Derek Thompson

Kevin, it's a really important point that Julia just made.

There's this nostalgia for 100 years ago when people didn't die of obesity.

Well, maybe they didn't have time to get fat because they were dying young of ground calf brains and lead in their milk and in their food.

But thanks to Wiley and thanks to his work, we have regulatory guardrails in place to prevent acute food poisonings.

But today, our food environment is fattening and sickening us on timescales of years and decades.

They're chronically sickening us.

And here you look at all of the money that we spend on American science, just over 1% of all NIH-funded research projects today address the role of diet and nutrition.

Shortly after your ultra-processed food study was published, your bosses tried to close the research facilities that you and your colleagues used to study nutrition and metabolism.

How dire is our lack of science and research and funding in the space of nutrition?

Julia, I really like this framing that we used to die in America of acute food poisoning, and we developed a policy regime to fix that problem.

But now millions of Americans are dying of chronic overeating or chronic eating of the wrong foods, and we don't have a policy regime to fix that problem.

What is the original sin here that you see?

Why are we so unprepared in our laws and our regulations to fix the food supply?

So in the 20th century, in the early 20th century, Wiley and Upton Sinclair bring attention to acute food poisoning and the conditions of these meat plants.

And we get the FDA and lots of funding for USDA meat inspections.

But over time, there's less attention paid to the rest of the food supply.

Julia, why don't you keep the story going?

What happens in the 1950s?

Kevin, I want to follow up with that because while I think I agree with you, there's also a way in which I want to be careful about adding regulations before we have information.

So in a New York Times excerpt from your book, you wrote, quote, ultra processed foods that don't meet FDA definition and that can drive overconsumption.