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Dr. Longo, who is also a professor of gerontology and director of the U.S.C. Longevity Institute in California, has long advocated longer and better living through eating Lite Italian, one of a global explosion of Road to Perpetual Wellville theories about how to stay young in a field that is itself still in its adolescence.

In addition to identifying genes that regulate aging, he has created a plant and nut-based diet with supplements and kale crackers that mimics fasting to, he argues, allow cells to shed harmful baggage and rejuvenate, without the down side of actually starving.

He has patented and sold his ProLon diet kits; published best-selling books (“The Longevity Diet”); and been called an influential “Fasting Evangelist” by Time magazine.

Last month, he published a new study based on clinical trials of hundreds of older people — including in the Calabria town from which his family hails — that he said suggests that periodic cycles of his own faux-fasting approach could reduce biological age and stave off illnesses associated with aging.

“It’s very similar to the original Mediterranean diet, not the present one,” she said, pointing at photographs on the wall of a bowl of ancient legumes similar to the chickpe

“Almost nobody in Italy eats the Mediterranean diet,”

He added that many Italian children, especially in the country’s south, are obese, bloated on what he calls the poisonous five Ps — pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and pane (or bread).

in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires who hope to be forever young have funded secretive labs. Wellness articles have conquered newspaper home pages and Fountains-of-Youth workout and diet ads featuring insanely fit middle-aged people teem on the social media feeds of not insanely fit middle-aged people.

he said Italy’s lack of investment in research was a disgrace.

even as concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting and biological age — you’re only as old as your cells feel! — have gained momentum, governments like Italy’s are fretting over a creakier future in which booming populations of old people drain resources from the dwindling young.

many scientists, nutritionists and longevity fanatics the world over continue to stare longingly toward Italy, seeking in its deep pockets of centenarians a secret ingredient to long life.

“Probably they kept breeding between cousins and relatives,” Dr. Longo offered, referring to the sometimes close relations in little Italian hill towns. “At some point, we suspect it sort of generated the super-longevity genome.”

The genetic drawbacks of incest, he hypothesized, slowly vanished because those mutations either killed their carriers before they could reproduce or because the town noticed a monstrous ailment — like early onset Alzheimer’s — in a particular family line and steered clear.

Dr. Longo wonders whether Italy’s centenarians had been protected from later disease by a starvation period and old-fashioned Mediterranean diet early in life, during rural Italy’s abject war-era poverty. Then a boost of proteins and fats and modern medicine after Italy’s postwar economic miracle protected them from frailty as they got older and kept them alive.

At age 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives and couldn’t help notice that his middle-aged aunts and uncles fed on the “Chicago diet” of sausages and sugary drinks suffered diabetes and cardiovascular disease that their relatives back in Calabria did not.

He eventually earned his Ph.D in biochemistry at U.C.L.A. and did his postdoctoral training in the neurobiology of aging at U.S.C. He overcame early skepticism about the field to publish in top journals and became a zealous evangelizer for the age-reversing effects of his diet. About 10 years ago, eager to be closer to his aging parents in Genoa, he took a second job at the IFOM oncology institute in Milan.

He found a fount of inspiration in the pescatarian-heavy diet around Genoa and all the legumes down in Calabria.

he also found the modern Italian diet — the cured meats, layers of lasagna and fried vegetables the world hungered for — horrendous and a source of disease.

His private foundation, also based in Milan, tailors diets for cancer patients, but also consults for Italian companies and schools, promoting a Mediterranean diet that is actually foreign to most Italians today.

“Italy’s got such incredible history and a wealth of information about aging,” he said. “But spends virtually nothing.”

He talked about how he and others had identified an important regulator of aging in yeast, and how he has investigated whether the same pathway was at work in all organisms.

Dr. Longo said he thinks of his mission as extending youth and health, not simply putting more years on the clock, a goal he said could lead to a “scary world,” in which only the rich could afford to live for centuries, potentially forcing caps on having children

A more likely short-term scenario, he said, was division between two populations. The first would live as we do now and reach about 80 or longer through medical advancements. But Italians would be saddled with long — and, given the drop in the birthrate, potentially lonely — years burdened by horrible diseases.

The other population would follow fasting diets and scientific breakthroughs and live to 100 and perhaps 110 in relative good health.

The ordinary fixes—the kind that draw on people’s will, and require eating less and moving more—rarely have a large or lasting effect. Indeed, America itself has suffered through a long, maddening history of failed attempts to change its habits on a national scale: a yo-yo diet of well-intentioned treatments, policies, and other social interventions that only ever lead us back to where we started

Through it all, obesity rates keep going up; the diabetes epidemic keeps worsening.

The most recent miracle, for Barb as well as for the nation, has come in the form of injectable drugs. In early 2021, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk published a clinical trial showing remarkable results for semaglutide, now sold under the trade names Wegovy and Ozempic.

Patients in the study who’d had injections of the drug lost, on average, close to 15 percent of their body weight—more than had ever been achieved with any other drug in a study of that size. Wadden knew immediately that this would be “an incredible revolution in the treatment of obesity.”

Many more drugs are now racing through development: survodutide, pemvidutide, retatrutide. (Among specialists, that last one has produced the most excitement: An early trial found an average weight loss of 24 percent in one group of participants.

In the United States, an estimated 189 million adults are classified as having obesity or being overweight

The drugs don’t work for everyone. Their major side effects—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea—can be too intense for many patients. Others don’t end up losing any weight

For the time being, just 25 percent of private insurers offer the relevant coverage, and the cost of treatment—about $1,000 a month—has been prohibitive for many Americans.

The drugs have already been approved not just for people with diabetes or obesity, but for anyone who has a BMI of more than 27 and an associated health condition, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. By those criteria, more than 140 million American adults already qualify

if this story goes the way it’s gone for other “risk factor” drugs such as statins and antihypertensives, then the threshold for prescriptions will be lowered over time, inching further toward the weight range we now describe as “normal.”

How you view that prospect will depend on your attitudes about obesity, and your tolerance for risk

The first GLP-1 drug to receive FDA approval, exenatide, has been used as a diabetes treatment for more than 20 years. No long-term harms have been identified—but then again, that drug’s long-term effects have been studied carefully only across a span of seven years

the data so far look very good. “These are now being used, literally, in hundreds of thousands of people across the world,” she told me, and although some studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs may cause inflammation of the pancreas, or even tumor growth, these concerns have not borne out.

adolescents are injecting newer versions of these drugs, and may continue to do so every week for 50 years or more. What might happen over all that time?

“All of us, in the back of our minds, always wonder, Will something show up?  ” Although no serious problems have yet emerged, she said, “you wonder, and you worry.”

in light of what we’ve been through, it’s hard to see what other choices still remain. For 40 years, we’ve tried to curb the spread of obesity and its related ailments, and for 40 years, we’ve failed. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We don’t even understand what’s really causing it. Now, again, we have a new approach. This time around, the fix had better work.

The fen-phen revolution arrived at a crucial turning point for Wadden’s field, and indeed for his career. By then he’d spent almost 15 years at the leading edge of research into dietary interventions, seeing how much weight a person might lose through careful cutting of their calories.

But that sort of diet science—and the diet culture that it helped support—had lately come into a state of ruin. Americans were fatter than they’d ever been, and they were giving up on losing weight. According to one industry group, the total number of dieters in the country declined by more than 25 percent from 1986 to 1991.

Rejecting diet culture became something of a feminist cause. “A growing number of women are joining in an anti-diet movement,” The New York Times reported in 1992. “They are forming support groups and ceasing to diet with a resolve similar to that of secretaries who 20 years ago stopped getting coffee for their bosses.

Now Wadden and other obesity researchers were reaching a consensus that behavioral interventions might produce in the very best scenario an average lasting weight loss of just 5 to 10 percent

National surveys completed in 1994 showed that the adult obesity rate had surged by more than half since 1980, while the proportion of children classified as overweight had doubled. The need for weight control in America had never seemed so great, even as the chances of achieving it were never perceived to be so small.

