This Podcast Will Kill You - Ep 209 Dietary Guidelines Part 2: Why is there protein in everything?

Episode Date: May 5, 2026

If you’ve come across the latest dietary guidelines, a few things may have caught your attention: a big ol’ steak front and center in the new “inverted pyramid”, beef tallow and butter recommended as “healthy” fats, a declaration that the war on protein is ending. “Since when have we been at war with protein?” you may reasonably ask. In part 2 of our episodes on dietary guidelines, we get to the bottom of the latest iteration of these guidelines and investigate which changes are good (there are a few), which are bad (definitely a few there), and which are somewhere in between. Then we explore what science has actually shown about what constitutes a “healthy” diet. Tune in for a lively discussion that features lots of complaining about protein-enriched products, exasperated sighs, and a few shocking revelations about “the American diet.” Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/3WwtIAuSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is exactly right. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I, like, was just so wanting to, like, be out of that

phase out of my skin and I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? I would just be made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed.

What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Lettby on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Restoring science and common sense. Every American deserves to be healthy, but too many Americans are sick and don't know why. That is because their government has been unwilling to tell them the truth. For decades, the U.S. government has recommended and incentivized low-quality, highly-processed foods and drug interventions instead of prevention. Under the leadership of President Trump, the government is now going to tell Americans the truth.

Today, the White House released the dietary guidelines for Americans 2025 to 2030, the most significant reset of federal nutrition policy. in decades. Under President Trump's leadership, common sense, scientific integrity, and accountability have been restored to federal food and health policy. For decades, the dietary guidelines favored corporate interests over common sense, science-driven advice to improve the health of Americans. That ends today. The new dietary guidelines call for prioritizing high-quality protein, healthy fats, fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, and avoiding highly processed foods and refined carbohydrates. Okay.

So, ooh, my face made some... that. That was my dramatic rendition of an unadulterated, uncut first two paragraphs of the USDA's fact sheet that they released when they released these new dietary guidelines. We'll have a link to it on our website. And it was completely uncut. It cracks me up because like the whole framing this is a complete reset of everything. And I'm like, this is just like the 11th version of a textbook with like very little changes. Very little changes. And to imply that the changes that they have made are in any way based in science in a way that previous ones weren't is false. To imply that they are not backed by industry interests is also false. So it's like we'll get into all of it today. Oh, I'm excited for this episode, Aaron.

Me too. Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh. And I'm Aaron Elman Updike. And this is, this podcast will kill you. Today we're talking about the dietary guidelines, part two. Part two. Part two. Bringing back the food pyramid. I think this is going to be a very interesting discussion of rhetoric and just branding.

Like so much of this is branding, even looking at the design of the pyramid, which I didn't talk about that last week. But like there has been a lot of intention behind how this information is presenting. committees on committees on committees of like how do we turn this? Do we do a pyramid? Should we add stairs? Should we do an upside down triangle? Like whatever. I guess triangles can't be upside down. But like, right, right. Yeah. And it's just, wow. I know. Well, and it's interesting too, because historically the like dietary guidelines for Americans document has been this like pretty large, you know, hefty document that's geared towards professionals, you know, nutrition experts and people who are making the decisions about things and not not the same document that is necessarily geared towards

general public where then they take those dietary guidelines, the DGA, and then make a food pyramid and make this public facing, you know, information. Infographic thing. Yeah, this time it's like we got it. It's all in one. It's just this very short, a few pages, and this is the dietary guidelines. It is public facing. And so they've kind of just wrapped it all up in one, which is also interesting in and of itself.

It is. Oh, there's so much good stuff today. Yes. But first. But first. It's quarantini time. It is. What are we drinking again, Erin? We're drinking your daily apple.

We are. It's a pretty simple beverage. It's got apple juice, pomegranate juice, lemon juice, sparkling water. There you go. Delish, refreshing. We'll post the full recipe as if you need one on our website, this podcast will kill you.com, and all of our social media. So make sure that you're following us there, you know, so you don't miss it. Do it.

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Great to see you. Okay. Shall we get into this week's episode, Aaron? Absolutely. Okay. We'll take a break and then dive in. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and your talk. 20s, they can feel like a lot. On the psychology of your 20s podcast, we unpack the anxiety,

the overthinking, the heartbreak, the identity crisis, all of it that comes with being in your 20s. Because if you've ever thought, is anybody else feeling this way, they definitely are. I feel like my 20s was a process of checking off everything that I was not good at to get to what I was good at. Oftentimes, we take everything a little bit too seriously and we get lost. in things that we later on decide weren't even important to us to begin when. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin. And I just like really regret not living in the present more. Each week we break down the science behind what you're going through and give you real tools to navigate it.

Your 20s aren't about having it all figured out. They're about understanding yourself just a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts. Every story has a point where it's balanced on a knife's edge. That's where we begin. For some, it's a confrontation no parent ever expects. They finally admit we're here to take your children.

The department has taken custody and we're here to take your kids. It was just shock and horror and desperation. For others, it's surviving the unthinkable. As they're having this gun battle, thousands of feet up in the air, Many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft. I thought we were going to die then. The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant. We talked to the people who lived it, unpacking what happened, how they got through it, and what came next.

And on our off-record episodes, we go even deeper into the reporting and answer the questions you can't stop thinking about. New episodes drop every Thursday on the exactly right network and the IHeart Podcast Network. Listen to The Knife on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When, like, young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. And my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that.

Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance, like he's about to attack me, like, making karate noises. And his entire the Kardashian family over there, everybody's going, and the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleepwalk. David O'Yello.

I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over?

