Meat Is Medicine

By Sara Keough, MS, CNS, LDN

The “Food is Medicine” movement has been gaining traction across the healthcare world.

At its core, the idea is promising: shift from simply treating disease to preventing it through what we eat. From produce prescriptions to medically tailored meals, these programs aim to use food to improve health outcomes and lower healthcare costs.

But there’s a glaring omission that few in the space are willing to address: Meat, eggs, and dairy—some of the most nutrient-dense foods available—are almost entirely excluded from Food Is Medicine programs.

The movement has become synonymous with plant-based dietary guidelines, excluding entire categories of nutrient-rich, pasture-raised animal foods. And it's imperative that we change this.

The Problem with “Food Is Medicine”

Let’s be clear: I respect the intention behind “Food is Medicine.” But I’ve never loved the term. Here's why:

• Medicine is medicine. The word carries baggage. For many, it evokes images of prescription drugs with side effects, impersonal care, and a system that often manages symptoms rather than addressing root causes. While I’m not anti-pharmaceutical—some medications can be truly life-saving—it’s important to recognize that real healing begins from the ground up with true nourishment. Medicine is medicine, and food is nourishment.

• Regulatory risks. Labeling food as “medicine” could subject these programs to regulatory oversight by the FDA. That’s not necessarily a good thing. Food policy has long been influenced by weak science and corporate interests. For example, the widely criticized Tufts Food Compass ranked sugary cereals above eggs and beef in terms of healthfulness—a testament to how flawed metrics can distort dietary recommendations [9].

• Language matters. I prefer the term “Food is Nourishment”, because that’s what food fundamentally is: a source of essential nutrients that allow our bodies to heal, thrive, and optimally function. Still, that phrase lacks the same punch of “Food is Medicine,” so for now, I’m calling this movement “Meat is Medicine”—a stepping stone toward a more accurate and inclusive vision.

  • That said, even this term has limitations—“meat” often implies only red meat, though a truly nourishing diet includes the full spectrum of animal-sourced foods—fish, dairy, eggs, organ meats, and more. This diverse array of animal foods are all vital to human health and deserves equal recognition in any food-as-healing framework.

Tufts University and the Plant-Based Bias

Tufts University, through its Food Is Medicine Institute, has positioned itself as a leader in this space. However, its programs and recommendations heavily promote a plant-based diet—excluding meat, dairy, and eggs altogether. This same institution developed the Food Compass Score, which bizarrely rated foods like Frosted Mini Wheats as more nutrient-dense than beef.

Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise, has written extensively about the bias against animal foods in public health and nutrition science. She argues that many of the studies underpinning dietary guidelines are deeply flawed, often observational, and confounded by variables like socioeconomic status and lifestyle [8]. Yet these same studies influence food policy and FIM program eligibility.

Dr. Frédéric Leroy, a professor of food science and biotechnology, has also been a powerful voice exposing the global anti-livestock agenda that increasingly shapes our food policy and public perception. His research highlights how a small network of ideologically driven organizations—often backed by corporate and philanthropic interests—has successfully influenced dietary guidelines in schools, hospitals, and government institutions. Through detailed investigations, Leroy has demonstrated how this movement infiltrates media narratives, academia, and global policy frameworks, promoting plant-based diets as a universal good while undermining the role of animal-sourced foods in sustainable and healthy food systems [1].

The end result? Millions of dollars directed toward plant-based programs that may not provide the full spectrum of nutrients required for optimal human health.

The Great Plant-Based Con: A Thought-provoking Challenger

In her groundbreaking book, The Great Plant-Based Con: Why eating a plants-only diet won’t improve your health or save the planet, journalist Jayne Rees Buxton offers a rigorously referenced rebuttal to the widespread promotion of veganism. Drawing on more than 1,400 sources and nearly 500 pages of analysis, she argues that diets excluding animal foods can compromise human health, obscure nuance in environmental debates, and serve powerful industry agendas.

Buxton maintains she’s not anti-plant—but advocates for nutritional balance, pointing to the synergy of both plant and animal foods. She tackles myths around cholesterol, dismantles weak links between meat and disease, and calls out oversimplified “five-a-day” wisdom and the EAT-Lancet guidelines.

Buxton critiques the overselling of plant-based diets as environmental panaceas. She explores regenerative agriculture and carbon sequestration as overlooked levers of planetary health. Additionally, she provides insight into how financial, media, and ideological forces steer public messaging—and dietary choices.

Who’s Funding “Food Is Medicine”—and is there Bias Against Meat?

While the idea of using food to heal is powerful, the current implementation of Food Is Medicine (FIM) programs is heavily shaped by funding priorities—and those priorities are far from neutral.

Many FIM programs depend heavily on government agencies, major public health philanthropies, health systems, and nonprofit organizations, such as The Rockefeller Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Arnold Ventures, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), American Heart Association, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the USDA, and state-level Medicaid programs, and insurers like Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kaiser Permanente.

