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"Women in West Virginia smoked during pregnancy more than five times as often as women in the states with the lowest prevalence,"

The researchers also found that prevalence of smoking during pregnancy varied by age and race. The prevalence was highest among women 20 to 24 at 10.7%, followed by women 15 to 19 at 8.5% and 25 to 29 at 8.2%.

The prevalence also was highest among non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native women at 16.7%, followed by non-Hispanic white women at 10.5%, non-Hispanic black women at 6%, Hispanic women at 1.8% and non-Hispanic Asian women at 0.6%.

"We still have a serious issue with infant mortality -- prematurity and infant mortality are clearly linked to cigarette smoking, as is low birth weight -- and when you begin to explain these things to patients, it really does appear to make a difference to them," he said.Brown pointed out that some of the states in the new CDC report with the highest prevalence of smoking during pregnancy also tend to have high rates of infant mortality. A CDC data brief released in January showed that, between 2013 and 2015, West Virginia and Kentucky had infant mortality rates higher than the overall national rate.

Most interestingly, Americans still don’t care that much. Sure, two-thirds say they are dissatisfied with the way income and wealth are distributed, according to Gallup. Still, more than three out of five — compared with just over half six years ago — are satisfied with “the opportunity for a person in this nation to get ahead by working hard.”

As my column has aimed to highlight, too many Americans are, well, sinking. Seventeen percent of Americans are poor by international standards — living on less than half the nationwide median income. That’s more than twice the share of poor people in France, Iceland or the Netherlands.

Unequipped to cope with the demands of a labor market in furious transformation, they will give “social mobility” a new, all-American meaning: the tendency to move in and out of prison. It’s hard to believe any country could waste so many resources and prosper.

Forget about income, though. It’s hard to square Americans’ belief in their society’s greatness with the life expectancy of its newborn girls and boys. It is shorter than in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and probably a few other countries I missed.

The impact of the nation’s fundamental paradox mostly fails the nonwhite and the poor. Black males born in the United States today will probably live shorter lives than boys born in Mexico, China or Turkey.

The children of poverty who survive will most likely hobble through life with mediocre educations — lagging their more affluent peers even before their first day in school and then falling farther behind, deprived of the resources that disadvantaged children in other advanced nations routinely enjoy.

Or let’s measure our progress in terms of infant deaths. Scientists in the United States invented many of the technologies used around the world to keep vulnerable babies alive. So how come our infant mortality rate is higher than that of every nation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with the exceptions of Mexico, Chile and Turkey?

America is doubling down on its exceptionalism. The rich got a tax break. Bankers got a break from the pesky rules written in the shadow of the financial crisis to protect the little guy. The poor and near poor were freed from their ability to afford health insurance.

populism — understood as a political movement shaped around giving the working class a “fair shake” — is pretty much dead.

Analyzing the relative sizes and frequencies of spots and ripples over the years has allowed astronomers to describe the birth of the universe to a precision that would make the philosophers weep. The new data have allowed astronomers to tweak their model a bit. It now seems the universe is 13.8 billion years old, instead of 13.7 billion, and consists by mass of 4.9 percent ordinary matter like atoms, 27 percent dark matter and 68 percent dark energy.

“Our ultimate goal would be to construct a new model that predicts the anomalies and links them together. But these are early days; so far, we don’t know whether this is possible and what type of new physics might be needed. And that’s exciting.”

The microwaves detected by the Planck date from 370,000 years after the Big Bang, which is as far back as optical or radio telescopes will ever be able to see, cosmologists say. But the patterns within them date from less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, when the universe is said to have undergone a violent burst of expansion known as inflation that set cosmic history on the course it has followed ever since. Those patterns are Planck’s prize.

Within the standard cosmological framework, however, the new satellite data underscored the existence of puzzling anomalies that may yet lead theorists back to the drawing board. The universe appears to be slightly lumpier, with bigger and more hot and cold spots in the northern half of the sky as seen from Earth than toward the south, for example. And there is a large, unexplained cool spot in the northern hemisphere.

The biggest surprise here, astronomers said, is that the universe is expanding slightly more slowly than previous measurements had indicated. The Hubble constant, which characterizes the expansion rate, is 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec — in the units astronomers use — according to Planck. Recent ground-based measurements combined with the WMAP data gave a value of 69, offering enough of a discrepancy to make cosmologists rerun their computer simulations of cosmic history.

a Planck team member from the University of California, Berkeley, said it represents a mismatch between measurements made of the beginning of time and those made more recently, and that it could mean that dark energy, which is speeding up the expansion of the universe, is more complicated than cosmologists thought. He termed the possibility “pretty radical,” adding, “That would be pretty exciting.”

