Ultra-processed food manufacturers ran the Big Tobacco playbook to addict consumers: Study



A study published Monday in the Milbank Quarterly, an esteemed peer-reviewed health policy journal, indicated that ultra-processed foods "share key engineering strategies adopted from the tobacco industry, such as dose optimization and hedonic manipulation."

While the overlap in approach and fallout is striking, it's also unsurprising given the industries' entanglements. After all, tobacco companies like R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris acquired food companies such as Kraft, General Foods, and Nabisco in decades past.

'Not simply natural products but highly engineered delivery systems.'

UPFs are defined by the NOVA food classification system as "industrial formulations made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods (oils, fats, sugar, starch, and proteins), derived from food constituents (hydrogenated fats and modified starch), or synthesized in laboratories from food substrates or other organic sources (flavor enhancers, colors, and several food additives used to make the product hyper-palatable)."

Grocery stores are replete with UPFs, which include store-bought biscuits; frozen desserts, chocolate, and candies; soda and other carbonated soft drinks; prepackaged meat and vegetables; frozen pizzas; fish sticks and chicken nuggets; packaged breads; instant noodles; chocolate milk; breakfast cereals; and sweetened juices.

Numerous studies have linked UPFs to serious health conditions.

A massive peer-reviewed 2024 study published in the BMJ, the British Medical Association's esteemed journal, for instance, found evidence pointing to "direct associations between greater exposure to ultra-processed foods and higher risks of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease-related mortality, common mental disorder outcomes, overweight and obesity, and type 2 diabetes."

RELATED: 'A giant step back': Liberals rage against red meat after new food pyramid guidelines release

Photo by Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images

In the new study published this week, researchers from Harvard University, Duke University, and the University of Michigan noted that like cigarettes, UPFS "are not simply natural products but highly engineered delivery systems designed specifically to maximize biological and psychological reinforcement and habitual overuse."

The researchers identified a number of commonalities between ultra-processed foods and beverages, which apparently now dominate the supply across much of the globe, and ultra-processed cigarettes.

The primary reinforcer in ultra-processed cigarettes is nicotine, which is optimized for rapid delivery. UPFs also have primary reinforcers optimized for rapid delivery, namely refined carbohydrates and added fats.

Just as the nicotine dose in ultra-processed cigarettes is standardized — 1% to 2% by weight — "to balance reward and aversion," the researchers noted that refined carbohydrates and fats are precisely calibrated in UPFs to "maximize hedonic impact."

"On a biological level, carbohydrates and fats activate separate gut-brain reward pathways. Refined carbohydrates stimulate dopamine release via the vagus nerve, whereas fats do so through intestinal lipid sensing and cholecystokinin signaling," said the study. "When consumed together, their effects are supra-additive: the mesolimbic dopamine response can rise to 300% above baseline, compared with 120% to 150% for fat alone."

"This makes UPFs with high levels of refined carbohydrates and added fats some of the most potently rewarding substances in the modern diet," added the study.

In both ultra-processed cigarettes and food, the reinforcers are reportedly rapidly absorbed or digested; the reward is short-lived, leading to a desire for more; flavorants and sweeteners are added to processed ingredient bases to amplify appeal; risks of use abound.

The researchers noted further that both the tobacco and food industries have also worked diligently in their marketing to "create the illusion of reduced harm while preserving their core addictive properties."

"Many UPFs share more characteristics with cigarettes than with minimally processed fruits or vegetables and therefore warrant regulation commensurate with the significant public-health risks they pose," said the paper.

The researchers indicated that their analysis demonstrates "how UPFs meet established addiction-science benchmarks, particularly when viewed through parallels with tobacco."

The apparent aim of such scholarship is to provide the "basis for policies that constrain manufacturers, restrict marketing, and prioritize structural interventions."

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Don’t be seduced by AI nostalgia — it’s a trap!



I don’t often argue with internet trends. Most of them exhaust themselves before they deserve the attention. But a certain kind of AI-generated nostalgia video has become too pervasive — and too seductive — to ignore.