These funders have invested millions into Food Is Medicine pilot projects and policy advocacy and heavily influence not only what gets served, but what stays out of view in nutrition interventions.

Furthermore, these funders often support dietary frameworks that are explicitly plant-forward or plant-exclusive.

• The Rockefeller Foundation has openly supported initiatives that call for a reduction in animal-based foods in the global diet [14] and helped fund the development of the EAT-Lancet Commission [15], which proposed a planetary health diet that drastically limits meat and dairy intake, yet has been heavily criticized by many nutrition researchers. Rockefeller has invested over $100 million into FIM programs and often frames their nutrition work around plant-centric interventions like produce prescriptions and incentives [16]. Although they’ve shown support for regenerative livestock agriculture, their public messaging tends toward a plant-first narrative. That said, they have also made efforts to support small and mid-scale U.S. farmers, including those involved in regenerative agriculture.

• The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) is explicitly anti‑meat, advocating for wholesale elimination of animal products in public food systems and actively campaigning against the inclusion of animal products in institutional food programs. Their messaging often falsely equates meat consumption with smoking in terms of health risks.

• Foundations such as Robert Wood Johnson and Arnold Ventures fund a mix of projects—some promoting plant-based policy, others supporting groups like the Nutrition Coalition that challenge anti-meat dietary guidelines—making their stance more pragmatic, though still largely shaped by prevailing plant-based norms.

• Health insurers and health care systems typically align their support with public health norms, which have long favored plant-based dietary patterns due to flawed interpretations of loose correlations in epidemiological data, though that is starting to change as new evidence on nutrient-dense animal foods gains traction. However, Kaiser Permanente, another major healthcare player supporting FIM pilots, published a report in 2017 explicitly recommending plant-based diets as a default for chronic disease prevention and reversal [17].

This widespread promotion of plant-based diets is often framed as environmentally and ethically responsible—but it sidelines the nutritional science and the needs of patients who benefit from high-quality animal foods. As a result, the very foods that could be most therapeutic—grass-fed beef, pastured-raised eggs, raw dairy, and liver—are left out of most Food Is Medicine programs.

This funding landscape creates an inherent bias. When organizations that shape food policy also dictate what counts as "medicine," we risk replacing one narrow model of care (pharmaceutical) with another (plant-based ideology), rather than truly honoring diverse nutritional needs.

It also disadvantages regenerative ranchers and livestock farmers—many of whom are producing some of the most healing, nutrient-dense foods available. If we genuinely want to prevent disease and nourish communities, we must ensure that animal-sourced foods are not excluded due to ideology or institutional bias.

Let’s remember: nourishment is personal. One-size-fits-all nutrition—especially one that omits entire food groups—does not serve public health.

The Case for Animal-based Foods as Nourishment

Food Is Medicine programs should be grounded in nutrient density, clinical outcomes, cultural relevance, and sustainability—not ideology. While fruits and vegetables are foundational to health, so too are high-quality animal products. Researcher Ty Beal, known for his work on nutrient adequacy and dietary diversity, has shown that animal-sourced foods are often the only reliable sources of certain essential nutrients in vulnerable populations—especially children, pregnant women, the elderly, and those recovering from chronic illness—helping to close nutrient gaps that plant-only diets frequently leave unaddressed [13].

So let’s look at the facts.

Animal-based foods like grass-fed beef, pasture-raised eggs, liver, and raw dairy offer:

• Bioavailable vitamins and minerals (B12, iron, zinc, vitamin A, K2)

• Complete proteins essential for muscle repair and immune function

• Beneficial fats that support brain and hormone health

• Unique compounds such as carnosine, taurine, and CLA not found in plant foods

Animal foods also provide highly absorbable iron (heme iron vs. non-heme iron in plants), retinol (active vitamin A vs. beta-carotene in plants), choline, and essential fatty acids—all critical for brain function, immune health, and metabolic resilience. As Beal has highlighted in his global nutrition analyses, many of these nutrients are either absent from plants or exist in less bioavailable forms, making animal foods indispensable for addressing micronutrient deficiencies worldwide [13].

In fact, a recent global modeling study found that plant-only diets were significantly more expensive than mixed diets when assessed by nutrient adequacy. In the U.S., the most affordable diet that met all nutritional needs included animal foods and cost $1.98 per day, while a plant-only diet with the same nutrient targets cost $3.61 per day—an 82% increase [6,7].

When we look at cost per nutrient, not just cost per calorie, animal foods win out. While beans and grains may be cheaper per calorie, they don’t offer the micronutrient “bang for your buck” that eggs or liver do. A single egg, for example, provides essential B vitamins, choline, selenium, and high-quality protein—for less than 50 cents in most places.

