It is no secret that the average supersized diet in the USA is not good for our health. While it is true that many of us are eating healthier, the USA continues to have problems such as diabetes and obesity. Losing weight through an overpriced drug such as Ozempic may not mean you are healthy, but that you now need to use the drug to weigh less and seem healthier. There is evidence that countries like Brazil that have embraced our processed pre-packaged foods are now having weight and health problems too. The typical doctor’s visit looks at our blood and wants us to manage our health by numbers, with drugs and offers little in the way of health guidance other than you need to live a certain way, with certain pills to reduce risk as you age. They tell you if you are too heavy and help you manage your symptoms, and your sugar if needed, and offer little advice on how to avoid all of this. A recent article in The New Yorker illustrates the problem. In Europe, the eating habits and portions are different, and farm-to-table is more of a culture where people consume healthier food with less sugar, and salt and smaller portions. Some countries have their largest meals at lunch and dinner is usually light. The article tells some stories beginning with Guillaume Raineri, who formerly worked and lived near Paris and was in his 40s when his spouse got a job at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda. He noticed the food was different and he volunteered for a study that looked at the effects of transitioning to an American diet and seeing what happened over time as they added calorie-dense processed foods to his diet and how it made him feel. Scientists have believed that ultra-processed calorie-dense foods were the problem in the American diet. Scientists are now understanding the problem is much more complicated as digestion requires fiber which grows the right type of bacteria in the gut. The types of processed foods can either make us want to eat more and hence, gain weight. Scientists are now learning that ultra-processed foods that were neither calorie-dense nor hyper-palatable—for example, liquid eggs, flavored yogurt and oatmeal, turkey bacon, and burrito bowls with beans—people ate essentially as much as they did on the minimally processed diet. I have always told patients that health is not what you do when a doctor in a white coat scares the crap out of you. It is a lifestyle of how you eat and what you eat and how you move and function. The digestive system fuels it and poor food quality results in most of the diseases doctors treat with drugs rather than healthy diets. Making America Healthy again requires us to rethink industrial farming, the types of foods, the types of loaves of bread, and the types of wheat we consume. In a recent webinar I attended, they spoke about sprouted grains being healthier for us because it took more time to prepare but it was healthier for consumption than what we commonly consume. Just because you can take shortcuts in cooking and distribution of food to produce volumes of it, it does not mean this is what we should have in our diets. How nutrients find their way into our bodies matters. Sugar in Skittles isn’t the same as sugar in strawberries; fish oil in a capsule isn’t fish oil in a fish. The third era of nutrition has considered dietary patterns more holistically. Perhaps the problem of obesity just needs us to reboot in how we understand it, and understand what is good for us and what is not. Check out the article in The New Yorker. You may find yourself as I have looking more at food labels, looking at ingredients, while avoiding foods with chemicals that I cannot pronounce or understand and the life you improve may be your own. Why Is the American Diet So Deadly?