The Dictatorship
Experts question diet guidelines’ higher protein-intake advice
Protein just got a big boost from U.S. health officials.
The latest federal dietary guidelines tell Americans to “prioritize protein foods at every meal” and advise increasing daily intake — up to double the amount of previous recommendations.
“We are ending the war on protein,” Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a White House post on social media.
The guidance — including a new food pyramid — emphasizes red meat, whole milk and other animal sources of protein, while downplaying plant-based offerings.
But top nutrition experts question the protein push, saying Americans already consume more protein than they need, and there’s no new evidence that people need to drastically ramp up consumption. For many people, eating much more protein could lead to more fat and more cases of diabetes, they say.
“If you’re actively building muscle with strength or resistance training, more protein can help,” said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a Tufts University nutrition expert. “Otherwise, you’re getting enough.”
Others worry that the dietary advice will accelerate the trend of companies encouraging Americans to embrace extra protein in foods including bars, cereals and snacks – even water.
Sales of protein-enriched packaged food will increase at a time “when one of the main messages is ‘eat real food, eat whole foods,’” said Christopher Gardner, a nutrition expert at Stanford University. “I think they’re going to confuse the public in a big way.”
Here’s what you need to know about the new protein recommendations:
What is protein and how much do people need?
Protein is a macronutrient that is in every cell in the human body. It’s vital for growth and repair of muscle, bone, skin, hair and other organs and tissues. It’s made of building blocks called amino acids, including some that the body doesn’t make and must come from food.
For decades, the U.S. dietary guidelines and other sources have recommended that people consume 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight each day, or about 54 grams daily for a 150-pound person.
The new recommendation advises people to consume 1.2 grams to 1.6 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight — up to double the previous advice. The guidance says adults should consume at least 100 grams of protein per day with half or more coming from animal sources.
The average adult man already consumes about 100 grams of protein a day, or twice the old recommendation.
Why did the new dietary guidelines change?
The previous protein recommendations were calculated to prevent a nutrition deficiency, according to a scientific review published with the new dietary guidelines.
“It represents the lowest intake that maintains equilibrium in most healthy adults but does not reflect the intake required to maintain optimal muscle mass or metabolic function under all conditions,” the review said.
The new document relied on evidence from 30 studies that looked at the effects of higher protein diets on weight management and nutrient adequacy.
It concluded that protein intakes well above the previous guidance “are safe and compatible with good health.”
What’s the harm of eating more protein?
Nutrition experts noted that trials focusing on weight reduction aren’t typically used to make dietary recommendations for the general population. And, in a new article published in Journal of the American Medical Association, Mozaffarian said there is little evidence, outside of use for strength or resistance training, that “higher protein builds muscle or provides other health benefits.”
“In fact, excess dietary protein can be converted to fat by the liver,” Mozaffarian wrote. That can increase the risk of the development of dangerous fat in the abdomen that surrounds vital organs and boost the risk of diabetes, he added.
Protein in processed foods
Other nutrition experts said the recommendation to eat more protein could be useful if it helps achieve another key goal of the new guidelines: encouraging people to eat more whole foods and fewer highly processed foods such as packaged snacks and cookies.
“The main problem with the food supply is the processed carbohydrates,” said Dr. David Ludwig, an endocrinologist and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital.
But that will be a tall order for consumers faced with a slew of processed packaged foods — including toaster pastries, cereals and salty snacks — imbued with the halo of added protein.
“I think the American public’s gonna go buy more junk food,” Gardner said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Amanda Gorman shared a powerful poem on Instagram that she wrote in honor of Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old ICU nurse and U.S. citizen killed by a federal immigration officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Saturday.
The poem, “For Alex Jeffrey Pretti,” characterizes Pretti’s killing as a “betrayal” and an “execution.”
Gorman, earlier this month, also paid tribute to Renee Nicole Good, another U.S. citizen killed by a federal immigration officer in Minneapolis on Jan. 7. In a caption accompanying another poem shared on Instagram, Gorman said she was “horrified by the ongoing violence that ICE wages upon our community. Across our country, we are witnessing discrimination and brutality on an unconscionable scale.”