The data also offered striking support for the notion of inflation, which has been the backbone of Big Bang theorizing for 30 years. Under the influence of a mysterious force field during the first trillionth of a fraction of a second, what would become the observable universe ballooned by 100 trillion trillion times in size from a subatomic pinprick to a grapefruit in less than a violent eye-blink, so the story first enunciated by Alan Guth of M.I.T. goes.

Submicroscopic quantum fluctuations in this force field are what would produce the hot spots in the cosmic microwaves, which in turn would grow into galaxies. According to Planck’s measurements, those fluctuations so far fit the predictions of the simplest model of inflation, invented by Andrei Linde of Stanford, to a T. Dr. Tegmark of M.I.T. said, “We’re homing in on the simplest model.”

Cosmologists still do not know what might have caused inflation, but the recent discovery of the Higgs boson has provided evidence that the kinds of fields that can provoke such behavior really exist.

another clue to the nature of inflation could come from the anomalies in the microwave data — the lopsided bumpiness, for example — that tend to happen on the largest scales in the universe. By the logic of quantum cosmology, they were the first patterns to be laid down on the emerging cosmos; that is to say, when inflation was just starting.

Gloves and soap have vanished from some hospitals. Often, cancer medicines are found only on the black market. There is so little electricity that the government works only two days a week to save what energy is left.

At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table. Doctors preparing for surgery cleaned their hands with bottles of seltzer water.

The hospital has no fully functioning X-ray or kidney dialysis machines because they broke long ago. And because there are no open beds, some patients lie on the floor in pools of their blood.

This nation has the largest oil reserves in the world, yet the government saved little money for hard times when oil prices were high.

So without water, gloves, soap or antibiotics, a group of surgeons prepared to remove an appendix that was about to burst, even though the operating room was still covered in another patient’s blood.

Ms. Parucho, a diabetic, was unable to receive kidney dialysis because the machines were broken. An infection had spread to her feet, which were black that night. She was going into septic shock.

In a supply room, cockroaches fled as the door swung open.

In April, the authorities arrested its director, Aquiles Martínez, and removed him from his post. Local news reports said he was accused of stealing equipment meant for the hospital, including machines to treat people with respiratory illnesses, as well as intravenous solutions and 127 boxes of medicine.

A holiday had been declared by the government to save electricity, and the blood bank took donations only on workdays.

For the past two and a half months, the hospital has not had a way to print X-rays. So patients must use a smartphone to take a picture of their scans and take them to the proper doctor.

Near him, a handwritten sign read, “We sell antibiotics — negotiable.” A black-market seller’s number was listed.

The ninth floor of the hospital is the maternity ward, where the seven babies had died the day before. A room at the end of the hall was filled with broken incubators.

The day of the power blackout, Dr. Rodríguez said, the hospital staff tried turning on the generator, but it did not work.

Biden also on Wednesday announced a third Operation Fly Formula mission to ship approximately 3.7 million 8-ounce equivalents of Kendamil infant formula.

The White House has said it is working "24/7" to address the issue.

Abbott Nutrition's Sturgis, Michigan, facility, which exacerbated the industry-wide shortage, is expected to restart production June 4, meaning products from the plant won't return to store shelves until at least mid-July, according to the company's production timeline. 

The rate of firearm homicides was 20 times higher in the United States than in the other countries, according to the report, which cited a 2011 study of 23 countries. And though suicide rates were lower in the United States, firearm suicide rates were six times higher.

Panelists were surprised at just how consistently Americans ended up at the bottom of the rankings. The United States had the second-highest death rate from the most common form of heart disease, the kind that causes heart attacks, and the second-highest death rate from lung disease, a legacy of high smoking rates in past decades. American adults also have the highest diabetes rates.

Youths fared no better. The United States has the highest infant mortality rate among these countries, and its young people have the highest rates of sexually transmitted diseases, teen pregnancy and deaths from car crashes. Americans lose more years of life before age 50 to alcohol and drug abuse than people in any of the other countries.

Americans also had the lowest probability over all of surviving to the age of 50. The report’s second chapter details health indicators for youths where the United States ranks near or at the bottom. There are so many that the list takes up four pages.

the U.S. ranked near and at the bottom in almost every heath indicator. That stunned us.”

