By DEE-ANN DURBIN

Meals and snacks with “GLP-1 Friendly” labels on the packaging are becoming more common in U.S. supermarkets as a growing number of Americans try obesity drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound to lose weight.

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But the labels aren’t regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, unlike the popular medications themselves. Dieticians say people taking GLP-1 drugs need to read ingredient lists and talk to experts about what nutrients they need – and don’t need.

“A drug does not educate you on how to eat properly,” said Suzy Badaracco, a registered dietitian and president of the food trends forecasting firm Culinary Tides. “You’re not magically going to be educated — without a doctor’s help — to eat healthy.”

Nutritional needs

The nutritional needs of GLP-1 users aren’t that different from those of the general population, said Shannon Christen, a dietitian and diabetes educator with UCHealth University of Colorado Hospital.

The difference is that GLP-1 users eat less because the drugs suppress their appetites, so the foods they do eat need to be packed with nutrients, Christen said. They can expect to eat around 50% less than they ate before they started taking the medications, she said.

“Every bite needs to be nutritious,” Christen said.

Protein helps GLP-1 users maintain muscle mass as they lose weight. Christen said she generally recommends that patients eat 20-30 grams of protein per meal, or 1.2 grams per kilogram of body weight daily.

Samantha Snashall, a registered dietitian at Ohio State University’s Wexner Medical Center, said GLP-1 users should also try to meet the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s recommended daily amount of fiber, which is around 14 grams for every 1,000 calories consumed. Fiber is important for everyone, but it’s particularly helpful for GLP-1 patients because constipation is a frequent side effect of the medications, she said.

Badaracco said it’s easy for GLP-1 users to get dehydrated since the drugs may block the body’s thirst signals. Fresh fruits and vegetables provide hydration, she said, and patients should also drink water throughout the day.

Meals with “GLP-1 Friendly” labels sit on the shelf of a Kroger grocery store Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026, in Ann Arbor, Mich. (AP Photo/Dee-Ann Durbin)

GLP-1 users should avoid meals and snacks that are deep fried, high in sugar or saturated fat and spicy or acidic, since those foods can worsen side effects and work against weight-loss efforts, Snashall said.

Food makers see a market

Drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy mimic the naturally occurring hormone GLP-1, which the body produces in the small intestine to control blood sugar levels, digestion and appetite. Around 12% of U.S. adults were taking GLP-1 medications as of November to lose weight or treat a chronic condition like diabetes, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Big food companies expect the demand for GLP-1 drugs only to grow as the injected medication becomes available in pill form, which happened with Wegovy last week. Meals marketed for GLP-1 users also are attracting non-users, including people who have come off the drugs but want to maintain weight loss.

Nestle targeted GLP-1 users when it launched its Vital Pursuit frozen meal brand in the fall of 2024. The company didn’t use a “GLP-1 Friendly” label at first but added one to the packaging after customers reported that a label would help them identify products that met their dietary needs, according to Jennifer Barnes, vice president of brand marketing for Nestle’s frozen meals.

Sales have been brisk and the company is adding new meals to the lineup, Barnes said. She said the products have broad appeal; 77% of Vital Pursuit sales are coming from households where no one is using GLP-1 drugs.

Meals with “GLP-1 Friendly” labels sit on the shelf of a Kroger grocery store Tuesday, Jan. 13, 2026, in Ann Arbor, Mich. (AP Photo/Dee-Ann Durbin)

Conagra Brands added a “GLP-1 Friendly” label to 26 of its Healthy Choice frozen meals in early 2025. The Smoothie King chain has a “GLP-1 Support Menu,” while several meal kit brands cater to patients, like Factor’s “GLP-1 Balance.”

Both Conagra and Nestle got approval from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to use “GLP-1 Friendly” labels. The USDA said it granted approval because the labels are accompanied by statements about protein and fiber content and aren’t misleading. But the USDA reiterated that there is no regulatory standard for the term “GLP-1 Friendly.”

