Eating in America Podcast

Maybe if supplement hawker and wellness influencer Nicole Saphier is confirmed as Surgeon General, she’ll let us know how to choose the best protein water to buy. After all, with the flood of protein products pouring into our supermarkets and convenience stores, it is hard to know which product will build our muscles the fastest.

Maybe a protein soda is best, like SkyPop? Or Slammin’ Strawberry Pop-Tarts with protein? We can just ignore the 8 teaspoons of sugar, Red Dye #40, and all that other stuff Pop-Tarts doesn’t brag about on the front of the box, right?

Or how about Khloe Kardashian’s Khloud Protein Popcorn, perhaps the Cinnamon Roll flavor?

I’m just kidding about all this, of course. It is troubling that consumers are being preyed on by sellers of – and here’s an oxymoron for you – water containing protein. More absurd is the brand of protein water that also contains dietary fiber. You can get your fiber-maxxing and protein-maxxing fix all in one otherwise innocent bottle of water.

When it comes to protein, we are the hunted

Big Food is always a predator upon our nutrition worries, and with a population that is largely aging, sedentary, overweight, dieting with a GLP-1, or, frequently, all four, more and more American adults are very rightly concerned with their muscular strength. We present lots of potential prey for protein marketing. But, as silly and sad as these protein-added products are, taking a pause to re-think our protein intake while checking the new recommendations from the federal government, makes sense.

We lose muscle as we age.

We lose it faster if we are sedentary, and we are more sedentary if we are overweight or obese. Many of us who are or have been overweight or obese, are able to control our weight with a GLP-1 like Zepbound or Wegovy. The question has been raised as to whether GLP-1 based dieting can involve losing too much muscle mass along with the loss of fat tissue. There’s also the common condition of skeletal muscle attrition and reduction in strength coexisting with obesity, known clinically as sarcopenic obesity.

I’ll address all these concerns.

We need strength for health, to fully function, and ultimately for independence.

Our strength is largely, but not entirely, a function of our muscle mass. Strength also depends on how fast our brain fires our muscle, our skill in using our muscle, our body mechanics, and the balance in our muscle between slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers, fast twitch being better for sprinters and slow twitch for marathon runners.

Strength can be built to some extent just by training your nervous system and your movement skills, but the real gains in strength and confidence come with building up the key muscle groups.

Building muscle requires stimulus: play time!

Perhaps workouts should be re-worked and re-branded as “play time.” “Gamification” is everywhere today. Maybe some would enjoy “gamified” workouts. Whatever it takes.

Too many people are put off by the very thought of muscle training, but building muscle requires both protein and a stimulus, a signal to our bodies to add the muscle. Our bodies wisely require proof that more muscle is needed before they go about adding it. Otherwise, we would be growing muscle without control, using extra protein in our system. The stimulus that tells our bodies to create new muscle comes from pushing our muscles to their limit by working them, usually through training using weights or other resistance. Without a training stimulus, muscles won’t grow. Training and protein are both essential to building muscle.

So how much protein is needed?

The scientific consensus and federal recommendation was 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight from 1941 until this year. That’s going on 90 years. The method for coming up with the initial 0.8 grams recommendation has been replaced by a more accurate technology that does not underestimate protein need.

Also, for most of that time 0.8 grams was considered a target even though it was created as a recommended minimum. The new Dietary Guidelines for Americans issued in January by the Trump administration increased the recommended minimum to 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight, that’s 50 to 100% more than the old minimum recommendation.

The math made easier

Let’s pause for a moment because there’s more metric math in that equation than most of us Americans are keen on doing. Translated to pounds of body weight, we’re looking for roughly ½ to ¾ of a gram of protein per pound of body weight. So for a 150 pound adult, that is a recommendation of about 75 to 110 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day.

Across the day that could look like two large eggs (25g), almond butter on two slices of 100% whole wheat toast (20g), yogurt (15g), or a 4-ounce fillet of chicken (35g) or salmon (25g).

There is a 75 to 110 grams range in this minimum recommendation because there are many other factors besides body weight to consider, including age, GLP-1 use or other weight-loss dieting, exercising and strength training, and overweight and obesity. All of these factors are reasons to consider aiming for the upper end of this range or beyond.

Kennedy is…right

So it pains me to say it because he is so deadly wrong about other things like vaccines, but RFK, Jr. is right – albeit only partly – about increasing the recommended protein level. What he, the USDA, and the rest of the cattle-and-dairy-cozy Trump administration are wrong about is suggesting that consumption of red meat should be increased. And maybe full fat dairy is okay for active youths on a healthy diet, but for adults, saturated fat, like that in milk, is strongly linked to heart disease. Further, the Guidelines should have emphasized that seafood and plant protein are healthier than protein from meat.

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Protein can be 10% to 35% of our diet!

Protein can safely make up 10% to 35% of the calories in a diet according to the standard set by the National Academies of Science’s Academy of Medicine. So more protein is fine. If that extra protein replaces refined carbohydrates or saturated fat, all the better.

Older adults don’t make muscle as easily

The ability to synthesize muscle tissue is reduced in older adults – that’s called anabolic resistance – but eating an increased amount of protein can overcome that deficit. Because of this, the new Dietary Guidelines recommendation of a minimum of ½ to ¾ grams of protein per pound of body weight is largely in line with recommendations for older adults.

Sarcopenic obesity, explained

Adults of any age who have sarcopenia, that is loss of muscle mass or strength, associated with obesity, will benefit from increased protein and strength training to build muscle and increase its quality.

Protein and strength conditioning

As with recommendations for older adults, the International Society of Sports Nutrition’s position on protein for exercising individuals is roughly in line with the new Dietary Guidelines recommendation. Competitive athletes tend to have increased protein and other nutrition requirements depending on what their sport is and what their training requirements are. There’s clearly a range in needs from ping-pong to football players.

Eat protein anytime and it will go to work - if you have given it a reason to!

For the rest of us who do strength workouts, there’s a myth that the anabolic window when protein can be synthesized into muscle is limited to two hours after strength training. That window is actually 24 hours, so eat your protein whenever you can during the day, just be sure to get your resistance training in. However, for older adults, to overcome the anabolic resistance that comes with aging and makes muscle synthesis difficult, spread out the protein intake across three or four meals during the day. For many of us, that might only mean adding a good protein source such as eggs or yogurt to breakfast.

GLP-1s, dieting, and extra protein needs

Dieters, especially those using GLP-1s, may have heard concerns about losing too much muscle mass along with the fat.

Dieting does normally come with some muscle mass loss along with reduction in fatty tissue. GLP-1s like Zepbound and Wegovy can be very effective at weight reduction. Are these dieters losing muscle mass to a concerning extent? New analysis is reassuring on this front.

First, for heavy but strong individuals, a reduction in weight allows for a reduction in the muscle mass that was tasked with carrying that extra weight. Second, actual muscle loss has been found not to be bigger with GLP-1 use when compared to traditional dieting.

Muscle quality can be helped by GLP-1s

Third, the quality of muscle tissue is important along with the quantity of muscle, and GLP-1s have been found to improve muscle quality, removing interstitial fat from the muscle tissue. The fat within the muscle in people prior to using GLP-1s was degrading the performance of their muscles. The muscle was leaner and the quality and strength of the remaining muscle tissue was improved after treatment with a GLP-1.

So , pending further research, muscle loss with GLP-1 dieting is not as big a concern as some initially worried. Nonetheless, growing muscle mass is a great idea for almost all of us at any age, and a period of GLP-1 controlled weight loss is a perfect time to start a habit of strength training and increased protein intake in line with the new minimal recommendations to compensate for any muscle dieted away along with the fat.

Protein and medical patients

People with chronic disease or recovering from surgery may benefit from increased protein. Unless you have kidney disease, moderately increased protein intake is not a problem for renal function. For those with severe kidney disease, protein restriction may be warranted.

Here are three key points:

* Do the math, aiming for at least 1/2 to 3/4 gram of protein per pound of body weight per day. Then do a quick internet search on the food you typically eat and make a rough tally on the amount of protein you are consuming. You’ll quickly get a sense if you are eating enough.

* The quality of the protein you eat is very important. Cut back or eliminate red meat and emphasize fish and plant protein in your diet as much as possible.

* Workout with weights and other forms of resistance. You can start with the easiest bits and pieces of a weight program and still see quick and meaningful improvements.

What about protein supplements?

Remember, all protein supplements and products with added protein are ultra-processed food.

