Eating in America Podcast

The Lone Star Tick, not named after Texas but for the single white spot on its back, has begun moving in to the Lone Star State along with the alpha-gal syndrome it can cause. This dangerous tick might already be in your state. What’s a tick got to do with eating? Lot’s, because it’s bite can cause a meat allergy , the alpha-gal syndrome. And for many victims, alpha-gal creates a dairy allergy as...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.eatinginamerica.co The most special person I have met recently is Marilyn Monroe. That’s her name as she said it, and she didn’t explain why. She was pretty much the opposite in every way of the Marilyn Monroe of the silver screen. Marilyn was a five-year old Latina niña when she started picking coffee on the finca where her mother...

This post is in the “totally bonus” category. This short, summarized description of a proposed highly- and ultra-processed food definition is for scientists and policy makers familiar with this important issue as well as anyone with an interest. So if you missed the first version of this piece a couple of days ago, maybe because it was a lot longer, here is a chance to hear the essence of it. And...

It’s vacation travel season, so I thought I might be helpful sharing a preventative health tip I recently became aware of. It involves eating. A chance encounter with the wrong bacteria or virus can create an unpleasant GI problem even here in America, so I always travel with Pepto-Bismol. But it turns out the pink tablets are good for more than just treating a tummy problem. They can be a very ef...

Please note that a small portion of the text of this podcast is taken from an Eating in America Note, published on EatingInAmerica.co this week. I propose a new, simple definition for highly- and ultra-processed food, the definition of which shouldn’t be, but nonetheless has become, perhaps the most important nutrition issue of 2026. It has been made an issue as a tactic of delay by the Big Food l...

Trump suppressed a major government-led study on alcohol, health, and risk of death meant to guide the writing of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. Although a draft of the report had been released for public comment, this was, nonetheless, a big win for the alcohol industry. This week the scientists who did the research published the results that Trump, Republicans in Congress, and the al...

Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, eat your hearts out. In today’s game, three doctors walk into a Fox TV studio for a taping of Survivor, Surgeon General. Two of them work for Fox. Two of them got their medical degrees at schools in the Caribbean. One of them lies about her qualifications. Two of them are selling supplements. One of them isn’t really a doctor and is a recent stockholder in tobacco. Two of...

Here’s a story that is so scary and sobering that only a science fiction writer could make it up. Only it is not fiction. And while a mere epidemiologist like me could not have conceived this story – it is too outrageous given what we know today – the story does provide us, and by us, I mean scientists including epidemiologists, media, and the public, at least several sobering lessons. I love food...

This month Lela Nargi in an article in The Guardian wrote about one of the studies I led that, together, examined, among other things, the use of cars vs. buses vs. walking to shop for healthy food. I told Ms. Nargi that I thought buses were a terrible way to have to go to get groceries, at least compared to going in a car. As part of the access to healthy food research, we surveyed community lead...

Coming up this week, I’ll share what I found doing a study in Rhode Island on the use of buses vs. cars to access healthy food. If you haven’t had to do it, and I’m glad I have never had to, it might be a little hard to imagine how hard it is to shop for groceries relying on the bus. Medicare says yes to Ozempic and Zepbound But first, there are a couple of big GLP-1 things to talk about. Beginnin...

Turns out RFK, Jr. could be called today’s James Delaney , the congressman who gave us the Generally Recognized As Safe, or GRAS, system. Kennedy has been voicing many of the exact same nutritional concerns that Delaney expressed – two years before Kennedy was born. And, in the same way that Delaney struggled with the power of what was to become known as the ultraprocessed food industry, Kennedy i...

Guess who said: …the survival of the country, as well as its democracy, depends on the health of its citizens. The shocking number of our young men who cannot meet the … physical requirements of our armed services must make each of us ask the reasons for this reservoir of ill health in the midst of such a varied and abundant food supply. It wasn’t Abe Lincoln with regard to the Union forces or Fra...

