The most powerful cabinet in the free world is eating fistfuls of fermented cabbage on the advice of a private doctor who charges $18,000 for a consultation. JD Vance picked up the habit for Lent and, per RFK Jr., has never looked back. The United States of America, everyone.
The Kraut Crew, Assembled
The Wall Street Journal reports that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and Vice President JD Vance have all signed on to a diet engineered by a physician named Dr. Sean O'Mara. The menu: red meat, eggs, fermented foods, berries, and what O'Mara apparently calls "old world cheese" with a straight face. Gorgonzola and parmesan, specifically. The forbidden items are sugar and alcohol, which, fine, but also presumably the will to live a normal life.
O'Mara is not a fringe figure in the usual sense. He served as one of the physicians assigned to assist the White House during the second Bush administration, and he now runs a private practice where his "optimization plans" start at $8,000 and direct consulting runs $18,000. For that price, you get the carnivore-adjacent diet, the fermented foods gospel, and presumably a very confident man telling you that your body is a sinking ship he has been sent to save.
How This Started, Because It Had to Start Somewhere
The New York Post reports that Kennedy met O'Mara last year and adopted the diet shortly after. He claims it helped him drop 20 pounds, reduced general aches and pains, and eliminated symptoms of atrial fibrillation. Kennedy then, apparently, turned to Vance and said words to the effect of "you should really eat more sauerkraut," and Vance listened. The VP took up the diet for Lent earlier this year and has stuck with it since, per Kennedy himself.
Lutnick's conversion story is also something. The Commerce Secretary avoided red meat for years out of concern about cancer risk. He has now abandoned that concern, traded his Diet Coke for plain iced coffee, and gone full red meat. What changed? Unclear. O'Mara happened, apparently. That's the whole answer.
The Science, Such as It Is
To be fair to the fermented cabbage portion of this program: sauerkraut is genuinely not nothing. It contains both prebiotics and probiotics, the live bacteria produced during fermentation break down sugars in the cabbage, and a study from the University of California, Davis found that sauerkraut outperformed raw cabbage in protecting intestinal cells from inflammation-related damage. Experts say a single regular serving can help build digestive resilience. This part of the diet is defensible.
The red meat avalanche is where things get more complicated. Medical experts warn that carnivore-adjacent diets carry a higher risk of kidney stones, digestive issues, elevated cholesterol, nutritional deficiencies, and colon cancer. The New York Post, which is not typically a publication that goes out of its way to undercut a conservative health trend, felt compelled to note a documented case of a man who developed cholesterol literally seeping out of his hands. That is a real sentence that appeared in this article. Proceed accordingly.
This Is Now Federal Policy, Which Is the Real Story
Here is where the story stops being a quirky lifestyle piece and becomes something more alarming. O'Mara's dietary philosophy has apparently found its way directly into the federal government's official nutritional guidance. The New York Post reports that Kennedy's new dietary guidelines, for the first time in American history, include recommendations to incorporate fermented foods like sauerkraut, kimchi, and kefir.
The guidelines also, per the Post, prioritize foods high in saturated fat, including meats, poultry, eggs, full-fat dairy, and butter, framed explicitly as an effort to end what Kennedy calls "the war on saturated fats." The man overseeing the health policy of 340 million Americans adopted a diet from a private doctor who compares his elderly clients to companies headed for bankruptcy, and that diet is now shaping federal nutritional recommendations. The pipeline from $18,000 private consultation to official government guidance has never been shorter.
O'Mara's Philosophy, in His Own Words
In remarks to the Wall Street Journal, O'Mara explained his preference for older clients. "I tend to like to work with older people because the ROI is so much greater," he said. "It's like taking over a sinking ship, a company that is headed to bankruptcy." The ROI. Return on investment. For human bodies. For the aging men who run the executive branch of the United States government.
O'Mara claims the diet aids digestion, boosts the gut microbiome, and reduces visceral fat, which is the deep fat that wraps around your internal organs. These are real things that diet and lifestyle affect. Whether eating your weight in gorgonzola and brisket while chugging sauerkraut brine is the optimal path to those outcomes is, let's say, contested territory in the medical community.
The Dingo Take
Let's be honest about what we're looking at here. The Vice President of the United States changed his diet on the recommendation of the Health Secretary, who changed his diet on the recommendation of a private physician charging the GDP of a small municipality for his services, and that physician's philosophy has now been laundered into official federal health policy. This is the health freedom agenda in action: one very expensive doctor's opinions, trialed on the cabinet, then handed down to 340 million people as national guidance. Incredible.
The sauerkraut thing, again, is fine. Fermented foods are genuinely beneficial and the science on that is reasonably solid. But the broader diet these men are following comes with documented risks that legitimate medical experts have flagged repeatedly, and the person responsible for communicating those risks to the American public is currently eating red meat and gorgonzola on the advice of the guy who sold him that diet for $18,000. You could not design a more complete conflict of interest with a pencil and a week to think about it.
Somewhere, a doctor at the Department of Health and Human Services is watching the dietary guidelines get rewritten around their boss's personal meal plan and staring into the middle distance. The sinking ship metaphor O'Mara likes so much is doing some real work here, just not in the direction he intended.