Gaten Matarazzo from Stranger Things. Tena Monsu. Camilla Morone at Carrie Kenny Silver. And more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. If anyone missed last week's episode, part one of this two-part series, Aaron, you walked us through the good, the bad, and the ugly, really, of how we got to be here where we are today. So I think we all understand a lot more about where the concept of these dietary guidelines really comes from and the issues that have always been present in the creation of the dietary guidelines for America. And this is a very America-centric couple of episodes, but I will talk about global dietary guidelines today as well.

But today's episode, I am mostly focused on these newest dietary guidelines that came out in January, 2026. And what I want to walk through is why it is that they've made such headlines. Like, when was the last time we ever even heard about them being updated? Did you know they were updated in 2020? No. Because they were. Of course. They are every five years.

why are we hearing so much more about this upside down pyramid than we did the debut of MyPlate back in 2011? My plate still. Can't believe I missed a whole era of dietary guidelines. And of course, I think that part of this is down to the time in which we are currently living in, with RFK Jr. being the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, who made it known very clearly and very loudly that he was going to overhaul these guidelines. Right. And I think that in some ways, the kind of nutrition community, the wider medical community has been bracing for this. What is it going to look like? And it's very clear that maha and the maha kind of ideals and ideology has had a very huge hand in shaping these guidelines. You know, I was thinking about like the Super Bowl commercial with Mike Tyson. It's, Erin, I have so many feelings about it, and I'm not even going to get deep into it. No, I know. But it's just like, it's funny because, like you said, we didn't, like, there weren't, or maybe there were, and I just missed them because they were so not as ridiculous, like so unrediculous compared to that. I genuinely thought that I was watching like a spoof, a spoof thing.

Like it came up and I was like, this is. Like an SNL skit. Yeah, like a 30 Rock thing. I was like, what is happening? And so it is really interesting, the drive for publicity and publicizing. these guidelines. And I think that's one of the big, big differences that we're seeing, like, already off the bat is the way that these guidelines are being marketed. The way that they're being talked about, the vibes behind them is like totally, totally different than anything that

we've seen before. Yeah. It's a lot. And there is a lot that I think that these guidelines kind of bring up that are part of larger discussions. And we don't have time for those larger discussions today. So what I am going to focus on for this episode is how the most recent guidelines, this upside down food pyramid, if we're calling it that, what are the real key differences between these dietary guidelines and every other set of guidelines that has changed minimally over the last several decades? There's four key differences that I'm going to kind of go through, some of which are not based at all in science, and some of which are really probably good recommendations, and some of which are somewhere in between. And then we'll compare the current food guidelines now that exist in the U.S. to what guidelines actually look like across the globe?

Like how different are these new recommendations from global recommendations? I'm so excited for that. It's going to be great. How are Americans doing on eating according to these guidelines if we're falling short? in what areas are we falling short and why? What are the barriers that we see? Fiber. And yes, fiber is the answer.

And finally, the question that you kind of ended us with last week, Erin, is does any of this matter? Who is going to be affected by these changes besides our global reputation? Ready? Oh, yeah. So we're going to also go good, bad, and ugly. Or, like, I'm going to start with, like, probably beneficial changes, somewhat. maybe neutral changes, and then baseless changes that are probably harmful to our house. Wonder which those are.

I can't wait to tell you. So the first thing to know is that they really are not that different from previous iterations. Guidelines for forever have emphasized the importance of whole grains, whole fruits and vegetables, limiting added sugar, limiting sodium. and limiting our saturated fat to less than 10% of our total calories. That has not changed at all. Nope. These guidelines, similar to the guidelines from 2020 as well, also include a one-pager on nutrition information geared towards infants and toddlers, which is quite well put together and very, very similar to the 2020 guidelines. Right.

Okay. But there are a few big changes, like I said, four that we're going to go through. So the first big change is that this is the first dietary guidelines for Americans to specifically emphasize that we should be avoiding consumption of, quote, highly processed, packaged, prepared, ready to eat, unquote, foods or other snacky foods. And they list specifically chips, cookies, candy as the types of foods they're talking about. and they emphasize the need to prioritize what they call nutrient-dense foods. They go so far as to recommend that no amount of added sugars or non-nutrative sweeteners is needed or recommended in a diet. And multiple times in different sections of these guidelines, they call out refined grains,

added sugar, and added salt or sodium as something that we should be avoiding, including things like sugar-sweetened beverages, which they have been railing against for a very long time now, and fruit juices. I think their stance against fruit juices is a bit different than previous ones. They also say, and I think this is really interesting, that if you're going to be eating packaged or like snacky foods, to look for ones that meet FDA, quote-unquote, healthy claim limits. And this is a category that exists. It was like updated in 2024, these like limits on what should constitute a quote-unquote

healthy food. No one knows what those are. What? I've never heard of this. Okay. No, of course you have it. No one's heard of it. And the thing is that like this is a theoretical category kind of that exists, but there's no like labeling for it. So there's no way that that companies can label a food as quote unquote healthy and that you know as a consumer it is sticking to an actual category that the FDA has made. Like that has been proposed, but right now it does not exist. So healthy. limits, we don't really know exactly what those are. Okay. Okay. They list in the dietary guidelines some specific limits on the amounts of added sugar that should be in a certain amount of ounces of food as part of this healthy claim, but that's it. It's only a limit on sugar,

not on anything else saturated fat or sodium or anything. So this is a potentially beneficial change. However, it does kind of merit a bit more nuance than what the guidelines are giving it. Yeah. Okay. We're going to talk about processed foods, I think, someday. We have to because an in-depth look on what processed foods, or they call them highly processed foods, and that's not a thing that exists. Like, it's not a category of processing. There is a classification system called the Nova classification system that lists minimally processed and ultra-processed foods. Okay. But highly processed is not technically a term.

