The USDA requires retailers who accept SNAP benefits to stock a few fruits and vegetables.  Formerly, USDA required retailers to provide three varieties of food in each of four categories—dairy, protein, grain, and fruits and vegetables.  It allowed stores to meet these requirements by providing a few tired-looking produce items, such as the ones shown here from a Walgreen drugstore.

USDA proposes to expand the number from 3 to 7.

This is confusing.  I thought the USDA did this in 2016: Enhancing Retailer Standards in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) Clarification of Proposed Rule and Extension of Comment Period.

OK.  Whatever.  Let’s start with the press release, because I always enjoy USDA rhetoric: Secretary Rollins Strengthens SNAP Retailer Stocking Requirements to Make America Healthy Again.

Right now, the bar for stocking food as a SNAP retailer is far too low, allowing people to game the system and leaving vulnerable Americans without healthy food options. These common-sense changes are designed to minimize benefit trafficking and skimming, among other fraudulent activities, while making more nutritious foods available to families who rely on the program….USDA is actively reorienting SNAP towards better nutrition and emphasizing whole, healthy food for program participants. This includes approving 12 states to exclude certain unhealthy foods from purchase with SNAP benefits.

If you want the details, check the Proposed Rule – Updated Staple Food Stocking Standards for Retailers in SNAP. 

This offers complicated explanations of each food category: “The Department is proposing to subdivide protein into the following seven groupings of varieties:

• Perishable meat, poultry, or fish, including fresh or frozen versions for each different kind of animal;
• Shelf-stable meat, poultry, or fish for each different kind of animal;
• Eggs;
• Nuts/seeds;
• Raw beans, peas, or lentils, each of which would count as a distinct protein variety;
• Cooked (e.g., canned) beans,
• Peas, or lentils and multi-ingredient products with beans, peas, or lentils as the main ingredient; and
• Tofu/tempeh, together, would be a distinct variety from all other types of proteins and any other pea product as the main ingredient.”

At first glance, this looks like a step in the right direction.  It will require stores that accept SNAP benefits to offer a greater variety of healhy food options.

This is a no-brainer for Walmart or any other large grocery store.  They already do this.

Therefore, this rule has to be understood as being aimed at bodegas as well as at Dollar stores located in areas where no other retail foods are readily available.

That is why this proposal is considered a ‘mixed bag’ for both retailers and shoppers.

Such stores, widely frequented by SNAP recipients whose payments are likely to constitute significant percentages of sales, will have a hard time meeting these requ.  They already had trouble meeting the existing requirements.

This proposal does not seem to be accompanied by incentives to SNAP recipients to buy fruits and vegetables.

As detailed in an issue brief by Healthy Eating Research, The Current State of Knowledge on SNAP Restrictions and Disincentives, incentives would help.  Otherwise, the rising cost of fruits and vegetables can seem prohibitive.

The proposal is open for comment—by November 24.  Here’s how.

The Food and Nutrition Service (FNS), USDA, invites interested persons to submit comments on this proposed rule. Comments may be submitted by one of the following methods:

• Federal e-Rulemaking Portal: Go to regulations.gov. Preferred method; follow the online instructions for submitting comments on docket FNS-2025-0018 or enter “RIN 0584-AF12” and click the “Search” button. Follow the instructions at this website.
• Mail: Comments should be addressed to SNAP Retailer Policy Division, Food and Nutrition Service, USDA, 1320 Braddock Place, Alexandria, Virginia 22314.

When I saw this article in the Journal of Nutrition, my first question was, “Who paid for it?”

The article: Yogurt and Reduced Risk of Type 2 Diabetes: Exploring the Food and Drug Administration Qualified Health Claim and Potential Implications for Improving Public Health. Freitas, Miguel et al. The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 155, Issue 8, 2475 – 2484

The premise: “As yogurt is a component of the underconsumed dairy food group within the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, communication on the relationship between yogurt and T2D risk can help encourage the public to increase intake of yogurt and, with it, nutrients of public health concern such as calcium.”

The discussion: the article summarizes a symposium about the FDA’s approval of a qualified health claim for yogurt and type 2 diabetes.

Comment: Danone, of course, makes Dannon yogurt and of course views it as underconsumed.  The company petitioned the FDA to allow these claims on yogurt products:

“Eating yogurt regularly may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. FDA has concluded there is limited information supporting this claim.”
“Eating yogurt regularly may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes according to limited scientific evidence.”

Eating yogurt regularly, at least 2 cups (3 servings) per week, may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. FDA has concluded that there is limited information supporting this claim.
Eating yogurt regularly, at least 2 cups (3 servings) per week, may reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes according to limited  scientific evidence.”

Danone pretty much got what it wanted.

To understand why I find qualified health claims nutritionally hilarious, I must point out that “may reduce the risk” also means “may not reduce the risk.”

As I endlessly repeat, health claims are not about health; they are about marketing.

Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall.  Food Intelligence: The Science of how Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us.  Avery, 2025. ~340 pages

This is the long-awaited manifesto from the journalist Julia Belluz and scientist Kevin Hall.

