Veterans, people aging out of foster care, and parents of teenagers are just a few of the groups who will face dire consequences from new work requirements for people receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, on Sunday, February 1.  Expected to impact millions of Americans and cause around two million recipients to stop receiving benefits altogether, these changes stem from President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that passed in July. The GOP bill will reduce SNAP funding by approximately $186 billion over 10 years—a cut of around 20 percent.  SNAP currently helps provide food to more than 42 million Americans each month—more than two–thirds of whom are elderly, disabled, or children. To qualify for SNAP, households must be at or below 130 percent of the poverty line —which, as of 2026, stands at $15,960 for a single person, $27,320 for a three-person household, and $38,680 for a five-person household. Typically, adults who are eligible for SNAP can receive benefits for three months within a 36-month period before needing to fulfill additional work requirements, such as getting employment or attending a work training program. Many groups of people are granted exceptions to the work requirements depending on their abilities and life circumstances. The new requirements, however, target some of these groups.  Starting Sunday, February 1, able-bodied individuals between the ages of 18 and 65 without dependents must be working or attending a work program for 80 hours or more per month to receive benefits. Before the GOP bill’s passage, the age limit for work requirements was 55. And, while parents and household members with dependents under the age of 18 were previously exempt from the requirements, those exceptions will now only apply to families with dependents under the age of 14.  Certain other groups facing unique challenges were also able to receive benefits without fulfilling certain requirements, but will now be forced to comply with the new rules. These groups include veterans, people ages 24 and under who recently aged out of foster care, and people who are unhoused.  According to a Congressional Budget Office report from August 2025, these new provisions could reduce participation in SNAP by roughly 2.4 million people in an average month from 2025 to 2034.  White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt took questions on the SNAP program on November 4, 2025.Andrew Harnik/GETTY The power of individual states to provide benefits during difficult hiring periods is also being affected. Moving forward, state leaders can only temporarily extend benefits beyond three months if the unemployment rate in an area is at least 10 percent. The national unemployment rate is, according to a January report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, around 4.4 percent. According to the Trump administration, these new rules are aimed at eliminating what they say is fraud and “reflect the importance of work and responsibility,” as detailed on the United States Department of Agriculture website. The USDA is the agency that funds SNAP. Yet, according to an April 2025 report from the Congressional Research Service, “SNAP fraud is rare.” Sometimes, an occasional error may occur through bureaucratic mistakes such as duplicate enrollments—though this does not constitute fraud, the report explained.  Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has lauded the new rules, saying in an interview with Fox Business on Friday that “the American dream is not being on [a] food stamp program.” She added, “That should be a hand up, not a handout.”  People who receive SNAP benefits repeatedly have faced uncertainty recently, including during the longest government shutdown in American history last year, when millions of Americans didn’t receive their food benefits. Unlike during other government shutdowns, the Trump administration opted not to use contingency funds to keep SNAP operating while Congress worked on a deal.  The administration last year also threatened to withhold federal funding for food stamps for more than 20 Democratic-led states that refused to hand over sensitive personal data—such as Social Security numbers, birth dates, and home addresses—about their recipients, reportedly in an effort to root out fraud. Democratic leaders refused, in part, because they worried this data would be used for immigration enforcement.  Daytona Beach residents line up in their cars during a free food distribution for recipients of SNAP on November 9, 2025. The US Supreme Court said on November 7 that the Trump administration does not have to immediately pay SNAP food benefits defunded during the government shutdown. MIGUEL J. RODRIGUEZ CARRILLO/GETTY Some people who are legally in the country but are not citizens have had access to SNAP benefits. These rules have also changed in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The GOP move will affect scores of people legally present in the US, including those who came to the country under asylum and refugee laws or had urgent humanitarian needs, such as being survivors of domestic violence or human trafficking. The new work guidelines risk adding more confusion to the mix. “These work requirements aren’t really about promoting work. They’re about dehumanizing people and attacking the ‘other,'” Joel Berg, CEO of the nonprofit Hunger Free America, told ABC News. “Most SNAP recipients are pro-work, and most SNAP recipients are already working, or children, or people with disabilities, or older Americans. So all this is sort of a diversionary debate.” And now, he explained, “more Americans will go hungry.”

Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has taken a major step to stabilize water use in the state’s rural desert, where a Saudi-owned company established a massive farming operation more than a decade ago. During her State of the State Address earlier this month, Hobbs announced she was placing the Saudi alfalfa farm within an “active management area,” a technical designation that allows Arizona to slow and possibly even reverse the growth of groundwater use in a remote desert area of western Arizona. The megafarm near Vicksburg—owned by the Riyadh-based dairy company Almarai—began pumping massive amounts of groundwater in 2014 to grow hay for export to feed the Kingdom’s dairy cows. The Center for Investigative Reporting first broke news about the desert farm in 2015, drawing attention to a growing trend: Companies connected to foreign governments—Almarai was founded and is currently chaired by a member of the Saudi Royal family—were effectively exporting massive amounts of American groundwater in the form of hay, a water-intensive crop, to help their own countries cope with severe shortages. But one country’s solution would become another’s problem, as the wells of Arizonans living in La Paz County near the farm began running dry. The situation attracted international news coverage as awareness grew about the increasing global competition for groundwater, and other Arizona megafarms exporting desert water in the guise of agricultural products. The water grab would become a key issue in the state’s 2022 gubernatorial election. The Grab, an Emmy-winning documentary based on our reporting, followed rural La Paz County supervisor Holly Irwin as she fought to protect residents’ precious water. Watch the trailer: After the film’s release, Hobbs canceled some of the Saudi farm’s contracts to grow hay on land owned by the state. Attorney General Kris Mayes then sued Fondomonte, a wholly owned subsidiary of Almarai, seeking compensation for the locals whose wells were kaput. Hobbs’ designation of the Ranegras Plain Groundwater Basin, located in western Arizona, as an “active management area,” allows regulators to curtail additional water use, effectively limiting the withdrawals to the people and entities pumping it today. In the short term, the designation by itself cannot reduce the amount of water being used by foreign megafarms, but it can at least stop new ones from coming in—and current ones from expanding their operations—in addition to encouraging farms to reduce their withdrawals. “This is huge,” said Irwin, the county supervisor. “It prevents any future companies from being able to purchase land and come here to extract water.” The global scramble for freshwater supplies is only increasing, according to a UN report released this week, which noted the world has entered an “era of water bankruptcy.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Trump administration’s new dietary guidelines urging Americans to eat far more meat and dairy products will, if followed, come at a major cost to the planet via huge swathes of habitat razed for farmland and millions of tons of extra planet-heating emissions. A new inverted food pyramid recently released by Donald Trump’s health department emphasizes pictures of steak, poultry, ground beef, and whole milk, alongside fruits and vegetables, as the most important foods to eat. The new guidelines are designed to nearly double the amount of protein currently consumed by Americans. “Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines,” said Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.” But a surge in meat-eating by Americans would involve flattening vast tracts of ecosystems such as forests to make way for the hefty environmental hoofprint of raised livestock, emitting large quantities of greenhouse gases in the process, experts have warned. > Choosing beef over protein sources like beans and lentils is “a big choice we > make that has real consequences.” Even a 25 percent increase in the amount of protein consumed in this way in the US would require about 100 million acres of additional agricultural land each year, an area about the size of California, and add hundreds of millions of tons of extra pollution to an already overheating planet, according to an estimate by the World Resources Institute (WRI), a nonprofit research body. “We are seeing millions of acres of forest cut down and agricultural expansion is the lead driver of that—adding 100 million acres to that to feed the US means additional pressure on the world’s remaining ecosystems,” said Richard Waite, the director of agriculture initiatives at WRI. “It’s already hard to feed the global population while reducing emissions and stopping deforestation, and a shift in this direction would make the challenge even harder. We need to reduce the impact of our food systems urgently and the US is an important piece of the puzzle in doing that.” While many Americans will simply ignore the guidelines, the new framework will probably influence institutions such as schools and federal workplaces. The average American already eats about 317 pounds of meat and seafood a year, second globally only to Portugal, and ingests more protein than previous federal government guidelines recommended. Any further increase will be felt in places such as the Amazon rainforest, which is already being felled at a rapid rate for cattle ranches and to grow livestock feed. Red meat, in particular, has an outsized impact upon the planet—beef requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gases per gram of protein than common plant proteins, such as beans. The raising of cows, pigs, lamb and other animals for slaughter is also associated with significant localized air and water pollution. “To the extent that people follow these guidelines and eat more animal protein foods, particularly beef and dairy, they will negatively impact our environment, since the production of these foods emits way more greenhouse gases than vegetable protein foods, or even other animal foods,” said Diego Rose, a director of nutrition at Tulane University. Choosing beef over beans and lentils is “a big choice we make that has real consequences,” said Waite. “If people want more protein there are ways to do that via eating plant-based foods without the environmental impacts. We can have our protein and our forests, too.” > “Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and > things like beef tallow is puzzling to me.” Animal agriculture is responsible for about a fifth of global emissions, with little progress made in recent years to reduce its impact as more of the world starts to demand meat products. Worldwide consumption of pork, beef, poultry and meat is projected to reach over 500 metric tons by 2050—double what it was in 2000. In the US, much of this meat-eating is concentrated in a relatively small group of avid carnivores—just 12 percent of Americans consume nearly half of the country’s beef, a 2024 study found. But plant-based options, including “fake meat” burgers, have suffered a slump in sales in recent years amid a resurgent trend in meat-eating fueled by online “meatfluencers” and a broader desire to consume more protein. The environmental problems associated with the meat industry were previously highlighted by Kennedy himself, when he was a campaigner on green issues. At one point, Kennedy even said the pork industry was an even bigger threat to the US than Osama bin Laden, the terrorist mastermind. “The factory meat industry has polluted thousands of miles of America’s rivers, killed billions of fish, pushed tens of thousands of family farmers off their land, sickened and killed thousands of US citizens, and treated millions of farm animals with unspeakable and unnecessary cruelty,” Kennedy wrote in 2004. However, since becoming Trump’s health secretary, Kennedy has sought to elevate meat-eating, dismissing an independent scientific committee’s advice to emphasize plant-based proteins to instead favor meat. “The Trump administration will no longer weaponize federal food policy to destroy the livelihoods of hard-working American ranchers and protein producers under the radical dogma of the Green New Scam,” a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services said in response to questions about the knock-on environmental impacts of the new guidelines. “Americans already eat a lot of meat, so this promotion of more meat and things like beef tallow is puzzling to me,” said Benjamin Goldstein, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied the huge emissions associated with meat-eating by city-dwellers in the US. “We needed to be addressing climate change two decades ago and we are still not doing enough now. If we are adding more greenhouse gases to impose unnecessary ideas of protein intake, that’s going to destabilize the climate further. It’s going to have a big impact.”

