October 25, 2020 — After two decades of really bad publicity, sugar is reinventing itself. Just last week, FDA finalized its rules for allulose, a rare but natural form of sugar. It looks and tastes a lot like regular sugar, though it’s about one third less sweet. But the really sweet deal is that the final rule from FDA […]
September 9, 2020 — Eight years of change packed into one month. COVID-19 has changed food shopping. All of a sudden, everything about the ways we hunt and gather our meals is different. For one thing, we’re making fewer trips and more clicks. But we’re buying more and buying in new ways. Professor Anna Nagurney tells the New York […]
August 18, 2020 — For the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, this was a relatively easy question. Americans typically consume too much added sugar. So the committee recommends a lower limit. In the 2015, the limit was ten percent of total calories from added sugars. But now the committee says that limit should come down to six. Not so fast, […]
August 12, 2020 — Who wants to eat healthy? Roughly nine out of ten of American adults. And at the top of their list for what’s healthy is fiber and whole grains. But somehow, we feel no surprise learning that food labels about healthy whole grains are leaving consumers confused. Because the point of health claims on food labels […]
August 8, 2020 — Correcting errors is such a nuisance. People feel bad about it. Some people simply can’t admit errors, so it can get messy. But errors are inevitable. Thus it’s really important to correct errors when they are discovered. Especially in scientific research. Nonetheless, one journal seems to have a different solution. Nutrients – an open-access nutrition […]
July 28, 2020 — For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. Henry Louis Mencken wrote this in 1920, well before the the health challenge of obesity flummoxed us. But he described our systematic failures with obesity almost perfectly. Obesity is a problem of complex systems that conspire to harm our health. Simple, […]
June 23, 2020 — Tamar Haspel tells a positively appealing story in the Washington Post this week. We don’t have a problem with obesity because of carbs, she writes. Nor fats, nor processed foods. The problem is the food environment. Cheap, convenient food surrounds us, with endless prompts to eat it. All these food cues, coaxing us to eat […]
June 15, 2020 — Now, there can be no doubt. This new coronavirus is indeed a cruel one. It is radically reshaping our dietary habits. Many of us are having to cook at home. But it’s worse than that. As a few of us start venturing out and staying at newly sanitized hotels, something is missing. No more DIY […]
May 22, 2020 — Remember when Blue Apron was poised for a hot IPO? It’s only been three years, but it seems like a lifetime. Along with the rest of a flock of fledgling meal kit services, Blue Apron has been down in the dumps since its IPO. It seems that beautiful images and romantic notions of cooking with […]
May 20, 2020 — It seems like conspiracy theories are enveloping us. The new coronavirus was hatched in a lab and foisted on us by China! The one percent is manipulating the economy! Oh, my. It’s a long list that we can read and smugly think, we’re too smart to fall for that. Right? But on the other hand, […]
