on Substack

I have spent most of my adult life working at the intersection of food, health, and public policy. I did not come to this work through ideology. I came to it through lived experience, long before I ever held a policy title.

My mother reversed severe, debilitating Crohn’s disease decades ago after being advised to undergo radical intestinal surgery. Doctors told her there were no other options. She refused to accept that verdict and changed what she ate. Through a whole food, plant-based approach, she regained her health. That decision reshaped our family’s relationship to food and planted the seed for my life’s work.

My mother’s healing journey is also rooted in land and farming history. Her family were pasture raised cattle farmers. They raised animals on grass, with care for land, animals, and food quality long before industrial confinement systems existed. I grew up understanding that animals, soil, and human health are inseparable, and that how food is produced matters as much as what is eaten.

That way of farming did not disappear by choice. My mother’s family were eventually pushed out of agriculture by industrial pressures. Like so many small and mid sized family farmers, they could not compete with consolidation, vertically integrated markets, and systems that rewarded scale over stewardship. What was lost was not only a livelihood, but a way of relating to land, animals, and food that honored balance, care, and continuity. That history sits quietly beneath today’s dietary debates, reminding us that industrial food systems did not simply replace older models. They displaced living ones.

Years later, my husband Dennis faced his own long battle with Crohn’s disease, which had begun in childhood and resulted in multiple major surgeries that left his body profoundly compromised. Before we ever met, Dennis made a pivotal dietary choice. He became vegan, and the transformation in his health was almost immediate. After decades of illness, removing animal foods and adopting a whole food, organic, plant-based diet changed everything. His inflammation subsided. His energy returned. His vitality came back online.

Rather than eating spring chickens, Dennis, at 79, has the energy of one.

These experiences shaped my professional path. I went on to serve as Director of Government Affairs at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, working on prevention and reversal of chronic disease through plant-based nutrition. Later, I became Director of Policy at the Center for Food Safety, where I worked on investigations into drugs used in industrial animal agriculture and the regulatory failures that allow chemical and pharmaceutical residues to persist in the food supply.

I have seen this issue from every angle: personal, clinical, agricultural, and policy level.

This piece builds directly on an earlier essay I published here, The False Promise of Keto and Ancestral Eating in the Age of Chemical Intensive Industrial Agriculture. In that article, I examined how popular dietary narratives that romanticize meat heavy or so-called ancestral diets collapse when confronted with the realities of modern food production.

What may have made sense in ecological contexts defined by pasture, seasonality, and low chemical inputs no longer maps onto an industrial system dependent on genetically engineered feed, pervasive herbicide use, and routine pharmaceutical intervention. The newly released Dietary Guidelines for Americans double down on that disconnect. Rather than grappling with how food is actually produced in the United States today, they reinforce dietary advice that assumes a food system that no longer exists.

Which is why the release of the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans is so deeply troubling.

Nutrition divorced from reality

The guidelines promote increased consumption of meat and dairy while remaining almost entirely silent on how those foods are produced, what they contain, and whether our land, water, animals, and bodies can bear the cost. Nutrition is treated as an abstraction, divorced from agricultural reality.

This is not a minor oversight. It is the central failure of the document.

In the United States today, the overwhelming majority of meat, eggs, and dairy come from highly intensive industrial systems. These systems rely on confinement, routine drug use, chemically saturated feed, and enormous waste burdens. Animals are routinely administered antibiotics, hormones, beta agonists, coccidiostats, and other pharmaceutical agents, many of which accumulate in animal tissues and enter the human food supply.

What is also missing from the guidelines is any acknowledgment that most U.S. meat production depends on a chemically intensive feed system built on genetically engineered corn and soy. These crops are routinely treated with glyphosate and other herbicides, fungicides, and insecticides. Residues move through the feed supply and into animal tissues, manure, soil, air, and water. Recommending increased consumption of animal foods without acknowledging this reality divorces nutrition guidance from the actual conditions under which American food is produced.

This omission places the guidelines in direct tension with the stated goals of the Make America Healthy Again agenda. You cannot reduce chronic disease, chemical exposure, or environmental harm while promoting dietary patterns that rely on genetically engineered feed, pervasive herbicide use, and pharmaceutical dependent animal production systems. Health policy that ignores these realities is not reform. It is avoidance.

I worked on the reports documenting this reality. Hundreds of veterinary drugs and feed additives are approved for use in food producing animals, many with limited post market surveillance and inadequate consideration of cumulative exposure. This is not speculation. It is policy fact.

If federal nutrition guidance is going to encourage Americans to eat more animal foods, it has a responsibility to say clearly that those foods must be produced under organic, chemical free standards. Absent that, the guidance effectively endorses industrial practices that undermine human health while externalizing the costs onto people, animals, and ecosystems.

Protein obsession stripping away fiber

The guidelines center protein while marginalizing fiber rich plant foods that are foundational to gut health, metabolic function, immune resilience, and inflammation control.