Now, is that semantics a little bit? But the problem is that to really, like, get at the idea of food processing, you have to, like, what is it that we're trying to get at here? Right. Because, like, it's a little bit like you know it when you see it. Like, yes, we know that certain things are processed. But that are not inherently bad because of that processing. Exactly.

Most of our food is processed. Exactly. And it's. Yeah, but to say that and then say, well, then that means all processed food is fine or all processed food is bad, both of those things are not, are lacking the nuance that is impactful for dietary health. They're oversimplifications on both like both ends of the spectrum essentially. And people use them in both ways where it's like, well, no, there are clearly highly processed foods. that are clearly not good for you. No one thinks that Cheetos are a health food.

Right. You know? Not to name names, but... Not to name names, but I don't think anyone is out there eating Cheetos thinking that they're getting nutrient-dense foods in their diet. I mean, but then there's like baked Cheetos as like, here's a healthy option. Don't get me started. Okay.

Again, it's the whole health washing. And that's a health washing and a marketing and that's kind of a separate issue, right? but it is part of this. And the thing is that like none of these types of foods that they are really trying to get at here, right? Because what they're trying to get at is avoiding sugared sweetened beverages, refined, highly processed carbohydrates, and other foods that have a lot of added sugars, added sodium, and tend to be high in saturated fats. None of these types of foods were recommended by any means in previous guidelines. Right. And scientific reports, again, the reports that are coming out of the DGAC, the committee who's making these initial recommendations that go to the DGA, they have recommended limiting them to various degrees.

Previous guidelines have never explicitly discouraged the consumption of these foods. We've been recommended to avoid added sugars, to limit our amounts of added sugars and things like that. So it's really kind of the emphasis and the explicitness of this recommendation that's different. It's interesting, too, to see whether there will be an impact. And so you're right. Like this seems like theoretically a step in the right direction. But how is it going to translate to purchasing? Exactly. Exactly. And I think that that theoretical part is so important. Because it's also the case that these highly processed, I'm going to call them what they actually are, which is ultra-processed foods and processed foods. in general, tend to be less expensive. They tend to be more available, especially in low-income areas.

They are going to be more shelf-stable. Many times they're fortified with a lot of vitamins and minerals that people might be lacking. And so to just blanket statement discourage all processed foods is really doing a disservice if we're not also changing the way that we regulate our foods, the way that we label our foods, and the way that we provide access to foods for people. And none of that is changing with these dietary guidelines. Yeah, all it's going to do, well, no, not all it's going to do. One of the things that's going to do is change the way that foods market themselves to no longer be highly processed, like the new naked Doritos or whatever. Suddenly that's not an ultra-processed food. Like, you're kidding me. And what that also does is it contributes to a level of stigma or shame associated with certain foods that we've then associated exactly. And that contributes to issues of disordered eating as well.

well as just discrimination. Like, it's, we could keep going. A can of worms. That is like a Costco-sized can of worms. Yes. They go even further, though, in this, like, section where they talk about avoiding highly processed foods because they also specifically talk about limiting artificial food dyes. We know that they're railing against those, as well as preservatives, non-nutriative sweeteners. And if you haven't listened to our food dyes episode, we have a way deep dive on that. But the fact is there really isn't a ton of data to support these recommendations. There really isn't. Like, we don't have data to say that we need to be avoiding X, Y, and Z preservatives or for what reason, or that artificial food dyes are in any way less safe than so-called natural

food dyes, which, again, they are just lifting restrictions on the ability to license and use various forms of, quote-unquote, natural-derived food dyes. I mean, like food dyes are not necessary period. No, right. And none of this, like, so that part is really not based in data, but it's lumped into this idea of avoiding highly processed foods. So again, that's a can of worms. And that's like, if there is a change that could potentially be for the better, that might be it. So moving on. Now, dairy has been, I think, contentious in guidelines for years. And for good reason. Yeah. Because honestly, the bottom line is that none of us over the age of 12 months need any form of dairy to survive as a species.

75% of the global population is lactose intolerant as adults and cannot consume dairy, period. Dairy is a good source of calcium. It has quite a lot of calcium in it and 46% of Americans don't get enough calcium. Dairy in this country has to be fortified with vitamin D and many of us don't get enough vitamin D. And then dairy contains protein and it is high in saturated fat if you are drinking whole fat dairy. But for a long time, the guidelines not only emphasized like the need for dairy. Dairy was its whole own food group, okay, which it still is. It is a front page recommendation on these guidelines. Of course it is.

Before whole grains, before anything. But every other guideline in the past has emphasized the need. need to consume low-fat dairy. They have recommended specifically low-fat dairy items, and that is because of the data surrounding saturated fat intake. And the truth is that the more data that we have gotten to specifically look at dairy, low-fat dairy versus full-fat dairy, is that the data doesn't really bear out the idea that low-fat dairy is really, you know, truly any healthier when it comes to cardiovascular disease, cholesterol, cardiovascular mortality, those kinds of things.

So whether you're consuming low fat milk or skim milk or whole milk, the data, like the newer data, it's true, doesn't really, like, it doesn't bear out that whole milk is truly worse than low fat. Okay? Okay. Where it does make a difference is that whole milk dairy, which, which is just as processed as low fat because they take out the fat and put it back in. But it is going to have more calories and it is going to have more saturated fat.

