Group items tagged

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

We know that, in the United States, 90 plus percent of staple crops like corn are genetically modified, along with 94 percent of soybeans and 94 percent of cotton. A ban on GMOs in food production would radically change the entire food supply. In Russia, however, the country is much more poised for a GMO food revolution. [

President Vladimir Putin believes that he can keep GMOs out of the country, even while staying in compliance with the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) commandments. In a past meeting addressing the members of the Board of the Russian F

deration Council he stated:

the mouth feel of soda and many other food items, especially those high in fat, is second only to the bliss point in its ability to predict how much craving a product will induce.

He organized focus-group sessions with the people most responsible for buying bologna — mothers — and as they talked, he realized the most pressing issue for them was time. Working moms strove to provide healthful food, of course, but they spoke with real passion and at length about the morning crush, that nightmarish dash to get breakfast on the table and lunch packed and kids out the door.

as the focus swung toward kids, Saturday-morning cartoons started carrying an ad that offered a different message: “All day, you gotta do what they say,” the ads said. “But lunchtime is all yours.”

When it came to Lunchables, they did try to add more healthful ingredients. Back at the start, Drane experimented with fresh carrots but quickly gave up on that, since fresh components didn’t work within the constraints of the processed-food system, which typically required weeks or months of transport and storage before the food arrived at the grocery store. Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped.

One of the company’s responses to criticism is that kids don’t eat the Lunchables every day — on top of which, when it came to trying to feed them more healthful foods, kids themselves were unreliable. When their parents packed fresh carrots, apples and water, they couldn’t be trusted to eat them. Once in school, they often trashed the healthful stuff in their brown bags to get right to the sweets.

This idea — that kids are in control — would become a key concept in the evolving marketing campaigns for the trays. In what would prove to be their greatest achievement of all, the Lunchables team would delve into adolescent psychology to discover that it wasn’t the food in the trays that excited the kids; it was the feeling of power it brought to their lives.

The prevailing attitude among the company’s food managers — through the 1990s, at least, before obesity became a more pressing concern — was one of supply and demand. “People could point to these things and say, ‘They’ve got too much sugar, they’ve got too much salt,’ ” Bible said. “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.”

at last count, including sales in Britain, they were approaching the $1 billion mark. Lunchables was more than a hit; it was now its own category

he holds the entire industry accountable. “What do University of Wisconsin M.B.A.’s learn about how to succeed in marketing?” his presentation to the med students asks. “Discover what consumers want to buy and give it to them with both barrels. Sell more, keep your job! How do marketers often translate these ‘rules’ into action on food? Our limbic brains love sugar, fat, salt. . . . So formulate products to deliver these. Perhaps add low-cost ingredients to boost profit margins. Then ‘supersize’ to sell more. . . . And advertise/promote to lock in ‘heavy users.’ Plenty of guilt to go around here!”

men in the eastern part of Finland had the highest rate of fatal cardiovascular disease in the world. Research showed that this plague was not just a quirk of genetics or a result of a sedentary lifestyle — it was also owing to processed foods. So when Finnish authorities moved to address the problem, they went right after the manufacturers. (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.)

I tracked Lin down in Irvine, Calif., where we spent several days going through the internal company memos, strategy papers and handwritten notes he had kept. The documents were evidence of the concern that Lin had for consumers and of the company’s intent on using science not to address the health concerns but to thwart them. While at Frito-Lay, Lin and other company scientists spoke openly about the country’s excessive consumption of sodium and the fact that, as Lin said to me on more than one occasion, “people get addicted to salt

the marketing team was joined by Dwight Riskey, an expert on cravings who had been a fellow at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, where he was part of a team of scientists that found that people could beat their salt habits simply by refraining from salty foods long enough for their taste buds to return to a normal level of sensitivity. He had also done work on the bliss point, showing how a product’s allure is contextual, shaped partly by the other foods a person is eating, and that it changes as people age. This seemed to help explain why Frito-Lay was having so much trouble selling new snacks. The largest single block of customers, the baby boomers, had begun hitting middle age. According to the research, this suggested that their liking for salty snacks — both in the concentration of salt and how much they ate — would be tapering off.