That said, former body builder and California Governor, and current movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger thinks the daily protein shakes he has consumed since he was fifteen years old have worked well for him. I wouldn’t argue. Not with him anyway. But Arnold has invented the notion of adding alcohol in the form of Schnapps from his Austrian homeland to his protein shakes and serving them to his fellow movie cast members. That, I would skip.

Thank you for reading. Your support for Eating In America with your subscriptions, paid or free, likes, shares, and comments is key for my work. I appreciate it.

References

Moscucci F, Baratta F, Pastori D, et al. A Narrative Review on GLP-1 Receptor Agonists for Obesity in Older Women: Maximizing Weight Loss While Preserving Lean Mass. Nutrients. Feb 14 2026;18(4) https://doi.org/10.3390/nu18040632

Spees CK, Scott JM, Taylor CA. Differences in amounts and types of physical activity by obesity status in US adults. Am J Health Behav. Jan 2012;36(1):56–65. https://doi.org/10.5993/ajhb.36.1.6

Wei S, Nguyen TT, Zhang Y, Ryu D, Gariani K. Sarcopenic obesity: epidemiology, pathophysiology, cardiovascular disease, mortality, and management. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne). 2023;14:1185221. https://doi.org/10.3389/fendo.2023.1185221

McLeod M, Breen L, Hamilton DL, Philp A. Live strong and prosper: the importance of skeletal muscle strength for healthy ageing. Biogerontology. 2016/06/01 2016;17(3):497–510. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10522-015-9631-7

Trumbo P, Schlicker S, Yates AA, Poos M. Dietary Reference Intakes for Energy, Carbohydrate, Fiber, Fat, Fatty Acids, Cholesterol, Protein and Amino Acids. Journal of the American Dietetic Association. 2002;102(11):1621–1630. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-8223(02)90346-9

Bauer J, Biolo G, Cederholm T, et al. Evidence-Based Recommendations for Optimal Dietary Protein Intake in Older People: A Position Paper From the PROT-AGE Study Group. Journal of the American Medical Directors Association. 2013;14(8):542–559. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jamda.2013.05.021

Jäger R, Kerksick CM, Campbell BI, et al. International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: protein and exercise. J Int Soc Sports Nutr. 2017;14:20. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12970-017-0177-8

Scheen AJ. GLP-1-derived therapies and risk of sarcopenia: myth or reality? Expert Opinion on Drug Safety. 2026/03/23 2026:1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/14740338.2026.2640980

Noronha JC, Van Gaal LF, Neeland IJ, et al. Optimizing GLP-1 therapies for obesity and diabetes management. Obesity Pillars. 2025/12/01/ 2025;16:100222. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obpill.2025.100222

Hosie R. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he drinks protein powder mixed with tequila or schnapps. It’s an upgrade from the terrible protein shakes he made in the 1960s, which contained yeast. Business Insider. July 26, 2022. https://www.businessinsider.com/arnold-schwarzenegger-bodybuilder-adds-tequila-schnapps-protein-shakes-2022-7

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From stories of food pantries during SNAP cuts, to coffee and the Ngabe people in Panama who pick the beans, to industry funded research like the 1945 margarine experiment on orphans in Chicago, to the role of sailing ships and the military in shaping our current food environment and the role of food on military ships in shaping morale, to Surgeon General candidates who invest in smoking (still an issue!),

to GLP-1s, to a much better way to define and understand ultra-processed food, to the generally recognized as crippled GRAS system of food additive safety, to the dangerous state of cannabis and hemp dysregulation due to greed and politics, and, not at all last or least, to my hero, the father of epidemiology, slayer of cholera, and clean water fanatic, John Snow, the first year of Eating In America has been busy.

I was getting my Master of Science in Nutrition Policy and Programs and my Master of Public Health when Covid hit. I rolled up my sleeves and used my epidemiology to make maps of where food assistance would be needed and where hospital beds would run short. I picked up the phone and traced Covid cases and contacts to help contain the epidemic and get assistance to those in need. I thought “good job Ric!,” way to pick a time to be training in public health and epidemiology and nutrition. What no one saw coming, except those who were then planning what has since happened with the American government, was that public health would soon be pilloried, assaulted, defunded, and deprioritized.

Stories I have posted in the last year have often pointed out how the science got it wrong or authorities kept their blinders on when presented with the facts. That has always been true.

Socrates was executed for teaching youth to think and the Church banned Copernicus’s ideas about the solar system.

But as scientific knowledge and capacity have exploded and, coupled with technology, become an overwhelming source of power in our civilization, is the killing of science a more frequent response of the despot? The last 100 years provides all the evidence we need to worry about when extremists take control of science. From the famines in Russia and China stemming from Stalin and Mao’s rejection of agricultural science, to the German brain drain as Hitler rejected Einstein’s physics and Jewish scientists in general, to Pol Pot’s killing fields filled with the hundreds of thousands of corpses of anyone with the executable offense of having an education, men with the certainty of their own infallibility have sent millions to their deaths.

My writing in Eating In America has an urgency, for me, because it so often deals with the consequences of the actions and policies of America’s infallible despot, Trump, and his servant, RFK, Jr. As long as Trump and Kennedy are in office, I will have, uh, a lot to report on and analyze coming from our central government.

I’ve posted and podcasted 62 pieces since Eating In America launched.

Science and facts are the foundation of everything I write, although I try to help our understanding of the facts by, at times, drawing lines to show the connections which are hidden from us and making fair assumptions about what is going on with the motivations of politicians, corporations, researchers, and other organizations.

A new phase of Eating In America begins today, as I take a moment to sharpen my quills, and add in a new, I hope important, project for the coming year. Since AI can hear even my faint voice in the public health wilderness, I need to keep to myself just what my new project is at the moment…

In the meantime I need to dial back my writing for Eating In America. I’ll keep posting, just not as much.

I hope I’ll have your continued support over the next year. Your support has meant so much. It’s absolutely key for Eating In America and related endeavors going forward…Please stick around.

Thank you.

Ric

References

Mann DL. When Facts Become Forbidden: The Past and Present History of Scientific Censorship. JACC Basic Transl Sci. Mar 2025;10(3):402–404. https://doi.og/10.1016/j.jacbts.2025.02.003

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A bright ray of hope shone on the breakfast table while visiting friends this morning.

Two weeks ago I reviewed Sugar Coated, Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America’s Favorite Breakfast Food, Marion Nestle and Lisa Sutherland’s new telling of the transformation of a 19th century health food, un-sugared granola, into a keystone of the American ultraprocessed food diet. The Kellogg brothers’ of the 1870s, launched as disciples into the American food environment by the fervently health-preaching Seventh-day Adventist church, started a lineage that one-hundred years later resulted in the bastardized, unholy, unhealthy Kellogg’s Froot Loops of 1963 with its 12 grams of added sugar, bright artificial colors, refined flours, and child-targeting Toucan Sam mascot.

Today’s food environment: gone to hell in a shopping cart

Since 1963 it’s been sixty years of the American food environment generally going to hell in a shopping cart, but, praise be to Nestle and Sutherland, the first a deity in matters of nutrition policy, the descent into ultraprocessed Hades turns out to be a two-way path!

Uncommonly intutive pre-schoolers

My friends, let’s call them Pop and Mima just as their three- and five-year-old grandchildren do, made a point of eating healthy breakfasts every day. But Pop and Mima first and foremost, love their grandkids and understand the license that grandparents have in making sure the adoring love of the little ones pours back in return. So Froot Loops were acquired for the first morning of a four-day stay of the preschoolers with Pop and Mima. On the morning of the first day, Pop poured himself a bowl of granola, while Mima got ready to pour two bowls of Froot Loops for the little ones. Lo and behold, at Pop’s first bite, adoring Child 1 said “I want what Pop is having” and adoring Child 2 said “Me, too!” And granola, with yogurt, fruit, and a little drizzle of maple syrup to seal the deal, is all the four of them ate every day for breakfast. Pop and Mima, your medal is in the mail.

Pop and Mima deserve a medal

In my experience as a parent there is little precedent for Pop and Mima’s granola magic. It was a breakfast miracle. There is hope.

The coffee pot

Today it’s Breakfast in America on Eating in America, or at least, perhaps, Part One, since, as you will see, I don’t get far on the breakfast menu. We’re going to start where many of us start our day: at the coffee pot.

And a lot of Americans drink coffee: ¾ of us. Half of us drink it every day. 1 And mostly in the morning. For some people, breakfast is only coffee.