Her poem says, in part: “You could believe departed to be the dawn/ When the blank night has so long stood./ But our bright-fled angels will never be fully gone,/ When they forever are so fiercely Good.”
The 27-year-old writer and activist famously recited her poem, “Blue Light News We Climb,” at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration in 2021. Gorman has also written poems in the wake of other tragedies in the country, including “Hymn for the Hurting,” about the Robb Elementary mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas in 2022. She also performed a poem she wrote about reproductive rights and the Roe V. Wade Supreme Court case in a NowThis video in 2019.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in recordings obtained by Axiosseems to have a bone to pick with Vice President JD Vance and sometimes, President Donald Trump.
In his remarks, which lasted about 10 minutes and were reportedly made in a private meeting with donors sometime last year, Cruz portrays himself as an economically-minded, pro-interventionist who has the president’s ear.
The Texas senator is also heard criticizing former Fox News personality, Tucker Carlson, and his relationship with the vice president. “Tucker created JD. JD is Tucker’s protégé, and they are one and the same,” Cruz told donors.
Cruz, who has clashed with Carlson in the past over foreign intervention policies, bashed the administration’s appointment of Israel critic Daniel Davis to a top national intelligence position. A vocal supporter of Israel himself, Cruz called Davis “a guy who viciously hates Israel,” and credited himself with removing Davis from the job.
The Republican senator also blamed Vance and Carlson for ousting former national security adviser Mike Waltz over similar anti-interventionist sentiments related to Iran.
“[Waltz] supported being vigorous against Iran and bombing Iran — and Tucker and JD took Mike out,” Cruz said.
Cruz also said he has been trying to get the White House to accept a trade agreement with India, but claimed White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, Vance and “sometimes” Trump, are resistant.
Domestically, Cruz cautioned donors about Trump’s tariffs, which he said could result in severe economic and political consequences. Cruz is reportedly heard telling donors that he told the president “if we get to November of [2026] and people’s 401(k)s are down 30% and prices are up 10–20% at the supermarket, we’re going to go into Election Day, face a bloodbath.”
Cruz said a conversation he had with Trump about tariffs “did not go well,” and that Trump was “yelling” and “cursing.” Cruz said Trump told him: “F*** you, Ted.”
“Trump was in a bad mood,” Cruz said. “I’ve been in conversations where he was very happy. This was not one of them.”
In a statement about the recordings, a spokesperson for Cruz said he is “the president’s greatest ally in the Senate and battles every day in the trenches to advance his agenda. Those battles include fights over staffers who try to enter the administration despite disagreeing with the president and seeking to undermine his foreign policy” and that “these attempts at sowing division are pathetic and getting boring.”
In an email responding to MS NOW’s request for comment on Cruz’s reported statements, the White House did not address Cruz’s statements.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter and producer for MS NOW. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
Alex Pretti was shot to death on the sidewalk of a street in Minneapolis after he didn’t leave when federal agents demanded he leave. Renee Good was shot to death in her car on a street in Minneapolis because she tried to leave when federal agents demanded she not.
Advocates of President Donald Trump’s administration will cite this disobedience as a central factor in Pretti and Good’s deaths. Each has been assigned a contrived danger, as well, to reinforce the urgent need for their killings: Pretti had a gun (that he doesn’t appear to have drawn) and Good had her car (that she doesn’t appear to have used as a weapon).
But their central offense, among those eager to champion Trump’s politics and policies, was their failure to be pliant. They were at odds with the state and, well, sometimes that’s punishable by death.
It is stunning, though not surprising, to see the president of the United States and sworn federal officials impugn dead citizens so callously.
It has been posited that the eagerness with which Trump and his allies have defended Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against charges of excessive force, and the alacrity with which they assign blame to the victims of those shootings, demonstrates hypocrisy, given their collective willingness to absolve — to beatify! — the rioters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. They, too, defied state authority and, in many cases, far more aggressively. But they are hailed as heroes by the current administration.