Riskey realized that he and his colleagues had been misreading things all along. They had been measuring the snacking habits of different age groups and were seeing what they expected to see, that older consumers ate less than those in their 20s. But what they weren’t measuring, Riskey realized, is how those snacking habits of the boomers compared to themselves when they were in their 20s. When he called up a new set of sales data and performed what’s called a cohort study, following a single group over time, a far more encouraging picture — for Frito-Lay, anyway — emerged. The baby boomers were not eating fewer salty snacks as they aged. “In fact, as those people aged, their consumption of all those segments — the cookies, the crackers, the candy, the chips — was going up,” Riskey said. “They were not only eating what they ate when they were younger, they were eating more of it.” In fact, everyone in the country, on average, was eating more salty snacks than they used to. The rate of consumption was edging up about one-third of a pound every year, with the average intake of snacks like chips and cheese crackers pushing past 12 pounds a year

Riskey had a theory about what caused this surge: Eating real meals had become a thing of the past.

“We looked at this behavior, and said, ‘Oh, my gosh, people were skipping meals right and left,’ ” Riskey told me. “It was amazing.” This led to the next realization, that baby boomers did not represent “a category that is mature, with no growth. This is a category that has huge growth potential.”

The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension.

He zeroed right in on the Cheetos. “This,” Witherly said, “is one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure.” He ticked off a dozen attributes of the Cheetos that make the brain say more. But the one he focused on most was the puff’s uncanny ability to melt in the mouth. “It’s called vanishing caloric density,” Witherly said. “If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there’s no calories in it . . . you can just keep eating it forever.”

Frito-Lay acquired Stacy’s Pita Chip Company, which was started by a Massachusetts couple who made food-cart sandwiches and started serving pita chips to their customers in the mid-1990s. In Frito-Lay’s hands, the pita chips averaged 270 milligrams of sodium — nearly one-fifth a whole day’s recommended maximum for most American adults — and were a huge hit among boomers.

There’s a paradox at work here. On the one hand, reduction of sodium in snack foods is commendable. On the other, these changes may well result in consumers eating more. “The big thing that will happen here is removing the barriers for boomers and giving them permission to snack,” Carey said. The prospects for lower-salt snacks were so amazing, he added, that the company had set its sights on using the designer salt to conquer the toughest market of all for snacks: schools

The company’s chips, he wrote, were not selling as well as they could for one simple reason: “While people like and enjoy potato chips, they feel guilty about liking them. . . . Unconsciously, people expect to be punished for ‘letting themselves go’ and enjoying them.” Dichter listed seven “fears and resistances” to the chips: “You can’t stop eating them; they’re fattening; they’re not good for you; they’re greasy and messy to eat; they’re too expensive; it’s hard to store the leftovers; and they’re bad for children.” He spent the rest of his memo laying out his prescriptions, which in time would become widely used not just by Frito-Lay but also by the entire industry.

Dichter advised Frito-Lay to move its chips out of the realm of between-meals snacking and turn them into an ever-present item in the American diet. “The increased use of potato chips and other Lay’s products as a part of the regular fare served by restaurants and sandwich bars should be encouraged in a concentrated way,”

the largest weight-inducing food was the potato chip. The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself — all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food. “The starch is readily absorbed,” Eric Rimm, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and one of the study’s authors, told me. “More quickly even than a similar amount of sugar. The starch, in turn, causes the glucose levels in the blood to spike” — which can result in a craving for more.

If Americans snacked only occasionally, and in small amounts, this would not present the enormous problem that it does. But because so much money and effort has been invested over decades in engineering and then relentlessly selling these products, the effects are seemingly impossible to unwind.

Todd Putman, who worked at Coca-Cola from 1997 to 2001, said the goal became much larger than merely beating the rival brands; Coca-Cola strove to outsell every other thing people drank, including milk and water. The marketing division’s efforts boiled down to one question, Putman said: “How can we drive more ounces into more bodies more often?”

“In a lot of ways apps seem played out,”

One answer might be to display a new kind of tech brand: physical products that aren’t so much dominated by new technology, but instead informed by the theories and practices that have ruled the tech business.

hey say they have applied an engineering mind-set to creating ingestible items. Traditional coffee is an inconsistent product, they argue — each cup may have significantly more or less caffeine than the last — and it can have undesirable side effects, like jitteriness.

Go Cubes, which the pair developed after a long prototyping process involving many different ingredients, are meant to address these shortcomings. The cubes are more portable than coffee, they offer a precise measure of caffeine, and because they include some ingredients meant to modulate caffeine’s sharpest effects, they produce a more focused high.

Ministry of Supply, an apparel company started by entrepreneurs who were unsatisfied with business clothing that couldn’t take the punishment that we ladle on athletic clothes, uses engineering techniques to create its products.

