David Allison

They probably don't really want to match, but some might, and you might miss some, but it's not a bad way to stay safe.

Similarly, if I said to you, you know what, don't eat anything from the center aisles at the grocery store, or as little as you can.

Get as much as you can from the periphery, the dairy, the produce, the meats, the fish, and so on, you might be better off.

You will wind up eating less ultra-processed foods, you will wind up eating less energy-dense foods in many cases, etc., etc.,

But that doesn't mean there's something intrinsic about the periphery of the aisles.

It doesn't mean if I took Twinkies and put them in the periphery and I took fat-free Greek yogurt and I put it in the middle, that suddenly it becomes bad and Twinkies become good.

It's a heuristic and it might work for you to the extent you can stick to it and to the extent it's correlated with these things, it might work.

But it says nothing about the causal effect of being in the periphery or the central aisle.

And I think as long as we take ultra-processed foods at that level, hey, power to you.

In the same sense, as if we were talking to that person back with the protein, you said, how do you explain it to them?

Maybe you don't say eat two grams per kilogram because that's too hard.

You have to use the metric system and Americans hate the metric system and you have to do math and so on.

You have to count stuff.

But if you just said, make sure you have two servings of lean fish per week and one serving of lean this and eat some egg whites and so on.

Maybe that works.

And we all have our own foods.

During World War II, they tried to get Margaret Mead, they hired Margaret Mead, the federal government, to try to get people to eat more organ meats because they wanted to send the steak and all to the soldiers overseas.

Didn't work.

Even Margaret Mead couldn't get people to eat a lot more organ meats.

I happen to love organ meats.