The panel sought to explain the poor performance. It noted the United States has a highly fragmented health care system, with limited primary care resources and a large uninsured population. It has the highest rates of poverty among the countries studied.

In the other countries, more generous social safety nets buffer families from the health consequences of poverty, the report said.

Could cultural factors like individualism and dislike of government interference play a role? Americans are less likely to wear seat belts and more likely to ride motorcycles without helmets.  

The United States is a bigger, more heterogeneous society with greater levels of economic inequality, and comparing its health outcomes to those in countries like Sweden or France may seem lopsided. B

the panelists point out that this country spends more on health care than any other in the survey. And as recently as the 1950s, Americans scored better in life expectancy and disease than many of the other countries in the current study.

It also created a new and more complex social structure. The bands who exchanged women with each other learned to cooperate, forming a group or tribe that would protect its territory from other tribes. Though cooperation became the norm within a tribe, tribes would wage warfare just as relentlessly as chimpanzee bands.

A system of cooperative bands “provides the kind of social infrastructure that can really get things going,” he said. In a series of experiments comparing human and chimpanzee infants, Dr. Tomasello has shown that very young children have an urge to help others. One of these skills is what he calls shared intentionality, the ability to form a plan with others for accomplishing a joint endeavor. Children, but not chimps, will point at things to convey information, they will intuit others’ intentions from the direction of their gaze, and they will help others achieve a goal.

Cooperation may have been forced on them as a condition of existence. “Humans were put under some kind of collective pressure to collaborate in their gathering of food — they became obligate collaborators — in a way that their closest primate relatives were not,”

Humans wear the mark of their shared intentionality, he notes, in a small but significant feature — the whites of their eyes, which are three times larger than those of any other primate, presumably to help others follow the direction of gaze.

Before antibiotics, and with the new crowding and population explosion brought on by the Industrial Revolution, cholera, measles, diphtheria, whooping cough, tuberculosis and typhoid were looming threats. And with no regulation of the advertising industry, manufacturers could claim pretty much anything.

the potato blight meant that huge numbers of English citizens were also starving. Goodman notes that the poor were markedly shorter than the wealthy, and several inches shorter than the average Londoner today. “It takes a lot of hunger to do that to people,” she adds. But even when money wasn’t an issue, self-abnegation was. In many homes children were sent to bed without dinner not as a punishmen

Here are the things you don’t think about when you’re watching something like “The Forsyte Saga.” The choking air pollution from all the coal fires. The atrophy of a woman’s stomach and chest muscles from years of relying on a corset for shape and posture. The fact that a country that saw its population almost triple within a few decades had no real sewage system, which meant that by 1858, the Thames was overflowing with human waste.

drugs that did nothing might have been preferable to the “tonics” that did work, which often contained laudanum or mercury. It was speculated that as much as a third of the infant mortality rate in Manchester had to do not with disease but with drugging children. Popular tonics like Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup and Street’s Infant Quietness did indeed stop children from being pesky, as they were filled with opiates. Unfortunately they also stopped children from wanting to eat,

According to the World Health Organization, “lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.”

The Hurley Medical Center, in Flint, released a study in September that confirmed what many Flint parents had feared for over a year: The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014.

The crisis reached a nadir Monday night, when Flint Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency. “The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster,” Weaver said in a declaratory statement. 1 of 11 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × fa fa

The mayor — elected after her predecessor, Dayne Walling, experienced fallout from his administration’s handling of the water problems — said in the statement that she was seeking support from the federal government to deal with the “irreversible” effects of lead exposure on the city’s children. Weaver thinks that these health consequences will lead to a greater need for special education and mental health services, as well as developments in the juvenile justice system.

To those living in Flint, the announcement may feel as if it has been a long time coming. Almost immediately after the city started drawing from the Flint River in April 2014, residents began complaining about the water, which they said was cloudy in appearance and emitted a foul odor.

Since then, complications from the water coming from the Flint River have only piled up. Although city and state officials initially denied that the water was unsafe, the state issued a notice informing Flint residents that their water contained unlawful levels of trihalomethanes, a chlorine byproduct linked to cancer and other diseases.

Protesters marched to City Hall in the fierce Michigan cold, calling for officials to reconnect Flint’s water to the Detroit system. The use of the Flint River was supposed to be temporary, set to end in 2016 after a pipeline to Lake Huron’s Karegnondi Water Authority is finished.

Through continued demonstrations by Flint residents and mounting scientific evidence of the water’s toxins, city and state officials offered various solutions — from asking residents to boil their water to providing them with water filters — in an attempt to work around the need to reconnect to the Detroit system.