Other companies are targeting GLP-1 users but not mentioning the drugs on their labels or menus. In November, French yogurt maker Lactalis began selling Ratio Pro Fiber yogurt in the U.S. The company said the yogurt, which contains 20 grams of protein and 10 grams of fiber per serving, was formulated with GLP-1 users in mind. Restaurant chains Chipotle and Shake Shack also mentioned GLP-1 users last month when they debuted new protein-heavy menu items.

Watch for added ingredients

Packaged foods may benefit GLP-1 users who live alone or don’t want to do a lot of cooking, Snashall said. But consumers should be wary of added ingredients like sugar or sodium.

“Labels can be very misleading, making a person think it’s healthier than it is,” Snashall said.

Vital Pursuit’s Cauliflower Crust Three Meat Pizza has 400 calories and 32% of the recommended daily value of protein, for example, but it also contains 40% of the recommended sodium and saturated fat. Christen said she advises GLP-1 users to choose foods with less than 10 grams of fat per serving because fat can worsen symptoms like nausea and acid reflux. The Three Meat Pizza has 18 grams of fat.

Smoothie King’s 20-ounce Gladiator GLP-1 Vanilla smoothie has more calories, sodium and cholesterol than an original glazed donut from Krispy Kreme.

Christen said that if foods are going to be labeled “GLP-1 Friendly,” she hopes they are truly nutrient dense and come in reasonable portions.

“Done responsibly, I think the labels could actually help people make smart choices while they’re on therapies, but done poorly, it could trivialize the medical treatment and drift into diet culture marketing,” Christen said.

Meeting nutritional needs

Badaracco said she advises clients not to put “GLP-1 Friendly” on their packaging. The labels aren’t backed by standards and may confuse some customers by making them think that eating frozen and ready-made meals that mention the medications will give them the benefits of the drugs.

Badaracco said labels should instead focus on how products will benefit consumers.

“You want to talk to the consumer about what it is that they’re looking for. They’re looking for protein, they’re looking for fiber, a good source of hydration, great flavor, it keeps your energy up,” Badaracco said.

Baytown Township is adding rooftop solar to power the township’s community center.

A crew from All Energy Solar this week installed solar panels on the roof of the Baytown Community Center, located at 4020 McDonald Dr. N.

The township board voted unanimously in September to have the solar panels installed.

The township received a grant from the Minnesota Department of Commerce’s Solar on Public Buildings Program to fund the $28,615 installation, said Avis Peters, a township board member who spearheaded the project.

The grant is covering 50 percent of the cost of the installation. Forty percent of costs will be covered by federal “direct pay” tax credits (30 percent from Investment Tax Credit and 10 percent for using domestic content materials). The remaining 10 percent – $2,862 – will be covered by the township, Peters said.

Payback, then savings

The installation of the 8.5-kW solar array will reduce the township’s energy costs and help reduce electricity-based greenhouse gas emissions, said Peters, who has had a ground-mounted solar array on her four-acre property since 2017.

“My solar array paid for itself in about four years,” she said. “There will be a two-year payback for our Baytown solar investment, and then we will have free community center electricity for 40-plus years, the life of solar panels. That amounts to $141,000 in savings.”

The township’s system is expected to be delivering power to the community center by early spring, Peters said.

“Solar produced electricity is much better for the environment because we’re not burning any fossil fuel (coal, oil or natural gas), nor using nuclear power to get our electricity,” Peters said.

Electric overproduction from the solar array will be automatically exported to the electric grid, and “Xcel Energy will pay us for that extra electricity at the rate they charge to other customers,” Peters said. “That’s another benefit of this program.”

Solar on Public Buildings program

The Solar on Public Buildings program launched in April 2024, and 187 projects – spread across 71 local units of government – have thus far received grants, said Lissa Pawlisch, assistant commissioner of the Division of Energy Resources at the Minnesota Department of Commerce.  The total amount of grants given to date: about $14.7 million, she said.

