Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received a warm welcome from some 9,000 attendees at CattleCon in Nashville on Thursday, in light of his agency’s new dietary guidelines that turned the food pyramid on its head.

“We now have a food pyramid, which we flipped upside down, because it made more sense. That puts protein at the top of the food pyramid,” Kennedy said in a fireside chat with National Cattlemen’s Beef Association President Buck Wehrbein. “Food is medicine, and meat and chicken and eggs and animal protein are now at the top of the priority list.”

Kennedy, who recently had his 72nd birthday, talked about the health benefits he personally experienced by switching to a carnivore diet. “I eat beef every day. I usually eat it twice a day,” said Kennedy. “My blood markers dropped dramatically. So I really, for me, .. it’s been incredible — it’s been transformative.”

Kennedy’s bottom line message to producers is eat real food and get production back up to where it used to be. “We had 132 million head in 1972. We have 92 million today. And a lot of producers are now, because of fluctuations in the markets and uncertainty, slaughtering the breeding cows. And I’d ask you to stop doing that. We need a lot of beef, and we want to make it here in America. We don’t want to be importing it from other countries.”

Listen to the conversation.
Sec. Kennedy and Buck Wehrbein (26:26)

Official CattleCon 2026 Photography