That call was finally made by Snyder (R) on Oct. 8. He announced that he had a plan for coming up with the $12 million to switch Flint back to the Detroit system. On Oct. 16, water started flowing again from Detroit to Flint.

As compared to others in the region, children living in areas sprayed with Agent Orange have been found to suffer three times as many cleft palates, three times as much mental retardation, are three times as likely to have extra fingers or toes and eight times as likely to experience massive abdominal and inguinal hernias.

Children born to Vietnam veterans are more prone to birth defects relating to the nervous system, kidneys and oral clefts. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome is 400% more likely to occur in infants born to the men and women who served in Vietnam.

In the forty years since the end of the Vietnam War, an estimated 10,000 Lao people, including thousands of children, have died. 

Someday perhaps, the way we look at war in our society will change. Someday perhaps, an informed and contemplative American citizenry will demand of its leaders full consideration of the true cost of armed conflict before permitting them to squander our most precious resource – our brave young men and women in service to America.

Francisco Franco Bahamonde, Caudillo and dictator of Spain, needed a general. Carefully balancing the two bulwarks of his regime - Falange and Army- he selected an old comrade from the Moroccan campaigns, General Agustin Munoz Grandes, then Commandant of the garrison opposite Gibraltar

He was again turning his eyes towards Gibraltar

Without Franco’s approval, he would find it difficult to cross their homeland in order to take Gibraltar

Only twelve volunteers remained. Hitler was impressed. He called the Spaniards ‘the only virile Latin race’

As the German front swayed and the Führer sacked generals by the score, his admiration for the iron-willed Munoz Grandes grew

General Emilio Esteban Infantes reported to the Reich in June 1942, but Munoz Grandes was already planning to turn his glory into political capital at home. He sought and was granted an interview with Hitler

employ the Spaniards in a new offensive to storm the Russian barricades

Field Marshal von Manstein, with the Blue Division in his van, was preparing to smash through the Leningrad perimeter when, suddenly, the Red Army pre-empted his attack. By November, General Sir Bernard Montgomery had struck at El Alamein, the Allies had landed in North Africa, Stalingrad was encircled by the Russians, and von Manstein hurried south to the rescue. The Leningrad offensive was stillborn. In December, a disappointed Munoz Grandes headed home for a triumphal reception, while Esteban Infantes took over the Blue Division

he urgently needed the Blue Division at full strength to achieve his diplomatic goals

The Blue Division was a counter in the Caudillo’s game. If Hitler had won, Spain would have been an ally. As the Third Reich collapsed, the guripas were pulled home, and the franquista state acknowledged them only as anti-Communist volunteers, who had proved to the Führer that Spaniards would fight, even should he reach through their homeland to Gibraltar

the power of the first consul was so well established that there was no hope of intervening in France. Instead, the house of Orléans became reconciled with the elder branch of the Bourbon family. Even so, Louis-Philippe never took up arms to fight with émigré forces for the royalist cause against other Frenchmen

On November 25 he married Marie-Amélie, a daughter of King Ferdinand IV of Naples and Maria Carolina of Austria. About this time there was some suggestion that Louis-Philippe should join the English forces in the Peninsular War. Maria Carolina—who held the real power in Naples and whose sister Marie-Antoinette had been executed by the French Revolutionary government—had long backed the campaign against the Revolutionary armies and Napoleon. She certainly would have supported such a move by her son-in-law, but nothing came of it, probably because Louis XVIII again feared any activity that might further the Orleanist cause.

Louis-Philippe returned to France at the First Restoration (1814). Although Louis XVIII refused to grant Louis-Philippe the style of royal highness (later allowed to him by Charles X), the king did grant Louis-Philippe the dignities traditionally held by the head of his family. More important perhaps, Louis-Philippe regained possession of the family estates and forests that had not been sold after his own emigration and his father’s execution. During the Hundred Days (1815) he returned to England instead of following the court to Ghent.

Under the second Restoration the duc d’Orléans was a steady and more or less open adherent of the liberal opposition

when Louis-Philippe had become king and his eldest son, Ferdinand-Louis-Philippe, was heir to the royal domain, he could reserve the Orléans inheritance for his other sons instead of merging it with the crown lands.

In 1830 Charles X’s attempt to enforce repressive ordinances touched off a rebellion (July 27–30) that gave Louis-Philippe his long-awaited opportunity to gain power.