Wadden wasn’t terribly concerned, because no one in his study had reported any heart symptoms. But ultrasounds revealed that nearly one-third of them had some degree of leakage in their heart valves. His “cure for obesity” was in fact a source of harm.

In December 1994, the Times ran an editorial on what was understood to be a pivotal discovery: A genetic basis for obesity had finally been found. Researchers at Rockefeller University were investigating a molecule, later named leptin, that gets secreted from fat cells and travels to the brain, and that causes feelings of satiety. Lab mice with mutations in the leptin gene—importantly, a gene also found in humans—overeat until they’re three times the size of other mice. “The finding holds out the dazzling hope,”

In April 1996, the doctors recommended yes: Dexfenfluramine was approved—and became an instant blockbuster. Patients received prescriptions by the hundreds of thousands every month. Sketchy wellness clinics—call toll-free, 1-888-4FEN-FEN—helped meet demand. Then, as now, experts voiced concerns about access. Then, as now, they worried that people who didn’t really need the drugs were lining up to take them. By the end of the year, sales of “fen” alone had surpassed $300 million.

It was nothing less than an awakening, for doctors and their patients alike. Now a patient could be treated for excess weight in the same way they might be treated for diabetes or hypertension—with a drug they’d have to take for the rest of their life.

the article heralded a “new understanding of obesity as a chronic disease rather than a failure of willpower.”

News had just come out that, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, two dozen women taking fen-phen—including six who were, like Barb, in their 30s—had developed cardiac conditions. A few had needed surgery, and on the operating table, doctors discovered that their heart valves were covered with a waxy plaque.

Americans had been prescribed regular fenfluramine since 1973, and the newer drug, dexfenfluramine, had been available in France since 1985. Experts took comfort in this history. Using language that is familiar from today’s assurances regarding semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs, they pointed out that millions were already on the medication. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything significant in toxicity to the drug that hasn’t been picked up with this kind of experience,” an FDA official named James Bilstad would later say in a Time cover story headlined “The Hot New Diet Pill.

“I know I can’t get any more,” she told Williams. “I have to use up what I have. And then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that. That’s the problem—and that is what scares me to death.” Telling people to lose weight the “natural way,” she told another guest, who was suggesting that people with obesity need only go on low-carb diets, is like “asking a person with a thyroid condition to just stop their medication.”

She’d gone off the fen-phen and had rapidly regained weight. “The voices returned and came back in a furor I’d never heard before,” Barb later wrote on her blog. “It was as if they were so angry at being silenced for so long, they were going to tell me 19 months’ worth of what they wanted me to hear. I was forced to listen. And I ate. And I ate. And ate.”

For Barb, rapid weight loss has brought on a different metaphysical confusion. When she looks in the mirror, she sometimes sees her shape as it was two years ago. In certain corners of the internet, this is known as “phantom fat syndrome,” but Barb dislikes that term. She thinks it should be called “body integration syndrome,” stemming from a disconnect between your “larger-body memory” and “smaller-body reality.

In 2003, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity “the terror within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction”; a few months later, Eric Finkelstein, an economist who studies the social costs of obesity, put out an influential paper finding that excess weight was associated with up to $79 billion in health-care spending in 1998, of which roughly half was paid by Medicare and Medicaid. (Later he’d conclude that the number had nearly doubled in a decade.

In 2004, Finkelstein attended an Action on Obesity summit hosted by the Mayo Clinic, at which numerous social interventions were proposed, including calorie labeling in workplace cafeterias and mandatory gym class for children of all grades.

he message at their core, that soda was a form of poison like tobacco, spread. In San Francisco and New York, public-service campaigns showed images of soda bottles pouring out a stream of glistening, blood-streaked fat. Michelle Obama led an effort to depict water—plain old water—as something “cool” to drink.

Soon, the federal government took up many of the ideas that Brownell had helped popularize. Barack Obama had promised while campaigning for president that if America’s obesity trends could be reversed, the Medicare system alone would save “a trillion dollars.” By fighting fat, he implied, his ambitious plan for health-care reform would pay for itself. Once he was in office, his administration pulled every policy lever it could.

Michelle Obama helped guide these efforts, working with marketing experts to develop ways of nudging kids toward better diets and pledging to eliminate “food deserts,” or neighborhoods that lacked convenient access to healthy, affordable food. She was relentless in her public messaging; she planted an organic garden at the White House and promoted her signature “Let’s Move!” campaign around the country.

An all-out war on soda would come to stand in for these broad efforts. Nutrition studies found that half of all Americans were drinking sugar-sweetened beverages every day, and that consumption of these accounted for one-third of the added sugar in adults’ diets. Studies turned up links between people’s soft-drink consumption and their risks for type 2 diabetes and obesity. A new strand of research hinted that “liquid calories” in particular were dangerous to health.

when their field lost faith in low-calorie diets as a source of lasting weight loss, the two friends went in opposite directions. Wadden looked for ways to fix a person’s chemistry, so he turned to pharmaceuticals. Brownell had come to see obesity as a product of our toxic food environment: He meant to fix the world to which a person’s chemistry responded, so he started getting into policy.

The social engineering worked. Slowly but surely, Americans’ lamented lifestyle began to shift. From 2001 to 2018, added-sugar intake dropped by about one-fifth among children, teens, and young adults. From the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the obesity rate among American children had roughly tripled; then, suddenly, it flattened out.

although the obesity rate among adults was still increasing, its climb seemed slower than before. Americans’ long-standing tendency to eat ever-bigger portions also seemed to be abating.

sugary drinks—liquid candy, pretty much—were always going to be a soft target for the nanny state. Fixing the food environment in deeper ways proved much harder. “The tobacco playbook pretty much only works for soda, because that’s the closest analogy we have as a food item,

that tobacco playbook doesn’t work to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, he said. It doesn’t work to increase consumption of beans. It doesn’t work to make people eat more nuts or seeds or extra-virgin olive oil.

Careful research in the past decade has shown that many of the Obama-era social fixes did little to alter behavior or improve our health. Putting calorie labels on menus seemed to prompt at most a small decline in the amount of food people ate. Employer-based wellness programs (which are still offered by 80 percent of large companies) were shown to have zero tangible effects. Health-care spending, in general, kept going up.

From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion of adults who said they’d experienced discrimination on account of their height or weight increased by two-thirds, going up to 12 percent. Puhl and others started citing evidence that this form of discrimination wasn’t merely a source of psychic harm, but also of obesity itself. Studies found that the experience of weight discrimination is associated with overeating, and with the risk of weight gain over time.

obesity rates resumed their ascent. Today, 20 percent of American children have obesity. For all the policy nudges and the sensible revisions to nutrition standards, food companies remain as unfettered as they were in the 1990s, Kelly Brownell told me. “Is there anything the industry can’t do now that it was doing then?” he asked. “The answer really is no. And so we have a very predictable set of outcomes.”

she started to rebound. The openings into her gastric pouch—the section of her stomach that wasn’t bypassed—stretched back to something like their former size. And Barb found ways to “eat around” the surgery, as doctors say, by taking food throughout the day in smaller portions

Bariatric surgeries can be highly effective for some people and nearly useless for others. Long-term studies have found that 30 percent of those who receive the same procedure Barb did regain at least one-quarter of what they lost within two years of reaching their weight nadir; more than half regain that much within five years.

if the effects of Barb’s surgery were quickly wearing off, its side effects were not: She now had iron, calcium, and B12 deficiencies resulting from the changes to her gut. She looked into getting a revision of the surgery—a redo, more or less—but insurance wouldn’t cover it

She found that every health concern she brought to doctors might be taken as a referendum, in some way, on her body size. “If I stubbed my toe or whatever, they’d just say ‘Lose weight.’ ” She began to notice all the times she’d be in a waiting room and find that every chair had arms. She realized that if she was having a surgical procedure, she’d need to buy herself a plus-size gown—or else submit to being covered with a bedsheet when the nurses realized that nothing else would fit.