You’ve seen them. Soft-focus fragments of the 1970s and 1980s. Kids on bikes at dusk. Station wagons. Camaros. Shopping malls glowing gently from within. Fake wood paneling! Cathode ray tubes! Rotary phones! A past rendered as calm, legible, and safe. The message hums beneath the imagery: Wouldn’t it be nice to go back?

Human nostalgia, as opposed to the AI-generated kind, eventually runs aground on grief, embarrassment, and the recognition that the past demanded something from us and took something in return.

Eh ... not really, no. But I understand the appeal because, on certain exhausting days, it works on me too — just enough to make the present feel a little heavier by comparison.

And I don’t like it. Not at all. And not because I’m hostile to memory.

I was there, 3,000 years ago

I was born in 1971. I lived in that world. I remember it pretty well.

How well? One of my earliest, most vivid memories of television is not a cartoon or a sitcom. No, I’m a weirdo. It is the Senate Watergate hearings in 1973, broadcast on PBS in black and white. I was 2 years old.

I didn’t understand the words, but I sort of grasped the tone. The seriousness. The tension. The sense that something grave was unfolding in full view of the world. Even as a toddler, I vaguely understood that it mattered. The adults in ties and horn-rimmed glasses were yelling at each other. Somebody was in trouble. Before I knew anything at all, I knew: This was serious stuff.

A little later, I remember gas lines. Long ones. Cars waiting for hours on an even or odd day while enterprising teenagers sold lemonade. It felt ordinary at the time, probably because I hadn’t the slightest idea what “ordinary” meant. Only later did it reveal itself as an early lesson in scarcity and frustration.

The past did not hum along effortlessly. Sometimes — often — it stalled.

Freedom wasn’t safety

I remember my parents watching election returns in 1976 on network television. I was bored to tears — literally — but I remember my father’s disappointment when Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter. And mind you, Ford was terrible.

This was not some cozy TV ritual. It was a loss of some kind, plainly felt. Big, important institutions did not project confidence. They produced arguments, resentment, and unease. It wasn’t long before people were talking seriously about an “era of limits.” All I knew was Dad and Mom were worried.

I remember a summer birthday party in the early 1980s at a classmate’s house. It was hot, but she had an awesome pool. I also remember my lungs ached. That day, Southern California was under a first-stage smog alert. The air itself was hazardous. The past did not smell like nostalgia. It smelled like exhaust with lead and cigarette smoke.

I don’t miss that. Not even a little bit.

Yes, I remember riding bikes through neighborhoods with friends. I remember disappearing for entire days. I remember my parents calling my name when the streetlights came on. I remember spending long stretches at neighbors’ houses without supervision. I remember watching old movies on Saturdays with my pal Jimmy. I remember Tom Hatten. I remember listening to KISS and Genesis and Black Sabbath. That freedom existed. It mattered. It was fun. But it lived alongside fear, not in its absence.

Innocence collides with reality

I don’t remember the Adam Walsh murder specifically, but I very much remember the network television movie it inspired in 1983. That moment changed American childhood in ways people still underestimate. It sure scared the hell out of me. Innocence didn’t drift into supervision — it collided with horror. Helicopter parenting did not emerge from neurosis. It emerged from bona fide terror.

And before all of that, my first encounter with death arrived without explanation. A cousin of mine died in 1977. She was 16 years old, riding on the back of a motorcycle with a man 11 years her senior. She wasn’t wearing a helmet. The funeral was closed casket. I was too young to know all the details. Almost 50 years on, I don’t want to know. The age difference alone suggests things the adults in my life chose not to discuss.

Silence was how they handled it. Silence was not ignorance — it was restraint.

RELATED: 1980s-inspired AI companion promises to watch and interrupt you: ‘You can see me? That’s so cool’

seamartini via iStock/Getty Images

Memory is not withdrawal

This is what the warm and fuzzy AI nostalgia videos cannot possibly show. They have no room for recklessness that ends in funerals, or for freedom that edges into life-threatening danger, or for adults who withhold truth because telling it would damage rather than protect.