Yes, I know it is Eating in America, not “Smoking in America”, but today’s news is important, and I had to cover it, given the conclusion this week of EiA’s four-part series on cannabis . Think of this as a little bonus, since I already wrote this post for the Notes social media-ish stream of Substack. (If you are not familiar with Notes, you can find EiA’s Notes collection on the website EatingIn...

This week Eating in America has ventured out the kitchen door to the living room to explore something that might be on the coffee table of 44 million Americans in the last month. That is to say, cannabis. Cannabis has become widely legal but also highly potent, and regulations are loose and vary by jurisdiction. Enforcement is sometimes loose. There is increasingly good evidence about the risks of...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.eatinginamerica.co Usually Eating in America is about what we eat and what people like RFK, Jr. are doing or not doing to make it healthy. But EiA is near the end of four-part series on cannabis, something Kennedy and Trump could help make less of a threat to health, and today we touch on another big failure of Kennedy and the curre...

Eating in America is typically about what’s on our plate: what we’re eating. However, in this series we’re examining something that is not on everybody’s plate but was consumed by 44 million Americans in the last month. Cannabis is very much “in the air” these days, so to speak, especially if you live in a state where it is decriminalized and the smell of cannabis is easily found on the streets. C...

Cannabis was legal in America well into the 20th century and medical cannabis products were manufactured by pharmaceutical companies and widely prescribed and used. Of course, it’s important to keep in mind that this was before modern medicine: before aspirin even. Thirty years after medical cannabis was first re-legalized in California in 1996, what is the role of medical cannabis today? The flip...

Why, what, and how we eat is all about our neurological reward circuits, the dopamine pathways that control so much of what we do. These are the channels tapped, to our detriment, by the designers of ultraprocessed food. They are also the paths that lead to pleasure when we drink, smoke a cigarette, or eat a weed gummy. In this four-part series I’m going to expand the scope of Eating In America a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.eatinginamerica.co You’ve got a healthy weight, or you are not interested in weight loss, or at least in weight loss using available medical paths like GLP-1s or bariatric surgery – why should you care about GLP-1s? GLP-1s are a factor in the continued fast rise in health care costs in America. If you don’t need them or take them bu...

With today’s video podcast, you have your full choice: watch, listen, or, as most do, read Eating in America. Anyway you do it, we are glad to have you here. This post and podcast are about what’s in our food and who’s in charge of making it healthy. While RFK, Jr. and his Department of Health and Human Services are getting a lot of attention when it comes to federal action or inaction on making o...

RFK, Jr. has gone full publicity blitzkrieg about his success enlisting U.S. medical schools to teach more about nutrition. The Health and Human Services Department is selling it as a great victory for Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again Movement. However, the omission of a very important item from Kennedy’s proposed nutrition curriculum topics for doctors has hit a very sensitive nerve with me t...

Red meat consumption is down, and chicken consumption is up. While the consumption of beef, the most popular red meat, continued to grow in the prosperous years after World War II, it peaked in the 1970s and has rapidly declined since. On the other hand, chicken consumption has been growing steadily since World War II. During the Great Recession of 2007 to 2009, chicken overtook beef as the most c...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.eatinginamerica.co Excess unhealthy weight is a risk factor for serious chronic diseases, including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, osteoarthritis, and cancer. A new study reveals trends in obesity among people who are Black, White, and Hispanic. The projected trend for the next ten years, through 2035, does not look good for any o...

GLP-1 coverage shrinks as demand grows As costs rapidly rose in the last few years due to expanded coverage of GLP-1s like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound, insurers began to respond with medication management programs and restrictions on coverage. Many GLP-1 patients prescribed for obesity or excess unhealthy weight have struggled to maintain coverage, pay increased costs for coverage, or find the m...

Everyone on Earth has one food in common, milk. We all drank it as our first meal, even if it was just the milk contained in formula. Breast milk is the most perfect food: the ultimate personalized nutrition. I envy all moms and dads who have experienced breast feeding and its joy and love. Of course, breastfeeding is great if it can happen, but, in the interest of inclusivity, I wasn’t breastfed...