As the press release puts it,  the book

digs deep into the fundamental, often overlooked, and always enthralling science of nutrition (the chemicals and energy we get from food) and metabolism (how our bodies use food)—covering what we know and the history of how we came to know it, up to the frontiers of research into the invisible forces that really shape our eating habits. The result is a sprawling tour of centuries of science into the wonders of food and the marvelous ways our bodies use it, for better and worse health.

As you can see, I wrote a blurb for the book (they edited it slightly).

If you want to understand how nutrition became so contentious and why we are still arguing about whether it’s better to eat more or less fat, carbohydrate, protein, or vitamins, you must read Food Intelligence. Well written, historically accurate, and scientifically rigorous, this book brings you up to the moment on contemporary dietary issues. 

Here are two excerpts, the first from a discussion of one of Kevin Hall’s studies comparing high fat to high carbohydrate diets:

[Kevin] predicted that the body would select fuels for metabolism in a way that caused body fat loss to vary only a little, regardless of the proportion of carbs or fat a person was eating.  Cutting carbs from a balanced diet caused the body to shift toward burning fewer carbs and more fat after several days.  But surprisingly, reducing dietary fat by the same number of calories didn’t seem to change the mixture of carbohydrate and fat the body burned.  The net result was that both diets led to similar body fat losses, but with a slight difference that contradicted the popular claims of low-carb acolytes like Atkins.  The reduced-fat diet, Kevin’s model predicted, led to a little more body fat loss compared to the reduced-carb diet.

Maybe a calorie wasn’t exactly a calorie, Kevin told his audience.  But the difference was in the opposite direction from the one claimed by the low-carb diet camp. P. 70

And here is one about why it’s useful to eat a variety of foods:

Food combinations matter—a complexity we’re only beginning to unravel.  Pairing foods rich in plant-based iron with foods rich in vitamin C increases the body’s ability to absorb the iron, while drinking alcohol with a meal hampers nutrient absorption.  Too many glasses of wine, and the ability to absorb vitamins and minerals, such as thiamine, vitamin B12, folate, and zinc, drops off.  pp 221-222

So many readers have sent me notices about California’s Senate having unanimously passed a bill banning ultra-processed foods from schools—and defining what they are—that I just have to write about it.

The bill is here.  The legislative analysis is here.

Two things about this bill are noteworthy.

I.  The bill defines ultra-processed foods. 

An ultra-processed food:

Contains one or more of the following

• Surface-active agents
• Stabilizers and thickeners
• Propellents, aerating agents and gases
• Colors and coloring adjuncts
• Emulsifiers and emulsifier salts
• Flavoring agents and adjuvants
• Non-nutritive sweeteners [D-sorbitol, erythritol, hydrogenated starch hydrolysates, sucralose, isomal, lactitol, luo han fruit concentrate, maltitol, steviol glycosides, thaumatin, xylitol)

And contains one or more of:

• Saturated fat at 10% or more of calories
• A ratio of mg sodium to calories of more than 1:1
• Sugars at 10% or more of calories

II.  The bill summarizes existing California laws related to school food.  These:

• Ban foods containing brominated vegetable oil, potassium bromate, propylparaben, red dye no. 3.
• Provide free breakfasts and lunches to all students.
• Restrict foods sold outside the schools meals to those that are reasonably healthy.
• Limit fat, saturated fat, sugar, sodium, and calories in competitive foods.
• Restrict competitive beverages to drinks to those that are reasonably healthy
• Prohibit several synthetic color additives.

Comment: The bill has yet to be signed by the governor.  I hope he does.

Press accounts

• Yahoo News
• The Guardian (I’m quoted)
• Politico
• Eat Real

According to the Wall Street Journal (sent to me by Lindsey Smith Taillie, who is quoted in the story), the USDA will no longer be collecting data on food insecurity after this year.

“This nonstatutory report became overly politicized and upon subsequent review, was unnecessary to carry out the work of the Department,” USDA spokesman Alec Varsamis said.

He added that the 2024 report will be released on Oct. 22, but the 2025 report has been discontinued.

I then received USDA’s official notice.

Costly and politicized, yes.  But redundant and fear-mongering?  Hardly.

It’s easy to understand this kind of rhetoric.

The last report, Household Food Security in the United States in 2023, published this extremely inconvenient finding.

It’s pretty hard to justify cutting food assistance funding when food insecurity is rising to levels like those in the 2008 recession.

Cuts and changes to SNAP are leaving a lot up to states, which will have a hard time with it.

If you live in an Orwellian universe, you can use not measuring to pretend that food insecurity does not exist and certainly that it is not increasing as a result of your policies.

It took a long time for the anti-hunger community to achieve federal documentation of this enormous social problem.  I suppose we will now have to go back to the old days of local anti-hunger reports.  See my comments (with Sally Guttmacher) on state hunger reports.

Truly, we are living in Orwellian times.  May we find our way out of them soon.

It breaks my heart to learn of the death of the great cookbook author and food politics writer, Marian Burros.

She was immensely important to me and to my work.