What we often recall as freedom often presented itself as recklessness ... or worse.

None of this negates the goodness of those years. I’m grateful for when I came of age. I don’t resent my childhood at all. It formed me. It taught me how fragile stability is and how much of adulthood consists of absorbing uncertainty without dissolving into it.

That’s precisely why I reject the invitation to go back.

The new AI nostalgia doesn’t ask us to remember. In reality, it wants us to withdraw. It offers a sweet lullaby for the nervous system. It replaces the true cost of living with the comfort of atmosphere and a cool soundtrack. It edits out the smog, the scarcity, the fear, the crime, and the death, leaving only a vibe shaped like memory.

Here’s a gentler hallucination, it says. Stay awhile.

The cost of living, then and now

The problem, then, isn’t sentiment. The problem is abdication.

So the temptation today isn’t to recover what was seemingly lost but rather to anesthetize an uncertain present. Those Instagram Reels don’t draw their power from people who remember that era clearly but from people who feel exhausted, surveilled, indebted, and hemmed in right now — and are looking for proof that life once felt more human.

RELATED: Late California

LPETTET via iStock/Getty Images

And who could blame them? Maybe it was more human. But not in the way people today would like to believe. Human experience has never been especially sweet or gentle.

Human nostalgia, as opposed to the AI-generated kind, eventually runs aground on grief, embarrassment, and the recognition that the past demanded something from us and took something in return. Synthetic nostalgia can never reach that reckoning. It loops endlessly, frictionless and consequence-free.

I don’t want a past without a bill attached. I already paid the thing. Sometimes I think I’m paying it still.

A warning

AI nostalgia videos promise relief without effort, feeling without action, memory without judgment.

That may be comforting, but it isn’t healthy, and it isn’t right.

Truth is, adulthood rightly understood does not consist of finding the softest place to lie down. It means carrying forward what we’ve lived through, even when it complicates our fantasies.

Certain experiences were great the first time, Lord knows, but I don’t want to relive the 1970s or ’80s. I want to live now, alert to danger, capable of gratitude without illusion, willing to bear the weight of memory rather than dissolve into it.

Nostalgia has its place. But don’t be seduced by sedation.

Editor’s note: A version of this article appeared originally on Substack.

Intercepted prison drone drop includes ingredients for 'early holiday Old Bay crab boil and steak dinner,' officials say



Inmates at the Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, South Carolina, will have to settle for their normal cafeteria fare this week, as officials intercepted a drone drop carrying ingredients for an "early holiday Old Bay crab boil and steak dinner," according to an X post from the state Department of Corrections.

Indeed, the illicit delivery included steak, crab legs, and even a container of Old Bay Seasoning. Also added to the package were cigarettes and two large bags of marijuana.

'I’m guessing the inmates who were expecting this package are a bit crabby.'

Fox News reported that the contraband was captured early Sunday morning.

"Seems some folks were planning an early holiday Old Bay crab boil and steak dinner along with their marijuana and cigarettes — all dropped by a drone at Lee [Correctional Institution]," the X post said.

— (@)

Officials at the maximum security prison recovered the drone along with the package, WLTX-TV reported, adding that no arrests have been made.

"As you likely know, we often see odd items included in contraband packages, but this was a bit unusual, even for us," SCDC spokeswoman Chrysti Shain told Fox News. "I’m guessing the inmates who were expecting this package are a bit crabby."

The cable news network added that the SCDC and the Lee County Sheriff’s Office actually have spent years combatting ongoing drone drops at the Lee Correctional Institution.

"Contraband is a real threat to prisons across the country, and we fight nightly attacks from drones dropping dangerous drugs — often fentanyl and meth — onto prison yards," Shain added to Fox News. "We go to extraordinary lengths to combat drones."

More from Fox News:

In 2022, an eight-month investigation at Lee Correctional led to 20 arrests and the seizure of 12 drones, as well as 100 pounds of contraband, authorities reported.

Additionally, officers discovered three abandoned drones in the woods near the prison fences.