But this isn’t hypocrisy at all. It’s consistent. If you object to or impede their politics, they will hurt you. That is the consistency and it is why off-duty police were in the mob on Jan. 6 and why Trump supporters defend ICE today. It’s not the badge that matters. It’s the red cap.
The most jarring element of the response to Pretti’s death and to Good’s death is the speed with which the administration has disparaged the victims rather than the perpetrators. Each of them was also immediately asserted to have been a premeditated, violent actor. A terrorist. When each, instead, was at the scene of their unwitting deaths because they were part of and supportive of their community.
It is stunning, though not surprising, to see the president of the United States and sworn federal officials impugn dead citizens so callously. It’s utterly immoral, if not deranged. What flows through their veins is partisanship, and what dominates their thoughts is knocking their opponents and critics back on their heels. Perhaps there are flutters of recognition that this is not how human beings behave, much less political leaders in a democracy. But if those flames flicker into existence, they are quickly snuffed.
And for what! This is the question that continues to baffle me more than any other. Why has the Department of Homeland Security dispatched vans and SUVs filled with masked men to Minneapolis? Most immediately, it seems, it’s because a bad-faith “investigation” from a right-wing media personality made Minnesota a focus of the right’s collective anger. So the president pointed at Minnesota and his shock troops marched.
Their mission has been described in a number of ways, which means that (as with so much else in Trump’s world) the effect was decided before the cause. Maybe it’s about combatting the fraud alleged by the media personality, even though prosecutors had been investigating and securing convictions for social services fraud in Minnesota for years. Or maybe it’s just about uprooting immigrants.
This is the government’s most common explanation. Trump and his aides have repeatedly insisted that the expansive, guerrilla-style raids being conducted by federal agents in Minnesota have been effective at removing the “worst of the worst” criminal immigrants from the area, something it insists that the state’s Democratic leaders had refused to do. (The state disagrees.)
What’s the right ratio here, Mr. President? How many citizens being shot to death is worth this campaign of fear and its sporadic deportations?
At a White House press conference on Jan. 20, Trump held up images of 40 individuals who he claimed had been detained by federal agents in Minnesota. A DHS website titled, “ARRESTED: WORST OF THE WORST,” — identifies just under 500 such people in the state. Some of them (as was the case with Trump’s visual aids) seem less like “the worst of the worst” than like “people with any criminal record at all.” Does having a DUI make you one of the nation’s worst criminals? If you weren’t born here, I guess so.
Even by DHS’ count, though, the government isn’t only targeting “the worst of the worst.” On Jan. 14, the agency put out a press release claiming that they’d arrested 2,500 of the “worst of the worst,” meaning that the website, even with the drunk drivers, is a couple thousand short in its tally. Nationally, of course, ICE has accelerated its detention of people with no criminal records at all. One analysis estimates that 92 out of every 100 people added to ICE detention last year faced no criminal charges and had no past convictions. Besides, violent crime in Minnesota was already on the decline before DHS and ICE showed up (also mirroring national trends).
So the feds rolled up some people with criminal records or maybe pending charges. In doing so, they spread chaos and confusion around the city, shipped a kindergartener off to Texas and sent a baby to the hospital.
In doing so, they killed two residents of Minneapolis, their dying bodies laying at the side of the road.
What’s the right ratio here, Mr. President? How many citizens being shot to death is worth this campaign of fear and its sporadic deportations?
It seems as though the answer is clear by now: As many as can be killed with his base still believing that they were violent opponents of the president’s politics. As long as that belief is sustained, the killings can continue because it means that his supporters’ confidence and trust in him is sustained, too. And that, more even than purifying the populaceis what matters to Trump.
The White House and DHS frequently validate their work by pointing to the killers they’re taking out of the country, outsiders who’d killed Americans. It would be a more effective argument if they weren’t defending the outsiders they brought into Minneapolis who did the same thing.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor.
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