An additional 45 projects have been approved and are currently moving through the grant-contracting process, Pawlisch said. No additional funding rounds are expected, she said.

The program “is about more than clean energy — it’s about investing in our communities,” Pawlisch said. “By putting solar on fire stations, wastewater-treatment facilities, libraries and other public spaces, we’re reducing energy costs, creating local jobs and demonstrating Minnesota’s commitment to a sustainable future.”

Other east-metro projects of note: Bayport Public Works Building; Falcon Heights City Hall; Little Canada City Hall; Mahtomedi Public Works Building; Roseville Booster Station; St. Anthony Village Public Works Building; St. Paul North End Community Center; St. Paul Animal Services; St. Paul Fire Station No. 3; Hamline-Midway Library; Shoreview Water Treatment Plant; South St. Paul City Hall; Vadnais Heights City Hall, and the Washington County Emergency Housing Services Building.

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If you own a home in Minnesota, there’s a roughly 2-in-5 chance that your home has dangerous levels of radon gas.

Free or inexpensive radon gas test kits are available from many the public health departments. (Courtesy of Meeker County Public Health Department)

State and local officials are encouraging residents to test their homes for radon, a colorless and odorless radioactive gas that naturally occurs in Minnesota soils. Homes in south and southwestern counties have a higher percentage of detectable radon, Dakota County said in a news release.

The leading cause of lung cancer among non-smokers, radon is at elevated levels in about 40% of all Minnesota homes, according to the Minnesota Department of Health. Radon can enter homes and other buildings through cracks or openings in walls or foundations.

“You can’t see or smell radon, so the only way to know how much is in the air is to test for it,” said Dan Tranter, supervisor of the MDH Indoor Air Unit, in a news release.

Radon gives off radioactive particles that can damage the lining of the lungs when breathed in, according to MDH.

Radon is a serious public health issue in Minnesota due to the state’s geology and cold climate, according to MDH. In the winter, home heating systems “tend to draw in radon gas from the soil, increasing radon levels inside the home,” MDH states.

While there is no safe level of radon, the risk from radon is largely preventable and winter is the best time to test for it.

“All homes should be tested for radon about every two to five years,” Tranter said in the release. “If tests indicate radon levels of 4.0 picocuries per liter or more, we highly recommend installing a radon mitigation system to lower those levels.”

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Dakota County residents can pick up a free radon test kit at the Northern Service Center, located at 1 Mendota Road in West St. Paul, or the Western Service Center, located at 14955 Galaxie Ave. in Apple Valley. Residents are also welcome to phone consultations with Dakota County Public Health staff.

Washington County residents can pick up a free radon test kit during operating hours at the Cottage Grove Service Center, Forest Lake Service Center, North Environmental Center, South Environmental Center and the Stillwater Government Center.

Ramsey County residents can order a radon test kit for $2 at http://pipr.es/VIHgGys.

Homeowners from other Minnesota counties can also order radon test kits from Air Chek, which is partnering with MDH to offer the kits for $12.95 at mn.radon.com.

One unintended consequence of President Donald Trump’s militarized mass deportation campaign may be to demonstrate that the iron fist alone can never resolve America’s immigration challenges. And that, ironically, may open the door to a more balanced alternative.

One proposal is already quietly attracting bipartisan support in Congress.

Trump’s hardline approach to undocumented immigrants suffers from a fundamental mismatch between costs and benefits. The surge of masked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into cities nationwide has already generated enormous economic, political and social disruption.

Businesses are complaining about a shortage of workers — or, in heavily Hispanic areas, customers, as families curtail their time in public. Polls show that although most Americans still support Trump’s moves to regain control of the border, majorities now consistently disapprove of his handling of immigration overall and believe he is going too far in removing undocumented immigrants.

