Posts Tagged ‘food industry’

A new study in JAMA this week tells us that American youth get two thirds of their calories from ultra-processed foods. Is the response to this moral panic? Or does this observation document a serious threat to public health? It is easy to find responses on both ends of this spectrum and everything in between. […]

America has some of the cheapest food in the world. Out of pocket, we spend less for food than people in any other country in the world. Food beckons us to eat everywhere we turn. But the actual cost of cheap food can be quite high. A new report from the Rockefeller Foundation tells us […]

We depend upon food for both life and pleasure. But that dependence can go awry in many different ways. One way is captured by the popular concept of food addiction. Though it is controversial, some consensus holds that addictive eating behaviors are very real. People who are living with this problem will tell you just […]

Brace yourself for sugar 2.0. Processed food makers are loading up on sugar that’s not sugar. The push to drive added sugar out of the food supply means that allulose – a rare, but natural form of sugar – is suddenly popular with the industry. It helps that food companies can add this sugar to […]

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed a broken food system, writes Miriam Nelson in the Boston Globe. But she is hardly the only one. A UN Study last week told us that food systems account for a full third of global carbon emissions. The Lancet Commission on Obesity in 2019 morphed into a Global Syndemic commission […]

The collision of dietary dogmas is fascinating to watch. Especially in the early days of it. Right now, plant-based diets and ultra-processed foods are getting a whole lot of press. Plant-based is good. Ultra-processed is bad. So naturally, we see the meteoric rise of plant-based, ultra-processed food. Writing in the New York Times, Frank Bruni […]

COVID-19 has rearranged lives all over the world, but today, Americans are having a football game. Urgent pleas from public health folks are putting a lid on big parties. So the emphasis seems to be shifting to far-flung snacking. Social distance, small crowds, or preferably no crowds – people still want their Super Bowl snacks. […]

A long, long time ago, the FDA proposed voluntary goals for reducing salt in processed, packaged, and prepared foods. But that was 2016 and a new administration came the following year with less interest in this subject. So naturally, this went nowhere. It took little more than this idea coming from the Obama team to […]

Ultra-processed foods seem to be a problem for human health. For one thing, the link between consuming them and bad health outcomes seems strong. We have a steady stream of new studies to confirm this. For another, we have some pretty compelling experimental evidence from well-controlled studies to tell us that there may be a […]

New publications about the role of ultra-processed foods in health and food systems remind us about a missing dialogue. Food policy advocates are very clear that food systems should evolve to favor minimally processed food. Nutrition scientists know that ultra-processed foods have an association with poor health outcomes. But they also know that the science […]