It is not my fault or your fault

These days as the writer of Eating In America, I feel like I’m the bearer of bad news far too much. It’s not really my fault: I am not a wellness influencer peddling hope in exchange for clicks, and neither you nor I are responsible for screwing up the food environment. We’re both just figuring out how to do the best for ourselves and our families with the food we are dealt. And, when I write about the politics and the commercial side of our food environment, it’s about who we can blame, boycott, or vote against, all of which feels better and is far more accurate than blaming ourselves.

Coffee: the dependable feel good nutrition story

But when I write about coffee and tea, it’s a happy, feel good story, with the science continuing to tell us that these beverages that most of us enjoy and that make us feel good, are, in fact, good for us.

And the science keeps coming.

Candy and snacks made with THC, the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis, are for sale to both adults and kids in America: not in cannabis dispensaries but places like convenience stores. These treats are not regulated. Seventh graders on their way to school can stop and pick up packages of THC edibles made to look like familiar name brand candies. Except these candies can get them high, dangerously high.

As I reported in my April series “Ultraprocessed Cannabis: Potency, Policy, and Public Health in America,” in 2018 Trump and Congress deregulated hemp, meaning cannabis without an intoxicating amount of THC. While the intent was to allow the unregulated sale of wellness products and supplements containing CBD, or cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive chemical in the Cannabis Sativa plant, there was a loophole. While hemp products couldn’t contain more than a tiny amount of Delta-9 THC, which causes the high in cannabis, nothing forbid using ultraprocessing techniques to make products with potent amounts of the Delta-8 THC that is found in hemp.

For years, large quantities of Delta-8 THC have been added to canned drinks, gummies, and other snacks that have been sold without restriction, including purchasing age.

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Some states have taken action, but more than half have not

Thirteen states ranging from Idaho to New York have banned hemp products with Delta-8 THC. Another seven allow intoxicating products but impose limitations or regulation. It is alarming from a public health viewpoint that intoxicating hemp products are legal and unregulated in about 25 states.

Federal action at last

Last year, as part of a continuing funding bill, Congress, with Trump’s signature, set this coming November 12th as the date when all hemp-based products with intoxicating levels of THC would be banned federally. Some legislators pushed for an additional one-year delay in the ban, but that effort failed.

Trump changes mind, now favors a delay in action. Did the White House Chief of Staff’s daughter marrying a hemp products CEO have anything to do with Trump’s reversal?

In June, Trump reversed himself and began asking Congress either to enact a regulatory framework allowing hemp-based products or to delay the ban. MS-NOW has pointed out this is the same month that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ daughter got married to the CEO of MC Nutraceuticals, a large wholesaler of hemp-based products, including Delta-8 THC. Could Trump’s reversal on the ban be a wedding gift? Forgive me for suggesting this possibility, but Trump’s past behavior is consistent with an inability to see himself in a conflict of interest in anything he fancies to do.

What was the political game with the delay?

At the beginning of August the quest for a delay turned into a proposed 4-week postponement of the ban ostensibly to allow legislators time to work out a hemp regulatory proposal. This ask for a small one-month delay baffled me at the time. It came an entire three months before the ban was meant to go into effect. I could understand if November 12th was drawing close after three months of hard lobbying and work constructing a compromise proposal and then a delay to the ban was asked for, but to ask so far ahead for a small one-month delay?

Clearly, some political gamesmanship and heavy hemp industry lobbying was at play. Maybe the hemp lobby thought waiting until after the mid-terms would free up some favorable votes, or maybe they thought just being able to get one positive outcome in favor of hemp, even if just a short delay, would swing momentum in hemp’s favor. Or maybe the fact that Congress was not going to be in session at the start of the ban was a factor.

One month delay slid into a funding bill and passed.

In any case, the hemp ban delay was added to a must-pass federal short-term funding extension and the hemp industry got their 4-week reprieve. As it stands the ban will now end on December 11.

Three types of hemp-based products: not gross, gross, and the big money maker to be.

So let’s try to make sense of what is at stake. There are three types of hemp-based products.

In the first, the hemp form of the Cannabis Sativa plant is used to make CBD products, such as tinctures, gummies, edibles, teas, and topical creams. The same plant is used for making rope and fabric.

Within this first, non-intoxicating CBD category, there are three sub-categories. The first subcategory of hemp products use full spectrum CBD, meaning small amounts of different types of THC are retained. Some users regard full spectrum as providing the most beneficial effect. However, full spectrum consumable products can have enough total THC to cross the federal threshold of 0.4 mg, in which case they would be banned beginning December 11th.

In the second sub-category, broad spectrum CBD has Delta-9 THC, the main kind of THC in cannabis, but the total quantity of is not enough to have any psychoactive effect.

Thirdly, CBD isolate is, as the name implies, just the cannabidiol with other compounds, including any kind of THC, removed.

The worst harm with this whole category of CBD products - it is not a huge harm but it is a harm - is that people are usually spending money on the basis of health claims which are not proven and are not regulated. The actual amount of active ingredient can vary from what is claimed on the package, which is never a good thing. There is, however, strong evidence for the usefulness of CBD in treating epilepsy, although using an unregulated product for this important purpose carries risks.

The second type of hemp-based product is of greatest concern and most in need of regulation. Those are the consumables like gummies and edibles that can have very high levels of Delta-8 or other synthetic THC components. Some makers have gone so far as to put these dangerous psychoactive products into forms and packages which look like well-known, colorful, innocent candies.

No alcohol but still a buzz in the can

THC beverages represent the third type of hemp-based product. I suspect the enormous financial potential of THC drinks sold outside of cannabis dispensaries is the biggest motivator for the hemp lobby to try to kill the hemp ban. Currently these drinks are being put on shelves in stores that sell alcohol.

Can hemp leapfrog cannabis to get federal approval and regulation?

As alcohol sales decline and cannabis consumption increases, major voices on the retail side of the alcohol industry are in favor of regulating THC drinks made from hemp so that liquor stores and restaurants can sell them. Some major brewers like Constellation (Corona, Modelo), Heineken (Lagunitas), and Coors Molson, along with some craft brewers, are already investing in hemp-based beverages. Restaurant associations are also part of the lobby to legalize intoxicating hemp drinks. This whole beverage segment would love to leapfrog the possibility of federal legalization of cannabis and reap big gains in this quickly developing market.

The big dog in the fight: THC in a can or martini glass

So, to review, in the realm of hemp first we have the fairly innocent CBD products, then the THC gummies and edibles, a segment that has been grossly tarnished by the those who make hemp products targeting a market that doesn’t have an adult understanding of psychoactive drugs and their hazards, including kids who end up hallucinating at school. Third is the big dog in the fight, the hemp-based THC beverage market.

The wild, wild west of cannabis at 90% potency vs. a regulated hemp industry? Hmmm…

The current state of legal cannabis access is a hodge-podge wild west, not regulated at all by about half of the states, with many products having excessive levels of THC. High potency THC in hemp or cannabis products is associated with increased risk of cannabis use disorder and mental illness.

A strong federal structure of cannabis regulation is needed. However, the medical and adult-use cannabis dispensary lobby is influential, bringing in substantial revenues for states where cannabis has been legalized. The cannabis industry is likely to push for a light federal regulatory hand when, and if, it is legalized on the national level. This could mean continued high THC content products in dispensaries.

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Could hemp products provide a model for federal approval and regulation of cannabis?

If hemp-based THC beverages are legalized at the federal level, it would likely be with enough regulation and moderation to serve as a model for when the eventual federal legalization of cannabis occurs, assuming it does. So I am rooting for the hemp-based THC beverage industry to succeed in getting sensible regulations in place and soon. I just wish they didn’t have to play mysterious political games to get there in such a volatile and corrupt political environment.

Thanks for reading Eating in America. Please help spread the word and share this post!

Thank you for reading. Your support for Eating In America is key for my work. I appreciate it!

References

Rittiphairoj. High-Concentration Delta-9-Tetrahydrocannabinol Cannabis Products and Mental Health Outcomes. Ann Intern Med. 2025;178(10):1429–1440. https://doi.org/10.7326/annals-24-03819

Senator Ted Budd, Republican, North Carolina on Hemp Ban Delay legislation, (August 5, 2026) (Senate).