Barb grew angrier and more direct about her needs—You’ll have to find me a different chair, she started saying to receptionists. Many others shared her rage. Activists had long decried the cruel treatment of people with obesity: The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had existed, for example, in one form or another, since 1969; the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination had been incorporated in 1991. But in the early 2000s, the ideas behind this movement began to wend their way deeper into academia, and they soon gained some purchase with the public.

“Our public-health efforts to address obesity have failed,” Eric Finkelstein, the economist, told me.

Others attacked the very premise of a “healthy weight”: People do not have any fundamental need, they argued, morally or medically, to strive for smaller bodies as an end in itself. They called for resistance to the ideology of anti-fatness, with its profit-making arms in health care and consumer goods. The Association for Size Diversity and Health formed in 2003; a year later, dozens of scholars working on weight-related topics joined together to create the academic field of fat studies.

As the size-diversity movement grew, its values were taken up—or co-opted—by Big Business. Dove had recently launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which included plus-size women. (Ad Age later named it the best ad campaign of the 21st century.) People started talking about “fat shaming” as something to avoid

By 2001, Bacon, who uses they/them pronouns, had received their Ph.D. and finished a rough draft of a book, Health at Every Size, which drew inspiration from a broader movement by that name among health-care practitioners

But something shifted in the ensuing years. In 2007, Bacon got a different response, and the book was published. Health at Every Size became a point of entry for a generation of young activists and, for a time, helped shape Americans’ understanding of obesity.

Some experts were rethinking their advice on food and diet. At UC Davis, a physiologist named Lindo Bacon who had struggled to overcome an eating disorder had been studying the effects of “intuitive eating,” which aims to promote healthy, sustainable behavior without fixating on what you weigh or how you look

The heightened sensitivity started showing up in survey data, too. In 2010, fewer than half of U.S. adults expressed support for giving people with obesity the same legal protections from discrimination offered to people with disabilities. In 2015, that rate had risen to three-quarters.

In Bacon’s view, the 2000s and 2010s were glory years. “People came together and they realized that they’re not alone, and they can start to be critical of the ideas that they’ve been taught,” Bacon told me. “We were on this marvelous path of gaining more credibility for the whole Health at Every Size movement, and more awareness.”

that sense of unity proved short-lived; the movement soon began to splinter. Black women have the highest rates of obesity, and disproportionately high rates of associated health conditions. Yet according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, Black patients with obesity get lower-quality care than white patients with obesity.

That system was exactly what Bacon and the Health at Every Size movement had set out to reform. The problem, as they saw it, was not so much that Black people lacked access to obesity medicine, but that, as Bacon and the Black sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in a 2020 article, Black women have been “specifically targeted” for weight loss, which Bacon and Strings saw as a form of racism

But members of the fat-acceptance movement pointed out that their own most visible leaders, including Bacon, were overwhelmingly white. “White female dietitians have helped steal and monetize the body positive movement,” Marquisele Mercedes, a Black activist and public-health Ph.D. student, wrote in September 2020. “And I’m sick of it.”

Tensions over who had the standing to speak, and on which topics, boiled over. In 2022, following allegations that Bacon had been exploitative and condescending toward Black colleagues, the Association for Size Diversity and Health expelled them from its ranks and barred them from attending its events.

As the movement succumbed to in-fighting, its momentum with the public stalled. If attitudes about fatness among the general public had changed during the 2000s and 2010s, it was only to a point. The idea that some people can indeed be “fit but fat,” though backed up by research, has always been a tough sell.

Although Americans had become less inclined to say they valued thinness, measures of their implicit attitudes seemed fairly stable. Outside of a few cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, new body-size-discrimination laws were never passed.

In the meantime, thinness was coming back into fashion

In the spring of 2022, Kim Kardashian—whose “curvy” physique has been a media and popular obsession—boasted about crash-dieting in advance of the Met Gala. A year later, the model and influencer Felicity Hayward warned Vogue Business that “plus-size representation has gone backwards.” In March of this year, the singer Lizzo, whose body pride has long been central to her public persona, told The New York Times that she’s been trying to lose weight. “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.

Among the many other dramatic effects of the GLP-1 drugs, they may well have released a store of pent-up social pressure to lose weight.

If ever there was a time to debate that impulse, and to question its origins and effects, it would be now. But Puhl told me that no one can even agree on which words are inoffensive. The medical field still uses obesity, as a description of a diagnosable disease. But many activists despise that phrase—some spell it with an asterisk in place of the e—and propose instead to reclaim fat.

Everyone seems to agree on the most important, central fact: that we should be doing everything we can to limit weight stigma. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the arguing.

Things feel surreal these days to just about anyone who has spent years thinking about obesity. At 71, after more than four decades in the field, Thomas Wadden now works part-time, seeing patients just a few days a week. But the arrival of the GLP-1 drugs has kept him hanging on for a few more years, he said. “It’s too much of an exciting period to leave obesity research right now.”

When everyone is on semaglutide or tirzepatide, will the soft-drink companies—Brownell’s nemeses for so many years—feel as if a burden has been lifted? “My guess is the food industry is probably really happy to see these drugs come along,” he said. They’ll find a way to reach the people who are taking GLP‑1s, with foods and beverages in smaller portions, maybe. At the same time, the pressures to cut back on where and how they sell their products will abate.

the triumph in obesity treatment only highlights the abiding mystery of why Americans are still getting fatter, even now

Perhaps one can lay the blame on “ultraprocessed” foods, he said. Maybe it’s a related problem with our microbiomes. Or it could be that obesity, once it takes hold within a population, tends to reproduce itself through interactions between a mother and a fetus. Others have pointed to increasing screen time, how much sleep we get, which chemicals are in the products that we use, and which pills we happen to take for our many other maladies.

“The GLP-1s are just a perfect example of how poorly we understand obesity,” Mozaffarian told me. “Any explanation of why they cause weight loss is all post-hoc hand-waving now, because we have no idea. We have no idea why they really work and people are losing weight.”

The new drugs—and the “new understanding of obesity” that they have supposedly occasioned—could end up changing people’s attitudes toward body size. But in what ways

When the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease in 2013, Rebecca Puhl told me, some thought “it might reduce stigma, because it was putting more emphasis on the uncontrollable factors that contribute to obesity.” Others guessed that it would do the opposite, because no one likes to be “diseased.”

why wasn’t there another kind of nagging voice that wouldn’t stop—a sense of worry over what the future holds? And if she wasn’t worried for herself, then what about for Meghann or for Tristan, who are barely in their 40s? Wouldn’t they be on these drugs for another 40 years, or even longer? But Barb said she wasn’t worried—not at all. “The technology is so much better now.” If any problems come up, the scientists will find solutions.

The initial report presents a flexible daily diet for all food groups based on the best health science, which also limits the impact of food production on the planet

The Eat-Lancet report posits that the global food system is broken. From the numbers quoted alone, it is hard to disagree: more than 2 billion people are micronutrient deficient, and almost 1 billion go hungry, while 2.1 billion adults are overweight or obese

Unhealthy diets are, it says, “the largest global burden of disease”, and pose a greater risk to morbidity and mortality than “unsafe sex, alcohol, drug, and tobacco use combined”

we are not (yet) extinct, but we have an era named after us. And what we are eating has a lot to do with that. Food production, the report states, “is the largest source of environmental degradation”.

It has identified a daily win-win diet – good for health, good for the environment – that is loosely based on the much-lauded Mediterranean diet, but with fewer eggs, less meat and fish, and next to no sugar.

it does include a range of foodstuff types that are adaptable, in theory, to the cuisines (potato or cassava; palm-oil-based, say, or soy-rich) and primary dietary restrictions (omnivore, no pork, pescatarian, vegetarian, vegan) found across the world

the daily ration of red meat stands at 7g (with an allowable range of 0-14g); unless you are creative enough to make a small steak feed two football sides and their subs, you will only be eating one once a month.

you are allocated little more than two chicken breast fillets and three eggs every fortnight and two tins of tuna or 1.5 salmon fillets a week

Per day, you get 250g of full-fat milk products (milk, butter, yoghurt, cheese): the average splash of milk in not very milky tea is 30g

The diet functions on the basis of 2,500 kcal daily,

It is still more food – way, way more – than two billion people currently have access to.