This isn’t an anti-veggie rant. Plant foods absolutely have a role in a healthy diet.

But if we truly care about nutritional density, affordability, soil health, and rural livelihoods, then animal foods must be central to the solution, and meat, eggs, and dairy are among the most nutrient-dense and bioavailable foods on the planet.

Meat Is More Than Just Protein: It's Vitamins, Minerals, Healthy Fats, and an Amazing Array of Phytonutrients

Phytochemicals are naturally occurring compounds found in plants that provide health benefits beyond basic nutrition. They play important roles in human health by reducing inflammation, supporting immune function, and protecting against chronic diseases. While these compounds originate in plants, they also enter the human diet through animal products when livestock consume phytochemically diverse forages.

Dr. Fred Provenza and Dr. Stephan van Vliet have been at the forefront of this exciting field. Provenza’s work highlights how the health of livestock—and their exposure to phytochemically rich diets—can influence the quality and medicinal properties of the meat they produce. Van Vliet uses metabolomics to analyze the biochemical richness of animal foods, showing that grass-fed and regeneratively raised meat, eggs, and dairy contain a wide spectrum of these phytonutrients that are absent from conventionally produced products. These compounds may offer additional health benefits far beyond macronutrient content [11, 12].

Emerging research suggests that these phytonutrients, that include terpenoids, phenols, carotenoids, and flavonoids, may act synergistically with vitamins, minerals, and healthy fats in animal-sourced foods to optimize human health—enhancing antioxidant defenses, improving metabolic function, and potentially lowering disease risk. For the animals themselves, consuming diverse plant species rich in secondary compounds can improve their immune resilience, reduce parasite loads, and even influence grazing patterns in ways that benefit soil and ecosystem health. In other words, the nutritional story of meat begins long before it reaches our plate—it starts in the soil, passes through the plants, and is transformed by the animals into a form that nourishes us on multiple levels [11, 12].

What Health Results Do Clinical Patients Experience With Eating More Meat?

In most of my presentations I like to include real world patient case studies that demonstrate the positive health benefits people experience when they add more meat to their diet. Time and time again, patients tell me how incredible they feel: their energy improves, digestion improves, mental clarity sharpens, and even mood is boosted—and we often see measurable changes in their lab markers as well.

I have countless case studies showing remarkable health improvements such as lowered inflammation markers, reduction in insulin resistance, positive changes in cholesterol numbers, and improved body composition.

One of my recent favorites was a 73-year-old woman who started adding substantially more meat to her meals and within 6 months we saw her HDL ("good") cholesterol rise, she lost over 35 lbs (without exercise), and reduced her A1C to the point that she was no longer deemed to be diabetic. Her doctors were stunned that her increased consumption of so-called “inflammatory red meat” could produce such health outcomes.

Interestingly, when we ran a follow-up stool test to monitor her gut health, we also saw a significant increase in her microbiome diversity while we worked on a gut-healing protocol. This offers further evidence that meat does not seem to harm gut health and our microbiome—and may even enhance it.

Beyond Plants: Animal Agriculture as Ecological Medicine

There’s another layer to this conversation: the future of farming.

Food Is Medicine programs often only fund fruit and vegetable growers—excluding ranchers and livestock producers. That’s not just nutritional negligence—it’s economic injustice.

We need programs that support all producers, especially regenerative livestock operations. These farmers and ranchers are not only providing some of the most nutrient-dense and healing foods we could possibly be eating, but they are also improving ecosystem health by restoring degraded soil, building biodiversity,  sequestering carbon, and improving the water cycle.

Peer-reviewed research by Dr. Richard Teague, a rangeland ecologist at Texas A&M University, has shown that well‑managed adaptive grazing systems can significantly enhance soil carbon sequestration, improve water infiltration, and increase biodiversity—outcomes that industrial monocultures cannot replicate [5].

The Savory Institute has further demonstrated how holistic planned grazing can regenerate grasslands and reverse desertification, benefiting both ecological function and local economies. Their global network of regenerative hubs showcases how livestock, when properly managed, can be a tool for ecosystem restoration rather than degradation.

Even the National Audubon Society, traditionally focused on bird conservation, now actively partners with ranchers through its Conservation Ranching Program. This initiative certifies ranches that use bird‑friendly, regenerative grazing practices—recognizing that grazing ruminants play a vital role in preserving grassland bird habitats and native prairie ecosystems [2].

Filmmaker Peter Byck, in his documentary Roots So Deep (You Can See the Devil Down There), describes striking results from comparisons between regenerative AMP grazing and conventional systems: “overgrazed pastures…look like a golf course” while regeneratively grazed ranches create carbon sinks, support microbial life, and generate dramatically better ecological outcomes [3]. He notes AMP farms sequester an estimated 12.1 t CO₂e/ha/year vs. 2.9 t CO₂e/ha/year on conventional farms—roughly quadruple the climate impact [3].

