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The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a nonprofit organization that supports plant-based diets, filed a lawsuit Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, challenging the legality of the latest dietary guidelines.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are tasked with co-writing the guidelines every five years. The latest iteration was published under the Trump administration in January this year, along with a new, inverted food pyramid.

The DGA process is complex. The final guidelines are supported by recommendations and a scientific report completed by an independent advisory committee.

For the latest version, the original advisory committee met over the course of two years, concluding its work before the end of the Biden administration. Their scientific report prioritized plant-based proteins over animal products.

However, the latest DGAs emphasize animal proteins and dairy products, contradicting many of the recommendations in the advisory committee’s report. Instead, the DGAs were backed by a separate report, completed by a panel of researchers with ties to the beef and dairy industries. Unlike the original committee, this second panel’s work was not open to the public.

The lawsuit argues that HHS and the USDA violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) by relying on this second panel for scientific evidence. The law was created to limit industry and special interest influence in federal advisory committees, and it sets parameters for transparency, like requiring meetings to be open to the public.

“The government allowed the meat and dairy industries to ghostwrite the Dietary Guidelines,” Neal Barnard, president of the Physicians Committee, said in a press release. “They put money in industry’s pocket and cholesterol in Americans’ arteries.”