Brisket, bacon, butter. Novelty clothing, raw milk, big steaks. That was the backdrop in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in May 2026, when followers of meat-based diets filled Meatstock for a weekend of presentations, panels and vendor booths built around carnivore and keto eating, and biohacking.
The crowd was not only enthusiasts. Calley Means, a senior adviser at the US Department of Health and Human Services, took part, and so did Vani Hari, the “Food Babe”, who has often met White House officials to press for artificial dyes and pesticides to be cleared out of the food supply. Zen Honeycutt of Moms Across America opened the event.
On a MAHA panel on 2 May, Means described how the movement had come together. “It culminated in this union between Bobby Kennedy and President Trump,” he said, adding that it had put the subject “at the top of the national discussion”. MAHA, short for Make America Healthy Again, was promoted by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who follows a carnivore diet himself. Its causes run from cutting ultra-processed food and pesticides to vaccine skepticism, but the through-line is that Americans should eat “real food”, meat included.
Panelists told personal stories. Podcaster Mikhaila Peterson said she dropped processed food for meat, vegetables and some fruit, and it “transformed my health in like a month”, putting her arthritis and chronic fatigue into remission. Nathan Bryan, a Texas biochemist and author who presented, told Fox News Digital afterwards that “Americans are the sickest people on the planet”. He said attendees described weight loss and autoimmune diseases they believed they had cured. Those results were self-reported and are not broadly established in clinical research.
The critics
Doctors and dietitians are less convinced. Tara Schmidt, a registered dietitian at Mayo Clinic, warned that carnivore-style diets risk shortfalls in fiber, calcium and Vitamin D, and are too restrictive for many people to keep up. Washington has leaned the other way. Earlier this year HHS and the Department of Agriculture released new dietary guidelines urging a variety of protein from animal sources, including red meat, and Kennedy told the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in February that the “war on protein is over”.
The supply side is where the tension sits. Brian Bienkowski of The New Lede, who covered the event, pointed out that concentrated animal feeding operations supply nearly all the chicken and turkey Americans eat, 75% of the beef and over 98% of the pork. Brent Kim, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the country could not keep up its current appetite for animal products, “let alone more”, without that industrial model. Hari rejected the idea that the only choices are factory farming or giving up animal protein. HHS did not respond when asked how the farms fit into its agenda.
Sources
- MAHA's CAFO conundrum (Brian Bienkowski, The New Lede)
- Meatstock carnivore diet convention draws fans, diet experts to Tennessee (Teresa Mull, Fox News)