Rossheim M, Tillett K, Loparco C, Livingston M, Soule E, Berg C. Pediatric Cannabis Poisonings, United States Hospital Emergency Departments, 2018-2023. Health Behavior Research. 06/25 2025;8 https://doi.org/10.4148/2572-1836.1301

Bayly R. Ultraprocessed Cannabis: Potency, Policy, and Public Health in America. April 14, 2026. Eating In America. https://www.eatinginamerica.co/p/ultraprocessed-cannabis-potency-policy-aeb

Marijuana Policy Project. What are state regulators doing about delta-8? Accessed September 18, 2026. https://www.mpp.org/policy/federal/delta-8/what-are-state-regulators-doing/

Fitzpatrick J. ‘Reefer Madness’: White House’s hemp reversal divides GOP — and sparks conflict of interest concerns. MS NOW. August 6, 2026. https://www.ms.now/news/white-house-hemp-reversal-susie-wiles

Sholler DJ, Schoene L, Spindle TR. Therapeutic Efficacy of Cannabidiol (CBD): A Review of the Evidence from Clinical Trials and Human Laboratory Studies. Curr Addict Rep. Sep 2020;7(3):405–412. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40429-020-00326-8

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Surgeon General nominee Dr. Nicole Saphier will testify at her Senate confirmation hearing tomorrow. If she is approved as Surgeon General it will represent another major corruption of America’s public health authority.

Eating In America previously reported that Saphier owns a supplement company. Her pricey tinctures have unquantified, ultraprocessed ingredients, and the health claims she makes for them are unsupported by science. One of them contains kava root, a supplement that is banned in the U.S. military because of its association with liver damage.

Her involvement in supplements should have immediately dismissed her from consideration as Surgeon General. Newly disclosed is that she has profited by $270,000 from these products.

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Equally disqualifying are new revelations in the financial disclosure and ethics agreement she submitted last week that she owns stock in the three major tobacco companies, Altria Group, British American Tobacco, and Philip Morris.

Equally disqualifying are the new revelations Saphier owns shares of Nestlé, a giant ultraprocessed food company, who’s ethics include vigorously marketing infant formula to women who could have breast fed but were convinced by Nestlé to use formula, even though they did not have clean water to mix the formula, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of babies and children.

Equally disqualifying are the new revelations that she is an owner of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mondelēz, Taco Bell, McDonald’s, KFC, makers of food linked to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and many other ailments.

Saphier owns stock in 239 major corporations apart from these nine who peddle toxic products. She did not have to sacrifice profit to make choices that were less abhorrent for a health leader.

With these new revelations of tobacco and sugar-based food investments, Saphier draws even closer to matching the profiles and disqualifications of the two Surgeons General nominees who were “voted off” before her.

As I point out in my May podcast/post “Survivor, Surgeon General,” Saphier shares with the first nominee, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, graduation from a medical school in the Caribbean and broadcasting at Fox News. With failed nominee #2 Casey Means, Saphier shares profiting from the supplement industry and stated ambiguity about vaccines. Newly disclosed and also thoroughly damning are the tobacco investments Saphier has made, like Means, in Altria Group and Philip Morris.

Trump’s need to insist repeatedly that his choices are right until they are accepted, despite the consequences Americans are suffering, is again reflected in his third Surgeon General nominee, stamped in the very same mold as the first two.

Unfortunately, back in her hearing in February, the Senate paid little attention to Casey Means’ involvement with tobacco, so that black stain on Saphier’s public health resume may not be a factor in her hearing tomorrow.

Thank you for reading. Your support for Eating In America is appreciated.

References

Saphier, Nicole. Surgeon General nomination, financial disclosure details. September 7, 2026. Provided by U.S. Office of Government Ethics, September 15, 2026.

Saphier, Nicole. Letter of financial disclosure and ethics agreement. September 7, 2026. https://extapps2.oge.gov/201/Presiden.nsf/PAS+Index/54788BB045EFAE6E85258E6E002DFF11/$FILE/Saphier

Bayly R. Survivor, Surgeon General, podcast/post on Eating In America. May 26, 2026. https://www.eatinginamerica.co/p/survivor-surgeon-general-who-will

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Are you one of the 300 million Americans who together spend $23 billion to eat breakfast cereal each year? Is there nostalgia in that bowl or just a pleasant-enough dose of food to push you out the door in the morning?

Marion Nestle and Lisa Sutherland’s new book, Sugar Coated, Unboxing the Hidden Forces Shaping America’s Favorite Breakfast Food, is a not-sugar-coated history of the invention and evolution of cereal in America, inspired by and told through an extraordinary collection of Kellogg cereal box reproductions dating back to 1919 and given to Nestle by Kellogg in 2010. Nestle and Sutherland, who was Vice President for Nutrition at Kellogg at the time, understood immediately that these artifacts embodied - and displayed in bright colors - a macro case study of the way processed food has been marketed in the United States in the last hundred years.

Granula, the sanctified but inedible beginning

As Nestle and Sutherland recount the history, the first granola was created in 1863 in a sanatorium in western New York. “Granula,” as it was called, was inedible unless it was soaked overnight.

Nonetheless, the idea for the whole grain breakfast food was quickly appropriated by two brothers, the Kelloggs, who added a moralistic wrapper as they served it along with the beliefs of the health and nutrition conscious Seventh-Day Adventist Church. C.W. Post, of the soon to be Postum Cereals, helped in the kitchen of the Kelloggs’ sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan where Post also, let’s not sugar coat it again, appropriated stole the idea of a healthy whole grain cereal.

Snake oil and whole grains

By the turn of the century, the shift from pulpit to profit was complete in the cereal market and soon 100 cereal makers populated Battle Creek. In 1906, health-promising snake oil sales were at their peak in America, but purchases of genuinely healthy cereal were taking off, albeit with the help of snake-oil-like health claims such as Postum Grape-Nuts’ “rebuilds the soft gray matter in your brain.”

Cereal had already been industrialized with extrusion and crushing processes that break the whole grains down into a more digestible form. Some cereal makers in Battle Creek were adding barley malt to sweeten their products, but the elder Kellogg, Dr. John Harvey, was adamantly opposed to sugar in the diet. The younger W.K. Kellogg saw great wealth in the future, however, and in 1906 added cane sugar to the new Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The road to the prominence of breakfast cereal as a highly- and ultra-processed food in our culture was paved.

The cereal industry’s manipulation of … everybody

In Sugar Coated, Nestle and Sutherland carefully lead us through formulation of cereals over time with the addition of artificial colors, vitamins, minerals, fiber, protein, artificial sweeteners, and, of course, sugar, and lots of it. The book thoroughly and frighteningly tracks the industry’s manipulation of the Food and Drug Administration for food and labeling standards, the Federal Trade Commission for commercial advertising, academia and the nutrition research community for production of the supporting science, along with the USDA and Congress for laws and policies, all to help avoid or reduce regulation and gain license to market in ways that would best promote cereal sales.

Health claims, laughable and cringeworthy

The authors by turn amused and enraged me in sorting out the confusing and contentious history of health claims on cereal boxes, from the reasonable “avoids constipation” of the Kellogg 1919 All-Bran to the icky-sticky endorsement of the America Diabetes Association on boxes of Post’s sugary cereals.

Sugar Coated is bound to be frequently cited for detailing the way the industry has doggedly pursued its marketing goals, through managing to get government regulations changed, creating self-imposed regulation to deflect government efforts to regulate, or just ignoring the rules, often paying the penalty in court while reaping the bigger benefit in sales. Other writers will undoubtedly extend the lessons of Sugar Coated to help examine and link the tactics of highly- and ultra-processed food segments and other industries which market addictive or regulated substances. (I include sugar as an addictive substance, a conclusion W.K. Kellogg himself might have intuited.)

Sugar as the essence of cereal’s rise to be a keystone of the diet of many Americans

As the name Sugar Coated implies and Nestle and Sutherland convincingly detail, sugar has long been the essential ingredient for the success of breakfast cereal, as well as one of the key battlegrounds in regulatory and court struggles. The unhealthiness of added sugar is also the reason that the behavior of the Big Four cereal makers in targeting children is unethical. Of the four giants, General Mills, Kellogg, Post, and Quaker Oats, it is no coincidence that Kellogg, now split into W.C. Kellogg for North America and Kellanova for the rest of the world, is owned by Ferraro, the Italian candy maker, and Mars, the American candy maker. Quaker Oats is also owned by a sugar-centric food maker, PepsiCo.

Candy for the breakfast of kids as a new norm

With marshmallows, chocolate, and candy-names in and on our cereal, we live in a food environment where candy is promoted for breakfast and breakfast is marketed as a sugary snack for eating throughout the day. The authors’ incense at the TV ads, cartoon characters, in-box prizes, colored cereals in unusual shapes, and other marketing tricks that drive the buying of sugar-laden cereal for children is restrained but palpable.