Animal foods contain no dietary fiber. None.

Fiber deficiency is strongly associated with rising rates of metabolic disease, inflammatory disorders, colon pathology, and dysregulated gut microbiomes. Yet fiber remains sidelined in favor of protein targets that ignore the broader nutritional matrix required for health.

Nutrition does not begin on the plate. It begins in the soil.

Industrial animal agriculture depends on feed crops grown with herbicides, pesticides, and fungicides that degrade soil biology, reduce micronutrient density, and compromise ecosystem function across the food chain. When soil is depleted, food is depleted. The guidelines ignore this reality entirely.

Emotional and psychological health cannot be separated from diet

What we eat affects not only our bodies, but our nervous systems.

Diet influences emotional regulation and mental wellbeing through inflammation, the gut brain axis, and stress response pathways. Across cultures and traditions, plant forward diets have long been associated with greater calm, clarity, and nonviolence. This is observable human experience, increasingly supported by neuroscience and microbiome research.

The drugs used in industrial meat are hurting people, but there is also a deeper cost that rarely gets acknowledged. A diet built on pain, confinement, and chemical exposure dysregulates the nervous system and dulls our capacity for calm, empathy, and connection. Food produced through suffering affects the human spirit as well as the body.

By contrast, plant forward diets are consistently linked to greater calm, emotional resilience, and psychological stability.

Bio-individuality, ecology, and honest availability

I understand the need for dietary approaches that account for bio-individuality, ecological reality, and availability. Human bodies differ. Cultures differ. Geographies differ. Access differs. Health circumstances differ. There is no single diet that looks identical for every person in every place at every stage of life.

Acknowledging bio-individuality is an opportunity for leadership. It allows policymakers to align flexibility with integrity, dietary choice with truth, and availability with lived reality. When nutrition guidance reflects how food is produced, how land and ecosystems function, and how people actually access nourishment, it becomes a tool for health rather than abstraction.

Flexibility grounded in integrity strengthens public trust. Choice grounded in truth empowers people. Availability addressed honestly invites policies that expand access to nourishing food rather than assuming it exists for all.

Carrying capacity and ecological limits

Perhaps most troubling of all is the absence of any discussion of ecological limits.

You cannot recommend that everyone eat more meat without asking where that meat will come from, what the land can sustain, how much water is required, and who bears the environmental and social costs. Increased animal food consumption at population scale does not lead to pastoral renewal. It leads to further expansion of confinement-based production systems.

Nutrition guidance that ignores agricultural reality is not guidance. It is fiction.

Some have begun referring to the newly released document as “dietary guidelines against humanity.” While the language is stark, the concern it reflects is serious. Guidelines that normalize cruelty, chemical exposure, nutrient dilution, and ecological overshoot do not simply fail to protect health. They shape systems that harm people, animals, land, and the social fabric that binds them together.

Policy alignment, not rhetoric

This moment calls for more than critique. It calls for alignment.

We have heard this administration pay lip service to healthy food and agriculture while simultaneously decimating the very programs that make it possible. Never in modern history has USDA been so overtly hostile to organic production, regenerative transition, and the farmers working to steward land responsibly. Funding for organic research, technical assistance, conservation programs, and transition support has been cut or sidelined, even as consolidation accelerates, and farmer bankruptcies rise. It is impossible to claim a commitment to health while dismantling the policy infrastructure that supports clean food, resilient farms, and ecological renewal.

It is also impossible to ignore who holds influence inside this administration. Chemical and pharmaceutical interests are deeply embedded across the agencies tasked with protecting health, food safety, and the environment. When Big Chemical and Big Pharma shape policy priorities, it should not surprise anyone that dietary guidance minimizes chemical exposure, overlooks drugs in the food supply, and treats food as a delivery vehicle for nutrients rather than as a living system tied to land, biology, and community wellbeing. Regulatory capture does not require malice. It requires only silence where honesty is needed most.

A way forward

If we are serious about health, then USDA policy must support organic, regenerative pasture systems that restore soil, respect animals, and allow farmers to remain on their land. Farmers should be helped to stay in farming, not pushed into bankruptcy by consolidation, debt, and policies that reward scale over stewardship. The current farm crisis is not a failure of farmers. It is the predictable outcome of a system that has stripped resilience from rural America.

Health guidance cannot stand apart from this reality. FDA, EPA, USDA, and HHS must align around a shared mandate to truly protect life, beginning with the unborn, extending through the land that nourishes us, and reaching into the wellbeing of communities themselves. Protecting health means reducing chemical exposure, supporting clean food systems, restoring soil, and ensuring that nourishment is not built on harm displaced elsewhere.

The Dietary Guidelines were an opening. They could have been an invitation to tell the truth about food, farming, and health in America today. That invitation still stands. We can choose guidance that heals people, restores land, honors farmers, and reconnects food with life itself. That future is not theoretical. It already exists wherever land is cared for, animals are respected, and food is grown with integrity. Our policies can meet it there.