September 20, 2023 — Apparently big food is not scary enough. The Washington Post wants you to know that it’s really big tobacco that is selling you those noxious and addictive Teddy Grahams to destroy the health of your children. For this report, they rely on a paper by Tera Fazzino and colleagues. This continues a tradition of using […]
September 18, 2023 — Clickbait journalists are taking aim at clickbait nutrition influencers and we wonder: Who benefits from this fracas? Late last week, the Washington Post ran a story exploring the phenomenon of dietitians who are active in social media. Their thesis: “Registered dietitians are being paid to post videos that promote diet soda, sugar and supplements on […]
September 13, 2023 — The 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee just finished an afternoon of taking public comments at its third meeting. They are well on their way to producing a scientific report that might guide the guidance when it emerges in time for the dawn of 2025. Right now, it does seem like everyone is ultra-worried about what […]
July 30, 2023 — We know that meat has a substantial impact on the planet, and that plant-based diets are more environmentally sustainable. But exactly how much impact does the food we eat have on environmental outcomes and what difference would following a vegan diet make compared to consuming a high meat, or even low meat diet? We studied […]
July 2, 2023 — The impulse to attach health claims to food is growing stronger among many advocates and agencies for food and health policy. The FDA is moving to put nutrition information on the front of food packages. This news comes in addition to the agency’s seven-year quest to define healthy for food marketing claims. The Food Is […]
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 […]
June 20, 2023 — Two researchers from the Harvard Medical School tell us we cannot have confidence in findings the World Health Organization gleaned from nutrition science related to sweeteners. But the problem is not limited to sweeteners. Writing in the New York Times, Anupam Jena and Christopher Worsham say the problem afflicts much of nutrition research: “This is […]
June 13, 2023 — We are in the midst of a great deal of cognitive dissonance about obesity. Part of the boilerplate description is that it is simply a dietary disease. But recent scientific and therapeutic advances tell a different story – that obesity is just as much a disease of altered brain function as it is a dietary […]
June 7, 2023 — Overheated rhetoric in nutrition is nothing new. But the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) set a high bar yesterday. In a press release, the organization rang alarm bells, saying that “big dairy” is on its way to “making school meals less healthy by allowing whole milk.” Oh my. Is the persistent fear of […]
May 24, 2023 — The logic of trying to turn food into medicine simply escapes us. The week, the Washington Post has a new twist on food as medicine – telling us to eat our greens if we want better mental health. It leaves us with mixed feelings. On one hand, we’re all in on the concept of finding […]