Law enforcement reported that the drones involved have grown larger and are capable of carrying heavier loads.

"These large drones can carry heavier and heavier packages," Lee County Sheriff Daniel Simon said in a 2022 statement, according to the cable news network. "We are working hard to stop them from getting in the wrong hands."

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Why the nicotine myth might be the most lethal public health lie



An alarming new survey reveals a dangerous blind spot in the medical community: Countless doctors still believe nicotine directly causes cancer. That myth has been repeated for decades, but science says otherwise.

The survey by Povaddo LLC included 1,565 U.S. medical professionals. Nearly half of health care practitioners (47%) and 59% of those treating heavy smokers incorrectly identified nicotine as a carcinogen. Another 19% weren’t sure. The result: Many physicians discourage patients from trying “tobacco harm reduction” products — like e-cigarettes or smokeless tobacco — that contain nicotine but eliminate the thousands of toxins in combustible cigarettes.

It’s time for the FDA to cut through decades of propaganda and tell the truth: Nicotine is addictive, but it isn’t the cause of cancer.

This misunderstanding costs lives. By misidentifying nicotine as the killer, doctors steer smokers away from safer alternatives that could dramatically reduce cancer, heart disease, and lung disease.

Education matters. Health care providers need to know nicotine is addictive, but the real harm comes from the smoke. Until that distinction is clear, patients will remain trapped in the deadliest habit of all — traditional smoking.

Science has already proven the case. A conventional cigarette contains more than 600 ingredients and, when burned, produces over 7,000 chemicals, including arsenic, formaldehyde, tar, and lead. Smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans each year, according to the CDC, making it the nation’s leading cause of preventable death. By contrast, studies show vaping or smokeless products cut exposure to those toxic substances by orders of magnitude.

Even the FDA admits this. In 2017, then-Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said, “Nicotine, though not benign, is not directly responsible for the tobacco-caused cancer, lung diseases, and heart disease that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans each year.” Yet years later, the agency continues to regulate vaping into oblivion while dragging its feet on promoting THR.

The public is ahead of the bureaucrats. A 2024 poll of U.S. voters found overwhelming support for FDA reform and a strong desire to reduce smoking. Congress has noticed too. Former Rep. Larry Bucshon (R-Ind.), a physician, called risk reduction for combustible smoking not “a partisan issue.” Rep. Don Davis (D-N.C.), co-chairman of the Congressional Tobacco Harm Reduction Caucus, added: “As we move from smoke-based to smokeless products … that’s going to reduce the harm [caused by] tobacco across this country.”

RELATED: WHO’s war on FDA: Science or sour grapes over US cuts?

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call Inc. via Getty Images

Americans want safer alternatives. Lawmakers in both parties support tobacco harm reduction. The medical community, however, remains misinformed — and the FDA’s mixed messaging hasn’t helped. Every day doctors cling to the nicotine myth, more smokers stay chained to cigarettes.

It’s time for the FDA to cut through decades of propaganda and tell the truth: Nicotine is addictive, but it isn’t the cause of cancer. Doctors need to know it, patients need to hear it, and policies need to reflect it. Mislabeling nicotine has killed enough people already.

If regulators and medical professionals are serious about saving lives, they must stop demonizing nicotine itself and start promoting harm reduction. Millions of lives depend on it.

Global elites think you’re too stupid for soda and beer



The latest wheeze from global public health elites? Jack up taxes on tobacco, alcohol, sugary drinks, and processed food by 50% to raise $3.7 trillion in new revenue. They call it “health policy.” In plain English, it’s government-sanctioned theft.

This isn’t about curing disease. It’s about expanding state power. These so-called health taxes, pushed by academic ideologues and international bureaucrats, are little more than economic punishment disguised as progress. They won’t meaningfully reduce illness, but they’ll absolutely hit working people the hardest.

Sin taxes don’t foster well-being — they weaponize economic pain against the people who can least afford it.

The new push for massive taxes on soda, smokes, beer, and snacks is social engineering with a hefty price tag. The goal isn’t better health so much as behavioral compliance. And who pays for it? Not corporations. Not policymakers. Regular people. Especially those already stretched thin.