And so if you're consuming that, you probably need to reduce the amounts that you're drinking in order to stay within whatever your calorie limits are going to be for the day, right? Okay. But the new guidelines on this very first page specifically recommend consuming whole fat, full fat, dairy. They don't say, like, pick a dairy of your choice. They specifically say you should be consuming whole fat dairy. There's no data to support that. Right. Necessarily. And again, there's no data that says that anyone needs to be consuming dairy whatsoever. And all of the previous guidelines have aired, at least the way that they have framed it, have erred on the side of caution saying,

because we know the risks of saturated fat, even though we don't have a strong indication that low-fat dairy is substantially healthier or substantially more safe a choice than whole milk, we should err on the side of caution and recommend low-fat options to people. Okay. And you could confuse a little bit. Okay. So these studies, and this might not be like an answerable question, but like these studies that are showing that there's not necessarily a relationship, a strong relationship between

whole milk or whole fat milk or skin milk or whatever and health is that if quantities are equal is that if you know like it's a great question our nutrition is tough right it is really tough it's it's really most of them are just based on like changing a recommendation so in like for example dash diet studies which is like the dietary approaches to stopping hypertension or like mediterranean diet studies where they have either allowed participants to have milk whether they've recommended low fat milk or recommended whole milk. Are they restricting how much people are drinking? Probably not. So people are probably drinking however much milk they're going to drink. And so, but in those, when they have kind of allowed people more leniency and switching from

low fat to whole fat and things like that, there isn't that big of a difference, really. It's true. And it is interesting, too, in the context of thinking about servings and, like, recommended serving. So it's like we're now recommending any type of fat, dare, or like dairy fat amount versus. Well, specifically we're actually recommending whole fat. Okay. Well, there you go. But I mean like does that play?

Yeah, it's just I think it's it's, it's, the reason I say it's unanswerable is because like it's just there is so much. There's lack of clarity in all of this and what the impact is. And I think it is really difficult to take data and then translate that to advice. Yes, it is. It's really, really hard. Okay. But that is a big, that is a change, a pretty, a pretty, a.

pretty good size change that we see in these newest guidelines is the switch to emphasize the need to consume whole fat dairy products as like a very explicit recommendation. Okay? Yeah, sure. Next. Next is, I think, the one that you're probably most excited about, Erin. The war on protein. Yeah.

I'm waging this war. I'm starting now. I'm fighting back against the onslaught of protein. protein in the grocery store. The guidelines on real food.gov, which is where you can find these guidelines, they really do specifically say that they are ending the war on protein. As someone who lived through the 90s and the 2000s and the Atkins diet, I didn't realize that we were in a war.

I'll tell you what I think the war actually is, Erin. Yeah. Let me get through it. Is it the war on beef? Okay. Go on. Okay. Yeah.

Listen. So this version of the dietary guidelines. really puts protein on a huge pedestal, and it does so in two ways that are different from prior guidelines and not based in nutrition research or data. So first, these guidelines emphasize over and over again, both visually and in the text itself, a specific and explicit recommendation to consume your protein primarily from animal sources. Right.

I can picture the steak in that pyramid. It's huge. They have a huge whole steak, an entire turkey, a package of ground beef, a chunk of raw salmon, and a carton of whole milk all to represent your protein sources. Okay? They also, in the text, emphasize eggs, poultry, seafood, and red meat. And then later, later down the line, say, like, you can get it from vegetable sources too. But don't you dare be vegetarian or vegan or you'll definitely end up deficient? There's like a whole section on that.

Great. The nutrition data that we have rife with biases and. things and limited as all nutrition data is, all of the nutrition data that we do have point to plant sources of protein being associated with lower disease risks, lower mortality, better cardiovascular outcomes than animal proteins. So that is what Atwater basically said. I mean, Atwater was like get your protein however you can get your protein, animal, plant, whatever. And then at least 70 years ago, it was known that plant protein was associated with lower incidence of chronic disease.

Yes, yes. Plant proteins are sufficient in terms of getting us enough quality of protein. And they, again, reduce cardiovascular disease risk, like over and over and over again in studies. Now, in these newest guidelines where they are making these recommendations, they don't provide. any quantitative data to actually, like, prove or, like, any data to support this idea that animal proteins are actually healthier in any way, shape, or form. Like, they don't even try to really back this up with any quantitative data. Okay. And, and we're going to get more into this in a second, but meat, especially red meat,

like the giant steak that they have right there in the front of the triangle, is much higher in saturated fat than plant-based proteins. And we have decades of data. This is where our nutrition data is the strongest. Reducing saturated fat is beneficial for your cardiovascular health. Also, like, they don't even mention in these guidelines how strong of associations they are between red meat and processed meats and the fact that they're carcinogens, right? These are carcinogenic foods and associated with an increased risk of cancer. None of this is addressed in these guidelines. They just really focus on the need to consume animal-based protein. And the other thing that they specify for the first time in a dietary guidelines is a protein goal of 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day.

So for 100 kilogram person, we're talking 120 to 160 grams of protein. What's that in pounds? It's... Oh, my God. I don't know. 2.2. So that would be like 220 counts? Okay. Okay. Okay. Wow. Pull that out. The current like dietary reference intakes, the like, which is separate from these DGAs, but that's getting into semantics. The recommendation is a goal of 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight. So this is up to double, like up to doubling what the recommended target protein intake is. And the current evidence is that the vast majority of Americans with some exceptions for maybe. older adults are getting about one gram per kilogram of protein. We're already meeting what the

previous goals are. We are not deficient in protein whatsoever. What would protein deficiency look like? So protein deficiency can result in like muscle wasting and things like that for sure. And it's like a very real concern if you didn't have access to protein. And there's some data that in like older Americans, especially like over 70, 75, that having a protein deficit is associated with increased frailty and, you know, that's a fall risk and things like that. But that's only in a subset of older Americans. The vast majority of everyone else is getting plenty of protein to support our daily needs and to support our bodily functions.

