What’s Mark Been Reading and Cooking?

This​ news is all very nice and is likely to have some impact on consumption, as most calorie labeling, especially in fast-food joints, has had. If you show people just how egregious a calorie bomb is, they step down. But of course if it’s soft drinks only, they either contain sugar and therefore roughly the same amount per ounce, or some artificial sweetener, and on those the jury is out. Good, comprehensive nutritional labeling would probably make a profound difference, as would signs on most fast-food chain stores saying “Danger Lurks Here.” The key is to develop real alternatives.

This is an unusually ​wise piece out of Harvard School of Public Health​, with some fine recommendations about how to go about looking at and evaluating ultraprocessed foods (UPFs), now widely accepted as the best term to use for overall bad actors in our diets. Still not as precise as we’d like, but more accurate than “fat, sugar, salt,” or any one of those. The problem is that we need a cooperative government, so make sure to vote for the good guys on every level—federal, state, and local —come this November. If you care about food, we need strong legislative efforts for the next ten years, and for the ten years after that.