April 23, 2024 — “Taxing unhealthy food helps cut obesity, says global study. Mexico is leading the way in implementing taxes on unhealthy food options, successfully helping to tackle obesity and related health issues.” This is the start of a breathtaking press release from Imperial College London. But those opening lines are more fiction than fact. First, the publication […]
June 25, 2023 — We take it as a given – we want to eat healthy. Since 2016, FDA has been working on developing an updated definition for the meaning of “healthy” if a food seller wants to say that about one of its products. The agency is still struggling with this question today. So we were glad to […]
May 6, 2023 — Nope. We are not done with fighting obesity by selling water, fruits, and veggies. Former First Lady Michelle Obama is starting a healthy food and beverage company with the help of private equity. Ordinarily, we’re supposed to think of private equity as the bad guys – helping the rich get richer and driving wider disparities. […]
March 24, 2023 — You might have thought the U.S. government was busy with other stuff. Like writing new dietary guidelines. Or defining what food is naughty or nice. Or perhaps even sorting out problems with bank regulation. Maybe so, but these folks can multitask, so now we have the final word on peanut butter – it’s definitely, certifiably […]
February 22, 2023 — Has the FDA bitten off more than it can chew? Two presidents ago, back in 2016, the FDA told us the agency had begun work to “redefine the term ‘healthy’” for food labels. Good luck with that is a fair summary of our reaction at the time. Seven years later, the quest to define objectively […]
January 30, 2023 — Are we reaching a point where the reductive assumptions embedded in dietary recommendations are more confusing than helpful? A new paper in Scientific Reports begs this question. Yutang Wang and colleagues find evidence that polyunsaturated fatty acids are associated with a small reduction in cardiovascular mortality in the general population of the U.S., but not […]
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, […]
March 26, 2022 — Not every study in PLOS Medicine is thoroughly impressive, but this one is pure genius. Researchers at the University of Oxford have discovered that if grocers don’t promote Easter candy, they will sell less of it. But wait, there’s more. Those same researchers showed that promoting “healthy items” – like low fat potato chips – […]
February 11, 2022 — “Whether you like it or not, processed food is here to stay,” says professor Ciarán Forde. But wait, Barry Popkin writes that we must “reverse the rapid shift to diets dominated by a stage of high ultra-processed food intake” if we want to stem the global tide of non-communicable diseases arising from obesity. The dominant […]
May 13, 2021 — Why didn’t someone think of this before? FDA is working on a better guidance for healthy food. One of the ideas is simple and sweet. Just let the marketers put a “healthy” badge on food that meets the standard. What standard? FDA is working on it. But when they figure out what it takes to […]