The revolution that brought Louis-Philippe to power constituted a victory for the upper bourgeoisie over the aristocracy. The new ruler was titled Louis-Philippe, king of the French, instead of Philip VII, king of France. He consolidated his power by steering a middle course between the right-wing extreme monarchists (the Legitimists) on the one side and the socialists and other republicans (including the Bonapartists) on the other. The July Monarchy, with its “Citizen King,” could never command the support of all the factions, however. Its opponents resorted to political intrigue, insurrection, and even assassination plots. In July 1835 an attempt on the king’s life by Giuseppe Fieschi resulted in the deaths of 18 people and the wounding of many more, but the royal family escaped injury. Throughout Louis-Philippe’s reign, it was said that “for shooting kings there is no close[d] season.”

before abdicating in favour of his 10-year-old grandson, Henri Dieudonné d’Artois, comte de Chambord. On August 7 the provisional government of deputies and peers present in Paris declared the throne vacant. Following the terminology of the Constitution of 1791, Louis-Philippe was on August 9 proclaimed “king of the French by the grace of God and the will of the people.” A modified version of the Charter of 1814 was issued, which the new king was obliged to accept.

The death of the popular duc d’Orléans in a carriage accident in July 1842 not only grieved Louis-Philippe very deeply but also seriously weakened the dynasty. The new heir to the throne, the duke’s son Philippe d’Orléans, comte de Paris, was an infant for whom a regency had to be prearranged.

The marriage (August 1832) of his daughter Marie-Louise to Queen Victoria’s uncle Leopold I, king of the Belgians, established an excellent relationship between Paris and London, almost foreshadowing the Entente Cordiale.

The British were finally alienated by Louis-Philippe’s policy on the “Spanish marriages.” In an attempt to revive the traditional family alliance between the French and Spanish Bourbons, he had at first wanted his sons Henri d’Orléans, duc d’Aumale, and Antoine, duc de Montpensier, to marry Spanish Queen Isabella II and her sister and heiress presumptive, the infanta Luisa Fernanda, respectively. The British objected to this obvious threat of French predominance in Spain, and in 1843 Louis-Philippe agreed that Isabella should marry neither Henri nor the British nominee, Prince Albert’s cousin Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, but rather some Spanish Bourbon instead.

French opposition to the regime had become much more embittered. The industrial and agricultural depression of 1846 aroused widespread popular discontent, and Louis-Philippe’s constant refusal of any electoral reform meant that many members of the lower middle class—from whom he might still have drawn support—remained without the vote. Finally, his narrow-minded conservatism and his unwillingness to seek any solution for pressing political and social problems drove many divergent interests into union against him.

The July Monarchy was but one casualty of the great revolutionary movement that swept through Europe in 1848. In any case, a change had come to seem unavoidable in France.

The July Monarchy was really an anachronism. To the French people—for whom, whether or not they favoured the institution, monarchy meant the splendours and absolutism of the ancien régime

In power Louis-Philippe strove to implement his desire to rule as well as to reign. The political difficulties with which he was faced revealed in him the weaknesses of an obstinate man; increasingly, his only response to crises was words and theories, and ultimately inaction lost him his crown.

Past research on other communities of color finds that repeated exposure to racism and racial violence can grind one's physical and mental health down. Race-related stress has been linked to higher infant mortality rates and cardiovascular disease in African American communities, and researchers continue to find more insidious ways racism harms health.

Without the research specific to Asian Americans' experience, it means any problems currently facing the Asian American community will likely continue to fester, unnoticed and unaddressed.

One is the model minority myth, which can suggest that Asians don't suffer economic or health disparities compared to whites.

From 1992 to 2018, only 0.17% of the National Institutes of Health's budget went to studying Asian, native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Americans.

"Aside from the language barrier, immigrants may not understand the justice system and that may be another reason that prevents them from reporting."

"If you look at all those cases, you will find that many people had the same or similar experiences before they reported,"

From March 19, 2020 to Feb 28, 2021, a period encompassing the ballooning of the country's coronavirus pandemic and some politicians' insistence on linking the virus to China, the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center recorded nearly 3,800 separate incidents of hate against Asians in the United States.

"White toxicity and racism have put an inordinate amount of pressure on Asians living in diaspora communities to cope with the trauma of being in an environment that does not see them and does not protect them."

Parents, heeding the advice of physicians and even the U.S. government, adopted a style of care that was chilly and aloof.

