David Allison

They've been bred.

Even if it's not transgenic, they've been bred by ordinary breeding things.

The cows, the chickens, the pigs have been bred to be different.

They are not indigenous species.

All the chicken, all the cow, all the pig that we eat in this country, the soybeans, none of that's indigenous.

They're all invasive species.

Turkey, that's indigenous to North America.

Pecans and black walnuts, but not the other walnuts that they love so much in the Mediterranean diet over there.

They're not American.

I think this is all silliness.

The only thing that's artificial here is our creation of these categories, and we should just recognize that we create the categories.

Let's make them meaningful and useful.

So back to ultra-processed foods.

If you said to me, I'm just looking to give my patients or my friends or my mom or myself

A hint, a heuristic.

There are lots of heuristics that don't- Don't require that classification.

But there are also lots of heuristics that work, even though there may be some illogic embedded in them or some incompleteness or some variability.

If you said to me, for example, don't talk to people on the street who look like this.

If I was your kid and you said, look, you're walking down the street, you're in a big city, someone comes up, ask you if a match, just keep walking.

It's probably a good heuristic.