On December 1, under President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—which more than 40 million Americans rely on—introduced new work requirements for people verging on retirement age. Millions of adults ages of 55 to 64 may now be locked out of the program if they’re not able to work—and in a one-two punch of attacks on federal services, the USDA has terminated its annual Food Insecurity Survey, making it impossible to know just how devastating an impact Trump’s backdoor SNAP cuts will have on aging adults who are unable to get exemptions from their state. In normal conditions, said Tufts University food economist Parke Wilde. policymakers and government workers would ask, “‘What are the consequences of policy changes this fall so that we can calibrate and improve the program in the future?’ We won’t be able to do that this year.” Targeted actions to eliminate federal government data have accompanied countless other Trump administration cuts and defundings: An executive order by Trump curtailed the collection of gender and sexuality information in federal surveys, and the Institute of Education Sciences, which disseminates education data, faced mass layoffs last year. What existing data tells us is that tacking on new SNAP work requirements leads people to lose their benefits. Research from George Washington University found that between 2013 and 2017, changes to SNAP work requirement waivers led to around one-third of adults without dependents losing SNAP benefits. “There is scant evidence that work requirements are effective in helping people gain employment or become more self-sufficient, and there is strong evidence that work requirements create hardships,” the researchers concluded. Colleen Helfin, a Syracuse University professor of public administration and international affairs, said that around half of early retirements between the ages of 55 and 65 are the result of health issues or difficulties maintaining employment, often compounded by challenging state processes to seek exemption from “It’s really important for states to be thinking about the administrative burden,” Helfin said. “All these things become a little bit harder as people become older, and they may have declines in hearing, sight or cognitive function.”  Some states try to reduce hurdles, rather than add them, explained Lauren Schuyler, a specialist in family welfare at the University of Maryland School of Social Work. “Having your practitioner provide documentation or proving that you have disabilities is just an added layer of that administrative burden,” Schuyler said, which is especially likely to strip SNAP from people in their fifties and through mid-sixties. With the USDA’s decision to quit tracking food insecurity, the impact will remain unclear and far more challenging to address. Helfin is wary of smaller organizations trying to fill the data gap left by USDA—but some states are seeing an effort to do so. “There’s a movement for state legislators to pass bills to mandate the state measurement of food insecurity, perhaps putting it on something like the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance Survey,” Helfin said.  In response to a request for comment, a USDA spokesperson characterized the Food Insecurity Survey as “subjective, liberal fodder” designed “as a means to support the increase of SNAP eligibility and benefit allotments.”

