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Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?

A scientist tried to discredit the theory that ultra-processed foods are killing us. Instead, he overturned his own understanding of obesity.

“With a physiological confusion that barely makes it to the surface of our conscious experience, we find ourselves reaching for another—searching for that nutrition that never arrived,” the physician Chris van Tulleken writes in his recent book, “Ultra-Processed People.” Some scientists have proposed “taste-bud rehab” to redirect our cravings toward healthy options. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who may soon lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has made common cause with some lawmakers by railing against ultra-processed food, pledging to remove it from public schools and limit the use of pesticides, artificial dyes, and, perhaps more dubiously, seed oils. Marion Nestle, a towering figure in American nutrition, is a molecular biologist and nutritionist who started the country’s first academic food-studies program, at N.Y.U., helping to bring attention to the roles that culture, capitalism, and politics play in what and how much we eat.

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