The evidence that they cite, that they present in these guidelines to actually support this idea that we need more protein, are a few studies, some of which show that with a high protein diet, people have more weight loss. That's it. They're not, they don't have any data to show that more protein is better for cardiovascular disease, for diabetes, for mortality, for cancer, for anything else, just a few short-term studies, 68% of these 30 studies, showed decrease in one weight-related metric, like BMI or waist circumference or something like that. So there's really no data to support this idea that we need more protein than what we're already getting. And like excess dietary protein ends up converted into fat, which is going to

increase your visceral adiposity, and that's the type of fat that puts people at risk of diabetes and metabolic disease. There's some evidence that increasing your protein intake if you are doing intensive strength and resistance training can increase your muscle mass, but they're not, like, that's a separate subset and that's not the general population, because if we were all doing more strength training, that would be great for everyone, but we're not as a whole. Okay, so what does this mean for, we should do an episode on protein? We really should. I've been wanting to do the keto diet for a long time. Oh, yeah. But what does this mean for the fact that, like, you know, we're seeing this now, How long has this been building this war on protein rhetoric? Again, I still come back to the protein in every product that you see these days. Like, that's like the newest trend. It is. And what are the implications of that trend? Like, what are the outcomes going to be? It's a great question. We don't know. Will there be? Yeah. Because this is, I mean, this sets us up for the protein marketing to be like, heck yes, thank you so much for doing this. Right. We're already here. Now look at us. We're in the guidelines.

right, despite the fact that they're all ultra-processed foods. Yeah. Right? Yeah. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and your 20s, they can feel like a lot. On the psychology of your 20s podcast, we unpack the anxiety, the overthinking, the heartbreak, the identity crisis, all of it that comes with being in your 20s. Because if you've ever thought, is anybody else feeling this way, they definitely are. I feel like my 20s was a process of checking off everything that I was not good at to get to what I was good at.

Oftentimes we take everything a little bit too seriously and we get lost in things that we later on decide weren't even important to us to begin when. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I was just so wanting to be out of that phase out of my skin. And I just like really regret not living in the present more. Each week we break down the science behind what you're going through and give you real tools. to navigate it. Your 20s aren't about having it all figured out. They're about understanding yourself just a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every story has a point where it's balanced on a knife's edge. That's where we begin. For some,

it's a confrontation no parent ever expects. They finally admit, we're here to take your children. The department has taken custody and we're here to take your kids. It was just shock and horror and desperation. For others, it's surviving the unthinkable. As they're having this gun battle, thousands of feet up in the air, many of the bullets start to puncture the aircraft. I thought we were going to die then. The Knife is a podcast about real people whose lives were upended in an instant.

We talked to the people who lived it, unpacking what happened, how they got through it, and what came next. And on our off-record episodes, we go even deeper. into the reporting and answer the questions you can't stop thinking about. New episodes drop every Thursday on the exactly right network and the IHeart Podcast Network. Listen to the Knife on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark.

When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever, my first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be. Because-pointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary. I wake up and I'm hitting him in the head with a water bomb. And Bruce Jenner is on the aisle in a karate stance.

Like he's about to attack me. Like, making karate noises. And his entire, the Kardashians family over there, everybody's going. And the air marshal is trying to grab my arms and screaming. I immediately know that I've been asleep walking. David O'Yellow-O. I love this podcast. Whether it's therapy.

or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts. Guy Branham. So anyway, Nicole Kidman broke up with Keith Thurban. Being half of a country couple was always a hat she was going to wear, not like a life she was going to lead. Oh, interesting. I like that. Did you practice that on your way over? Gayton Matarazzo from Stranger Things.

Santa Monsu. Camilla Morone at Carrie Kenny Silver. And more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The war on protein, from what I can tell, is that the dietary guidelines advisory committee, who published the initial recommendations that they did not use to make these new guidelines, specifically said that we need to have an emphasis on plant-based proteins. and they had the audacity to suggest that beans, peas, and lentils should be taken out of the vegetables group and grouped with the proteins group.

Which is wild because historically that's where it has been, too. Listen. Beans were with meat. Legumes were with meat historically since the early days. Yes, but peas, Aaron, they're green. I wonder when it switched. Okay, okay. That's the war.

That is the war. That's the war on protein. I'm not done. Okay. Yeah. The last and I think the most egregious change, the ones that people are really kind of up in arms about, is the changes in terms of the recommendations on fat. And I hinted at this already. Yes.

So just like every other guideline forever, these guidelines explicitly say that we should be limiting our total saturated fat intake to less than 10% of our diet. That has not changed. Yeah. Because the data to support that is so strong, that has not changed. However, the new guidelines say that we should be incorporating healthy fats, quote unquote, healthy fats, and they repeatedly list butter and beef tallow many times as options for healthy fats. These fats are 50% saturated fat compared to liquid fats like olive oils, vegetable oils, seed oils, which, are like 10% saturated fat. The guidance on saturated fat for years has been that saturated fat increases our LDL cholesterol,

which is the type of cholesterol associated with cardiovascular disease, and saturated fat intake increases cardiovascular disease and mortality from cardiovascular disease. The data is like as strong as it gets when it comes to nutrition data. And there are so, so much data that shows that reducing our saturated fat specifically in these ways. one by replacing saturated fats like butter and lard and beef tallow with plant-based fats like olive oil, vegetable oil, seed oils, improves people's lipid profiles and reduces cardiovascular disease. And number two, replacing animal-based sources of saturated fat, including red meat and white meat and dairy products, with plant-based sources of proteins like legumes and whole grains and vegetables reduces

cardiovascular disease. These are not new data. These are long-standing. So these recommendations and the lumping of these sources of highly saturated fat as a healthy option is not based in data whatsoever. And to still say, like, we need to be eating animal-based protein. We need to be eating whole-fat dairy products. we need to be using butter as our healthy fat, but we should be limiting our saturated fat intake to 10% of our diet.

