Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announces the new USDA dietary guidelines. Anna Moneymaker/Getty

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions.

A new inverted food pyramid recently released by President Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef, and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat.

The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr., the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”

But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned.

Choosing beef over protein sources like beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences.”

Even a 25 percent increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100 million acres of additional agricultural land each........

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