The idea of stop signals to warn us

Change is coming in other parts of the world and Nestle and Sutherland provide examples. The most important and potentially achievable change the authors describe would be the addition of an instantly understandable and nutritionally-sound front-of-box indication of the healthiness of the cereal or other processed food product being examined. This consumer-friendly heads up has been enacted in the form of octagonal stop-sign shaped warnings in the majority of countries in South America and has greatly reduced sugary cereal sales there. Our Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Make America Healthy Again leader, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has advocated for perhaps the strongest choice for such a warning system, red-yellow-green light icons. Of course, after reading Sugar Coated, we shouldn’t be left with any delusions about the forces the Big Four and the rest of the highly- and ultra-processed food industry are bringing to bear to fight back against RFK, Jr.’s idea.

Happy birthday, Marion Nestle!

Look at the photo and guess how old Marion Nestle is. This week she celebrated a birthday that ends with a zero.

You probably guessed 70th and would be in disbelief that it was her 80th, but it was actually Nestle’s 90th. Where does the impressive nutrition advocacy, book-producing, interview-giving, lecture-delivering, FoodPolitics.com post-writing energy come from? Good luck, but also good nutrition, Nestle says.

Happy birthday and thank you and Lisa Sutherland, for this perfect insight into the way Big Food markets, lobbies, and formulates its way onto our tables with the only consideration of healthiness being the ultimate effect on the bottom line.

In two weeks, we’ll set Nestle and Sutherland’s Sugar Coated cereal story in the context of the other choices made in the morning by Americans. It will be Breakfast in America on Eating in America. Please join me then and every week at EatingInAmerica.co.

Thank you for reading and your support of Eating in America through your subscriptions, comments, and likes.

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Height equals genetics plus nutrition plus health. George Washington was about 6’-2” tall. Trump claims to be 6’-3”, but his draft card and driver’s license said he was 6’-2”.

Average Americans were a little shorter in Washington’s time than they are now, making Washington’s height more impressive. However, average American men were a whopping 5’8”, three inches taller than the average European! Colonial Americans were largely farmers, growing and eating their own food. Apparently, they got more food and better food on the New World farm, and they got taller.

Remembering Wendell Berry

Let me pause here to remember the great American agrarian writer Wendell Berry, who died this week. He wrote a lot about society that is divorced from the farm, that is, most of us today: “The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical—in short, a victim.” That’s from the book Bringing it to the Table. Thank you, Wendell Berry.

The equation for good teeth

Back to teeth. Good teeth equals genetics plus nutrition plus health plus good dental care.

The dental situation is where Washington came up short

There was no or little added sugar in Washington’s growing up years, but also no added fluoride, no toothbrushes, and nothing similar to the professional dental care we have today.

Washington lost his last tooth while he was President. None of his various dentures ever fit well, causing him problems like being reluctant to speak in public.

I wrote recently about how Washington’s mandatory smallpox inoculation measures were possibly critical in the eventual success of the Continental Army. An incident involving the General’s teeth helped deceive the British about Washington’s ultimately successful attack on Yorktown, Virginia.

A stolen letter and a lost battle

Washington had written to his dentist in Philadelphia asking him to send tooth cleaning tools, saying that he, Washington, wouldn’t be in Philadelphia soon. The letter was intercepted by the British and unintentionally helped convince them that Washington’s plan was to stay north and attack New York City. Because of this Cornwallis received no reinforcements at Yorktown and lost the battle to Washington, leading to the end of the Revolutionary War.

The very unpleasant, unethical makeup of Washington’s dentures

Those dentures the General was trying to take care of? Not wood, but the ivory bases were so brown-stained that an observer might think so. The teeth in various of Washington’s dentures consisted of a few of his own teeth that had been removed, along with “purchased” teeth extracted from people enslaved by Washington at Mount Vernon. Cow, donkey, and horse teeth were also used, along with ivory from a hippopotamus, a walrus, and maybe an elephant. The mandibles were spring loaded to open, and the teeth were embedded in lead, tin, copper, and silver alloys.

American oral health has improved a lot since Washington’s day

The huge increase in dental health began in the 1940s as the era of the ultra-processed was getting started with the technical innovations devised for military food. Two changes in dental care happened just in time to save our teeth, somewhat, from the flood of carbonated, sugared sodas and ultra-processed foods with refined starches and added sugars which was just about to come.

Give me 100 pushups and brush for two minutes

It was the military that changed American dental habits. Badly hampered in readiness by dental issues like Trench Mouth in World War One, the military made it a firm policy that troops in World War Two would brush daily. They were provided with toothbrushes and powder or paste, supplies that many, perhaps most, could not afford before joining up. Brushing was a habit brought back home in the 1940s by many millions of troops.

The other big change was fluoridated water. Fluoridation of the water supply was first tested in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1945. In ten years, tooth decay in the city’s 30,000 school children had dropped 60%. Today over 209 million Americans receive caries protection from 17,400 fluoridated community water systems. Community water supplied populations which receive fluoridation range from an extreme low of 8.5% in Hawaii, mostly on military bases, to a low of 16% in New Jersey, to around 90% to 100% in many southern and rural states. Globally, 25 countries have fluoridated systems.

Tooth decay remains a public health issue

Despite these changes and big improvements, tooth decay, or caries, remains a public health issue because of all the pain, infections, time lost from work and school, loss of teeth, and costs. It’s the most common chronic disease in children, with half of nine-year olds having already developed caries. And for people over 65, one-quarter have severe tooth loss, meaning they have only eight or less teeth remaining. All the teeth are gone in fifteen percent of older Americans. Socioeconomic disparities and inequities continue to exist in oral health, particularly impacting poor children, but those disparities have tended to lessen as dental health has gotten better in America.

Tooth decay down 26% with fluoride in the water

Fluoridated water can reduce caries 26% in permanent teeth. This varies depending on factors like the use of fluoride toothpaste in a population or whether the water supply contains natural fluoride. Fluoride is the 13th most common element in nature and some community water systems and many private wells contain higher levels of natural fluoride than the low level added to fluoridated systems.

Fluorosis

Too much fluoride can cause fluorosis. In its mildest form, fluorosis can cause almost invisible white flecks on the teeth. Acute fluorosis comes with gastrointestinal problems. In a combination of data from 40 other studies, researchers found fluorosis to the degree of showing as spots or streaks on teeth, an esthetic concern, in 12% of people. Another study found that fluorosis is mainly diagnosed in children age five and under who might have swallowed too much fluoridated toothpaste.

Fluoride applied directly to the teeth through toothpaste or treatment at a dentist’s visit is by far the most effective method of delivering protection.

$120 billion on tooth care per year

In 2015, Americans spent $120 billion on their teeth and gums. That spending reduced productivity losses, which were still $46 billion. But fluoridation is the hero for dental return on investment. Every dollar spent on fluoridation decreased dental costs and productivity losses by $20.

From a public health standpoint, fluoridation is especially beneficial to those who can’t or don’t access regular dental preventive health services or don’t use fluoride toothpaste.

Despite the unquestionable and highly important benefits of fluoridation, community fluoridation is still an issue for many. The concern is not just fluorosis but also the potential risk to IQ.

IQ and fluoride

A recent analysis combining the results of other studies found a relationship between loss of IQ and increased level of fluoride from all sources. A big caveat of this analysis is that it did not include any direct data of the effect on IQ at the low level of fluoride added to community water systems. More research is needed around the possible effects of low levels of fluoride before the public health benefits of fluoridation are sacrificed.

In addition to fluoride in drinking water, toothpaste, or dental treatments to prevent cavities, dental sealants should be applied to the back teeth of children and young adults. Sealants can prevent 80% of cavities, and 9 out of 10 cavities are in the back teeth.

You are putting what in my mouth?

Throughout history the dental profession has promoted the use of various substances in our mouths which have been great for dental results but can be cringey when other health concerns are considered. Just drawing from the past 100 years, I am thinking of mercury amalgam fillings; BPA or Bisphenol A and a host of other toxic chemicals used in composite fillings, retainers, and sealant; Teflon for brace wires; arsenic to kill tooth roots; formaldehyde to remove the pulp in an infected baby tooth; and chloroform to dissolve the roots of teeth in a root canal operation. About the mercury and BPA-containing fillings: better than the molten lead fillings French dentists would pour as hot liquid into their patients mouths in the 1700s, right?!

And then there are the liberal x-rays, the radiation dose of which has been cut dramatically in the digital age.

Today, these toxic substances have been eliminated or greatly reduced in dental treatments. Of course, there are other materials and chemicals used in dental care outside the office. Almost all toothbrushes have nylon bristles that can shed microplastics. Dental floss is made of nylon or, much worse, Teflon, as in Glide floss. Even natural products maker Tom’s of Maine uses nylon in its floss.