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. High-profile studies reporting the presence of microplastics throughout the human body have been thrown into doubt by scientists who say the discoveries are probably the result of contamination and false positives. One chemist called the concerns “a bombshell.” Studies claiming to have revealed micro- and nanoplastics in the brain, testes, placentas, arteries, and elsewhere were reported by media across the world, including the Guardian and Mother Jones. There is no doubt that plastic pollution of the natural world is ubiquitous, and present in the food and drink we consume and the air we breathe. But the health damage potentially caused by microplastics and the chemicals they contain is unclear, and an explosion of research has taken off in this area in recent years. However, micro- and nanoplastic particles are tiny and at the limit of today’s analytical techniques, especially in human tissue. There is no suggestion of malpractice, but researchers told the Guardian of their concern that the race to publish results, in some cases by groups with limited analytical expertise, has led to rushed results and routine scientific checks sometimes being overlooked. > One scientist estimates there are serious doubts over “more than half of the > very high impact papers” on microplastics in biological tissue. The Guardian has identified seven studies that have been challenged by researchers publishing criticism in the respective journals, while a recent analysis listed 18 studies that it said had not considered that some human tissue can produce measurements easily confused with the signal given by common plastics. There is an increasing international focus on the need to control plastic pollution but faulty evidence on the level of microplastics in humans could lead to misguided regulations and policies, which is dangerous, researchers say. It could also help lobbyists for the plastics industry to dismiss real concerns by claiming they are unfounded. While researchers say analytical techniques are improving rapidly, the doubts over recent high-profile studies also raise the questions of what is really known today and how concerned people should be about microplastics in their bodies. “Levels of microplastics in human brains may be rapidly rising” was the shocking headline reporting a widely covered study in February. The analysis, published in a top-tier journal and covered by the Guardian, said there was a rising trend in micro- and nanoplastics (MNPs) in brain tissue from dozens of postmortems carried out between 1997 and 2024. However, by November, the study had been challenged by a group of scientists with the publication of a “Matters arising” letter in the journal. In the formal, diplomatic language of scientific publishing, the scientists said: “The study as reported appears to face methodological challenges, such as limited contamination controls and lack of validation steps, which may affect the reliability of the reported concentrations.” One of the team behind the letter was blunt. “The brain microplastic paper is a joke,” said Dr Dušan Materić, at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany. “Fat is known to make false-positives for polyethylene. The brain has [approximately] 60 percent fat.” Materić and his colleagues suggested rising obesity levels could be an alternative explanation for the trend reported in the study. Materić said: “That paper is really bad, and it is very explainable why it is wrong.” He thinks there are serious doubts over “more than half of the very high impact papers” reporting microplastics in biological tissue. Matthew Campen, senior author of the brain study in question, told the Guardian: “In general, we simply find ourselves in an early period of trying to understand the potential human health impacts of MNPs and there is no recipe book for how to do this. Most of the criticism aimed at the body of work to date (ie from our lab and others) has been conjectural and not buffeted by actual data. “We have acknowledged the numerous opportunities for improvement and refinement and are trying to spend our finite resources in generating better assays and data, rather than continually engaging in a dialogue.” But the brain study is far from alone in having been challenged. One, which reported that patients with MNPs detected in carotid artery plaques had a higher risk of heart attacks and strokes than patients with no MNPs detected, was subsequently criticized for not testing blank samples taken in the operating room. Blank samples are a way of measuring how much background contamination may be present. Another study reported MNPs in human testes, “highlighting the pervasive presence of microplastics in the male reproductive system.” But other scientists took a different view: “It is our opinion that the analytical approach used is not robust enough to support these claims.” This study was by Campen and colleagues, who responded: “To steal/modify a sentiment from the television show Ted Lasso, ‘[Bioanalytical assays] are never going to be perfect. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it when you can and if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving toward better.’” > “This isn’t a dig…They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything > better available to us.” Further challenged studies include two reporting plastic particles in blood—in both cases the researchers contested the criticisms—and another on their detection in arteries. A study claiming to have detected 10,000 nanoplastic particles per liter of bottled water was called “fundamentally unreliable” by critics, a charge disputed by the scientists. The doubts amount to a “bombshell,” according to Roger Kuhlman, a chemist formerly at the Dow Chemical Company. “This is really forcing us to re-evaluate everything we think we know about microplastics in the body. Which, it turns out, is really not very much. Many researchers are making extraordinary claims, but not providing even ordinary evidence.” While analytical chemistry has long-established guidelines on how to accurately analyze samples, these do not yet exist specifically for MNPs, said Dr. Frederic Béen, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam: “But we still see quite a lot of papers where very standard good laboratory practices that should be followed have not necessarily been followed.” These include measures to exclude background contamination, blanks, repeating measurements and testing equipment with samples spiked with a known amount of MNPs. “So you cannot be assured that whatever you have found is not fully or partially derived from some of these issues,” Béen said. A key way of measuring the mass of MNPs in a sample is, perhaps counterintuitively, vaporizing it, then capturing the fumes. But this method, dubbed Py-GC-MS, has come under particular criticism. “[It] is not currently a suitable technique for identifying polyethylene or PVC due to persistent interferences,” concluded a January 2025 study led by Cassandra Rauert, an