Kevin Hall

These biological questions are still being worked out.

And we're still at the stage right now, even in our research, of trying to figure out, well, what is it specifically about the foods themselves that cause these disruptions?

And then more broadly, what is it about the food environment with all of these other social and environmental consequences of these foods being marketed to us on a regular basis and the defaults being the calorie-dense, hyperpalatable foods?

Yeah, no, it has been a problem for quite some time.

You know, the NIH has traditionally been very focused on finding cures and treatments, which is a great thing to do, and very little focused on prevention, at least when it comes to supporting the research from a monetary basis.

And, you know, it's a huge problem because if we don't have the science to understand explicitly what is it about, you know, for example, ultra-processed foods that are driving some of the problems that we've seen, then the sort of blunt instruments that we might have from a policy perspective become, you know, somewhat misguided.

Or if we are targeting certain aspects of foods that are not based on really solid science, then they might have

expending all this political capital on something that's not going to make much difference.

I would argue many of the things that the current administration does in the name of Maha wins are currently in that category.

Things like targeting high fructose corn syrup for replacements with cane sugar as a new brand of Coca-Cola products is not going to move the needle on public health because

It's not relying on good science about what it is about Coca-Cola products that are probably contributing to poor public health.

And so I think that the point here is that we need this dramatic improvement in nutrition science to better understand what are the specific roles of our foods and our food environment and even do the kinds of research like what policy changes do we need to make?

What changes in the food environment are going to be the most effective?

Even if our studies said there was nothing about the foods themselves that were driving this problem, it was just the fact that they're being marketed and promoted in such a way to make excess calorie consumption occur because we have so many calories available to us.

We need some science to better understand, well, what are the policies that are going to be most successful?

We had a few things about menu labeling at one point, and we have some policy research on soda taxes and things like that, but nowhere near the amount that would be required to really inform some of these things to really know if the policies that you're going to put forward are going to make a dent in the public health of the nation.

So there's this, yeah, I think that the biggest single investment that the NIH has ever made in nutrition research is this Nutrition for Precision Health program, which is kind of interesting from a scientific perspective, but they're spending like $170 million or more just trying to figure out, you know, what is the best diet for every individual based on, you know, maybe their gut microbiome or some genetic factor.

when everybody knows that the food environment is not allowing Americans to take up the dietary guidelines for Americans at a reasonable rate.

We don't produce enough fruits and vegetables in the country to feed everybody, even if they were to magically start adhering to the guidelines.

I think that, again, we're sort of focused on these whiz-bang sort of really interesting ideas at the individual level about how to optimize your health and what supplements we should prescribe to you and what wearable devices you should wear.