This Podcast Will Kill You
Ep 209 Dietary Guidelines Part 2: Why is there protein in everything?
05 May 2026
Chapter 1: What are the significant changes in the latest Dietary Guidelines?
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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 was just so wanting to be out of that phase, out of my skin, and I just 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.
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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.
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Chapter 2: How is the new food pyramid structured compared to previous guidelines?
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Yes.
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.
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Yeah.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of emphasizing high-quality protein sources?
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If anyone missed last week's episode, part one of this two-part series, Erin, 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? Yeah. 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?
MyPlate, still. Can't believe I missed a whole era of dietary guidelines.
Right. Right. 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.
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Chapter 4: Why is there a focus on avoiding processed foods in the new guidelines?
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-nutritive 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 snacky foods, to look for ones that meet FDA quote-unquote healthy claim limits is 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 those. Okay.
No, of course you haven't. 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 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. Okay. 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.
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Chapter 5: How do the new guidelines address fat consumption?
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 access to foods for people.
And none of that is changing with these dietary guidelines.
Yeah. All it's going to do ā well, no, not all it's going to do. One of the things it'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 ā
Right. And that what that also does is it contributes to a level of stigma or shame associated with certain foods. Yes. Guilty pleasures. That we then associated. Exactly. And that contributes to issues of disordered eating as well as just discrimination. Like it's we could keep going.
A can of worms. That is like a Costco size can of worms.
Yeah.
Yes. They go even further, though, in this section where they talk about avoiding highly processed foods because they also specifically talk about limiting artificial food dyesāwe know that they're railing against thoseāas well as preservatives, non-nutritive 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. Right.
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Chapter 6: What role does fiber play in the updated dietary recommendations?
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.
Okay.
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 servings. So it's like we're now recommending any type of fat, like dairy fat amount versus.
Well, specifically, we're actually recommending whole fat.
Well, there you go.
But.
But I mean, like, does that. Yeah, it's just I think 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. Yeah.
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Chapter 7: How do Americans currently meet dietary guidelines?
And the other thing that they specify for the first time in dietary guidelines is a protein goal of 1.2 to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. So for a 100-kilogram person, we're talking 120 to 160 grams of protein. What's that in pounds? Oh, my God. I don't know. 2.2. So that would be like 220 pounds. Okay.
Okay.
Wow. Pulled that out. The current dietary reference intakes, 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.
Okay.
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... 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
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 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 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.
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Chapter 8: What are the potential impacts of these guidelines on public health?
Listen to Look Back at It on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 with.
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 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This season on Dear Chelsea, with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests, like Emilia Clarke.
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?
I'd rather be disappointed in. Do that. Dennis Leary.
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