“My broader theory is that as the world shifts from TV, movies, magazines and newspapers to the Internet, one of the secondary effects of that is that cultural influence shifts from places like New York and L.A. to the Bay Area,”

The paradox of reform movements is that, if you want to defy authority, you probably shouldn’t think entirely for yourself. You should attach yourself to a counter-tradition and school of thought that has been developed over the centuries and that seems true.

The old leftists had dialectical materialism and the Marxist view of history. Libertarians have Hayek and von Mises. Various spiritual movements have drawn from Transcendentalism, Stoicism, Gnosticism, Thomism, Augustine, Tolstoy, or the Catholic social teaching that inspired Dorothy Day.

These belief systems helped people envision alternate realities. They helped people explain why the things society values are not the things that should be valued. They gave movements a set of organizing principles. Joining a tradition doesn’t mean suppressing your individuality. Applying an ancient tradition to a new situation is a creative, stimulating and empowering act. Without a tradition, everything is impermanence and flux.

If I could offer advice to a young rebel, it would be to rummage the past for a body of thought that helps you understand and address the shortcomings you see. Give yourself a label.

Effective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions.

Scientists call these two shapes the prefusion and postfusion forms of the spike. Antibodies against the prefusion shape work powerfully against the coronavirus, but postfusion antibodies don’t stop it.

they discovered a way to keep the protein locked in a tulip-like prefusion shape. All they had to do was change two of more than 1,000 building blocks in the protein into a compound called proline.

All three of the vaccines that have been authorized so far in the United States — from Johnson & Johnson, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech — use the 2P spike.

Other vaccine makers are using it as well. Novavax has had strong results with the 2P spike in clinical trials and is expected to apply to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization in the next few weeks. Sanofi is also testing a 2P spike vaccine and expects to finish clinical trials later this year.

Dr. McLellan’s ability to find lifesaving clues in the structure of proteins has earned him deep admiration in the vaccine world. “This guy is a genius,” said Harry Kleanthous, a senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “He should be proud of this huge thing he’s done for humanity.”

The potency of the vaccine brought an extra benefit: The researchers needed fewer viruses for an effective dose. A single egg may yield five to 10 doses of NDV-HXP-S, compared to one or two doses of influenza vaccines.

once Dr. McLellan and his colleagues handed off the 2P spike to vaccine makers, he turned back to the protein for a closer look. If swapping just two prolines improved a vaccine, surely additional tweaks could improve it even more.

The winner contained the two prolines in the 2P spike, plus four additional prolines found elsewhere in the protein. Dr. McLellan called the new spike HexaPro, in honor of its total of six prolines.

The structure of HexaPro was even more stable than 2P, the team found. It was also resilient, better able to withstand heat and damaging chemicals. Dr. McLellan hoped that its rugged design would make it potent in a vaccine.

the University of Texas set up a licensing arrangement for HexaPro that allows companies and labs in 80 low- and middle-income countries to use the protein in their vaccines without paying royalties.

The first wave of authorized Covid-19 vaccines require specialized, costly ingredients to make. Moderna’s RNA-based vaccine, for instance, needs genetic building blocks called nucleotides, as well as a custom-made fatty acid to build a bubble around them. Those ingredients must be assembled into vaccines in purpose-built factories.

The way influenza vaccines are made is a study in contrast. Many countries have huge factories for making cheap flu shots, with influenza viruses injected into chicken eggs. The eggs produce an abundance of new copies of the viruses. Factory workers then extract the viruses, weaken or kill them and then put them into vaccines.

In March, he joined forces with two fellow University of Texas biologists, Ilya Finkelstein and Jennifer Maynard. Their three labs created 100 new spikes, each with an altered building block. With funding from the Gates Foundation, they tested each one and then combined the promising changes in new spikes. Eventually, they created a single protein that met their aspirations.

PATH then connected the Mount Sinai team with influenza vaccine makers. On March 15, Vietnam’s Institute of Vaccines and Medical Biologicals announced the start of a clinical trial of NDV-HXP-S. A week later, Thailand’s Government Pharmaceutical Organization followed suit. On March 26, Brazil’s Butantan Institute said it would ask for authorization to begin its own clinical trials of NDV-HXP-S.

n vaccine maker Avi-Mex as an intranasal spray. The company will start clinical trials to see if the vaccine is even more potent in that form.