The future served up on a plate Monday

Breakfast: Porridge (made with water) with 1 tbsp honey or maple syrup, topped with nuts and seeds, and one piece of fruit; one cup of tea or coffee with milk

Lunch: Fennel, avocado, spinach and broccoli salad with feta and mustard and plant-oil dressing with one slice of sourdough bread, plus one plain yoghurt pot with a handful of berries

Dinner: Roast red cabbage and red lentil dahl with rice

Snack: Sugar-free ricecakes with nut butter.

Tuesday Breakfast: Two eggs with two slices wholemeal toast and Marmite

Lunch: Barley or other wholegrain salad with smoked mackerel, seeds

radishes, celery, chickpeas, herbs, oil and lemon juice dressing; one piece of fruit.

Dinner: One baked sweet potato with salsa, cavolo nero, avocado, black beans, grated cheese and a dollop of sour cream.

Snack: One handful of roasted chickpeas.

Wednesday Breakfast: Two slices of wholemeal toast with one sliced banana and honey; one cup of tea or coffee with milk.

Lunch: Spicy miso noodle soup with tofu, radishes, leafy greens and poached egg (that’s your quota for two weeks used up: no eggs for you next week); small pot of plain yoghurt

Dinner: Steamed veg (kale, broccoli and carrot) with a yoghurt and fresh herb dressing and olive oil, root veg and bean mash.

Snack: Cannellini bean dip with red pepper sticks

Dr. Monteiro and his colleagues developed a food classification system called Nova, named after the Portuguese and Latin words for “new.” It has since been adopted by researchers across the world.

Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, like fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, beans, lentils, meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, plain yogurt, rice, pasta, corn meal, flour, coffee, tea and herbs and spices.

Processed culinary ingredients, such as cooking oils, butter, sugar, honey, vinegar and salt.

If you look at the ingredient list and you see things that you wouldn’t use in home cooking, then that’s probably an ultraprocessed food,”

his group includes freshly baked bread, most cheeses and canned vegetables, beans and fish. These foods may contain preservatives that extend shelf life.

Ultraprocessed foods made using industrial methods and ingredients you wouldn’t typically find in grocery stores — like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and concentrated proteins like soy isolate.

They often contain additives like flavorings, colorings or emulsifiers to make them appear more attractive and palatable.

Think sodas and energy drinks, chips, candies, flavored yogurts, margarine, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausages, lunch meats, boxed macaroni and cheese, infant formulas and most packaged breads, plant milks, meat substitutes and breakfast cereals.

Processed foods made by combining foods from Category 1 with the ingredients of Category 2 and preserving or modifying them with relatively simple methods like canning, bottling, fermentation and baking

That has led to debate among nutrition experts about whether it’s useful for describing the healthfulness of a food, partly since many UPFs — like whole grain breads, flavored yogurts and infant formulas — can provide valuable nutrients

Most research linking UPFs to poor health is based on observational studies, in which researchers ask people about their diets and then track their health over many years.

Why might UPFs be harmful?

In a large review of studies that was published in 2024, scientists reported that consuming UPFs was associated with 32 health problems, with the most convincing evidence for heart disease-related deaths, Type 2 diabetes and common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

Such studies are valuable, because they can look at large groups of people — the 2024 review included results from nearly 10 million — over the many years it can take for chronic health conditions to develop

She added that the consistency of the link between UPFs and health issues increased her confidence that there was a real problem with the foods.

But the observational studies also have limitations,

It’s true that there is a correlation between these foods and chronic diseases, she said, but that doesn’t mean that UPFs directly cause poor health.

Dr. O’Connor questioned whether it’s helpful to group such “starkly different” foods — like Twinkies and breakfast cereals — into one category. Certain types of ultraprocessed foods, like sodas and processed meats, are more clearly harmful than others

UPFs like flavored yogurts and whole grain breads, on the other hand, have been associated with a reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

Clinical trials are needed to test if UPFs directly cause health problems, Dr. O’Connor said. Only one such study, which was small and had some limitations, has been done, s

In that study, published in 2019, 20 adults with a range of body sizes lived in a research hospital at the National Institutes of Health for four weeks. For two weeks, they ate mainly unprocessed or minimally processed foods, and for another two weeks, they ate mainly UPFs. The diets had similar amounts of calories and nutrients, and the participants could eat as much as they wanted at each meal.

During their two weeks on the ultraprocessed diet, participants gained an average of two pounds and consumed about 500 calories more per day than they did on the unprocessed diet

During their time on the unprocessed diet, they lost about two pounds.

That finding might help explain the link between UPFs, obesity and other metabolic conditions

The Nova system notably doesn’t classify foods based on nutrients like fat, fiber, vitamins or minerals. It’s “agnostic to nutrition,”

There are many “strong opinions” about why ultraprocessed foods are unhealthy, Dr. Hall said. “But there’s actually not a lot of rigorous science” on what those mechanisms are

Because UPFs are often cheap, convenient and accessible, they’re probably displacing healthier foods from our diets

the foods could be having more direct effects on health. They can be easy to overeat — maybe because they contain hard-to-resist combinations of carbohydrates, sugars, fats and salt, are high-calorie and easy to chew

It’s also possible that resulting blood sugar spikes may damage arteries or ramp up inflammation, or that certain food additives or chemicals may interfere with hormones, cause a “leaky” intestine or disrupt the gut microbiome.

Researchers, including Dr. Hall and Dr. Davy, are beginning to conduct small clinical trials that will test some of these theories.

most researchers think there are various ways the foods are causing harm. “Rarely in nutrition is there a single factor that fully explains the relationship between foods and some health outcome,”

In 2014, Dr. Monteiro helped write new dietary guidelines for Brazil that advised people to avoid ultraprocessed foods.

Other countries like Mexico, Israel and Canada have also explicitly recommended avoiding or limiting UPFs or “highly processed foods.”

The U.S. dietary guidelines contain no such advice, but an advisory committee is currently looking into the evidence on how UPFs may affect weight gain, which could influence the 2025 guidelines.

It’s difficult to know what to do about UPFs in the United States, where so much food is already ultraprocessed and people with lower incomes can be especially dependent on them,

“At the end of the day, they are an important source of food, and food is food,” Dr. Mattei added. “We really cannot vilify them,”

While research continues, expert opinions differ on how people should approach UPFs.

the safest course is to avoid them altogether

to swap flavored yogurt for plain yogurt with fruit, for example, or to buy a fresh loaf from a local bakery instead of packaged bread, if you can afford to do so

Dr. Vadiveloo suggested a more moderate strategy, focusing on limiting UPFs that don’t provide valuable nutrients, like soda and cookies

She also recommended eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains (ultraprocessed or not), legumes, nuts and seeds.

Cook at home as much as you can, using minimally processed foods

The answer to both lies in one word: satiety. It’s a concept that we don’t use much in everyday life but that we’ve all experienced at some point. It describes the sensation of having had enough and not wanting any more.

The primary reason we have gained weight at a pace unprecedented in human history is that our diets have radically changed in ways that have deeply undermined our ability to feel sated

The evidence is clear that the kind of food my father grew up eating quickly makes you feel full. But the kind of food I grew up eating, much of which is made in factories, often with artificial chemicals, left me feeling empty and as if I had a hole in my stomach

In a recent study of what American children eat, ultraprocessed food was found to make up 67 percent of their daily diet. This kind of food makes you want to eat more and more. Satiety comes late, if at all.

After he moved in 2000 to the United States in his 20s, he gained 30 pounds in two years. He began to wonder if the American diet has some kind of strange effect on our brains and our cravings, so he designed an experiment to test it.