Mouthwash and the possible negative effect on heart health

And then there’s mouthwash. The concern most worth considering is that anti-bacterial mouthwash wipes out beneficial bacteria in the oral microbiome. A 2023 set of papers reviewed the evidence and could not conclude if the effect of anti-bacterial mouthwashes, which can improve dental health, are harmful to overall health, mainly through killing bacteria in the saliva which help convert good nitrates from vegetables into nitric oxide in your blood. Nitric oxide is a vasodilator that relaxes your blood vessels, lowers your blood pressure, and is protective against heart disease. More research on mouthwashes is required.

Doctors and dentists: is having such separation good?

By the way, did your primary care doctor ever ask if you were seeing a dentist regularly or take a peek at your dental records? None of my doctors ever did. For dentists and dental insurers, it’s the opinion of the American Dental Association about the benefits of a treatment that most matters. The dental results come first, and the overall health perspective is not represented in our dental health choice making. The separation of dental care from other medical care in our society is probably not to our benefit. The division seems sort of strange.

The tunnel vision and the benefits of dental innovations

I don’t mean to be too harsh on the dental profession. Humans tend to look to new technologies for solutions without fully understanding the long term consequences. That tunnel vision has happened repeatedly in dentistry. Our FDA has long accepted this approach to the industrialization of our food supply, allowing all sorts of chemicals to corrupt our food without much scrutiny.

However, in contrast to what has happened with the gratuitous de-naturalization of the food environment, these dental technologies have given us much better teeth and gums, with less pain and cost and more comfort, beauty, and durability. But, yes, I asked about the amount of BPA exposure before I allowed the dentist to put sealant on my kids teeth.

Can I get a dental chair for my living room?

One dental technology cannot be quibbled with: the modern dental chair, which first appeared in 1958. For me, a dental procedure, even a cleaning, can be exhausting because of the potential for pain. Nonetheless, this year, in the middle of a long and very complicated root canal procedure, I fell asleep in the chair…while being worked on.

The “caines”

Thank goodness for the “caines.” Cocaine was a good local anesthetic for dentistry before the 20th century. I know how good it can be to numb pain locally. I once had an operation on my nose septum where the doctor used only cocaine, but plenty of it. I looked out from under the eye covering to see him pounding on my nose with a steel chisel and hammer. He asked how I was doing.

In this post:

* New evidence on the worrisome, lifelong health effects of sugar in the first 1,000 days

* American infant formula promotes obesity and many other diseases

* American formula is primarily added sugar: corn syrup is prominent and even most of the lactose is refined

* Do formula makers like corn syrup because it gets infants to drink more?

* RFK, Jr. needs to make Big Formula back down to fulfill his goal of reforming formula in any meaningful way

* The added sugar Mom eats is “secondhand sugar” for the fetus

* 2025 Dietary Guidelines: no added sugar up to age 10. Radical?

Take a folic acid supplement if you are trying to get pregnant; don’t drink, smoke, or take drugs during pregnancy; hold and love your baby and use breast milk if available. Talk to your infant a lot. These we know.

New evidence about the health effects of sugar in the first 1,000 days

With the appearance of a new study, the evidence is now very strong for another recommendation that should be on the list already but is not always expressed by an obstetrician, pediatrician, or other relied on sources of pre- or neonatal information. It should be a must-add: don’t feed your fetus, baby, infant, or toddler added sugar.

Withholding added sugar from a fetus or child still seems like a bit of a radical idea today, even as we have established the role of refined sugar as a cause of obesity, but there was a time it wasn’t a choice.

George Washington did okay without sugar

Three hundred years ago sugar was an expensive luxury for the tea cups of the rich. Few kids or adults had much opportunity to enjoy it. The neural pathways of fetuses and babies were not re-shaped by exposure to sugar, because there were very few houses with a sugar bowl on the table and none with highly-processed food in the pantry.

That changed during the course of George Washington’s lifetime. Born in 1732, our first President likely ate little sugar as a child. That deprivation didn’t stop him from growing exceptionally tall, very athletic, and into a great leader. But by the 1800s and its industrial innovations in processing, sugar had transformed into a commodity, produced cheaply in massive quantities by enslaved labor on plantations in Haiti, Cuba, Mississippi, Louisiana, Brazil, and Java. Sugar had become part of most people’s diets. Today the pleasure, acceptance, and assumption of refined sugar in the diet is engrained in parents, great-grandparents, obstetricians, pediatricians, politicians, and, unfortunately, nutritionists and public health scientists, including me, around the globe. What’s a baby to do?

The evidence brought forward by several papers in the last few years provides compelling reasons for us grownups to do more.

Here’s the clever way this evidence has come together.

War time rationing in the UK: babies who had sugar and babies who didn’t

From the wartime rationing of 1942 all the way until 1953 each person in the United Kingdom, rich or poor, received about 1 cup of sugar a week and 3 ounces of sweets. Children two and under received no ration. Sugar rationing ended throughout the UK on one day in September 1953, and families could suddenly buy as much sugar as they wanted, and they immediately bought a lot.

The UK Biobank has medical and biological data for a half-million people. A large number of these spent their first 1,000 days of development just before, just after, or right through the abrupt end of sugar rationing. Those 1,000 days from conception through the second birthday are a critical period for child development. What happens in those first 1,000 days has been tied to obesity, cardiovascular disease, asthma, mental health, diabetes, and cancer.

A “natural experiment”

The way the Biobank data overlapped with the end of sugar rationing allowed our sugar researchers what is called a natural experiment, a comparison of two groups, one of which was exposed to a real life condition, in this case sugar rationing, and other not exposed.

Using the Biobank in this way was such a good idea that several groups did it, each analyzing a group of 60,000 to 65,000 people, the ones that bracketed the end of sugar rationing.

Evidence of disease from the data of people born as sugar rationing ended

First, Gracner and team found that those who spent their first 1,000 days with restricted sugar had better outcomes later in life for type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.

Two more teams followed with a look at the data for cardiovascular outcomes, finding that heart failure, cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, atrial fibrillation, and stroke were all a greater risk for those whose sugar consumption had not been restricted in their first 1,000 days.

Cancer and sugar in the first 1,000 days

Next, researchers Chen Zhu and Weilong Zhang went back to the same Biobank data and asked if restricting sugar in the first 1,000 days could reduce the risk of cancer? They found that, yes indeed, restricting sugar from womb to 2 years old is very protective. The adults who started life before sugar rationing ended had a reduced chance of cancer for each cancer they looked at: 69% for liver, 40% for rectum, 41% for lung, 52% for prostate, and 36% less chance of breast cancer.

What can explain these good results? The authors found that five decades after birth, sugar-restricted people ate less sugar and less food, and their diets were healthier and more diverse. They also had reduced levels of chronic inflammation. They also found that the telomeres of these folks had aged 2.2 years less than the telomeres of the people who came on board life after sugar rationing stopped.

Longer chromosome “shoelaces” with less sugar

What are telomeres you might ask?

Telomeres are the bits at the ends of chromosomes that protect the genetic data when a cell divides. They’re like the plastic tips of a shoelace. The telomeres get shorter every time a cell divides. Eventually the telomere gets too short and the cell dies. Getting an extra 2.2 years of telomere life is a good thing, sort of like when you buy a tire that’s rated for an extra 10,000 miles. Except that tires can be replaced, and some cells, like brain cells, once they’re gone, they’re gone.

So, to recap, Zhu and Zhang found that restricting sugar during pregnancy up to the second birthday caused, and they use the word “cause”, a reduction in cancer, chronic inflammation, and cellular aging as those children turn into adults.

This, combined with reductions in diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, makes a convincing case for adding a recommendation to restrict, if not eliminate, sugar exposure in the first 1,000 days.

Lots of recommendations not to feed added sugar before age two

But wait, the American Heart Association recommended no added sugar for children under two in 2016, ten years ago! And the American Academy of Pediatrics followed suit in 2019! And the Dietary Guidelines for Americans said this in 2020!

Whew! I guess new moms and dads already know what to do when it comes to sugar.

Unfortunately, the FDA does not regulate the carbohydrate content of baby formula or require amounts or types of added sugars to be stated on the label. This is not the case in other parts of civilization or for adult food in America. If knowing added sugar content is helpful for adult nutritional health, surely it’s helpful to make sure infants are getting the best nutrition?

