Hey, I'm Flora Lichten, and you're listening to Science Friday. Put down those cheese curls because ultra-processed foods, UPSs, are back in the news. Those highly processed, often delicious, foods make up a big part of the average American diet. and they've been getting lots of attention from

policymakers who want to limit how much of them we eat.

Even the new federal dietary guidelines suggest avoiding these foods.

Here's Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on what you should be eating instead.

Protein and healthy fats are essential, and we're wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines.

We are ending the war on saturated fats.

Good fats are in, flaming hot, double-stuffed mini pizza rolls are out.

So today we're digging into this buffet of nutrition news. And for the first

course, we're going to chew on these new federal food guidelines and why they matter. Then later

in the show, we're going to rifle through the snack drawer to see what we can learn about the world

of ultra-processed foods. Let me set the table with my guests. Laura Schmidt is a professor

at the Institute for Health Policy

Studies at UC San Francisco, and she studies chronic disease in our current food system. And Alyssa Moran

is a deputy director of the Center for Food and Nutrition Policy at Penn. She's a nutrition

policy researcher and dietitian. Welcome to you both to Science Friday. Hi, Flora. Hi, Flora. Thanks for having me.

Okay, Laura, what do you think of the guidelines generally? I worry a little bit about the way the

guidelines are positioned, almost as personal health recommendations. When most of us in the public health and nutrition field feel that

the real problems are in the food environment.

And they are really beyond the individual's ability to control what's available.

And so it'd be great.

I think there's a lot of controversy in the nutrition

science community about the saturated fat recommendations. But the general thrust of encouraging people

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