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Duke’s Erik Finkelstein – Public health can’t stop making the same nutrition mistake

public health can't stop making the same nutrition mistake

In the world of nutrition, few words are more contentious than healthy. Experts and influencers alike are perpetually warring over whether fats are dangerous for the heart, whether carbs are good or bad for your waistline, and how much protein a person truly needs. But if identifying healthy food is not always straightforward, actually eating it is an even more monumental feat.

As a reporter covering food and nutrition, I know to limit my salt and sugar consumption. But I still struggle to do it. The short-term euphoria from snacking on Double Stuf Oreos is hard to forgo in favor of the long-term benefit of losing a few pounds. Surveys show that Americans want to eat healthier, but the fact that more than 70 percent of U.S. adults are overweight underscores just how many of us fail.

The challenge of improving the country’s diet was put on stark display late last month, when the FDA released its new guidelines for which foods can be labeled as healthy. The roughly 300-page rule—the government’s first update to its definition of healthy in three decades—lays out in granular detail what does and doesn’t count as healthy. The action could make it much easier to walk down a grocery-store aisle and pick products that are good for you based on the label alone: A cup of yogurt laced with lots of sugar can no longer be branded as “healthy.” Yet the FDA estimates that zero to 0.4 percent of people trying to follow the government’s dietary guidelines will use the new definition “to make meaningful, long-lasting food purchasing decisions.” In other words, virtually no one.

All of this is a bad omen for Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. As part of his agenda to “make America healthy again,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has pledged to improve the country’s eating habits by overthrowing a public-health establishment that he sees as ineffective. He has promised mass firings at the FDA, specifically calling out its food regulators. Indeed, for decades, the agency’s efforts to encourage better eating habits have largely focused on giving consumers more information about the foods they are eating. It hasn’t worked. If confirmed, Kennedy may face the same problem as many of his predecessors: It’s maddeningly hard to get Americans to eat healthier.

“When people are making food choices,” Eric Finkelstein, a health economist at Duke University’s Global Health Institute, said, “price and taste and convenience weigh much heavier than health.”

Read the full article in Business and America

January 2025