Why the FDA needs to act

The FDA’s lack of ingredient control and labeling matters a great deal. According to a study published last year, of the 73 infant formula products available in the U.S. across three major brands (Similac, Enfamil, and Gerber/Nestlé), one smaller brand, and some store brands, only a few have naturally occurring lactose as their primary carbohydrate. Lactose is a sugar designed by evolution for mammals at an early stage of life. Almost all of the carbohydrate in human milk is lactose. Natural lactose is bound to fats and proteins in the mother’s milk and is digested somewhat slowly.

Added refined lactose is an added sugar and acts like it

A little more than half the formula products in the U.S. use added lactose which is refined. Refined lactose is like other refined sugars and isn’t bound to the fat and protein in the formula. It absorbs into the baby’s blood fast, spiking blood sugar and then insulin in response. And lots of formula products use other refined sugars apart from lactose, like glucose, maltose, or sucrose, all with refined lactose’s fast absorption and insulin response.

American formula is primarily added sugar

With no FDA requirements to use primarily natural lactose and to provide details of the carbohydrate ingredients, American parents and caregivers have no way to know that they are usually giving their babies primarily refined sugar and not natural lactose. I could not tell the proportion of natural to refined lactose from reading any of the formula containers I checked.

The Wirecutter doesn’t get it

Parents are not getting the info. In June, the Wirecutter section in the New York Times rated the six best infant formulas on the market in the U.S., in their opinion. They claim to have read 20 scientific articles in their research, but five of the six papers they cited were published nine or more years ago. Their seven expert interviews were mostly from 2022 or before, and more than half were with formula makers, none of whose formula sales websites said anything about natural lactose versus refined.

In essence, The Wirecutter reported that the FDA had baby needs covered, and all U.S. sold formulas were good. Wirecutter completely missed both that there is an important difference between natural lactose and refined and that FDA-approved formulas contribute to later obesity, and are not adequate for normal growth as The Wirecutter claims, unless obesogenic is the new normal.

U.S. baby formula is obesogenic: it promotes obesity

A whole lot of education needs to happen, even for New York Times writers.

It’s good to remember that parents might use formula early in their baby’s life for reasons including low breast milk production, medical issues, lack of paid family leave, a need to get back to earning, or their baby is adopted.

Natural lactose is more costly than refined lactose, but if the potential health differences between natural and refined lactose were publicized, I would expect there would be a larger market for natural. If the FDA were to up-regulate the natural lactose content of formula, some consideration would be needed so that access for families with less income would not be limited.

Corn syrup is a prominent ingredient in formula

Natural lactose is the most costly carbohydrate to meet the requirements of formula. Corn syrup, corn syrup solids, and other refined sugars are widely used, replacing some or all of the lactose. These sugars are not only cheaper than both refined and natural lactose, they are sweeter. Babies on formula tend to drink more than babies who are breastfeeding. The reward of sweetness increases consumption of a food in adults and might be true in babies. Formula makers are ultraprocessed food makers, and ultraprocessed food makers generally are happy to sell more product by increasing consumption.

Does corn syrup sell more formula?

I am perhaps jaded by the global formula behemoth Nestlé’s completely unethical, infanticidal marketing that contributed to hundreds of thousands of child deaths over decades for children who were receiving formula when they should have been breastfed. To me, the level of evil of Nestlé in this marketing of formula was considerably worse than that of Perdue Pharmaceuticals in marketing deadly opioids. It was, after all, babies dying from drinking formula made with unclean water when breast milk was available.

So forgive me for wondering if adding cheap, very sweet sugars instead of lactose is seen as both a cost-saving and a revenue-increasing recipe by the American formula makers, one of whom is Nestlé, owner of the Gerber label.

Operation Stork Speed: putting on the brakes?

Soon after RFK, Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services, the FDA announced Operation Stork Speed, an effort to review infant formula nutrients for the first time since 1998, and to increase testing for contaminated formula. The Request For Information period closed a year ago, but there has been no announcement yet of any conclusions or actions to improve the nutrition of formula.

There is a clear pattern of delays in major action in Trump’s HHS as the ultraprocessed food industry pulls strings to protect its interests. This delay in updating formula regulation cannot be for a lack of clear evidence of ways to improve formula. Forbidding corn syrup and similar sugars, like the Europeans do, would be a first step, along with labeling that details the amount and types of added sugars. These are low hanging fruit.

Is Big Formula involved in a delay of the first phase of re-regulation of U.S. formula?

A recent FDA press release says there will be a phased approach to nutrient review based on available evidence, but perhaps it neglected to say that enacting a plan might depend on the degree of resistance from the Big Formula lobby. In fact, while the release failed to announce progress on the review of nutrient content and labeling, it played up a focus on potential formula contaminants, an area in which the formula industry is cooperative.

European formula imported for quality

There was a shortage of formula in America in 2022 as bacterial infections caused factory closings for Similac and other Abbott brands making up 40% of the U.S. supply. To help ease the crisis, individuals were allowed to import European formula for personal use. Today, some people who can afford it, import European formula because it is organic or because it forbids corn syrup as an ingredient.

Lots of sources for added sugar in the first 1,000 days

But it is not just formula that can be a source of added sugar in the first 1,000 days. Snacks, baked goods, fruit-concentrates, flavored yogurt, fruit-flavored beverages, sweetened milk, and breakfast cereals are all sources of added sugars.

Mom’s added sugar is “secondhand sugar” for the fetus

During gestation, sugars the mother consumes are available to the fetus through the placenta and have a “secondhand sugar effect.” The 1,000 day sugar-rationing studies found that sugar levels delivered in utero had a role similar to post-natal sugar consumption.

It has been 10 years since the American Heart Association told us no added sugar should be given in the first two years after birth, and six years since the Dietary Guidelines followed suit.

2025 Dietary Guidelines: no added sugar up to age 10. Radical?

And the new 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend, rather radically, no added sugar up to age 10. Now it is time for the government to cut their teeth and start biting down on those recommendations.

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References

Zhu C, Zhang W. Early-life sugar restriction causally reduces adult cancer incidence and slows biological aging. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2026;123(32):e2610287123. doi:https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.2610287123

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The RFK, Jr. press conference two weeks ago was billed as a “celebration…of landmark actions…The event will highlight…Trump…accomplishments…and announce two major new food policy actions.”

This press event billed as announcing major food policy wins contained nothing impressive. One announcement was for a very partial measure to address the Generally Recognized As Safe loophole, and the other item was a non-announcement saying, in effect, that the much anticipated definition of ultra-processed food is still being kept a secret.

Big Food has a big foot in the door of the White House

As I have reported, Big Food has been working hard in Washington to minimize the damage that could come from the regulation of highly- and ultra-processed food, or HUPF. HUPF started out as a top issue of RFK, Jr.’s Make America Health Again agenda, with the initial MAHA Assessment report in May of 2025 mentioning ultra-processed more than 40 times. However, the MAHA Strategy Report, released the following September, mentioned ultra-processed only once, saying it needed to be defined in order to be researched. The squashing of discussion of HUPF was a result of pressure from the HUPF manufacturers. Now, almost a year after the MAHA Strategy Report, CEOs and industry associations have been lobbying the administration to delay the release of the definition that has been presented to the White House.

The disappearing HUPF definition

In fact, it seems as if RFK, Jr. was planning to release the definition two weeks ago, but, presumably, last minute pressure from the food industry caused him to announce only that the proposed definition was still being reviewed.

The proposed Generally Recognized As Safe loophole rule: Please don’t call this a win.

It looks like another loss for consumers, in favor of industry. However, compared to the non-news with the HUPF definition, slightly more progress was announced by Kennedy on the Generally Recognized As Safe loophole that has allowed an estimated one thousand substances to be introduced into the food supply without notice to the FDA. One thousand is the non-profit NRDC’s rough estimate, but the real number may be much higher. No one knows.

Further, the manufacturers are self-certifying these substances as safe for consumption, and the FDA and the public do not know how reliable that self-certification is.

If a new FDA rule is activated, manufacturers will still be able to self-certify safety and introduce the substances into the food supply. They will have to notify the FDA of both new and previously introduced substances.

It’s not clear when or whether the food or additive will need to be pulled from the market if the FDA takes objection to the manufacturer-funded safety certification. It is clear from decades of FDA underfunding and inaction and Trump’s recent deep cuts in FDA personnel, that, when inundated with hundreds, perhaps thousands of notifications of new and previously added substances, the FDA will have a very difficult, perhaps almost impossible, time working through the backlog of substances to pick the most worrisome to review. No new funding has been promised in conjunction with Kennedy’s announcement.

