Oil You Need to Know

New cooking oil claims in 2025

By Melissa Zetouna

If you grew up in America in the 1980s, you learned about the “Food Pyramid” in health class. But if you grew up in Iraq, you ate Masgouf cooked in beef tallow. Now, with the current HHS secretary in Washington, dietary guidelines are changing, and what was once old is becoming new again.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a seasoned environmental attorney with 40 years of experience suing everyone from agricultural biotechnology corporation Monsanto to the EPA and FDA, has eagerly accepted the nomination of Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS). Speaking to audiences of tens of thousands in 2024, he stated he prayed for 30 minutes every morning for 19 years for an opportunity from God to put him in a position to end the chronic disease epidemic and bring health back to America’s children.

Secretary Kennedy coined his movement Make American Healthy Again, or MAHA, and recently as HHS Secretary, created a centralized division within HHS called AHA, or Administration for a Healthy America, which will work alongside the Department of Agriculture, or USDA, to make a new food guide for school children.

Over the years, the USDA has phased from the famous Food Pyramid, which recommended the highest dietary intake of carbohydrates, to “MyPlate” in 2011, which more evenly recommends dietary intake of protein, grains, fruits, vegetables, and dairy. A food group contentiously debated over the years and missing in the USDA’s current MyPlate dietary guidelines is fats and oils.

MAHA contends that switching the fast-food use of lard in 1990 to cooking with margarine, which is primarily composed of seed oils like sunflower, grapeseed, peanut, sesame, soybean, and corn, is directly proportional to the U.S.’s chronic disease epidemic. Along with the USDA, the two departments will conduct a line-by-line review of the previous administration’s 2025 dietary guidelines.

One of the federal dietary guidance changes already discussed is offering students healthy food choices prepared on-site by a staff nutritionist, as opposed to prepackaged food from suppliers such as Aramark and Gordon Food Service, which are the main current mass food distributors of meals to school children.

If an HHS priority is for school children to consume food prepared on-site, will the type of cooking oil change? Imaginably so. Secretary Kennedy has publicly criticized seed oils as contributing to the chronic disease epidemic and wants a return to traditional cooking oils such as butter, lard, and tallow.

Kennedy also references the school lunch style in other countries, specifically commenting that “Japan has nutritionists in every school supervising food production,” and that “Japan has much healthier kids.”

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has also stated that her 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines will follow “sound science, not political science.” Though studies show that heating seed oils leads to the formation of harmful compounds, studies on seed oils by the American Heart Association, which receives funding from U.S. pharmaceutical, biotech, and other corporations, have not found harm in moderate consumption of seed oils.

Meta-analyses since 1990 show a rising trend of chronic illness among school-aged children and the preparation of school lunches and fast food with seed oils over traditional oils. In Iraq, and other countries such as India and Italy, where tallow, butter, and olive oil are common, there is substantially less childhood chronic disease reported.

We may be thousands of miles away from the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, but cooking carp in tallow will make a delicious, healthy, and favorable Masgouf in the perspective of the new HHS.

Melissa Zetouna is a practicing physician assistant with over 20 years of experience, founder of iMed, a health and wellness tele-platform, and an active participant in Make America Healthy Again (MAHA).