What's really wild to me is these forces have all coalesced to take billions in funding away from academics and there's still minimal serious effort by universities to take scicomm seriously & launch essentially a huge PR campaign to actually engage with the public abt science/public health
Saying this tongue in cheek but I have followed this stuff since 2012 & always got criticized by other academics for wasting my time, majoring in the minors when BigFood was the real corrupting force etc. Literally all of the anti-vax, natural foodie, gender anger etc has been there for decades
If you're confused by 2026 bizarre intersections of politics, the state of wellness/biohacking & the manosphere, you clearly weren't following low carb twitter of 2015 😂
Fatphobia and food shaming is so back y'all
In nutrition as clickbait for failing legacy media institutions ex #656765876, we have CNN putting out this headline on a new cross sectional analysis published in a Radiology journal with zero capacity for causal inference and even lower quality than usual dietary assessment. MAHA I guess
The natural products space is disappointingly full of so much low quality and/or fraudulent literature.
Recording now available if you've missed it:
The 2025 dietary guidelines: a resource to help you explain the changes and why they matter
@kcklatt.bsky.social @unbiasedscipod.bsky.social @sciencewhizliz.bsky.social
What I wouldn't give for politicians interested in bringing smart food minds to the table to identify policy instead of cheap performance to snag a few votes
The White House this week tried to smooth things over with key MAHA leaders who are furious the administration has fully backed Bayer in the ongoing legal fight over glyphosate.
foodfix.co/maha-advocat...
Screenshots of LinkedIn posts and tweets last forever. If we all live to see a reckoning some day, I fully plan to be there pointing out how so many in the nutrition world resigned themselves to irrelevancy by not advocating for science and public health when the time came
I can't begin to tell you the # of convos I've had with young folks in nutrition who have lost all faith in the ivory tower leadership in nutrition. Watching senior academics & advocates clamor to try to manipulate this admin to their own ends and fear calling out their BS looks honestly pathetic
If you ever wonder why we see huge outcry from medical folks Abt vaccines but little from the nutrition world, it's cause way too many people get into nutrition based on the same biases that drive MAHA - they care more abt virtue signaling on food additives/UPFs than they do abt real public health.
The delusion that this administration is making a meaningful impact on the USA's nutrition-related problems needs to end.
It's amazing how many foodies, & even public health nutrition professionals, continue to be captivated by the messaging from this administration and ignoring the tangible harms
Op-ed today in @medpagetoday.com commenting on the latest nutrition 'win' from the administration on hospital menu alignment with the Dietary Guidelines - yet another example of political theatre with near-zero likelihood of improving health outcomes.
www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/seco...
Dysfunction of AHRQ is one for nutrition folks to pay attention to - they undertake the systematic reviews used in updating the DRIs.
Op-ed today in @medpagetoday.com commenting on the latest nutrition 'win' from the administration on hospital menu alignment with the Dietary Guidelines - yet another example of political theatre with near-zero likelihood of improving health outcomes.
www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/seco...
Please don't pre-register your nutrition RCTs with multiple vague primary outcomes, and please don't put an omics outcome as the primary outcome! If you're doing a pilot trial, just be honest about it being a pilot trial and present your manuscript as an exploration of the data.
So much indirect harm too. The opportunity cost from focusing food movements on majoring in the minors will be devastating to real public health nutrition.
truthfully i'm just glad we dodged the 'put raw milk in the GJ tube for gut health' memo
Note: I'm not against incentivizing hospitals to increase their array of DGA-compliant offerings - pts who want these options should have them & for pts w/ospecial needs, these are great. But this whole thing is so MAHA coded ignore complexities, fix nothing, gaslight that you've done something real
On this issue of hospitals losing $, they'll also have the other basic economics issue - a DGA-aligned menu is going to cost more. Hospitals operate on tight food budgets, so they'd like end up spending a good bit more (~20+%) & renegotiate contracts with food service providers
"don't eat ultraprocessed foods"
*stares blankly at tube feeds*
Medicare ties payments to performance (HVBP program) thru the HCAHPS survey. This includes questions abt the hospital food experience that, if performance is poor, can negatively affect $. The incentives aren't there for hospitals to implement a DGA-menu, given clinical mismatch & lack of pt desire
4. You'll note throughout the memo that they're not making anything mandatory (language like "hospitals should") beyond what CFR says & there's little talk of enforcement of the DGA standards. That's likely not an accident - if hospitals enforced the suggested menus tmrrw, reimbursement wld drop
3. I'm seeing lots of folks talking abt the fact you can get fried food & SSBs at the hospital - the federal gov doesn't have the authority to regulate the retail food enviro at the hospital. It'd be great to make these offerings healthier but the admin has put forward no policies that will do that
This can be everything from pts in the ICU w elevated kcal/protein requirements, pts w poor appetite, aversion to smells, difficulty swallowing, needing a low residue diet, restriction or suppl of specific nutrients, needing artificial nutrition. Nourishment often looks nothing like the DGAs.
2. You don't want a menu that has to align with DGAs. The DGAs are based on meeting nutritional adequacy and preventing chronic disease for the general public , not for the acutely ill patient in a hospital. Pts are in the hospital for myriad reasons and many impact their capacity get adequate nutr