He and his colleague Paul Johnson raised a group of rats in a cage and gave them an abundant supply of healthy, balanced rat chow made out of the kind of food rats had been eating for a very long time. The rats would eat it when they were hungry, and then they seemed to feel sated and stopped. They did not become fat.

then Dr. Kenny and his colleague exposed the rats to an American diet: fried bacon, Snickers bars, cheesecake and other treats. They went crazy for it. The rats would hurl themselves into the cheesecake, gorge themselves and emerge with their faces and whiskers totally slicked with it. They quickly lost almost all interest in the healthy food, and the restraint they used to show around healthy food disappeared. Within six weeks, their obesity rates soared.

They took all the processed food away and gave the rats their old healthy diet. Dr. Kenny was confident that they would eat more of it, proving that processed food had expanded their appetites. But something stranger happened. It was as though the rats no longer recognized healthy food as food at all, and they barely ate it. Only when they were starving did they reluctantly start to consume it again.

Drugs like Ozempic work precisely by making us feel full.

processed and ultraprocessed food create a raging hole of hunger, and these treatments can repair that hole

the drugs are “an artificial solution to an artificial problem.”

Yet we have reacted to this crisis largely caused by the food industry as if it were caused only by individual moral dereliction

Why do we turn our anger inward and not outward at the main cause of the crisis? And by extension, why do we seek to shame people taking Ozempic but not those who, say, take drugs to lower their blood pressure?

The first is the belief that obesity is a sin.

The second idea is that we are all in a competition when it comes to weight. Ours is a society full of people fighting against the forces in our food that are making us fatter.

Looked at in this way, people on Ozempic can resemble cyclists like Lance Armstrong who used performance-enhancing drugs.

We can’t find our way to a sane, nontoxic conversation about obesity or Ozempic until we bring these rarely spoken thoughts into the open and reckon with them

remember the competition isn’t between you and your neighbor who’s on weight-loss drugs. It’s between you and a food industry constantly designing new ways to undermine your satiety.

Reducing or reversing obesity hugely boosts health, on average: We know from years of studying bariatric surgery that it slashes the risks of cancer, heart disease and diabetes-related death. Early indications are that the new anti-obesity drugs are moving people in a similar radically healthier direction,

But these drugs may increase the risk for thyroid cancer.

Do we want these weight loss drugs to be another opportunity to tear one another down? Or do we want to realize that the food industry has profoundly altered the appetites of us all — leaving us trapped in the same cage, scrambling to find a way out?

“why not go whole hog” (forgive me) “and advocate a strictly vegan diet?” Isn’t being a part-time vegan, the more strident demand, like being a little bit pregnant?

You might think of patterns of eating as falling on one point or another along a spectrum, and moving toward the plant-based end of that spectrum — as opposed to the end represented by Morgan Spurlock’s “super-sized” diet — is almost always beneficial.[7] It is about eating better, or well, not perfectly, and it must be said that “perfectly” has not yet been defined.

This much is known, now: We produce most animal products in deplorable conditions, and some of our health and environmental problems can be traced both to dominant production methods and our overconsumption. But we like to eat them, and they’re a pleasurable and even healthy part of many traditional diets and even sound agricultural practices.

Henri seemed set to win the election when news of the massacre in Paris reached Poland. Overnight the atmosphere changed: lurid depictions of cruelty began to circulate

We want Henri of Valois to be our king!

The former provided for a Diet every two years, forbade the king to name his successor or to marry without its consent, limited his power over legislation and bound him to accept a permanent council of 16 senators. To safeguard religious toleration, the terms of the Confederation of Warsaw of 1573 were included in the Henrician Articles, together with a clause releasing the king’s subjects of their obligation of obedience if he broke the contract

little more than a figurehead

For Poland was far from backward culturally. A strong humanistic tradition had developed there in the 15th century

You will be powerless to do evil’, he said, ‘but all powerful to do good.

This meeting revealed sharp differences among the Poles over religious toleration

Two conditions were particularly repugnant to Henri: the obligation to hand over his private fortune to the Polish state and that which released his subjects from their obedience if he should break any condition attached to his election

Henri sat as king of Poland alongside his brother, Charles IX, king of France

Poland as such did not interest him; he was only going there to please his mother.

German Protestants had been outraged by the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day. Yet Henri was received courteously

Protestant members of the Diet feared that, once crowned, he would expel all non-Catholics from Poland

He sentenced Zborowski to banishment, thereby unleashing a furious reaction. Considered too harsh by the Zborowskis and too light by the Wapowskis, the sentence ignited bitter criticism of Henri

He was accused of breaking his oath

By now Henri was heartily tired of Poland

On June 14th, 1574, however, news of Charles IX’s death reached Henri. Keeping it to himself, he declined to take part in a tournament that evening and instead consulted four of his French councillors as to what action to take. They were equally divided: some thought a clandestine departure would do lasting damage to Henri’s reputation, while others argued that he needed to return to France urgently

Having decided to go, Henri asked two of his French courtiers to find out how to leave Cracow unnoticed and to prepare horses and guides. For it was essential that the Poles should not suspect that he was about to ditch them. If they tried to retain him he might lose the throne of France, which he valued far more than that of Poland. He was being pressed by his mother to return without delay. His brother Alençon remained a threat. On June 15th Henri deceitfully informed the Senate that he was not planning to leave for the time being and summoned a meeting of the Diet for September

In Cracow Henri’s flight was discovered. Tenczynski and a large troop of horsemen set off in pursuit. On reaching the river the chamberlain spied Henri on the far bank: ‘Your Majesty’, he cried, ‘why are you fleeing?’ He then joined Henri at Ples, a small Austrian town. ‘My friend’, explained the king, ‘while I am taking up the succession given to me by God, I am not renouncing that which He has given me by election, for my shoulders are strong enough to support both crowns

The king gave him a valuable diamond instead. Tenczynski then returned to Cracow, leaving Henri and his company to continue their journey

Discontent and confusion erupted in Poland after Henri’s flight.

the nobles turned instead to Stephen Bathory, Prince of Transylvania. He was acclaimed by a Diet on January 18th, 1576 and, soon afterwards, accepted the conditions laid down by the Polish nobles. He was crowned in Cracow on April 29th and married Princess Anna the next day

Poles felt let down. No king of theirs had ever given up his crown voluntarily. A popular saying expressed their resentment: King Henri has done the Poles a bad turn: elected at night, he came at night, and, like a traitor, he fled at night

Many discount these nonexperimental studies—I know I have done so for years. But now I am taking another look as studies are starting to indicate that diet sweeteners could be hurting, instead of helping weight-loss efforts.

Colleagues at my institution argued in 2015 that such sweeteners are far from inert. They showed an impact on hormone secretion, cognitive processes and gut microbiota—and concluded that all of these effects could counter weight control intentions.

What was clear is that these substances again were linked to weight gain and metabolic disturbances.

It is reasonable to ask why these substances were not evaluated as drugs in the first place. Millions of people are exposed to them every day, and yet their long-term effect is uncertain. Could they be actually causing the health problems they were intended to prevent?

the burden of proof is on the manufacturers to show benefit and demonstrate safety through clinical trials.

one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it.

I’ve spent much of the last decade doing journalistic research on diet and chronic disease — some of the more contrarian findings, on dietary fat, appeared in this magazine —– and I have come to conclusions similar to Lustig’s.

“Calories in, calories out,” he says, “is a completely disproven hypothesis.”

Hyman advocates a cold-turkey approach to his patients. “You want people to experience their hunger, their behavior, their mood, their energy [and] their chronic symptoms if they stop [consuming] sugar and starch for a week or two weeks or three weeks,

Our biochemistry, he says, not will power, drives our cravings and hunger patterns. It’s not a “moral failing that we can’t control our diet.”

Hyman, who has written “The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet,” says his intent is to “completely obliterate the idea” that all calories are the same, that there’s no difference between 100 calories of Coca-Cola or cauliflower.

Fat actually helps you burn fat,” he explained, destroying many of the myths I’d grown up with

Fat, he says, “increases muscle mass and decreases inflammation — if it’s the right fat” — by that he includes coconut butter, MCT oil (or medium-chain triglycerides), extra-virgin cold-pressed olive oil, and those found in wild fatty fish such as salmon and sardines, nuts and avocados. (See his complete list at thechalkboardmag.com/dr-hyman-good-fat-bad-fat .)

here’s the part that blew my mind: I started to lose weight. Before the detox I weighed 166 pounds.

