Today’s Big Story

The New Food Pyramid

The updated recommendations invert the food pyramid to emphasize meat and dairy over whole grains

America’s new dietary guidelines, unveiled this week, make notable changes to the country’s prior guidance about healthy eating, placing a higher emphasis on protein and full-fat dairy while advising people to avoid sugar and highly processed foods. The guidelines—which are updated every five years by the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services—now have a Make America Healthy Again flare, reports The Cut. That familiar food pyramid is also upside down.

You might recall that back in 2011, the guidelines did away with the long-standing carb-prioritizing pyramid structure and instead introduced the MyPlate system, which encouraged roughly equal portions of protein, grain, fruits, and vegetables. So maybe it was time for a new graphic, something fun and cool to hook young people on clean eating. Enter the “New Pyramid,” which actually looks more like a funnel because, as previously stated, it’s upside down. At the top (now the widest part) are protein, dairy, and healthy fats alongside fruits and vegetables. At the bottom (smallest part) are whole grains. RIP to the part of the old food pyramid that allowed for sweets “sparingly”; that’s out completely.

Previous guidelines have highlighted seed oils like soybean oil and canola oil as healthier choices, but those are not explicitly acknowledged in the new ones. Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that seed oils are bad for health.

Kennedy, who has vowed to tackle rising rates of chronic disease among children, touted the guidelines as a way to reduce high levels of obesity and diabetes. The new guidelines suggest prioritizing protein at each meal, with a goal of getting around 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of a person's body weight each day. The government recommends protein from animal sources such as eggs, poultry, seafood and red meat, as well as plant-based sources such as beans, peas, lentils, legumes, nuts, seeds and soy. And whereas the previous guidelines recommended fat-free or low-fat milk and yogurt, the updated version prioritizes full-fat dairy with no added sugars. The change could have an impact on school lunch programs, through which kids are currently offered fat-free or low-fat milk.

House Votes to Extend Health Care Subsidies

Bucking GOP leaders and raising hopes of a deal, but it’s still a long shot

In a remarkable rebuke of Republican leadership, the House passed legislation Thursday, 230-196, that would extend expired health care subsidies for those who get coverage through the Affordable Care Act as renegade GOP lawmakers joined essentially all Democrats in voting for the measure. However, that three-year extension is not likely to go far in the Senate, where a similar measure failed in December. A bipartisan group of senators, however, say they are getting close to a deal on a compromise bill.

The pandemic-era subsidies expired at the end of last year, driving up costs for millions of Americans who buy health insurance on the ACA marketplace and qualified for the assistance. GOP leaders made no attempt to address the issue as the deadline neared, despite warnings from members in swing districts that higher prices could threaten their chances in this fall’s midterm elections and put Republicans in the minority. (The party has been trying unsuccessfully to dismantle the ACA since it became law in 2010.)

Representative Derrick Van Orden, one of the Republicans who crossed party lines, said he still believed the Affordable Care Act “broke” the health care system. “Philosophically, I completely disagree with this,” said Mr. Van Orden, who represents a competitive district in Wisconsin. “But I’m not going to leave millions of Americans who truly need health care insurance in the lurch.” And some Republicans who voted for the three-year extension insisted they were not, in fact, voting for that but instead for a yet-to-be-determined Senate compromise that might materialize as a result of the pressure generated by its passage.

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Health

But it’s ‘not intended for diagnosis or treatment’

OpenAI has been dropping hints about AI’s role as a “healthcare ally”—but now, the company is announcing a product to go along with that idea: ChatGPT Health. The Verge says it’s a “sandboxed tab within ChatGPT that’s designed for users to ask their health-related questions in what it describes as a more secure and personalized environment, with a separate chat history and memory feature from the rest of ChatGPT.”

The company is encouraging users to connect their personal medical records and wellness apps, such as Apple Health, Peloton, MyFitnessPal, Weight Watchers, and Function, “to get more personalized, grounded responses to their questions.” OpenAI is also encouraging users to connect their medical records so that ChatGPT can analyze lab results, visit summaries, and clinical history; MyFitnessPal and Weight Watchers for food guidance; Apple Health for health and fitness data, including “movement, sleep, and activity patterns”; and Function for insights into lab tests.

A small group will test the feature first. However, OpenAI will let users sign up for a waitlist to try out the product, with hopes to expand access more widely in the coming weeks. The company says it's trying to address a world in which people have lots of data from medical devices, fitness trackers and electronic health records, but often struggle to make sense of the information, but it’s “not intended for diagnosis or treatment”.

2026’s First Meme?

A TikTok user’s esoteric comment created a confusing viral moment

Did you hear … there’s a TikTok user who goes by Tamara who is marking 2026 using 365 buttons. How is Tamara doing that exactly? No one’s really sure. And, I guess, that’s the whole point? This slightly confounding practice was introduced to the world this month, when she posted a comment on a TikTok video, explaining that the buttons were a way of being more conscious of the passage of time.

But when other users asked follow-up questions, wondering what they were supposed to do with their buttons, Tamara rebuffed them. She even turned down a New York Times request for comment. Fair enough. It’s just like a calendar or a daily checkmark. But people kept following up. And finally, Tamara ended the conversation with a wonderful bit of snark: “Hey, so it actually only has to make sense to me for me to do it, and I don’t feel like explaining it to anyone else.”

Naturally, the rest of the internet is now dying to get to the bottom of the “365 buttons” mystery. There’s something inherently Brat about it, right? The silliness of a random trend. This video from @jasonsappy explaining the saga does a great job of breaking it all down.

A Weekend Pairing

‘The Night Manager season 2‘ + a Rosemary Gin & Tonic

Don’t waste time.