With the development of compound microscopes in the 1600s, scientists got their first glimpse of microorganisms. In the mid-19th century, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch demonstrated that bacteria were the agents of some diseases. By the close of the century, scientists identified viruses.

In 1870, 175 of every 1,000 infants died in their first year of life; by 1930, the number decreased to 75. Yet the hands-off approach that kept children safe from germs also ran counter to the instinctual need for physical affection that all primates, including humans, have.

In ancient times, disease was thought to be the result of an imbalance of body fluids or an affliction from the gods. Later, scientists suspected that illnesses might be transmitted through the air or water, but weren’t clear how.

All that would shift again by the middle of the 20th century, when psychologists such as John Bowlby and Harry Harlow exposed the potentially traumatic side effects of remote parenting on child development.

Refrigerators and vacuum cleaners were marketed not only as labor savers but as necessities for good hygiene. When the DuPont Cellophane Co. brought out plastic wrap in the 1920s, the product was hailed as a sanitary innovation for keeping food and other personal items.

In 1888, the “Wife’s Handbook” warned mothers that a single touch was teeming with deadly germs that might harm her infant, and public campaigns urged caution when preparing family meals.

Harlow’s and Bowlby’s insights set the stage for a shift toward child-centered and emotionally connected parenting that remains in fashion today. But it came too late for generations whose upbringings were marked by an excessive fear of germs

Still, a growing number of studies highlight the value of social interaction to brain development. Research shows that neural networks influencing language development and broader cognitive ability get built through verbal and physical give-and-take — from the sharing of a ball to exchanges of sounds and simple phrases.

These interactions build “structure and connectivity in the brain,” said Kathryn Hirsh-Pasek, director of the Infant Language Laboratory at Temple University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “They seem to be brain feed.”

John Hagen, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Michigan, said he would be more concerned about the effect of lockdowns on young children, “if this were to go on years and not months.”

Portland has proved a little less prohibitive place for childhood interaction in part because there is more space than in the dense neighborhoods of San Francisco, and so children can be in the same vicinity without the parents feeling they are at risk of infecting one another.

he rise of small neighborhood pods or of two or three families joining together in shared bubbles has helped to offset some parents’ worries. But new tough rules in some states, like California, have disrupted those efforts because playgrounds have been closed in the latest Covid surge and households have been warned against socializing outside their own families.

o that end, what infants, toddlers and other children growing up in the Covid era need most now is stable, nurturing and loving interaction with their parents, Dr. Volling said.

“These children are not lacking in social interaction,” she said, noting that they are getting “the most important” interaction from their parents.

In recent weeks, Biden has scrambled to show he is on top of the matter. He invoked the Defense Production Act to ramp up domestic production of baby formula, and his administration has airlifted supplies from foreign countries to try to address the mushrooming crisis. But the declaration by industry leaders that the scope of the problem was immediately clear to them in February raises questions of why the president was slow to learn of the issue.

“Seeing the empty shelves is unacceptable,” she said. “Seeing what families are going through is unacceptable. This is why we have been working 24-7 to make sure that we are using every lever at our disposal to deliver for the American people.”

Officials said United Airlines had agreed to transport Kendamil formula for free from Heathrow Airport in London to multiple airports across the United States over a three-week period. The formula will be distributed and available for purchase at selected U.S. retailers nationwide as well as online, the White House said.All told, about 3.7 million 8-ounce bottle equivalents of Kendamil infant formula will be delivered, it said.

Still, despite the all-hands-on-deck approach to replenishing the American supply, store shelves continue to be emptier: Data firm IRI reported Tuesday that the nationwide in-stock inventory figure was 76 percent for the week ending May 22, down from 79 percent the week before.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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 safest course is to avoid them altogether

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 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.

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 United States ranked 25th out of 29 in the percentage of people 15 to 19 years old who were enrolled in schools and colleges and 23rd in the percentage of people in that cohort not participating in either education, employment or training.

We have the highest teen fertility rate, and among the highest infant mortality rates. We have one of the lowest child immunization rates and lowest average birth weights.

Although our children were among the most likely to exercise, they were also the most overweight.

American children were in the bottom third when ranking their own level of “life satisfaction.” Our children were 28th out of 29 countries in ranking the quality of their relationships (the French were dead last). Only 56 percent of children in the United States find their classmates “kind and helpful,” 73 percent find it “easy to talk” to their mothers and 59 percent find it “easy to talk” to their fathers.

We have the third highest homicide rate among developed countries,

a third of parents fear for their children’s physical safety at school,