Twelve weeks later, I hit a new low adult weight: 155. I’ve cinched in my belt a notch. My bloodwork looks much better (my triglycerides dropped by half in six weeks

I’m now in my fourth month of a modified detox — I don’t want to live without wine or some sweets (I eat three 1-inch squared pieces of very dark chocolate a day). I know I can’t avoid all added sugars, no matter how vigilant I may be.

as with climate change, the powers that be in this country are doing very little to head off the potentially disastrous results of expanding obesity, obesity specialists say.

Well-intentioned efforts like limiting access to huge portions of sugar-sweetened soda, the scientists note, are effectively thwarted by well-heeled industrie

With rare exceptions, the sugar and beverage industries have blocked nearly every attempt to add an excise tax to sugar-sweetened beverages.

Claims that such a tax is regressive and unfairly targets low-income people is shortsighted

“What people would save in health care costs would dwarf the extra money paid as taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages,” he said in an interview.

in a city like Philadelphia, where a soda tax of 1.5 cents an ounce took effect three years ago, total purchases declined by 38 percent even after accounting for beverages people bought outside the city

piecemeal changes like this are not enough to make a significant difference in the obesity forecast for the country

nationwide changes are needed in the ubiquitous food environment that has fostered a steady climb toward a weight-and-health disaster.

Americans weren’t always this fat; since 1990, the prevalence of obesity in this country has doubled.

Our genetics haven’t changed in the last 30 years. Rather, what has changed is the environment in which our genes now function.

“Food is very cheap in the United States, and super easy to access,”

We eat out more, consuming more foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt, and our portion sizes are bigger.

“You don’t even have to leave home to eat restaurant-prepared food — just call and it will be delivered.

As a society, we also snack more, a habit that starts as soon as toddlers can feed themselves.

“People are snacking throughout the day,” Mr. Ward said. “Snacking is the normal thing to do in the United States. In France, you never see anyone eating on a bus.”

We also eat more highly processed foods, which have been shown to foster weight gain, thanks to their usually high levels of calories, sugar and fat.

even when controlling for weight, consuming lots of processed foods raises the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

“Through marketing, we’re constantly being sold on foods we didn’t even know we wanted. We’re all about immediate rewards. We’re not thinking about the future, which is why we’re going to see more than half the population obese in 10 years.”

Unless something is done to reverse this trend, Mr. Ward said, “Obesity will be the new normal in this country. We’re living in an obesogenic environment.”

“if I could wave a magic wand, I’d make a tax on beverages a federal mandate because they’re the largest source of added sugar in the diet and are strongly linked to weight gain and health problems.

the link between beverage consumption and greater intake of calories may also apply to drinks flavored with no-calorie or low-calorie sweeteners.

prompting restaurants to gradually, surreptitiously reduce the amount of fat, sugar and calories in the meals they serve could help put the brakes on societal weight gain. “Menus could make healthier, lower-calorie meals the default option,

Controlling portion sizes is another critically important step. “Big portions are especially motivating for low-income people who reasonably want to get more calories for their dollar,”

Another policy-based approach that could reverse rising obesity projections might be to partner with climate control advocates, Dr. Bleich suggested. “If we pull more meat out of the American diet, it would help both the environment and weight loss,

“prevention is the way to go. Children aren’t born obese, but we can already see excessive weight gain as early as age 2. Changes in the food environment are needed at every level — local, state and federal. It’s hard for individuals to voluntarily change their behavior.”

health-promoting changes in the food packages provided to low-income women, infants and children since 2009 have helped to reverse or stabilize obesity in the preschool children who receive them.

The culture accelerated with the appearance of Homo erectus (1.9 million years ago), whose larger brain and shorter digestive system reflected the increased consumption of meat

the Neanderthals (400,000 to 40,000 years ago), who developed more sophisticated technology.

It also spanned most of the existence of Homo sapiens, dating from the first anatomically modern humans 200,000 years ago, to the transition to permanent agricultural communities around 10,000 B.C.

sharpened stones were used for cutting before hand-axes were developed, marking the onset of Acheulean technology about 1.6 million years ago.

Use of hearths dates back almost 800,000 years ago, and other findings point to controlled heating as far back as 1 million years ago.

By the time of the Neanderthals, hunter-gatherers were displaying such “human” characteristics as burying their dead and creating ornamental objects

These more specialized tools enabled them to widen their diet and create more effective clothing and shelter as they moved about in search of food.

From their earliest days, the hunter-gatherer diet included various grasses, tubers, fruits, seeds and nuts. Lacking the means to kill larger animals, they procured meat from smaller game or through scavenging.

Modern humans were cooking shellfish by 160,000 years ago, and by 90,000 years ago they were developing the specialized fishing tools that enabled them to haul in larger aquatic life.

With limited resources, these groups were egalitarian by nature, scraping up enough food to survive and fashioning basic shelter for all.

Physiological evolution also led to changes, with the bigger brains of more recent ancestors leading to longer periods of childhood and adolescence.

Fire enabled hunter-gatherers to stay warm in colder temperatures, cook their food (preventing some diseases caused by consumption of raw foods like meat), and scare wild animals that might otherwise take their food or attack their camps.

By 50,000 years ago, huts made from wood, rock and bone were becoming more common,

Modern-day hunter-gatherers endure in various pockets around the globe. Among the more famous groups are the San, a.k.a. the Bushmen, of southern Africa,

Facebook and Instagram are simply carrying on a longstanding American tradition: stoking the insecurities of teenage girls to cash in on them.

The global beauty industry generates $500 billion in annual sales, and social media is now an important driver, especially for the youngest target demographic, Gen Z.

The global weight management market was estimated at more than $260 billion in 2020, and is projected to grow to more than $400 billion by 2027.

Before American girls’ confidence was commodified by Instagram, it was at the whim of magazines filled with impossibly slender, airbrushed models and ads from industries relying on girls and women for revenue

That’s because social media is addictive. Writing in The Atlantic, Derek Thompson called it “attention alcohol,” explaining, “Like booze, social media seems to offer an intoxicating cocktail of dopamine, disorientation, and, for some, dependency.”

as a student at Harvard, he put his female classmates’ photos on his now-notorious “Facemash” website, where students could rank and compare the students’ headshots based on how hot they were. He wrote at the time, “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

For girls now, things have changed. They’re largely worse. Social media platforms such as Instagram feel like algorithmic free-for-alls, full of images of people who have altered how they look, whether by using online filters or in real life, with dieting, surgery or both. In the feed, influencers’ and celebrities’ photos are interspersed with photos of your friends and yourself. Now any photo is subject to scrutiny, comparison and assessment in the form of likes and comments.

No school health class or parental reassurance is a match for the might of these powerful tech platforms, combined with entire industries that prey on girls’ insecurities.

Girls themselves often know Instagram is not good for them, but they keep coming back.

At the core of this marketing, the message endures: You are riddled with flaws and imperfections. We will tell you what to buy, and what do, to fix yourself.

Ultimately, Instagram is just a vicious messenger. But the cesspool of content fueling it? That comes from us.

Ms. Davis acknowledged that with her weight loss came affirmation — more party invitations, more attention from men. “I so badly want to be like, ‘What you look like doesn’t matter,’” she said. “But it sure does change how people treat you.”

When she relapsed, Ms. Davis convinced herself she was just trying to eat healthier and be more active. Soon though, she said, she was subsisting on rice cakes and Red Bull

iven that she is still working on her own issues — and given that she’s no longer plus size — she doesn’t feel it’s her place to advocate body positivity online.“There was a time when I was in a body where I was experiencing fatphobia,” she said. “Now that I’m not in that body currently, I don’t think my voice is needed.”