Marion Nestle and Marian Burros at NYU, 2018

Her obituary in the New York Times appeared on Saturday; I was interviewed for it some years ago and am quoted:

Marian was hugely ahead of her time in writing about the importance of food choices that not only improve health but also are sustainable and protect the environment…She was writing about the politics of food long before anyone dreamed that a food movement might exist.”

So true.  I first met her in the late 1980s when I was in DC working for Health and Human Services as managing editor of the Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health.  Marian was writing for the Washington Post and interviewed me about the report a couple of times.  Soon after, she moved to the New York Times and I moved to NYU.

In 1991, when the USDA withdrew the long-researched, about-to-be-published Eating Right Pyramid, ostensibly because it had not been tested on low-income women and children, I was contacted by a USDA staff person with documents proving that the real reason was pressure from meat producers who did not like the position of meat at the top of the pyramid.  As I tell in detail in my book, Food Politics, a USDA Deep Throat asked if I could get those documents to the press.

I called Marian Burros and asked if she’d be interested.  She was.

Her first of many articles on the pyramid scandal: Are cattlemen now guarding the henhouse? (it quotes me).

She worked on that story for a year, eventually digging out enough leaked information that she could piece together what the USDA was going to do—a bowl!

Her article so embarrassed the USDA that it had to admit the pyramid was a better option, and finally issued it.

In 1996, my NYU Department created undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs in Food Studies.  Clark Wolf, a food consultant who was advising us, told Marian Burros about the programs.

As soon as we had New York State approval for the programs, she wrote about them: A New View on Training Food Experts,

We had prospective students in our office that very afternoon, holding copies of the clipping, and saying they’d waited all their lives for this program.  Thanks to that publicity, even though this was mid-summer, we had a full class that fall.

And here we all were, celebrating the Department’s new teaching kitchen.

Three Marions—Nestle, Cunningham, and Burros (with an a)—and Clark Wolf at NYU’s newly renovated teaching kitchen in 1996.

She was one tough reporter.  She asked hard questions and insisted on answers.  She knew the food politics scene better than anyone.

I was sorry when she retired from the Times.  It seemed like a great loss.

It is a great loss.

Corporate Climate Resposibility Monitor has published its 2025 report: Food and Agriculture Sector Deep Dive, which looks at measures of protection against climate change.  It doesn’t find much.

It does find:

• Agrifood companies present measures that are unlikely to lead to structural, deep emission reductions in the sector.
• Agrifood companies’ emission reduction targets are currently undermined by the undefined role for land-based carbon removals.
• Standard setters need to anchor the need for deep and structural emission reductions in their voluntary standards and guidelines, guided by key transitions for the sector, and need to call for separate targets for emission reduction and removal.

Overall,

Not much green in this chart.

The report goes into detail for each of the companies it’s tracking.

Not much good news here.  No surprise.  Reducing and cleaning up emissions costs money.

I learned about this report from Ag Funder News: Danone and Nestlé hit back after new report accuses Big Food of ‘corporate greenwashing.’

According to the report, penned by nonprofits NewClimate Institute and Carbon Market Watch, “This focus on CDR [carbon dioxide removal] distracts from their lack of commitments to deep, structural emission reductions, especially regarding methane.

“While the draft GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Guidance recommends setting separate targets for emissions reductions and removals, the current SBTi FLAG guidance appears to allow companies to count removals toward their reduction targets. Danone, Nestlé and PepsiCo seem to be taking this approach.”

It adds: “Companies are exploiting loopholes in voluntary standards like SBTi FLAG and the GHG Protocol, which allow them to blend removals with reductions in a single figure, masking a lack of real mitigation.”

Protein is very much on the food agenda these days despite evidence that hardly anyone needs more of it than they are already getting.  This has led to at least two trends.

I.  Nutritional hilarity. 

Here’s my current favorite example (you can’t make this stuff up).

II.  Eat more meat!

The Institute for Food Technology says Hunger for Protein Fuels Meat Mania.

Meat and poultry purchases and consumption have reached an all-time high thanks to a dramatic drop in those trying to avoid meat (from 37% in 2022 to 22% in 2025) coupled with consumers’ ongoing interest in adding protein to their diets, according to new research from FMI, The Food Industry Association. Datassential reports that protein is now the most sought-after healthy descriptor on restaurant menus.

The protein craze raises a couple of important questions.  The meat industry wants you to eat more meat.  Should you?

I.   Do protein requirements need to be increased?

A review of protein requirements says 

Across populations, the findings reported for protein and indispensable amino acid requirements in our review both reflect and depart from the current DRIs. Additionally, studies in our review reported higher protein requirements for children and pregnant individuals than current DRIs…Notably, we found sparse literature on indispensable amino acid requirements across populations; therefore, consistency of these findings is unknown.

The answer: probably not.  Most people are already consuming twice recommended amounts.

II. Is eating too much protein harmful?

A review of the literature—The harms of high protein intake: conjectured, postulated, claimed, and presumed, but shown?—finds no harm from eating excessive amounts of protein.

Results from some observational studies have shown associations of high(er) protein intakes with a variety of negative health outcomes. However, we know of no compelling evidence that, in otherwise healthy humans, there is an upper level of protein intake where the conjectured harms of HP intake have been demonstrated.