LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Beef has a new champion - Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Kennedy says he is ending the war on saturated fats. Our colleagues over at The Indicator From Planet Money, Wailin Wong and Darian Woods, trace the history of beef consumption in the U.S.
WAILIN WONG, BYLINE: Beef has always been a huge part of the U.S. diet. Joshua Specht is a history professor at the University of Notre Dame who studies ranching and meat packing.
JOSHUA SPECHT: My story starts in the late 1800s. And that's when affordable, high-quality beef became a kind of expectation for people.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Beef production and consumption used to be local.
WONG: This changed dramatically in the 1800s. The U.S. government took away land from Native Americans in the western part of the country and opened it up for cattle ranching.
WOODS: Refrigerated railcars whisked cuts of meat to other parts of the country, and this meant that somebody living far from where the cattle was raised could still eat beef regularly.
SPECHT: It kind of goes from what I say is delicacy to daily fare.
WONG: Concerns over heart health and red meat wouldn't become part of the conversation until decades later.
WOODS: On a September day in 1955, President Eisenhower ate a hamburger for lunch, and he woke up after midnight with severe chest pain. It turned out he had suffered a heart attack.
WONG: Hannah Cutting-Jones is a food historian at the University of Oregon. She says Eisenhower's heart attack was a wake-up call.
HANNAH CUTTING-JONES: They were just starting to come out with this idea of the diet-heart hypothesis, linking diets high in saturated fat to heart disease.
WONG: Hannah says that studies at this time suggested a correlation between the diets of many middle-aged American men and rates of heart disease. Even so, American beef consumption kept climbing. But Hannah says concerns over heart health were on the minds of lawmakers when they set up the first congressional committee on nutrition in the late '60s. It was also around this time that the U.S. government was working on its first official set of dietary guidelines - what would eventually become the first food pyramid. Hannah says the beef industry was really motivated to take back the narrative.
WOODS: First, it pushed for friendlier wording in dietary guidelines. This language was incorporated into the first official food pyramid, which came out in 1992.
WONG: And secondly, farmers and ranchers launch an ad campaign to encourage Americans to eat more beef.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: Beef - it's what's for dinner.
WOODS: It's your only option.
WONG: Yeah (laughter). I'm a child of the '90s, and I vividly remember these commercials. The music is from the ballet "Rodeo" by American composer Aaron Copland.
WOODS: OK. Hannah says the ads were targeted at men and that you can see their effects today. About 12% of Americans are responsible for about 50% of beef consumption on any given day.
CUTTING-JONES: And out of that percentage, most of those are men.
WONG: The National Cattlemen's Beef Association, for its part, praise the new guidelines as simpler and more consumer-friendly than past versions. It's worth mentioning that the organization has ties to the panel that reviewed scientific research for the new dietary guidelines.
WOODS: We reached out to the Department of Health and Human Services about whether these ties represented a conflict of interest. Press secretary Emily Hilliard said the panel's conclusions were driven by evidence and scientific rigor.
WONG: And, you know, the guidelines get revised every five years, so things could change again before too long.
WOODS: Darian Woods.
WONG: Wailin Wong, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