When Ms. James first noticed that Ms. Davis had lost weight, she unfollowed her. “I just didn’t think that was good for me,” she said. But then she noticed her feeds were full of people posting their exercise and diet routines. Ms. Davis was just one of many women who were no longer proudly plus size. Ms. James re-followed her. And recently, she said, she started working out and shedding pounds herself.“I guess weight is just as much of a trend as anything else,” Ms. James said.

the alternative to that, which is admittedly less economically efficient, but much more likely to succeed in the real world, is to recognize that cleaner energy sources deliver some public good. They deliver a benefit of cleaner air, less air pollution and deaths and mortalities and asthma attacks and less climate damages. And to subsidize their production, so that we get more from the clean sources.

I do think that we are going to see basically the full range of all of those clean firm power generation technologies get trialed out over the next few years and have a chance to scale

what is going to be key to stopping, preventing the worst impacts of climate change is reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions globally as rapidly as possible.

where I see the future for nuclear in the West, and I think where the bulk of the industry and the investment now is focused is on smaller and more modular reactors that instead of trying to power a million people per reactor are trying to power 50,000 or 100,000 people, like a 1/10 or a 1/20 the size of a large scale reactor.

the challenge for electricity is really twofold, we have to cut emissions from the power sector, right? Which already is now the number two, used to be the number one, emitting sector of the economy. Since we have made some progress, electricity is now number two and transportation is edged into the number one position for biggest greenhouse gas polluting sector.

it is an important reality of complex energy systems that we need a complete team of resources, and we need a range of options because we’re a big, diverse country with different resource spaces, different geographic constraints and different values, frankly. So that some parts of the country really do want to build nuclear power or really do want to continue to use natural gas. Other parts don’t want to touch them.

I’m really struck by this International Energy Association estimate that almost half of global emissions reductions by 2050 will come from technologies that exist only as prototypes or demonstration projects today

And that means that the bets on each individual one are so much smaller that you can build one for a billion dollars instead of $15 billion or $20 billion. And I think that makes it much more likely that we can get our muscle memory back and get the economies of scale and learning by doing and trained work force developed around building them in series. That’s going to be key to building low-cost reactors.

I think we have to add that to the message. It’s not saying that one outweighs the other or these trade-offs are easy, but it is an important element that we can’t forget. That the more transmission we build, the more wind and solar we build, the lower the air pollution and public health impacts on vulnerable communities are as well, and we can save tens of thousands of lives in the process.

And so there’s sort of an opportunity cost right now where until we’ve shut down the last coal plants and the last natural gas plants, every single megawatt-hour of new clean electricity, new energy efficiency that we can add to the grid that goes to replace a nuclear power plant is a wasted opportunity to accelerate our emissions reductions and get rid of those dirty fossil fuels.

here is a segment of the climate movement that just hates this part of the bill, hates this part of the theory, does not want to see a substantial part of our decarbonization pathway built around things that allow us to continue producing fossil fuels in a putatively cleaner way. And I think there’s also some skepticism that it really will work technically in the long run. What is that critique? And why aren’t you persuaded by it?

And so they don’t cost a whole lot to demonstrate. We’re talking about tens of millions of dollars to demonstrate, rather than billions of dollars. And so I’m confident that we’re going to see a lot of success there.

But what we need are technologies that are not constrained by the weather and are not constrained by a duration limit, that can go as long as we need them, whenever we need them. And that’s what we call the third category, which are firm resources or clean firm resources, because we want to replace the dirty ones with the clean ones. And so today, we rely on natural gas and coal and our existing nuclear fleet for that firm role. But if we want to build a clean energy system and we need all that new clean electricity, we’re going to need to build about an equivalent amount as we have coal and gas plants today of clean firm options, whether that’s new nuclear power plants, advanced geothermal or similar options like that.

it is a massive transformation of our energy system, right? We’re going to have to rewire the country and change the way we make and use energy from the way we produce it, to the way we transport it, to the way we consume it at a very large scale. And so, yeah, that is the statistic.

l, let me get at that point about revitalization, about trying to spread a lot of this money geographically, widely. When I’ve talked to the Biden administration about this bill, something they’re always very keen to tell me is that it isn’t just money, it is standards. This bill is full of standards.

Well, there’s two — I think, two elements of that critique. One is that fossil energy companies are themselves primarily responsible for our lack of progress on climate change. That because of their vested economic interests, they have actively disrupted efforts to confront climate change over the long haul. And so climate campaigners, in this view, are trying to delegitimize fossil fuel companies and industries as social actors, the same way that tobacco companies were villainized and basically delegitimized as legitimate corporate citizens. And so that’s an effort, that’s a political strategy, that’s meant to try to weaken the ability of oil and gas companies to impede progress.

And that is real value because every time we burn natural gas or coal, we’re consuming something that costs money. And if we can avoid that, then the wind and solar farms are effectively delivering value in the value of the avoided fuel, and of course, the social value of the avoided emissions.

let’s also not forget that the money talks, right? That finances is a necessary condition, if not sufficient. But what this bill does is aligns all of the financial incentives, or at least most of them, behind making the right clean energy choices. And without that, there’s no way we’re going to make progress at the pace we need

And geothermal, unlike a big nuclear plant, they’re really modular. You only need to build them in 5 or 10 megawatt increments

The first rule of holes is stop digging, right? Then you can figure out how to climb out

We’re going to see the first nuclear power plants built at the end of the decade. There are a variety of technologies that are getting licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commissio

re you confident that we have or are near to having the carbon-capture technologies to reliably capture, and store, or use carbon for very, very long periods of geologic time?

You shouldn’t expect everyone to just be altruistic. We have to make it make good financial sense for everyone to make the clean choice. And so there’s two ways to do that. You can make fossil energy more expensive to price in the true cost of consuming fossil fuels for society, which includes all of the climate damages that are going to occur down the line because of accelerating climate change, but also air pollution

We still have to go all the way from there to net-zero in 2050. And that, of course, is assuming that we can build transmission in wind and solar at the pace that makes economic sense. So if we can’t do that, we’re going to fall even further short. So this is a big step down the road to net zero, but it is not the last step we need to take. And we need to sustain and accelerate this transition.

the policy environment is now finally aligned to do that with the Inflation Reduction Act and the infrastructure law providing both demonstration funding for the first kind of n-of-a-kind, first handful of projects in all of those categories, as well as the first market-ready deployment subsidies, so that we can scale up, and drive down the cost, and improve the maturity and performance of all those technologies over the next 10 years as well, just as we did for wind and solar.

And so the role of wind and solar is effectively to displace the fuel consumption of other potentially more dependable resources in the grid, maybe not necessarily to shut down the power plant as a whole, but to use it less and less.

The last time Congress took up and failed to pass climate policy in 2009 and 2010, solar PV cost 10 times as much as it does today, and wind, onshore wind farms, cost three times as much as they do today. So we’ve seen a 90 percent decline in the cost of both solar PV and lithium ion batteries, which are the major cost component in electric vehicles and our main source of growing grid scale energy storage to help deal with the variability of wind and solar on the grid. And so those costs have come down by a factor of 10, and we’ve seen about a 70 percent decline in the cost of wind over the last decade. And that changes the whole game, right?

we tried them out, and we deployed them at scale, and we got better and better at it over time. And so we don’t need carbon capture at scale this decade. The things that are going to do all of the emissions reduction work, really, the bulk of it, are technologies that we bet on a decade ago and are ready to scale now. What we need to do over this next decade is to repeat that same kind of success that we had for wind and solar and batteries with the full portfolio of options that we think we might need at scale in the 2030s and 2040

Every year matters. Every tenth of a degree of warming matters in terms of the impacts and damages and suffering that can be avoided in the future. And so we need to get to net-zero emissions globally as rapidly as we can.

until we reach the point where the total emissions of climate-warming gases from human activities is exactly equaled out or more so by the removal of those same greenhouse gases from the atmosphere each year due to human activities, we’re basically contributing to the growing concentration of climate-warming gases in the atmosphere. And that’s what drives climate change, those cumulative emissions and the total atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases

let’s take the big picture of that. It gets called decarbonization, but as I understand it, basically every theory of how to hit net zero by 2050 looks like this — you make electricity clean, you make much more clean electricity, you make almost everything run on electricity, and then you mop up the kind of small industries or productive questions that we have not figured out how to make electric. Is that basically right?

nothing in this bill really changes our capacity to plan. There’s no central coordinator, or the federal government doesn’t have vast new powers to decide where things go. So I worry a little bit that we’re solving the money problem, but there’s a lot of other reasons we end up building things slowly and over budget than just money.