Like, that's not feasible. You can't do all of that. It's contradictory. Yeah. I think it's like it's a little by design because it's like providing lip service to multiple different things at once without revealing what the true intention behind it is. If there is one, like, can there be an aligned goal or is it just like word vomit from RFK? From word vomit mouths. Yeah.

From someone who's a pro. And really, like, the way that they made these guidelines is also different than what you walked us through, Aaron, of the typical how these dietary guidelines are made. And you told us last week that there has always been black boxes. Yeah. There have always been concerns about industry ties. And there has always been a question of, like, how do these dietary guidelines committee recommendations actually get turned into the DGA? And so what's kind of interesting is that in some ways, the way that they went about this was more transparent. Yeah, the whole checklist of like, these are, this is what the committee recommended.

And here's what we did. Here's what we did. Whoa. We ignored over 30 out of 50 of their recommendations. And we mostly ignored another 15 of them. And there was like five or six that we took. Right. So that part was more explicit.

We still don't know who actually wrote any of these guidelines. Right, right. That's still a black box. But there was also an entirely separate scientific advisory committee that RFK made, and he gave them a couple of months instead of a couple of years to do a so-called rapid review of the evidence. And then he had his own folks, again, Black Box, take those scientific rapid reviews and make the actual guidance from it. Yeah. Certainly not an improvement on the process. Not an improvement.

A worsening on the existing terrible structure. Right. And the scientific advisors that wrote these scientific parts of the report also had tons of industry ties, every single one almost. So that part is really no different, even though they're trying to frame it as this is free from bias, et cetera. They also are very explicit in these guidelines that one of the things they really did not like about the previous guidelines is that they had the audacity to take into account things

like health equity, ethnicity, culture, socioeconomic status, race, all of these things were considered in the dietary guidelines advisory committees, actual guidelines, recommendations. And this report has an entire paragraph saying, how dare you take that into consideration? That's not what we're doing here. Yeah, I mean, it's unsurprising. So points for that kind of transparency, right? And honestly, I think that one of the big things that these guidelines do, is show the same exact trend that we've seen in pretty much everything that Maha touches,

whether it's raw milk, whether it's food dyes, whether it's anything, which is a real, like, rejection of any sort of scientific expertise and a remaking of facts to fit a specific agenda being explicit about it. But then also a packaging and, like, a branding of these very real health issues that are indeed facing Americans as something that we could fix individually, just eating more broccoli and steak, right? Like we have huge issues in our health system, and as we have talked about and we'll continue to talk about, many of us struggle to meet these dietary guidelines.

And people around the globe live with chronic diseases that poor nutrition has contributed to. But it will take structural changes to actually fix any of these issues, right? Yeah. And a willingness to actually. actually stand up to industry and require some sort of regulation over advertising, over what they can put on a label. And none of that has happened thus far.

No. Now, if we take a step back and look globally, pretty much every single country has some version of dietary guidelines. Many of them do use a little pyramid shape, which is so interesting. Why has that become the thing? And there's, of course, a lot of regional variation in, like, what countries are using as like their food examples or like are they calling things grains or starches or what have you but across the board there's a lot of very common themes that come out and that are things like

an emphasis on fish in many guidelines an emphasis on lean meats and limiting or moderating meat consumption that's in most other guidelines over half of countries have some specific messaging around increasing consumption of legumes and plant-based sources of protein and about 75% of countries have some kind of messaging about dairy. So not all, but a good chunk of them. And most of them that have anything about dairy specifically mention low-fat milk or low-fat dairy products. And then pretty much all countries mention things like limiting fat to some degree, some of them separate out the types of fat, and then limiting salt, limiting sugar, etc.

Okay. I also love that some countries go like a few steps further and, like, they're done. Dietary guidelines also include, like, conditions on how you should eat or, like, recommendations on physical activity. Apparently in Brazil, dietary guidelines, I don't know if they still do this, but in 2015, they said that you should dine in company to develop relationships. Oh, I love that. Isn't that so nice?

Okay. So if we look very broadly and, like, we try and incorporate all of what these other country guidelines, the World Health Organization recommendations, and what, like, nutrition science more broadly tells us what really is the healthiest diet? If we look at the preponderance of evidence, a healthy diet seems to be one in which we get a wide variety of foods that are going to meet our macro-nutrients, so protein, fiber, carbohydrate, fat, and our micronutrient, so vitamins and minerals requirements, it's going to be one which relies primarily on plants, including vegetables, fruits, and whole grains. And for many of us,

plant-based sources of protein are going to bring health benefits. And animal-based sources of protein can be incorporated as a part of a healthy diet. And across the board, based on all the evidence, the things that we should be limiting are saturated and trans fats, added sugars or free sugars and sodium. And it is true that ultra-processed foods are very often high in sodium, sugar, and saturated fats. Right. That's the end.

