If I ask you what constitutes “bad” eating, the kind that leads to obesity and a variety of connected diseases, you’re likely to answer, “Salt, fat and sugar.” This trilogy of evil has been drilled into us for decades, yet that’s not an adequate answer.

We don’t know everything about the dietary links to chronic disease, but the best-qualified people argue that real food is more likely to promote health and less likely to cause disease than hyperprocessed food. And we can further refine that message: Minimally processed plants should dominate our diets. (This isn’t just me saying this; the Institute of Medicine and the Department of Agriculture agree.)

And yet we’re in the middle of a public health emergency that isn’t being taken seriously enough. We should make it a national priority to create two new programs, a research program to determine precisely what causes diet-related chronic illnesses (on top of the list is “Just how bad is sugar?”), and a program that will get this single, simple message across: Eat Real Food.

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I will repeat my mantra of the last few years…

The problem with what we eat is the same one as our problem with most things today: corruption and money in politics.

The scientists at the FDA, USDA, NIH, and academia all know the same things Mark Bittman writes about so eloquently. They all know that the problem with food is what Big Foods adds to what we buy as food. The problem with what we eat is that, in one portion of food that has been added to in specific ways, we eat more than several times’ worth of nutrients needed for a day. 

To read the rest of this article and my comment, click here.