November 16, 2025 — “Studies show food is medicine” says WBUR, with Allison Aubrey quoting studies that suggest a benefit from prescribing healthy food to people at risk for metabolic and diet-related diseases. Under the Food Is Medicine banner, hyperbole is easy to find. The people who have taken up this cause are selling hard. So the headlines that […]
October 29, 2025 — In 2016, the use of the word “numbskull” in English literature soared to a new high. It has remained high ever since. Though we cannot be sure why, we are confident that members of Congress are earning that label as they crash toward creating an utterly unnecessary American hunger crisis by cutting off SNAP food […]
September 22, 2025 — Don’t look up statistics on hunger, says USDA. It only causes “fear mongering.” To make sure we don’t have to worry about that, the agency is canceling the survey research on food insecurity it’s been doing for 30 years. That’s right. USDA announced over the weekend that measurement of food insecurity is unnecessary: “The U.S. […]
April 7, 2025 — Efforts to improve global nutrition often run up against an inescapable truth: poverty, more than preference, limits healthy food choices. Two new studies highlight the complexity of this challenge and suggest that simply making nutritious foods more available or promoting dietary change isn’t enough – especially for the world’s poorest communities. Healthy Nutrition Out of […]
September 6, 2023 — A sure way to make a good program look bad is to offer up flawed evidence for its benefits. Then call it the biggest and best evaluation ever. So it is with a study of Food Is Medicine, impaired by a problem with regression to the mean. That little problem does not stop some pretty […]
April 23, 2023 — Camilla Kingdon is president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health and she has the cause of the whole childhood obesity thing figured out. “The primary cause is clear,” she writes in the Guardian. It’s poverty. She describes how her thinking has evolved: “In the last few years, I have been forced to […]
October 10, 2022 — Sunday at FNCE brought us a fireside chat with Sara Bleich, the first ever Director of Nutrition Security and Health Equity. Make no mistake about it, this is big. Because without secure access to genuinely nourishing food, it will be terribly hard to close the gap in health that comes from chronic diseases – including […]
August 25, 2022 — Perhaps you’ve heard. Next month, the White House will host a new conference on hunger, nutrition, and health. The goal of this conference is promising: “End hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so that fewer Americans experience diet-related diseases like diabetes, obesity, and hypertension.” We like the implicit acknowledgement that obesity […]
March 9, 2022 — The stupid, senseless war in Ukraine is causing massive suffering. For anyone who is paying attention, that much is perfectly clear. Stepping back from the dire, immediate humanitarian crisis, economists are fretting about the shocks coming from oil prices. But the shock to the global food supply will also be huge. Food security will almost […]
October 17, 2021 — FNCE 20201 opens today online. But pre-meeting symposia yesterday set the table for four days of rich information flowing about food and nutrition. COVID is still with us, so the meeting is virtual. Thus an outstanding session on nutrition, equity, and COVID-19 hit the mark especially well. In particular, it drew us into thinking more […]