Yeah. So we have these guidelines, these ones that change every five years in the United States. We have other sort of society guidelines or like these, these ones that there's consistency across the globe. How are we doing? Is any of us meeting any of these guidelines? I'm so glad that you asked. Erin, that's what I wanted to tell you next.

Okay, good. So in the U.S. at least, we can look at the Healthy Eating Index, 2020, is the most up-to-date ones that we have. They have a separate one for, like, children over age two and then another one for toddlers. Okay. But all across the board, we fail to align with any version of dietary guidelines for Americans. Okay? Yeah. Our standard American diet, which you can abbreviate as sad, is indeed, it's pretty, it's pretty bad, right?

Yeah, yeah. The mean healthy eating index scores for the total population was 56 out of 100. Goal is 100. Okay. And toddlers, it's 63 out of 100. So toddlers are doing a bit better, which is shocking to me based on my toddlers. I mean, 63, though, is still. It's not great.

Probably my kid is much less than that. That's an average, right? And these data come from like a whole bunch of really wide-ranging surveys. Despite those abysmal overarching statistics, according to all of this data, the majority of individuals over age one are at or above dietary guideline recommendations for total grains, refined grains, which is maybe the less great option, total proteins. total protein foods. Okay. Protein. And meat, poultry, and eggs.

Okay. So we're doing just fine there. We're hitting things, yep. Where we are falling short is vegetables, including all subgroups of vegetables. And they group them by like green versus red and orange versus, again, beans, peas, and lentils were in there as vegetables. We're falling short on fruits. We're falling short on the dietary guidelines recommendations for, dairy or fortified soy alternatives, as well as seafood, nuts, seeds, soy products, and whole

grains. Okay. So you might ask, as I did, why do we need recommendations telling us to emphasize protein and animal protein when we're already getting enough, if not too much, and we're falling short in so many other regards? If you want to go even deeper and you know that I do, we can look at other, like, macro nutrient profiles, only 6% of us in the United States are meeting our fiber recommendations, which is 25 to 35 grams of fiber a day.

It's actually quite – so I've been a little bit obsessed with fiber because I feel like we have talked about this in something else. Maybe it was a poop episodes or something. And I was like, how much fiber am I? Like I had no concept of how much I was supposed to eat. Like, yeah, you can hear 25 grams, 30 grams or whatever. But like, what does that actually look like? Right. And it's a lot of fiber. It's, it is. And so yesterday, I sat down with John and I calculated his, not mine, because I, I, I for, and also I've been taking fiber, like, yeah, I've been having fiber supplements and stuff. And trying to eat a lot of fiber. But John is just like, well, I think I eat a good amount of fiber. And I was like, do you? He does, actually. He hit 30 grams. I was like, are you kidding me? That's amazing. Yeah. I thought he only ate chicken.

No, he's a big smoothie vegetable guy. And so it's like most of the day is smoothie vegetables and then it's chicken and vegetables at night. And that's great. I think that like it was really a good exercise for me to be like, okay, what does this actually look like in terms of consuming fiber? Right. And it's, I mean, fiber is like it is the one thing that I do a lot of counseling on in all of my primary care visits, my preventive care visits when we're talking about food and diet. Because it's also that like food, that are high in fibers tend to be also the foods that are good plant proteins and they have a lot of other micronutrients and things. So like to get your fiber from whole food sources, you are also shifting the overall diet profile that you're eating, which is like, oh, fiber's great. Now, more. Eighty-nine percent of us are getting too much sodium. See our salt episode for more. I include myself in that. Yeah. 65 percent of us are eating more. more than 10% of our calories in added sugar, which is a lot. 82% of us are eating more than 10% of our calories from saturated fat already

before these recommendations to increase animal protein, to increase the fat in your dairy, to use butter. And it's only older adults. About 5 to 15% of older adults are maybe not getting enough protein. And that's like a low percentage compared to all of these other numbers. It is true, though, like, that our nutrition in the U.S. is not great, and it impacts our health. It's estimated that $700 billion each year is spent on health care costs related to nutrition-related chronic diseases, right? So these do have huge consequences on individual and public health.

So if we are falling short in these areas, why? Like, what are the barriers that people are facing? and who is going to face or who is going to see the impact of these newest changes that we're seeing? That's where I want to go next. There are very substantial differences in access to food and in health outcomes in this country based on race and ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Now, in this country, race and ethnicity contribute so hugely to differences in dietary intake. And it's largely due to historic marginalization and structural racism that's driving inequalities in socioeconomics and education. These are the two biggest factors, socioeconomics and education, that are associated with diet quality.

We also see huge geographic differences in the U.S. people in rural United States and in food deserts, whether in rural or urban areas, have substantially lower quality diets. And there's socioeconomics and historic redlining and, like, food deserts where even if you have food, like, let's say your bodega on the corner carries fresh fruits and vegetables, they're going to be sky high prices compared to the Walmart, which is out in the burbs that you can't get to because you don't have a car. Right. Right. Yeah. So there's huge amounts of inequalities in our food system, and that is baked into our food system. The scientific report from the dietary guidelines committee that was not used to make these guidelines really emphasized the need for us to do more research on those aspects, for us to understand what those drivers are and how we can actually address them systematically. Right.

And the dietary guidelines said absolutely not. We will not be doing that. Right. We are not going to acknowledge anything beyond personal choices. Exactly. 100%. But if our personal choices are that we're not eating according to these guidelines anyways, then what, like you asked last week, what impact are these changes really going to have?