Pfizer’s vaccine also contains nine other ingredients. Four of them are lipids with impossibly complex chemical names: (4-hydroxybutyl)azanediyl)bis(hexane-6,1-diyl)bis (ALC-3015); (2- hexyldecanoate),2-[(polyethylene glycol)-2000]-N,N-ditetradecylacetamide (ALC-0159); 1,2-distearoyl-snglycero-3-phosphocholine (DPSC); and cholesterol.

The vaccine also contains four salts: potassium chloride, monobasic potassium phosphate, basic sodium phosphate dihydrate and sodium chloride.

“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.

Elaine Swafford was hired as CGLA’s executive director in 2012 and given less than a year to transform the then-failing school, which had launched several years earlier as the state’s first single-gender public charter school and then tanked.

Math proficiency was in the single digits. Few students had solid prospects for the future.

. Last year, the school achieved a 93 percent graduation rate and nearly every graduate went on to college.

Over the last decade, new research has increasingly suggested that strong school leaders are a crucial component of success, and even that turning around failing schools is virtually impossible without a strong leader at the helm.

On an adjoining wall, hundreds of magnets bearing individual names track each girl’s proficiency in a range of subjects, from below basic to advanced.

When she took over, half of the school’s teachers turned over after she informed the staff they would need to reapply for their jobs.

Swafford’s way of thinking is based on the idea that if she can’t deliver the well-rounded education both in and out of the classroom that middle-class kids get, her students will never catch up to their more affluent peers

Each student at CGLA is assigned an adult mentor and Swafford recently hired a college-access counselor to help students work through the federal financial-aid application and to stay connected with recent graduates

After she recently discovered that 85 of the school’s 350 students don’t have internet access at home, Swafford set about securing a hotspot for each wifi-less child.

The school receives some extra funding from the government because it serves such a high number of low-income students, but it’s not nearly enough to pay for all of the programs the school offers, so Swafford has gotten very good at raising money

Twenty-nine percent of the school’s budget is from fundraising, she told me, which helps fill a $4,500-per-student gap in funding.

Teachers are expected to believe that every child is capable of success and then help them achieve it by doing whatever it takes, regardless of any obstacles

The school recently implemented “grit” grading, and, Swafford acknowledged unapologetically, “everybody’s not happy about it.”

“grit” grading

if I were president of a mid-tier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a circuits course.”

The edX project will include not only engineering courses, in which computer grading is relatively simple, but also humanities courses, in which essays might be graded through crowd-sourcing, or assessed with natural-language software. Coursera will also offer free humanities courses in which grading will be done by peers.

“What faculty don’t want to do is just take something off the shelf that’s somebody else’s and teach it, any more than they would take a textbook, start on Page 1, and end with the last chapter,” he said. “What’s still missing is an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses.”

We all expect a richer theory underlying the Standard Model. That’s one reason the mass matters to us. Some theories only accommodate a particular range of masses. Knowing the mass will give us insight into what that deeper underlying theory is.

The other possibility is that the answer is not the simple, fundamental particle that the Large Hadron Collider currently is looking for. It could be a more complicated object or part of a more complex sector that would take longer

the usual stories of utility maximization and optimal pricing “can’t explain the rise in the whole world’s (absolute) advantage from $3 to $30 a day, not to speak of $137 a day.”

McCloskey’s explanation is that people changed the way they thought, wrote and spoke about economic activity. “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,” she writes, “a great shift occurred in what Alexis de Tocqueville called ‘habits of the mind’ -- or more exactly, habits of the lip. People stopped sneering at market innovativeness and other bourgeois virtues.” As attitudes changed, so did behavior, leading to more than two centuries of constant innovation and rising living standards.

Most of “Bourgeois Dignity” is devoted to knocking down alternative explanations for the sudden and enormous escalation in living standards. In particular, McCloskey draws on the last half-century of economic-history scholarship to debunk what most people outside the field assume was the critical ingredient: savings and wealth accumulation. We might call this explanation “capital-ism.” Whether derived from Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Polyani, or, in a more-recent incarnation, Fernand Braudel, she argues, the emphasis on capital simply gets the facts wrong. It is empirically false.

savings rate of at least 12 percent, compared with no more than 10 percent to 20 percent in modern industrial economies. And, contrary to Weber’s story about a new Protestant Ethic, savings rates were roughly the same in Catholic and Protestant countries or, for that matter, in China.

