September 24, 2021 — Julia Child may have had it right. Way back in 1990, she had serious questions about dietary guidance to avoid saturated fat. At a food event in 1990, she described the response to her renowned cooking: “I hear them saying, ‘Here comes Julia, with all the cream and butter.’ “Everybody is overreacting. If fear of […]
September 23, 2021 — It’s amazing how strong the biases about dairy foods can be. In the process of developing the 2020 dietary guidelines, it came up over and over again. Negative sentiment about dairy was one of the top themes in public comments. One bias is a visceral disdain for dairy foods in any form. Some people cannot […]
September 10, 2021 — A new study in the September issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition asks an important question. Are Americans eating more junk food? Cutting right to the chase, the answer is no. Adults actually report eating less in 2018 than they did in 2011. Children haven’t changed their habits. Adults are getting 13 percent […]
September 4, 2021 — Suffering creates a vacuum. But health stigma is always ready to fill that vacuum, so blame and shame flow in and amplify the suffering. This has long been the case with obesity. We’re now seeing it come into play with COVID and even with the intersection of COVID and obesity. This is called blaming the […]
August 29, 2021 — Momentum seems to be growing for more explicit labeling of healthy and unhealthy foods. The Nutri-Score system has gained acceptance in Europe, albeit with some opposition along the way. It is a five color nutrition label that gives a product a score ranging from A to E. Originating in France, the European Commission and the […]
August 26, 2021 — Remember when the pandemic was new and we were not allowed to laugh? They canceled April Fool’s Day in 2020. Well, today it’s back. We refuse to believe this press release from the University of Michigan School of Public Health is not a prank. Their environmental scientists are telling us that one hot dog will […]
August 24, 2021 — Popular wisdom holds that we should be substituting plants and for animals in the sources of our food. The reasoning comes down to impact on the environment and arguments for reducing saturated fats in our diets. Much of the writing on this subject – even in scientific journals – comes from a perspective of advocacy. […]
August 23, 2021 — No two ways about it, we’re all getting a crash course in the uncertainty of science. It turns out that all those bumper stickers saying follow the science don’t mean exactly what we thought. Because COVID-19 is teaching us that the certainty we seek from science is not always there for us. Little more than […]
August 16, 2021 — A century ago, the iconic image of hunger was the bread line. Today, it is the line at a food bank, swamped by demand because of the pandemic. And for more than a decade now, the SNAP program has been inadequate for providing healthy nutrition to families facing food insecurity. But today, that will change. […]
August 2, 2021 — We see a lot of stubborn opinions about nutrition and obesity research. People dig intellectual trenches and defend their positions about sugar, salt, and fat. Suppositions turn into convictions. Data becomes a tool for proving a point. Or inconvenient data leads a professor say we have to stomp it out. It’s depressing, really, if we […]