And I think that one of the things that's important is that because these dietary guidelines are guiding policy for school lunch programs, for military nutrition programs, for what is covered by WIC or the women infants and children, which serves over 47 million people, these changes specifically to increase. things like full fat dairy, to increase protein recommendations, to avoid processed foods, these could result in pretty substantial changes being integrated into what foods are available in schools. Now, my kid goes to a public school and gets breakfast and lunch at public school, which is wonderful. Thank you, State of California. But the food choices that he gets are often quite bad.

Like, he eats gram crackers for breakfast because those count as whole grains. I'm not even joking. Yeah, no, I know you're not. I mean, that's like cinnamon toast crunch is a whole grain cereal. Yes, he gets cinnamon toast crunch, whole grain, low sugar, cinnamon toast crunch quite often. He brings home the little let packets sometimes. 5% reduced sugar now. Yes.

Yes. And do you know what? They don't taste as good. But that's besides the point. Well, but that is the point. But yeah. Yes. But so it is possible that these changes could result in choices that are higher in whole.

grains that are lower in sugar and that are lower in sodium. And that would not be a bad thing. That would be a really good thing. Will there be increased budgets for this? Because those foods are going to cost more money. So will this result in better food choices or will it result in less access? Will departments and programs have to decide, you know what, we can't give universal school lunch anymore? We have to go back to having income limits on who can actually access school lunch, which, again, that's a bigger issue and has a whole bunch of things associated with it, right? Universal School Lunch is an amazing thing. So is there going to be budgets for this to be able to implement and incorporate any of these recommendations into policy changes?

Will increasing full fat dairy be beneficial for kids? Will it end up having more calories? Because they're still going to be drinking chocolate milk, because that's what they all choose. Yeah. Right? Yeah. And I think, that we don't know, right? We literally just don't know. We don't know how this is all going to happen, how it's all going to shake out. So time will tell. It's the like short answer of like, how are these going to be impacted? In theory, you know, medical professionals and nutrition professionals also rely on these guidelines when they're counseling patients. Or when learning in their training. Or when learning, are they going to rely on these guidelines or are we going to

see what we've seen with the disillusion of the ACIP where all of the other professional organizations make their own guidelines. And that's actually what's used. And no one's even using these guidelines. We don't know. I do think like we talked about earlier, what is so different about the way that these guidelines are being presented is how they are being marketed and how much they are being marketed to the American public directly. And they're doing so under this guise of caring about people's health, while at the same time rejecting, examining any socioeconomic determinants of health, you know, rejecting science in a lot of ways for their own individual interests. And then also marketing this with commercials like the one with Mike Tyson

that shames foods, that shames people's bodies for what size their body actually is. again, without any meaningful policy change to make sure that people have access to foods or have the time to engage in physical activity or like any of these other things that we know would be beneficial. So I don't know, Erin. I am skeptical that there's going to be a lot of benefit that comes out of wrapping up these nuggets of truth or these nuggets of what we know to be quote unquote common sense in what is so hard to disentangle. good advice from ideology that's not based in reality. Science industry ideology. Yep. Where does it all? Like what does the pie chart look like? Right. It's different for each different thing. And like I feel like what I really drew from this, there are consistencies. And I think highlighting those global consistencies is really, it's really interesting because there are

things that haven't really changed. And there are maybe minor changes from from year to year as far as these go. But like we do have a roadmap. And it's just that there's an unwillingness, especially from the federal government, to provide the funding or the resources to enable everyone to use that roadmap. A hundred percent. The other thing that I swear this is my very last point, Aaron. We'll see. No, just kidding. Because I don't have time to get into it, but I feel like it's an important thing that I don't want to just gloss over entirely. The impact of dietary guidelines on climate change? Yes.

Okay? There's really wide ranges in emissions estimates of various specific countries recommended diets. And if the entire world was eating an old U.S. diet, not even the newest recommendations, it would substantially increase global greenhouse gas emissions. And now with an emphasis on dairy and even stronger, we always had an emphasis on dairy, but a stronger emphasis on dairy and a stronger emphasis on animal protein at the expense of plant protein, that is also going to result if it is incorporated in more greenhouse gas emissions, worsening of climate change.

There was also changes with like alcohol and making it much more ambiguous what the recommendations are and not explicitly saying you should not be drinking alcohol, period. Yeah. Which is what the old guidelines actually said. They were like, no one should be drinking alcohol if you are going to. It should be no more than one to two a day depending on who you are. And now the new ones are just like, limit your alcohol consumption, which like, what does that mean? Now I swear I'm actually done, Aaron.

Yeah. No, I mean, you bring up a good point about emissions. And it's all I think what it also reveals is just like how much of this, again, is about American agriculture. And interest in that area. 100%. Yeah. Tell us where we can learn more about this. Well, of course, you can read all of these guidelines for yourself.

I've got links to the report that came out in 2024. And then the scientific foundation that they wrote the new scientific committee that RFK made wrote, as well as the several-page dietary guidelines document. It's all there. I also have some data, like going back on previous dietary guidelines so that you can kind of see the evolution. And then a bunch of papers about the global. There was a couple really great ones. One from 2019 that was called a Global Review of Food-Based Dietary Guidelines from advances in nutrition.

And then another one from 2021 that was a comparison of dietary guidelines among 96 countries worldwide. I've got that climate change paper. It was from 2018. So it's a little bit old now. But anyways, we got so much there for you on our website, this podcast. will kill you.com. Yes. Thank you to Bloodmobile

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It does. Until next time, wash your hands. You filthy animals. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face. I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I like was just so wanting to like be out of that phase out of my skin.

And I just like really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox. And in the new podcast, Doubt the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2020. but what if we didn't get the whole story? Evidence has been made to fit.

The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh my God, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.