environmental chemist at the University of Queensland in Australia. “I do think it is a problem in the entire field,” Rauert told the Guardian. “I think a lot of the concentrations [of MNPs] that are being reported are completely unrealistic.” “This isn’t a dig at [other scientists],” she added. “They use these techniques because we haven’t got anything better available to us. But a lot of studies that we’ve seen coming out use the technique without really fully understanding the data that it’s giving you.” She said the failure to employ normal quality control checks was “a bit crazy.” > “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological > barriers,” but today’s instruments “cannot detect nano-size particles.” Py-GC-MS begins by pyrolyzing the sample—heating it until it vaporizes. The fumes are then passed through the tubes of a gas chromatograph, which separates smaller molecules from large ones. Last, a mass spectrometer uses the weights of different molecules to identify them. The problem is that some small molecules in the fumes derived from polyethylene and PVC can also be produced from fats in human tissue. Human samples are “digested” with chemicals to remove tissue before analysis, but if some remains, the result can be false positives for MNPs. Rauert’s paper lists 18 studies that did not include consideration of the risk of such false positives. Rauert also argues that studies reporting high levels of MNPs in organs are simply hard to believe: “I have not seen evidence that particles between 3 and 30 micrometers can cross into the blood stream,” she said. “From what we know about actual exposure in our everyday lives, it is not biologically plausible that that mass of plastic would actually end up in these organs.” “It’s really the nano-size plastic particles that can cross biological barriers and that we are expecting inside humans,” she said. “But the current instruments we have cannot detect nano-size particles.” Further criticism came in July, in a review study in the Deutsches Ärzteblatt, the journal of the German Medical Association. “At present, there is hardly any reliable information available on the actual distribution of microplastics in the body,” the scientists wrote. Plastic production has ballooned by 200 times since the 1950s and is set to almost triple again to more than a billion metric tons a year by 2060. As a result, plastic pollution has also soared, with 8 billion metric tons now contaminating the planet, from the top of Mount Everest to the deepest ocean trench. Less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled. An expert review published in the Lancet in August called plastics a “grave, growing and underrecognised danger” to human and planetary health. It cited harm from the extraction of the fossil fuels they are made from, to their production, use and disposal, which result in air pollution and exposure to toxic chemicals. > Insufficiently robust studies might help lobbyists for the plastics industry > downplay known risks of plastic pollution. In recent years, the infiltration of the body with MNPs has become a serious concern, and a landmark study in 2022 first reported detection in human blood. That study is one of the 18 listed in Rauert’s paper and was criticized by Kuhlman. But the study’s senior author, Marja Lamoree, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, rejected suggestions of contamination. “The reason we focused on blood in the first place is that you can take blood samples freshly, without the interference of any plastics or exposure to the air,” she said. “I’m convinced we detected microplastics,” she said. “But I’ve always said that [the amount estimated] could be maybe twice lower, or 10 times higher.” In response to Kuhlman’s letter, Lamoree and colleagues said he had “incorrectly interpreted” the data. Lamoree does agree there is a wider issue. “It’s still a super-immature field and there’s not many labs that can do [these analyses well]. When it comes to solid tissue samples, then the difficulty is they are usually taken in an operating theatre that’s full of plastic.” “I think most of the, let’s say, lesser quality analytical papers come from groups that are medical doctors or metabolomics [scientists] and they’re not driven by analytical chemistry knowledge,” she said. Improving the quality of MNP measurements in the human body matters, the scientists said. Poor quality evidence is “irresponsible” and can lead to scaremongering, said Rauert: “We want to be able to get the data right so that we can properly inform our health agencies, our governments, the general population and make sure that the right regulations and policies are put in place. “We get a lot of people contacting us, very worried about how much plastics are in their bodies,” she said. “The responsibility [for scientists] is to report robust science so you are not unnecessarily scaring the general population.” > “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume.” Rauert called treatments claiming to clean microplastics from your blood “crazy”—some are advertised for £10,000 (about $13,400). “These claims have no scientific evidence,” she said, and could put more plastic into people’s blood, depending on the equipment used. Materić said insufficiently robust studies might also help lobbyists for the plastics industry downplay known risks of plastic pollution. The good news, said Béen, is that analytical work across multiple techniques is improving rapidly: “I think there is less and less doubt about the fact that MNPs are there in tissues. The challenge is still knowing exactly how many or how much. But I think we’re narrowing down this uncertainty more and more.” Prof Lamoree said: “I really think we should collaborate on a much nicer basis—with much more open communication—and don’t try to burn down other people’s results. We should all move forward instead of fighting each other.” In the meantime, should the public be worried about MNPs in their bodies? Given the very limited evidence, Lamoree said she could not say how concerned people should be: “But for sure I take some precautions myself, to be on the safe side. I really try to use less plastic materials, especially when cooking or heating food or drinking from plastic bottles. The other thing I do is ventilate my house.” “We do have plastics in us—I think that is safe to assume,” said Materić. “But real hard proof on how much is yet to come. There are also very easy things that you can do to hugely reduce intake of MNPs. If you are concerned about water, just filtering through charcoal works.” Experts also advise avoiding food or drink that has been heated in plastic containers. Rauert thinks that most of the MNPs that people ingest or breath in probably expelled by their bodies, but said it can’t hurt to reduce your plastics exposure. Furthermore, she said, it remains vital to resolve the uncertainty over what MNPs are doing to our health: “We know we’re being exposed, so we definitely want to know what happens after that and we’ll keep working at it, that’s for sure.”

