Ideally, we should try to center our diets around healthy, unprocessed plant foods,

but in today's world, most of what fills our grocery carts isn't just processed,

but ultra-processed, which is good for shelf life, but not necessarily our life.

Let's take a closer look. Modern nutrition science began about a century ago in the context of nutrient deficiency diseases.

Editorials in the Journal of the American Medical Association had titles like sugar as food,

heralding sugar is one of the cheapest sources of calories.

For six cents you could buy 3,000 calories.

But the nutrient deficiency era gave way to the dietary excess era.

No longer were we dying of nutrient deficiency diseases like scurvy

as much as we were dying from nutrient excess diseases like scurvy as much as we were dying from

nutrient excess diseases like obesity and heart disease?

So nutrition scientists became more about avoiding too many calories, too much sensory

fat, too much sugar, too much sodium, while still focused on nutrients.

This allowed food companies to get away with whipping out fiber-fortified fruit

loops. But food, not nutrients, is the fundamental unit of nutrition. And to its credit,

the field of nutrition started moving towards a more holistic view. First-generation

dietary guidelines emphasized individual nutrients, then moved to second-generation

food-based dietary guidelines, which largely converged on encouraging diets rich in vegetables,

fruits, legumes, beans, split-piece, beans, lentils, whole grains, and nuts. But an area of emerging

importance is the degree of food processing. National

nutrition guidelines first told us to cut down on saturated fat, alcohol, cholesterol,

salt, and sugar. Then they started actually naming names, suggesting citizens might want to cut

...