January 14, 2023 — Defining healthy eating is somewhat like trying to define art. Everyone thinks they know it when they see it, but actually pinning it down in specific terms is not so easy. Nonetheless, we keep on trying and much of the focus from thoughtful people is on healthy patterns of eating, not individual foods. The exemplar […]
January 1, 2023 — While some of us slept last night, the calendar rolled us into the start of a whole new year. A clean slate with new challenges and opportunities. So what lies ahead? It’s impossible to know (as our review of 2022 predictions nicely shows), but that won’t stop us from offering our best guess. In that […]
October 9, 2022 — This afternoon at FNCE, Hope Warshaw will be moderating a wide-ranging conversation with David Kessler. He is the FDA commissioner who oversaw the requirement to put Nutrition Facts labels on food back in 1994. That’s when many ideas took shape in the popular imagination about what a healthy food is. Now is a good time […]
September 29, 2022 — What constitutes “healthy” for a packaged food? FDA, prompted by wrangling seven years ago, is out today with a new definition that everyone can fight about. Who cares? Well, just about everyone has an opinion. But the real passion for this subject comes from people who want to sell you more units of their food, […]
September 18, 2022 — One of the hottest concepts right now in dietary fashion is plant-based diets. It’s on the way to surpassing the dominant theme of the last two decades – low-carb diets. Thus, some really exceptional claims for the benefits of plant-based diets are popping up in scientific literature. Apart from the fanciful nature of some of […]
June 17, 2022 — Objectively, the healthfulness of our diets is poor. This is true for youth and older adults alike. But more people than ever – 52 percent of U.S. adults – say they are following a healthy diet or eating pattern. Yet, new research from the Nutrition 2022 conference tells us that they vastly overestimate the healthfulness […]
June 15, 2022 — The ASN Nutrition Live 2022 virtual meeting started with a feisty debate yesterday. The architect of the NOVA system for identifying ultra-processed foods – Carlos Monteiro – made the case for his magnum opus. Then, in this debate he faced off with nutrition professor Arne Astrup, who made the case that relying on the NOVA […]
April 15, 2022 — The drumbeat is growing louder. “Ultra-processed foods are trashing our health – and the planet,” say four nutrition scientists from Deakin University. It would be hard to find a clearer definition of these products as our enemy. Yet another set of distinguished nutrition scientists argue that ultra-processed alternatives to meat and dairy can offer valuable […]
March 23, 2022 — New research keeps popping up to remind us that ultra-processed food is a slippery boogeyman. Headlines about their addictive and toxic properties confront us everywhere. They’re “the worst” for your heart, say headlines quoting cardiologists. But the problem with this boogeyman classification is that it’s slippery. A new paper this week reveals that even experts […]
March 10, 2022 — In the realm of health halos, almonds shine brightly. Meanwhile, French fries are at the other end of the scale – lumped with iconic junk food. But the good food versus bad food paradigm has some serious limitations. A new RCT comparing the health outcomes from consuming almonds or fries illustrates this quite well. Researchers […]