New dietary guidelines announced Wednesday by Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. crank up the dials on red meat and full-fat dairy. The now-inverted food pyramid prominently features a steak, an entire chicken, and whole milk up top, relegating carbs to the bottom point—minor real estate compared to the portion they occupied before. Untethered from scientific research, the new recommendations seem more aligned with a burgeoning source of dietary advice: hypermasculine influencers. The fairly recent obsession with protein isn’t limited to men. “Protein has sort of become like a default or de facto good food, because it hasn’t been vilified in the same way that these other nutrients have,” says Charlotte Biltekoff, a professor at UC Davis who studies food and culture. It’s a buzzword in wellness corners around the internet. Yet the new guidelines basically ignore menopause influencers discussing the benefits of cottage cheese in favor of the red-meat-forward “manosphere.” Protein-maxxing obsessives can be found throughout MAGAville, ranging from Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson—with his “all beef” diet—to the so-called Liver King. Alongside fitness shakes and supplement powders, these kinds of dudes are often peddling the notion that a high-protein diet is essential for masculinity. > “Most of us eat, actually, way too much protein. I do worry about the longer > term health impacts of these kinds of recommendations.” The association of gender with certain foods isn’t new, but the wholehearted embrace of these perceptions is a more recent phenomenon, says Elaine Power, a dietician and professor at Queen’s University who studies food, gender, and health. In studies about a decade ago, when people were asked if they thought foods were gendered, they’d say no, “but then you show them a salad, and they say, of course that’s women’s food. You show them a steak, and that’s men’s food.” Her subjects, in other words, would initially deny that such perceptions existed. However, Power says she’s not sure she’d get that result if she repeated the experiment today. And these perceptions affect what men eat. A 2023 study titled “Healthful Eating as a Manhood Threat” found that men often avoid foods viewed as feminine, often favoring meat. This seems to have particularly affected young men, a greater proportion of whom—recent research suggests—have been eating meat daily and taking protein supplements. When asked why, many cited their desire for a more muscular physique, the baseline of the aesthetics advertised by macho influencers—some of the most notable of whom have been embroiled in steroid controversies. The ripped physiques influencers use to hawk carnivorous diets are hard to come by, of course, and consuming extra protein is often completely unnecessary. “Most of us eat, actually, way too much protein,” Power says. “I do worry about the longer term health impacts of these kinds of recommendations.” Besides being terrible for the climate, excessive meat consumption has negative health effects, including an increased risk of cancer and heart disease, even in young people. While the American Heart Association praised the new pyramid’s suggestions to limit highly processed foods, the group stated its disagreement with the emphasis on meat and RFK’s aim of “ending the war on saturated fats.” The contents of the pyramid are simply recommendations, with little to no direct policy influence. They may eventually be used to redesign school and other institutional lunches, but right now, “there’s no little to no infrastructure to act on this kind of dietary advice,” Biltekoff says. What’s more, the admonition to avoid processed foods and eat home-cooked meals are inaccessible to many. “This is just another set of ideals that become moralized,” Biltekoff says. “Eating real food becomes a part of identity and status, and it becomes a way of signaling or symbolizing certain kinds of class-based and race-based identities and reinforcing social hierarchies rather than addressing them.” And to the boys and men in the thrall of protein-maxxing, these new guidelines are just an affirmation that they’re headed in the right direction.

The first pilot episode of Reveal exposed how the Department of Veterans Affairs was overprescribing opioids to veterans and contributing to an overdose crisis. Journalist Aaron Glantz explained how he received—surprisingly quickly—a decade’s worth of opioid prescription data from the federal government.  “Sometimes, you have to sue to get the records,” he said. “I have to think that there were some people over there in DC who were as concerned as we were about this.” After that first show was made, host Al Letson didn’t know what to expect. “We weren’t sure if any public radio stations would even air it,” he said.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. Reveal’s VA investigation sparked outrage. Congress held hearings during a government lockdown, and there’s been a sea change in the way veterans are prescribed painkillers. And today, the show is on more than 500 stations.  This week on Reveal, we celebrate our 10-year anniversary with a look back at some of our favorite stories, from investigations into water shortages in drought-prone California to labor abuses in the Dominican Republic. And we interview the journalists behind the reporting to explain what happened after the stories aired.   This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in March 2025.