A database of food substances/chemicals/additives will be public

At least the newly revealed food substances will be added to a public database where scrutiny from outside scientists could potentially shed light on the riskiest additives that the public is consuming or the most questionable safety self-certifications.

The gaping GRAS loophole

So, in reality, the GRAS loophole is not closing. As Melanie Banesh of EWG, the Environmental Working Group, has put it, mandatory notification is a “first step” in GRAS reform, which also needs the creation of scientific standards and review by the FDA before chemicals are introduced to our food, along with review of the substances that have already been introduced under GRAS. As Benesh puts it: “Americans deserve a system where food safety decisions are made by independent experts at the FDA – not by the companies that profit from selling these chemicals.”

Will Big Food or consumers benefit from the delayed HUPF definition?

And as for the further delayed HUPF definition, when it is released, I would not be surprised if it is designed to be more helpful to the HUPF manufacturers than to those who would regulate or study HUPF.

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Every food substance created in the last two hundred years is HUPF

In reality, every food, food-like substance, or additive created since the mid-1800s – the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution – is highly-or ultra-processed, or HUPF. It is only with the technology of the last two hundred years that we have been able to create new foods, and they are, by virtue of that technology, at least highly- if not ultra-processed. If it didn’t need technology and it was good to eat, it had already been introduced as a food hundreds of years ago.

This HUPF definition even applies to ingredients like refined sugar and flour, which have been around since before the Industrial Revolution but only became a problem when industrial technology made them cheap, plentiful, and consumed in unhealthy quantities!

A broad definition of HUPF is not sufficient for policy making. HUPF is too complex.

The way HUPF has been defined in the last twenty years, initially by Carlos Monteiro or in my own definition, is too broad as a category to make policy and conduct new, helpful research. HUPF comes in many subcategories based on its ingredients, and these subcategories may be related to very different health outcomes such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, gut biome disruption, respiratory disease, and decreased mental health, for examples.

All types of HUPF are not created equal, and I predict the coming industry-influenced definition from the American government will play upon this complexity to delay research and regulation. It may be up to the states, national governments elsewhere, and the academic community to provide meaningful progress on regulation of different types of HUPF.

For my own, time- and technology-based definition of HUPF, see Refining a Highly-Refined Food Definition.

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There’s a big food story from the Trump administration this week. It goes right back to the Eating on Board story from a few weeks ago here on Eating In America. I did a podcast and post in conjunction with the Tall Ships that sailed the East Coast in honor of America’s 250th birthday. We talked then about the role of food in keeping up the morale of sailors, and that very topic has exploded with the retreat of the USS Lincoln from the Iran War theater due to the political cost of further deployment while the ship is struggling to feed its troops.

Today, the exposure of our sailors and Marines at sea in the Middle East to inadequate food and deteriorating morale is risky for them and the forces they support in an ill-conceived, unauthorized, unpopular war that is bleeding our resources and endangering our troops, nation, the world, and innocent civilians in many countries without a clear, believable goal.

Trump’s war in the Middle East is a disaster. There are tens of thousands of sailors and Marines at sea who are, or could be, in harm’s way. Several sailors on the Lincoln have attempted suicide. The Navy knows how to feed them in the best possible manner for deployment at sea, but the system is failing these troops.

Weight-loss is not meant as an enticement to enlist

Diet profiteers are everywhere in our society, but weight-loss is not meant to be a benefit of enlistment. It’s a cruel joke, but I wouldn’t put it past Trump to say it in public, given his complete public dismissal of the problems brought to light on the USS Abraham Lincoln and the USS Tripoli. There are multiple reports of severe weight loss and consequent reduction of physical and mental fitness among sailors and Marines aboard vessels deployed to the Middle East. These troops are not being served enough food, and the food they are being served is often not appetizing, but they are expected to do their jobs and be ready for attack in an ongoing war.

Seven tons of food a day

I visited the USS Intrepid, a huge floating museum, in New York City two weeks ago. The aircraft carrier, which saw action in World War II and the Vietnam War, was crewed by up to 3,400 troops. The men on the Intrepid required seven tons of food each day. That’s 14,000 pounds of food.

Navies have known for millennia the importance of food for morale and to keep up health, both physical and mental. Food planning has always been fundamental. Even on voyages of Greek mythology, food shortages were deadly, as we’re reminded in several scenes of the new movie re-telling of the Odyssey.

Napoleon Bonaparte invented the processing of canning fruits and vegetables for his sailors. Similarly, his nephew, Napoleon III invented margarine to replace butter, which could only last one week at sea.

The armed services know exactly what they are doing with food

The U.S. military devotes significant resources to optimizing the food and nutrition provided to its troops. The Food Utilization and Energy Laboratory (FUEL) provides the Navy with hard science on warfighter nutrition for high-stress environments, energy utilization, and performance optimization. During World War II the Natick Soldier Systems Center outside Boston developed many ultra-processed foods with the goal of keeping troops fed in heat, cold, and stressful conditions.

I visited the Natick Soldier Systems Center a few years back to investigate research being done there to optimize the gut microbiome for combat performance. It is a little ironic that the very lab that invented foods that could disrupt the gut microbiome was now inventing foods to optimize that biome. But it was all being done with the goal of helping our fighting forces survive combat

.So the Navy knows exactly what and how much food stuffs to put on board every vessel from an aircraft carrier to a submarine and how that food can best be prepared for purposes of morale, physical health, strength, and energy. They know how much fresh food they can leave port with and how much must be canned, frozen, dehydrated, or dry. What a military food scientist cannot know is the exact nature of the bad conditions that will occur in a war, and conditions have gotten bad in the war on Iran.

Persian Gulf Navy supply hub was a predictable Iranian target

The Iranians destroyed the functionality of the U.S. supply hub on the island of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, directly across from Iran. Trump should have taken into account, and maybe he did, that this was a vulnerable and likely target for Iran’s missiles. After the depot’s destruction early in the war, the logistics and supply hub had to be moved 2,200 miles away to Diego Garcia in the Pacific. Replenishment of food, weapons, and other supplies became a massive problem, which likely played a large part in the morale crises on board the Lincoln and the Tripoli.

Morale on board reflective of events and attitudes at home?

Also, I suspect – there is little hard data, although some investigators like NPR have made a good case – that decisions in the White House and Pentagon, an upheaval of culture in the military with a downgrading of minorities and women in promotions, political firings, dissatisfaction of the American public, uncertainty about the Iranian war goals, and constant shifting in strategy have been factors in the downward direction of morale. Remember, the Commander in Chief of our armed forces has called troops who gave their lives fighting for America in World War II “suckers” and “losers.”

What is certain is that the chef in charge on a navy vessel is likely to be highly experienced, extremely well-organized, very creative, and absolutely dedicated to his or her role in boosting the morale of the troops eating his or her food.

A sailor testifies to the importance of food on board ship

Here is a former enlisted seaman, who said his name is “Joe,” describing the role of a sailor’s meals at sea. I recorded him as he was about to board the USS Intrepid aircraft carrier:

Your morale is directly tied to food. I was on a small ship, a destroyer, DDG-64 [the USS Carney], so we had usually a bit of a better quality of life for food ‘cause our cooks weren’t making meals for 5,000 people. They had to do 300. So our food was a little bit better quality. We knew our cooks. We talked to them every day, gave them hell when they messed something up. When the food was good, it was great. It made us a lot happier. It was also a great way of telling what day of the week it was. Tuesday is tacos, burger Wednesdays, pizza Fridays, Sunday was brunch. And if you forget everything else out there, as soon as you get burgers for lunch, you know, okay it’s Wednesday. That’s what’s going on now.

Last week Retired Chief Petty Officer Thomas Nutzmann described being at sea in the Navy Times: “There’s no Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, it’s just a day…You can only do so much to keep morale up before you hit a stalemate … and that’s where the deterioration is.”

Four million meals in nine months at sea

Since the USS Abraham Lincoln was deployed in November, the seven galleys on board have served about 4 million meals. That’s a small miracle in itself, but with troops going so hungry they are losing 20 to 30 pounds on a deployment that is not yet over, that’s a major system failure.

Let them eat steak and lobsters, like they deserve

It seems unprecedented and an indicator of how arbitrary and unpopular the Iran War is, but the Lincoln is now sailing home from the Middle East, on the strong winds of public outrage and media attention. I hope at some point before they get to port, the Lincoln will be able to get a few thousand ribeyes on board and just as many lobsters to give the sailors and Marines the Navy’s traditional steak and lobster dinner to thank them for their extended service.

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