The Australian National Health and Medical Research Council has been working on an updated version of Australia's dietary guidelines for a couple of years now. The last version was in published in 2003. The US equivalent is controlled by two departments, the Department of Agriculture with a long history of having been under the thumb of major US agribusiness interests, and the Department of Health and Human Services.  US Professor of Nutrition Marion Nestle's 2002 book Food Politics spilled the beans on the USDA and there have been other insiders who have similarly been apalled at how industry in general, and the meat industry in particular, has dominated US food policy. One of the best being T. Colin Campbell's The China Study. In Australia we have the CSIRO putting the interests of the meat industry ahead of the public interest with its "Total Wellbeing Diet" as discussed in my book "CSIRO Perfidy". I also discussed the subversion of science by meat industry advocates in our 2003 Dietary Guidelines.

Now we have the new US Dietary Guidelines stating clearly:

Around the world and within the United States, people make strikingly different food choices and have different diet-related health outcomes. Although the study of eating patterns is complex, evidence from international scientific research has identified various eating patterns that may provide short- and long-term health benefits, including a reduced risk of chronic disease.

...Considerable research exists on health outcomes as well as information on nutrient and food group composition of some eating patterns constructed for clinical trials (e.g., DASH and its variations) and traditional eating patterns (e.g., Mediterranean-style patterns). Some evidence for beneficial health outcomes for adults also exists for vegetarian eating
patterns.

... In prospective studies of adults, compared to non-vegetarian eating patterns, vegetarian-style eating patterns have been associated with improved health outcomes—lower levels of obesity, a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, and lower total mortality. Several clinical trials have documented that vegetarian eating patterns lower blood pressure.

You can be assured that even these modest claims would have been subjected to intense scrutiny from the meat industry minions who would have been part of the process of writing and approving these guidelines. In Australia, drafts of parts of the Dietary Guidelines work have been subjected to public criticism by the meat industry's CSIRO buddies.

It will be interesting to see what our Dietary Guidelines end up with when they are released later this year!

References: The guidelines link above is to the main document people might read ... 112 pages. There is the usual big fat report behind this at 453 pages.