Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Obesity explained: Ultra-processed foods –> Calories –> Weight Gain
Kevin Hall at NIH has done a controlled diet study demonstrating that people who consume ultra-processed foods eat more calories—500 more a day (!)—and, therefore, gain weight.
Carlos Monteiro at the University of São Paulo and his colleagues explain how to identify ultra-processed foods.
They also demonstrate that ultra-processed foods comprise nearly 60 percent of calorie intake.
No surprise. Calories matter, as Mal Nesheim and I explained in our book Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics (and thanks Kevin for confirming what we wrote in that book).
The clear conclusions of this study have elicited a lot of attention. Here’s my favorite from Francis Collins, the head of NIH and Kevin Hall’s boss, who also did a blog post:
Examples of media accounts (there were lots more)
- New York Times (this comes with pictures of the two different diets)
- Consumer Reports
- Mother Jones
- Medical News Today
- NPR
- Center for Science in the Public Interest