And so when I think about the challenge of decarbonization, I think about how you unlock feedback loops and how you change the political economy of decarbonization by disrupting current interests that might oppose clean energy transitions and building and strengthening interests that would support them

the other analogy I often use is that of a balanced diet. You can’t eat only bananas, and you don’t want to only eat burgers, you want to eat a diverse mix of different parts of your diet. And so whether it’s trying to have all the right star players playing the right position on the court or trying to balance out your diet, what we need to build is an effective energy system that consists of team of different roles. And we break it down in our research as basically three key roles.

There’s a second, and more substantial or tangible reason to oppose carbon capture, which is that if it perpetuates some amount of fossil fuel use — it’s going to be dramatically less than today — but some amount of fossil fuel use, then it also perpetuates some of the impacts of the extractive economy and the transport and processing of fossil fuels that have primarily been borne by low income and Black and Brown communities

I worry about those things too. Those were big emphasis points in the Net-Zero America Study. Once you start to really unpack the scale and pace of change that we’re talking about, you inevitably start to be concerned with some of those other kind of rate limiting factors that constrained how quickly we can make this transition.

you write and your colleagues write in the Net-Zero Report that, quote, “expanding the supply of clean electricity is a linchpin in all net-zero paths.”

achieving the required additions by 2030 of utility scale solar and wind capacity means installing 38 to 67 gigawatts a year on average. The U.S. single year record added capacity is 25 gigawatts, which we did in 2020. So we need to on average be somewhere between — be around doubling our best-ever year in solar and wind capacity installation year after year after year after year.

that’s a big role, but it’s not the only role that we have. And because their output is variable, as well as demand for electricity which goes up and down.

there’s basically two main reasons why electricity is such a key linchpin. The first is that it’s a carbon-free energy carrier. And by that I mean it’s a way to move energy around in our economy and convert it and make use of it that doesn’t emit any CO2 directly when we do use electricity.

And so, yeah, you do have to onboard new workers through apprenticeship programs and pay them prevailing wages if you want to build wind and solar projects.

The first is the one that wind and solar fill and other weather-dependent variable renewable resources. And we call those fuel-saving resources. If you think about what a wind farm is, it’s a bunch of steel, and copper, and capital that you invested upfront that then has no fuel costs.

so aligning the incentives isn’t sufficient, but it does mean we now have a lot more very clear reasons for a lot more constituents to try to get to work solving the next set of challenges. And so that’s a huge step forward.

We need a second key role, which we call fast-burst or balancing resources. And that’s where batteries, battery energy storage, as well as smart charging of electric vehicles or other ways to flexibly move around when we consume electricity

so if we can grow the share of carbon-free generation, we can decarbonize both the front end of the supply of our energy carriers. And then when we consume that carbon-free electricity on the other end, it doesn’t emit CO2 either. And there’s just a lot more ways to produce carbon-free electricity than there are to produce liquid fuels or gaseous fuels

we could avoid on the order of 35,000 premature deaths over the first decade of implementation of the Inflation Reduction Act due to the improvements in our clean energy economy, through the reduction of coal combustion and vehicle-related emissions.

I just don’t think we’re going to sustain the clean energy transition and diversify the set of communities that have a clear political stake in continuing that transition if we don’t drive some of these kinds of broad benefits that the bill is trying to do

And then when I talk to critics of the bill, one thing I hear is that a real problem is that this bill is full of standards. That if you just look at the decarbonization task — the land use we were talking about, the speed we need to do it. It is inhumanly hard already. But all over this bill is the tying of decarbonization money to other kinds of priorities,

If you think about what it would take to get 10 times as much political will to act, that’s a huge effort, right? There’s a lot of organizing. There’s a lot of transforming politics to get 10 times as much political will

then the challenge is we need to produce that electricity from a carbon-free source, and that’s the second reason why electricity is so key because we do actually have a lot of different ways to produce carbon-free electricity

one of the clear, tangible, near-term benefits of transitioning away from fossil fuel combustion, whether those are coal-fired power plants or buses or gasoline vehicles is that we’re going to substantially reduce fine particulate pollution and other ozone forming pollution that also creates smog and impacts urban air quality and air quality across the country

we need solutions that work in all of those contexts. And so keeping our options open, rather than trying to constrain them is definitely the lowest risk way to proceed these days. Because if you bet on a set of limited set of technologies, and you bet wrong, you’ve bet the planet, and you’ve failed. The stakes are that high.

we are going to need to enter a new era of nation building, right? A new era of investment in physical infrastructure that can build a better country. There are huge benefits associated with this, but are going to mean, we are going to see large-scale construction, and infrastructure, and impacts on lives

the Inflation Reduction Act is insufficient. It’s a huge step forward. But our estimation from the Repeat Project is that it cuts about two-thirds of the annual emissions gap that we need to close in 2030. It still leaves about a half a billion tons of emissions on the table that we need to tackle with additional policies. And that’s just 2030.

All of those decisions, we basically are putting the thumb on the scale heavily for the cleaner option over the dirtier option.

it took 140 years to build today’s power grid. Now, we have to build that much new clean electricity again and then build it again, so we have to build it twice over in just 30 years to hit our goals.

We, in the broad human sense, right? So Germany and Spain and China and the United States and a whole bunch of different countries decided to subsidize the deployment of those technologies when they were expensive, create early markets that drove innovation and cost declines and made them into tremendously affordable options for the future

“Making Climate Policy Work” by Danny Cullenward and David Victor, which explores the political economy and really real world history and experience of using market-based instruments, like carbon taxes or emissions cap and trade programs to try to tackle climate change. I think the book does a really good job of summarizing both a range of scholarship and the kind of real-world experience that we’ve gotten in the few places that have succeeded in implementing carbon pricing

what the Inflation Reduction Act does at its core is focus on making clean energy cheaper. And it does that in two main ways. The first way is with subsidies, right? So there’s a big package of tax credits that does the bulk of the work. But there’s also rebates for low-income households to do energy efficiency and electrification.

We built about 10 gigawatts of utility solar in 2020. The E.I.A. thinks we’ll build about 20 gigawatts this year. So things change, we can grow.

. Beyond wind and solar, what do you see as playing the central or most promising roles here?

if I sort of sum up the whole bill in one nutshell or one tweet, it’s that we’re going to tax billionaire corporations and tax cheats, and use that money to make energy cheaper and cleaner for all Americans, and also to build more of those technologies here in the United States, which we can talk about later

There’s loan programs that can help offer lower cost financing for projects. There’s grants that go out to states, and rural utilities, and others to help install things. And all of that is designed to make the cleaner option the good business decision, the good household financial decision.

the excellent article in “Nature Climate Change” from 2018, called “Sequencing to Ratchet Up Climate Policy Stringency,” which is the lea

So why electricity? Why has electrifying everything become almost synonymous with decarbonization in climate world?

So that it just makes good economic sense. And that clean energy is cheap energy for everybody. That’s with subsidies upfront, but it’s also going to kick off the same kind of innovation and incremental learning by doing in economies of scale that unlock those tremendous cost reductions for solar, and wind, and lithium ion batteries over the last decade

so we have to guide that process in a way that doesn’t recreate some of the harms of the last era of nation building, where we drove interstates right through the middle of Black and brown communities, and they had no say in the process. So that’s the challenge at a high level is like how do you build a national social license and sense of mission or purpose, and how do you guide the deployment of that infrastructure at scale, which doesn’t concentrate harms and spreads benefits amongst the people who really should be benefiting.

By no means is that impossible, but it is a profound construction challenge