Unsettled Science

Delayed for months, the highly anticipated new U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans will be released to the public tomorrow, followed by a large (invite-only) event at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Thursday. As promised, the new guidelines are expected to be only about eight pages, far shorter than the 100+ tomes of previous administrations. The guidelines are also likely to include a lengthy appendix with scientific reviews to justify their changes.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), stated upon taking office that his top priority is to determine the causes of chronic diseases and how to reverse them. “We have to understand why our children are facing shorter lives than we are,” he urged at the White House at the release of the MAHA Commission Report in May.

Note: The version of this piece sent out this morning contained a chart from a pre-print rather than the final version of the paper. My mistake! Please read this version instead (which has also been slightly edited). The boom-and-bust of “alternative proteins” came and went faster than a Florida land deal: sky-high valuations soon plummeting to zero. Companies such as Beyond Meat, Impossible Burgers, and Oatly Milk seemed invincible in the early 2000s.

The boom-and-bust of “alternative proteins” came and went faster than a Florida land deal: sky-high valuations soon plummeting to zero. Companies such as Beyond Meat, Impossible Burgers, and Oatly Milk seemed invincible in the early 2000s.

Last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) celebrity researcher Kevin Hallannounced on X that he was retiring early due to “censorship.” He said his superiors instructed him to remove a reference to equity from a draft paper, leading him to voluntarily withdraw his name from the publication.

Dear Readers, I’m still working on the second installment of my investigation on NIH funding on nutrition and health. Stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, I’ve decided to do periodic round-ups of food-related news in Washington, DC. So much is happening these days, mostly related to the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, it’s hard to keep up.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., now the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has maintained that new research is needed to reverse chronic disease in America.

Let the Ozempic lawsuits begin… You knew the lawsuits were coming. Ozempic, Mounjaro, Wegovy, and others in the GLP-1 agonist category are just too rich a target. (Novo Nordisk, the leading manufacturer, now has a market cap of more than $600 billion, in March that of Tesla). And side effects have been serious. In a 2-year trial of semaglutide (2.4mg), the active ingredient in Ozempic and Rybelsus, 82% of the overweight obese subjects reported gastrointestinal issues.

The UK gets a reality check as children get fatter yet shorter We can’t blame the British government for failing to try. Between 1992 and 2020, it released 14 distinct strategy reports encompassing over 700 different policy recommendations, all with the goal of putting the obesity epidemic firmly in the rearview mirror. How are they doing?

In 2022, I co-authored a paper finding that 95% of the 20-person expert group reviewing the science for our 2020 national dietary guidelines had at least one undisclosed financial tie with a food or pharmaceutical company.