Besides, as economic historians discovered in the 1960s, the economic takeoff didn’t actually require large amounts of capital. Early cotton mills, for instance, were relatively cheap to set up. “The source of the industrial investment required was short-term loans from merchants for inventories and longer- term loans from relative

What was different, she maintains, is how people thought about new ideas. Creative destruction became not only accepted but also encouraged, as did individual enterprise. “What

ade us rich,” she writes, “was a new rhetoric that was favorable to unbounded innovation, imaginatio

ness, persuasion, originality, with individual rewards often paid in a coin of honor or thankfuln

McCloskey’s book is not only a useful survey of how scholars answer the biggest question in economics: What causes growth? It is also a timely reminder that prosperity depends on more than effort or resources or infrastructure or good laws. Attitudes matter, too. You don’t build a wealthy society by deriding bourgeois enterprise -- or the people who take pride in it.

Scalia declared that “a person who is required to put his name to a document is much less likely to lie than one who can lie anonymously.”Scalia concluded: “I can imagine no reason why an anonymous leaflet is any more honorable, as a general matter, than an anonymous phone call or an anonymous letter. It facilitates wrong by eliminating accountability, which is ordinarily the very purpose of the anonymity.”

“Much of the new growth in the segment is coming from younger consumers who seek foods that fit an overall lifestyle, be it for health reasons or personal ethics,” Mr. Loucks wrote. “They are not just seeking foods that mimic meat. Instead they specifically want vegetarian foods with distinctive flavors and visible, recognizable ingredients.”

“Not that long ago, electrical cars were considered nonperformers, and when Prius came out, a lot of people didn’t think there was a market for it,” said Yves Potvin, founder and chief executive of Gardein Protein International, which makes the Gardein line of meatless products. “Now people are willing to pay $70,000 for a Tesla, and more than one million Prius cars are sold each year.”

Mr. Brown is most proud of Beyond Meat’s “chicken breast” products, which are sold in strips that look like real chicken and can be pulled into shreds for chicken salad. “That was kind of the holy grail,” he said.

“It has to be just as good as, just as convenient as and maybe even cheaper than ground beef or chicken,” Mr. Brown said. “Our business is to create something better than meat; otherwise we are not going to move the needle.”

"High level visits between both countries... are a natural ingredient of tightening relationship between Israel and India," Mr Carmon was quoted as saying by The Hindu newspaper.

We can thank our lucky stars that foresighted Americans, starting around 1970, built the institutions to protect our air and water. Next time you hear someone beat up on the E.P.A., send them to Harbin for a week.

— “to assert environmental interests at least as strongly as economic interests,” said Harvey. That requires assigning real value, and giving real institutional power and weight, to those in the system who believe that it is just as important to protect the commons — air, water, land, food safety — as it is to grow the commons, that it is just as important to have decent ingredients in the pie as it is to grow the pie.

China is a one-party system with multiple, competing interests inside. More enlightened party leaders in Beijing may declare, “We have to clean this up,” but they still have to get the local bosses — whose bonuses depend largely on generating economic growth

China needs to carve our own unique way to a thriving life and stable community — a path that is a sustainable path. If we don’t do this soon, we will end up with a China Nightmare. And there’s no escaping that a China Nightmare is a global nightmare.”

The most anxiety-producing jobs are the ones in which the employee has very little control over what he or she does during the workday.

One thing that "Outliers" fails to point out is that practice alone is not enough. Anders Erickson, a psychologist at Florida State University who studies peak human performance, argues that practicing the same thing over and over again does not ensure that you will respond well in a stressful situation. The trick is to challenge yourself so you're constantly improving your skills.

The most frustrating thing about a traffic jam is not that we're stuck sitting there. For the most part, we're perfectly comfortable in our cars. The problem is that we have no control over what's going on -- we have no idea as to when the traffic will eventually let up. Those are the exact ingredients that make people anxious. Anger and fear are very similar physiologically, so that's why some people get stressed and some people get pissed. It's all part of the same fight-or-flight reaction cycle.

The notion of executive stress syndrome -- the idea that bosses and corporate executives experience much higher levels of anxiety than their underlings -- has proven to be total bullshit. Executives tend to have more control over what they're doing, and they often displace their anxieties on the people that work beneath them.

certain phobias can be made extinct by repeated exposure to what scares us.

only way to beat these feelings -- and by beat I do not mean extinguish so much as get in a more comfortable relationship with -- is to put yourself in the very situations that make you so uncomfortable.