Eating in America Podcast

The long reach of USAID across the globe, saving lives, making friends for America, and elevating this country’s place in the world, ended in 2025. This morning I came across a photo of a food pyramid poster I took at the health headquarters in Nampula Province in Mozambique while I was doing USAID-funded research in 2018 on childhood stunting caused by aflatoxin in mold on staples like maize and...

The 2025 Dietary Guidelines are finally here. Revealing them took a lot longer than Bobby Kennedy expected. It turns out that, working in secret, Brooke Rollins’ USDA and RFK Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services went to the trouble of writing a whole new science report to replace the one that didn’t say what they, and their friends in the cattle, pork, and dairy industries, wanted it to s...

We toss over 10% of our national food supply out of our homes each year, based on new statistics and methods from the 2025 Food Waste Report by ReFED , a leading non-profit using hard evidence to push for a reduction in food waste. That thrown-away food not only has a significant environmental impact but costs us consumers $262 billion. That is a lot of grocery money: $62 a week on average for a f...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.eatinginamerica.co Today’s post and podcast are especially for Eating in America’s paid subscribers and supporters, who I thank deeply. The fascinating and despicable colonial history of our most beloved drug’s most beloved delivery agent, I’m talking about caffeine and the way we most like to take it, that is in coffee, is told in...

The new 2025 Dietary Guidelines are due out this month, according to RFK Jr. Significant changes may be coming! The Dietary Guidelines have, in the past, been largely guided by science. This year Secretary of Health and Human Services Kennedy would like them to reflect his own particular ideas about healthy food. Given the makeup of his Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices , we know Kenned...

The critical health and nutrition data we nearly lost this year Chances are very good you have never taken the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NHANES: only 5,000 Americans are part of it each year. But 5,000 of us, randomized carefully to represent all Americans, is enough to provide public health and nutrition scientists and policy makers solid data to accurately check: * The...

Preface Microplastics is a very challenging topic. The research I did for this piece scared me in a way that I have not been scared by research before. I came to fully understand how immersed we are in microplastics on a daily basis, but how little we know about their effects, and how little we can ever know about how much and what kinds of plastics and, importantly, plastic additives, we are expo...

There are so many facets to the revolution in weight loss and control that is being led by the new GLP-1 class of drugs. Today I touch on a few of the many important aspects of GLP-1s. What I don’t get to today, I’ll try to return to soon. The headline this week: Price cuts and wider coverage for GLP-1s On Thursday, as you have probably heard, President Trump announced GLP-1 pricing will be lower...

East Coast, Gulf Coast, and the Heartland: Food pantries feel the fear, and good people stepping up The SNAP crisis and food security: I talk to people on the front lines Food security is fundamental to the life of every human. Thankfully, many of us don’t have to worry about it, but knowing where our next meal is coming from allows us to work on building and protecting our families: to provide sh...

As you may have read or heard in last week’s Trick-or-Treat Eating in America post or podcast, the PEZ dispenser packages I bought to give away at Halloween contained Red Dye No. 3 in the candy, so I took them back. Too bad. It was an otherwise great treat idea. Red No. 3, banned in Europe and North America because it can give cancer to rats, must be all gone from U.S. food shelves in 2027 and fro...

For 45 years, America’s most important official document on the topic of nutrition has been the U.S. Dietary Guidelines , “the cornerstone of Federal nutrition policy and … education activities, providing food-based recommendations to promote health…” according to its authors, RFK, Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services and the USDA. This coming week may see publication of the 10th edition...

I love Halloween, especially now that my three trick-or-treaters have grown up, and I am not the parent coping with the giant bag of candy at the end of the night. But we are getting a dwindling number of trick-or-treaters each year. Our numbers have been low…sad, single-digit low. Halloween is a competitive event, of course, with children competing for the biggest bag of candy, and our house and...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.eatinginamerica.co What Would Jesus Eat? Or for that matter what would Moses or Buddha or Mohammed eat? Let’s just say, they, in their divine wisdom and knowledge, might be a little upset at what we are eating today. These holy men ate healthy, even though they all spent time on the road, and, as we know, eating well when traveling...

RFK, Jr., the Make America Healthy Again would-be-goliath, campaigned against ultraprocessed (UPF) food, but that campaign has stalled out in the Trump administration. The new U.S. Dietary Guidelines , which are due this month according to Kennedy, were undercut by September’s MAHA Strategy Report and are unlikely to make UPF recommendations. Kennedy’s MAHA Report punts on UPF, as did the Dietary...

Farming districts, which tend to be heavily Republican and pro-Trump, have been buffeted in the quickly changing tariff, food stamp, Farm Bill , and farm subsidy winds of the Trump administration and Congress, as Eating in America pointed out recently . But agribusiness’s support for Trump has not been forgotten, as we are reminded in news about the way the Labor Department sets farm minimum wages...

Editor’s note: Eating in America officially launches today, so we’re celebrating something most of us love – coffee! Or tea, of course, if you prefer. The voices of 11 Eating in America readers are heard in the audio/podcast version of today’s Eating in America, making it a very good day to try the audio version, if that is not your usual choice. Thank you for being a part of Eating in America as...

We are a nation with some big superpowers – like military might, for example. One of our greatest superpowers is agriculture. America is the world’s leading single nation food exporter. (The European Union in aggregate is a larger exporter.) We produce enough food to feed the U.S. population and a third more. Why can’t America put healthy food on every plate? Why, as an agricultural superpower, do...

Zero parts per billion is the safe level of lead in the water we drink. Any lead, at all, is unsafe. Who agrees? The EPA, CDC , World Health Organization , and the American Academy of Pediatrics all concur. How much lead is in our water? According to EPA data reported by the NRDC , the National Resources Defense Council, between 2021 and 2024 community water systems serving over 250 million Americ...

September 23, 2025 On Saturday the USDA gave notice it would no longer collect survey data on food insecurity, saying: “For 30 years, this study…failed to present anything more than subjective, liberal fodder.” In fact, through Republican and Democratic administrations, the USDA reported on food insecurity with a consistent, unbiased, scientific process. Commenting to Eating in America, economist...

The Food and Drug Administration’s oversight of food safety has a giant loophole, really a series of giant loopholes, allowing cancer- and chronic-disease causing food ingredients to reach American plates every day. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has oversight of the FDA, made clear his dismay about this back in March: “For far too long, ingredient manufacturers...

Today we’ll catch up a bit on the news about one thing we need in our diet, lithium, and two we may love: alcohol and sugar. Lithium, mood, and dementia The element lithium found in the water we drink every day supports a positive mood and may reduce the risk of dementia. That is good. But don’t let ultraprocessed food deprive you of lithium’s benefit! Lithium found in trace amounts in drinking wa...

A draft of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Strategy report has been leaked , causing a big stir and considerable disappointment in the MAHA camp and among most others who advocate for better nutrition for Americans. In place of strong action on ultraprocessed food and pesticides, the report has recommendations for more research. Ultraprocessed food is mentioned only once, with the report say...

RFK Jr. says seed oils like canola and soy are “poisoning” us and driving obesity. He says we should cook with meat fat instead. The science says otherwise to all this. The real issue is the ultraprocessed food the oils are found in, not the oil itself. Seed oils do contain trace amounts of hexane, a neurotoxin, but scientists are comfortable seed oils are still safe and better for you than beef t...