Dr. Jonathan Lundgren of Blue Dasher Farm and the Ecdysis Foundation emphasizes the central role of biodiversity in farming:

“The only way to get carbon in the soil is WITH LIFE. And if we want to save this planet, we have to be conserving life.”

His work has shown that farms practicing regeneration harbor far greater insect diversity, reduce pest pressure naturally, and produce nutrient‑dense foods without synthetic inputs—demonstrating that ecological integrity and food quality go hand in hand [4].

The bottom line is this:  If we want healthy people, we need healthy ecosystems—and that means supporting the farmers and ranchers raising grass‑fed ruminants (cattle, bison, goats, sheep), pastured chickens, and pastured pork.

A New Paradigm: From “Medicine” to Nourishment

It’s time to reimagine what healing through food really means.

Let’s create programs that:

• Embrace nutrient-dense animal foods alongside plants

• Include regenerative farmers and ranchers in funding models

• Prioritize nutritional density per dollar, not just calorie counts

• Move away from flawed nutrition science and biased scoring systems

• Celebrate food as nourishment, not a pharmaceutical substitute

If we want to heal chronic disease, restore our soils, and support resilient food systems, then Meat must be part of the solution.

The Path Forward

Meat Is Medicine may be a provocative term, but it's also a necessary disruption. It challenges a food policy landscape that has for too long ignored the power of nutrient-dense animal foods.

My hope is that we can evolve this into a broader framework—Food Is Nourishment—where human health and ecological restoration go hand-in-hand.

Let’s cultivate a food future rooted in resilience and real nourishment—restoring both human health and ecological harmony.

©2025 Sara Keough, Eco-Nutrition LLC, all rights reserved

References

1. Aleph2020. (n.d.). Anti-Livestock Agendas and the Attack on Animal-Sourced Foods. Retrieved from https://www.aleph2020.org/asf-and-livestock/anti-livestock-agendas

2. Audubon Conservation Ranching Program. (n.d.). Saving Grasslands, One Ranch at a Time. Retrieved from https://www.audubon.org/conservation/ranching

3. Byck, P. (2023). Roots So Deep (You Can See the Devil Down There) [Documentary and research project]. Retrieved from https://rootssodeep.org

4. Lundgren, J. G., & Fausti, S. W. (2015). Trading biodiversity for pest problems. Science Advances, 1(6), e1500558. Also see: Blue Dasher Farm https://bluedasher.farm

5. Teague, W. R., Apfelbaum, S., Lal, R., et al. (2016). The role of ruminants in reducing agriculture’s carbon footprint in North America. Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, 71(2), 156–164.

6. Modern Nutrition Designs. (n.d.). The Cost of Eating Plant-Based: A Nutrient Density Comparison. Retrieved from https://modernnutritiondesigns.com

7. Nutrition Insight. (2024). Plant-Only Diets Are Significantly More Expensive Than Mixed Diets. Retrieved from https://nutritioninsight.com

8. Teicholz, N. (2014). The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. Simon & Schuster. More at https://ninateicholz.com

9. Tufts Food Is Medicine Institute. (n.d.). Food Compass Score Analysis. Retrieved from https://tuftsfoodismedicine.org

10. Leroy, F. (n.d.). Frédéric Leroy’s Research on the Global Anti-Livestock Agenda. Retrieved from https://aleph2020.org/asf-and-livestock/anti-livestock-agendas

11. Provenza, F. D., Kronberg, S. L., & Gregorini, P. (2019). Is grassfed meat and dairy better for human and environmental health? Frontiers in Nutrition, 6, 26. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2019.00026

12. Van Vliet, S., Kronberg, S. L., Provenza, F. D., et al. (2021). Health-Promoting Phytonutrients Are Higher in Grass-Fed Meat and Milk. Frontiers in Nutrition, 8, 689788. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-systems/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2020.555426/full

13. Beal, T., Ortenzi, F., Fanzo, J., & Ebel, A. (2023). Priority micronutrient density in foods. Frontiers in Nutrition, 10, 111. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2022.806566/full

14. The Rockefeller Foundation (2024). Rockefeller Foundation Joins Mayor Adams and Cross-Sector Partnership To Reduce Food-Related Carbon Emissions. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/news/rockefeller-foundation-joins-mayor-adams-and-cross-sector-partnership-to-reduce-food-related-carbon-emissions/

15. The Rockefeller Foundation. (2022). “EAT Foundation 2022.” Grant. https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/grants/eat-foundation-2022

16. The Rockefeller Foundation (2024). https://www.rockefellerfoundation.org/initiatives/food-is-medicine/

17. Tuso, P. J., Ismail, M. H., Ha, B. P., & Bartolotto, C. (2013). Nutritional update for physicians: Plant-based diets. The Permanente Journal, 17(2), 61–66. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3662288