Last week’s killing by an ICE officer of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three in Minneapolis, underscored how frequently the agency’s operations are now escalating into violence — not only against undocumented immigrants, but against U.S. citizens exercising their First Amendment rights. Mayors and local law enforcement have decried the lack of coordination and cooperation from federal immigration agents.

Despite the crackdown, Trump’s efforts have produced surprisingly modest results. Using ICE figures, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, calculates that the agency so far has arrested about 360,000–370,000 people (very few of whom have been convicted or arrested for violent crimes). The best estimate, from the non-partisan Pew Research Center, is that by the end of President Joe Biden’s administration about 14 million undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S. As ICE accelerates its efforts to reduce that population — aided by an extra 10,000 agents and $75 billion in funding provided by Republicans in Congress — how much more tension and violence loom ahead?

“Every American needs to be asking themselves: Can we tolerate, can communities withstand, three more years of what we have been seeing under the Donald Trump/Stephen Miller approach to immigration?” Democratic Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas, told me, referring to the president’s unusually powerful deputy chief of staff.

Escobar is the lead Democratic co-sponsor, with Florida Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican, of legislation that offers an off-ramp from Trump’s inflammatory course. The bill, known as the Dignity Act, has attracted about a dozen co-sponsors in each party, the most bipartisan support for a comprehensive immigration plan in years.

The bill would strengthen immigration enforcement in multiple ways. It would mandate that employers nationwide verify the immigration status of employees. And it would significantly restrict the process of applying for asylum. But it would also create a long-term legal status that would allow most undocumented immigrants without a criminal record to remain in the U.S. (a position that a preponderance of Americans consistently support in polls).

By coupling tougher enforcement to deter future illegal immigration with legal status for much of the existing undocumented population, the Dignity Act recreates the basic tradeoff in the bipartisan immigration reform bills that passed the Senate with substantial GOP support in 2006 and 2013. (Each of those bills died in the Republican-controlled House.) But in two important ways, the new legislation bends further toward conservative concerns.

First, it excludes from eligibility all the undocumented immigrants who entered the country under Biden (about 3.5 million people, Pew estimates). Even more important, the bill only provides undocumented immigrants with a legal status that would allow them to work, study and travel — and not a pathway to citizenship. That’s a big change from previous bills. (Only the so-called Dreamers brought to the U.S. illegally as children by their parents would be eligible for eventual citizenship under the new bill.)

Escobar told me “I had to do a lot of soul searching” before agreeing to drop a pathway to citizenship from the legislation. But she said she concluded both that it was necessary to secure meaningful Republican support and that citizenship mattered less to the undocumented than security and predictability — especially amid Trump’s enforcement offensive. “I would much rather move forward in a positive direction than wait for someday … when we might be able to get everything we want,” Escobar said.

Despite abandoning the pathway to citizenship, the bill has received a respectful response from immigrant advocacy groups. Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of America’s Voice, a leading immigrant rights group, told me that while she believes Democrats should still pursue eventual citizenship, she detects “more willingness to talk about” legal status short of that among advocates and the undocumented themselves.

There’s virtually no chance Congress will advance serious immigration reform while Trump (and even more so, Miller) is in the White House. But, just as Biden’s failures at the border increased public support for tougher enforcement, Trump and Miller may inadvertently prove that it is implausible to address the problem of undocumented immigration through enforcement alone.

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The tolerance among the public and even among Republican members of Congress for ICE agents killing middle-class, middle-aged white people on the streets of American cities is probably much lower than Miller would predict or prefer. “This is an eye-opening moment for the people who maybe (thought) mass deportation was a good slogan, but now they are seeing in real life what it looks like,” Cardenas says.

After Good’s death, the immediate priority for Congress, the media and the public should be closer scrutiny of ICE’s tactics and culture. But demonstrating the political viability of an alternative strategy is an important way to expand the audience for reconsidering the current one.

The Dignity Act may provide the foundation for a more durable approach to the undocumented population once Trump’s ICE storm blows past.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.