Q&A
‘Food Is Being Processed in Ways We Have Never Seen Before’
The former FDA commissioner says that dietary guidelines must change
We all know that the American body is in trouble. Unprecedented numbers of us suffer from obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other debilitating illnesses. The root cause is a once-revolutionary idea that seemed to offer so much promise: processed food.
In his new book released late last month, “Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs: The Simple Truth About Food, Weight, and Disease,” David Kessler, a friend of mine and a highly respected former government official at the highest level of food policy (he’s the former Food and Drug Administration commissioner who helped design the nutrition facts label and took on tobacco; he is currently on Joe Biden’s COVID-19 health task force), shows how our government and the food industry created a national health crisis.
Now more than ever, as we face a different kind of health crisis, it’s clear that the health issues that arise from our broken food system such as diabetes and heart disease put us, and especially at-risk communities, in ever greater danger.
I’ve admired David Kessler for 25 years, and I am lucky to have spent some time with him. His analysis of what’s gone wrong with food in the…