A landmark study on the safety of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the controversial herbicide Roundup, has been formally retracted by its publisher, raising new concerns about the chemical’s potential dangers.  Federal regulators relied heavily on the study, published in 2000 by the science journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, in their assessment that the herbicide is safe and does not cause cancer. Indeed, the paper, which concluded that “Roundup herbicide does not pose a health risk to humans” was the most cited study in some government reports. But the journal’s editor-in-chief, Martin van den Berg, said he no longer trusted the study, which appears to have been secretly ghostwritten by employees of Monsanto, the company that introduced Roundup in 1974. Officially, the paper’s authors, including a doctor from New York Medical College, were listed as independent scientists. Van den Berg, a professor of toxicology in the Netherlands, concluded that the paper relied entirely on Monsanto’s internal studies and ignored other evidence suggesting that Roundup might be harmful. >  “The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown > under the bus.” In 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that glyphosate probably causes cancer. Since then, Roundup’s manufacturer, Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in legal settlements to people who claim it gave them cancer.  In 2020, the US Environmental Protection Agency released an updated safety assessment on glyphosate that again determined that it was safe and did not cause cancer. This EPA report is often cited in news reports that contend glyphosate is “fine” and important for modern food production. But those reports failed to mention that the 2020 EPA health assessment was overturned in 2022 by the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals. The “EPA’s errors in assessing human-health risk are serious,” the judges wrote, and “most studies EPA examined indicated that human exposure to glyphosate is associated with an at least somewhat increased risk of developing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma”—a type of cancer. The court told the EPA it needed to redo its human health assessment, meaning the agency now has no official stance on glyphosate’s risk to people. It is expected to release an updated safety report next year.  During the first Trump administration, Monsanto executives were told they “need not fear any additional regulation from this administration,” according to an internal Monsanto email cited in a Roundup lawsuit in 2019. Monsanto had hired a consultant, according to court documents, who reported back that “a domestic policy adviser at the White House had said, for instance: ‘We have Monsanto’s back on pesticides regulation.’” On Tuesday, the US Solicitor General asked the Supreme Court to consider a case that could help shield Bayer from further lawsuits. The company’s stock soared by as much as 14 percent on news of the Trump administration’s help in the case. Two states—North Dakota and Georgia—have passed laws this year that help shield Bayer from some cancer lawsuits arising from Roundup use. There is a push to enact similar laws in other states and on the federal level.  In July, New Jersey Sen. Corey Booker introduced the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act to push back against these new laws, and ensure that “these chemical companies can be held accountable in federal court for the harm caused by their toxic products.” Zen Honeycutt, a key voice in the Make America Healthy Again coalition, has endorsed the legislation. Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said the glyphosate debate has become a key sticking point between President Trump and his MAHA base. “The MAHA world is losing their minds right now. They keep getting thrown under the bus by this administration,” Donley said. “He’s alienating a crucial voting bloc.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Shoppers have long sought ways to make more sustainable choices at the supermarket—and for good reason: Our food system is responsible for a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The vast majority of emissions from agriculture come from raising cows on industrial farms in order to sell burgers, steak, and other beef products. Beef production results in two and a half times as many greenhouse gases as lamb, and almost nine times as many as chicken or fish; its carbon footprint relative to other sources of protein, like cheese, eggs, and tofu, is even higher.  If you want to have a lighter impact on the planet, you could try eating less beef. (Just try it!) Otherwise, a series of recent lawsuits intends make it easier for consumers to discern what’s sustainable and what’s greenwashing by challenging the world’s largest meat processors on their climate messaging. Tyson, which produces 20 percent of beef, chicken, and pork in the United States, has agreed to drop claims that the company has a plan to achieve “net zero” emissions by 2050 and to stop referring to beef products as “climate smart” unless verified by an independent expert.  > “Even if you were to reduce [beef’s] emissions by 30 percent, it’s still not > gonna be a climate-smart choice.” Tyson was sued in 2024 by the Environmental Working Group, or EWG, a nonprofit dedicated to public health and environmental issues. The group alleged that Tyson’s claims were false and misleading to consumers. (Nonprofit environmental law firm Earthjustice represented EWG in the case.) Tyson denied the allegations and agreed to settle the suit.  “We landed in a place that feels satisfying in terms of what we were able to get from the settlement,” said Carrie Apfel, deputy managing attorney of Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food and Farming program. Apfel was the lead attorney on the case. According to the settlement provided by Earthjustice, over the next five years Tyson cannot repeat previous claims that the company has a plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 or make new ones unless they are verified by a third-party source. Similarly, Tyson also cannot market or sell any beef products labeled as “climate smart” or “climate friendly” in the United States. “We think that this provides the consumer protections we were seeking from the lawsuit,” said Apfel.  The settlement is “a critical win for the fight against climate greenwashing by industrial agriculture,” according to Leila Yow, climate program associate at the Institute for Agricultural and Trade Policy, a nonprofit research group focused on sustainable food systems.  In the original complaint, filed in DC Superior Court, EWG alleged that Tyson had never even defined “climate-smart beef,” despite using the term in various marketing materials. Now Tyson and EWG must meet to agree on a third-party expert that would independently verify any of the meat processor’s future “net zero” or “climate smart” claims.  Following the settlement, Apfel went a step further in a conversation with Grist, arguing that the term “climate smart” has no business describing beef that comes from an industrial food system.  “In the context of industrial beef production, it’s an oxymoron,” said the attorney. “You just can’t have climate-smart beef. Beef is the highest-emitting major food type that there is. Even if you were to reduce its emissions by 10 percent or even 30 percent, it’s still not gonna be a climate-smart choice.” A Tyson spokesperson said the company “has a long-held core value to serve as stewards of the land, animals, and resources entrusted to our care” and identifies “opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across the supply chain.” The spokesperson added: “The decision to settle was made solely to avoid the expense and distraction of ongoing litigation and does not represent any admission of wrongdoing by Tyson Foods.”  