Food choices and mixed messages

May 03, 2026

Key points from this story:

• Food prices have increased
• Supermarket baskets include non-food items
• Backyard gardens are nearly non-existent
• AHA recommends liquid plant oils
• USDA/HHS guidelines endorse butter and tallow
• Conflicting guidance confuses consumers

We all of course have to eat, so it is something we are faced with daily, but it does seem the number of hurdles to putting a healthy meal on the table is at its most difficult. It starts with the price of food.

You can be anywhere - from a between inning discussion with the better half to the table at the local Chamber of Commerce AGM - and the cost of food is likely to be discussed. Sure, the bag of goods we emerge from a supermarket with these days is not all food, it runs from toilet paper to hairspray to pop and chips, none of which are on the healthy list for the table. But the edible share has certainly seen a spike in prices thanks to US Trump-led tariffs, a US Trump war in the Middle East, and other influences well beyond consumer control.

As noted in an earlier column we have also mostly lost control of our food in the sense backyard gardens are almost non-existent, lost to easy manageable grass, rock and cement - none of which will feed a family. Then, even when we manage food sourcing and costs we are faced with the challenge of what constitutes healthy choices there days.

For example, the American Heart Association is promoting the use of liquid nontropical plant oils (such as soybean, canola and olive oil) in its 2026 dietary guidelines. Now you would imagine the AHA is a rather reliable source of information regarding heart health so you would gravitate toward its suggested choices.

But of course the AHA suggestion is the opposite of the guidelines recently updated by Dietary Guidelines for Americans published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

As noted in a www.producer.ca article, "those guidelines specifically encourage the use of butter and beef tallow when cooking with or adding fats to meals." The article notes U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. boasts of "ending the war on saturated fat" and has called seed oils "one of the most unhealthy ingredients that we have in foods."

Now given Kennedy's personal background, and the generally dismantling of anything remotely related to the common good of US citizens by president Trump and his admin, the changes in the dietary guidelines were frankly suspect from the get go. Now having the AHA offer a near directly opposite view solidifies concerns regarding Kennedy's motives.

But, the two opposite views also cause issues for the consumer who must wade through the politics of food to determine what to put on the table, while balancing the budget.