The Tyson settlement follows another recent greenwashing complaint—this one against JBS Foods, the world’s largest meat processor. In 2024, New York Attorney General Letitia James sued JBS, alleging the company was misleading consumers with claims it would achieve net-zero emissions by 2040.  > Industrial animal agriculture “has built its business model on secrecy.” James reached a $1.1 million settlement with the beef behemoth earlier this month. As a result of the settlement, JBS is required to update its messaging to describe reaching net-zero emissions by 2040 as more of an idea or a goal than a concrete plan or commitment from the company. The two settlements underscore just how difficult it is to hold meat and dairy companies accountable for their climate and environmental impacts.  “Historically, meat and dairy companies have largely been able to fly under the radar of reporting requirements of any kind,” said Yow of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. When these agri-food companies do share their emissions, these disclosures are often voluntary and the processes for measuring and reporting impact are not standardized.  That leads to emissions data that is often “incomplete or incorrect,” said Yow. She recently authored a report ranking 14 of the world’s largest meat and dairy companies in terms of their sustainability commitments—including efforts to report methane and other greenhouse gas emissions. Tyson and JBS tied for the lowest score out of all 14 companies. Industrial animal agriculture “has built its business model on secrecy,” said Valerie Baron, a national policy director and senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, in response to the Tyson settlement. Baron emphasized that increased transparency from meat and dairy companies is a critical first step to holding them accountable.  Yow agreed. She argued upcoming climate disclosure rules in California and the European Union have the potential to lead the way on policy efforts to measure and rein in emissions in the food system. More and better data can lead to “better collective decision making with policymakers,” she said.  But, she added: “We need to actually know what we’re talking about before we can tackle some of those things.”

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On Thursday, tens of millions of Americans will partake in a national ritual many of us say we don’t especially enjoy or find meaning in. We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys—factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable. “It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché—a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.” So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid. > On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect > world, surely we can come up with better symbols. Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why. Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story—aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all? Our instincts for conformity seem particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. And although many of us today recognize there’s something very wrong with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all occasions might seem like an ideal time to forget that for a day. In my experience, plenty of people who are trying to cut back on meat say they eat vegetarian or vegan when cooking for themselves—but when they are guests at other people’s homes or celebrating a special occasion, they’ll eat whatever, to avoid offending their hosts or provoking awkward conversations about factory farming. But this Thanksgiving, I want to invite you, reader, to flip this logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes, even more than taste itself, then it is in precisely these settings that we should focus efforts to change American food customs for the better. “It’s eating with others where we actually have an opportunity to influence broader change, to share plant-based recipes, spark discussion, and revamp traditions to make them more sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie Levin, a board member at PEAK Animal Sanctuary in Indiana and an acquaintance of mine from vegan Twitter, told me. > I’ve come to love Thanksgiving as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings—a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols. Besides, we don’t even like turkey. We should skip it this year. In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella published a wrenching investigation into conditions in the US turkey industry. He wrote: > The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 > grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize—you guessed it—the breast, > one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and > become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, > combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary > factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk. > > Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that > they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially. > > Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, > co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey > giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male > turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a > syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the > henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted > the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor. > > > Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a > day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” > he had ever done, Mason wrote. In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food…They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds. From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.” On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods. When I search for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can only describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration—of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On every other day of the year, it’s obscene enough. On a holiday that’s supposed to represent our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving, for many vegetarians or vegans, is often described as the most alienating day of the year. I count myself among that group, although I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. I usually spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (known by most people as “sides,” though there’s no reason they can’t be the main event). To name a few: a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a bright autumnal brussels sprout salad, roasted red cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add lots of white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart more complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align beautifully with the holidays. Vegan turkey roasts are totally optional, though many of them have gotten very good in recent years—I love the Gardein breaded roast and Field Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You can also make your own. The hardest part of going meatless is not about the food. (If it were, it might not be so hard to convince Americans to abandon parched roast turkey.) “It’s about unpleasant truths and ethical disagreements being brought out into the open,” Levin said, about confronting the bizarre dissonance in celebrations of joy and giving carved from mass-produced violence. These conversations are not easy, but they are worth having. And we don’t have to fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. To the contrary, culture is a continuous conversation we have with each other about our shared values—and any culture that’s not changing is dead. There’s far more meaning to be had, I’ve found, in adapting traditions that are no longer authentic to our ethics and violate our integrity. We can start on Thanksgiving.