The promise of $3.7 trillion in new revenue tells you everything you need to know. This is about cash, not caring. You’re not going to fix the obesity crisis by making a Coke cost $4. You’re just making life worse for the guy who wants a cold drink after work.

These aren’t just products. They’re small pleasures — a beer at dinner, a smoke on break, a soda on a hot afternoon. Legal, affordable, familiar. Stripping them from people’s lives in the name of “health” doesn’t uplift anyone. It makes life more miserable.

And this plan doesn’t educate or empower. It punishes. It uses taxes to bludgeon people into compliance. That’s not public health — that’s moral authoritarianism.

Proponents claim that higher prices discourage consumption, especially among young people. But that’s not smart policy — it’s an admission that the entire strategy relies on pricing people out of their own choices.

That’s not a sign of sound policy; it’s a confession that the aim is to price people out of their own choices. It’s hard not to see this as profoundly elitist. A worldview in which an ignorant public must be nudged, coerced, and taxed into making decisions deemed acceptable by a distant class of arrogant policymakers.

Sin taxes don’t foster well-being — they weaponize economic pain against the people who can least afford it. The more someone spends on a drink or a cigarette, the less they can spend on rent, groceries, or gas. In the U.K., economists found that sin taxes cost low-income families up to 10 times more than they cost the wealthy. That holds true in the United States as well. These are regressive by design.

History offers a warning. Prohibition didn’t end drinking — it empowered criminals. Today, in places like Australia, black markets for vapes and other restricted products are booming. When governments overregulate, people continue to consume. They just go underground, and quality, safety, and accountability go with them.

Public health bureaucrats love to talk about the “commercial determinants of health,” blaming industry for every social ill. But they ignore the personal determinants that matter even more: freedom, dignity, and the right to make informed decisions.

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People already know the risks of smoking, drinking, and sugar consumption. They’ve seen the labels and heard the warnings for years. They don’t need lectures from bureaucrats, government ministers, or international agencies. What they need is respect — and the freedom to live as they choose.

These new tax schemes don’t offer support or alternatives. They rely on coercion, not persuasion. The state becomes the enforcer, not the helper. It’s a government model that punishes pleasure and equates restriction with virtue.

The sinister core of this health tax agenda lies in its relentless condescension. It assumes people are too stupid, too reckless, or too addicted to choose what’s best for themselves, and so government must intervene forcefully and repeatedly.

This is control, not compassionate governance.

A better path exists — one rooted in harm reduction, not prohibition. Encourage low-sugar drink options. Expand access to safer nicotine alternatives. Support moderate alcohol consumption. Respect the people you’re trying to help.

If public health advocates truly want to improve outcomes, they should abandon these regressive, punitive proposals. They should promote innovation, not punishment. Education, not enforcement.

Because real public health doesn’t treat people like problems to be managed. It treats them like citizens — free to live, choose, and thrive.

Hormonal birth control: As bad for you as smoking



Filmmaker and mother Jessica Solce was frustrated by the difficulty of finding healthy, all-natural products for herself and her family. To make it easier, she created the Solarium, which curates trusted, third-party-tested foods, clothing, beauty products, and more — all free of seed oils, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, and other harmful additives.

In this occasional column she shares recommendations and research she's picked up during her ongoing education in health and wellness.

“Changes in gray and white matter in brains of women taking [oral contraceptives] suggest that OCs have an effect on brain architecture.” —Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, volume 67, October 2022.

I tried birth control in college. It lasted less than three months, and then I ran for the hills.

Birth control distorts sexual attraction. Women are literally put off the scent of the hunt for the right partner.

I hated how my body was feeling. It was swelling, and my mind was unsettled and lethargic. Luckily I had an old-world mother who always warned me never to take birth control, so I tiptoed into my college experiment with awareness and wariness, hypervigilant for any side effects.

Before we get into exactly why hormonal birth control is systemically wrecking your body and mind — both on a micro (you) and a macro (societal, generational) level — I'm going to skip ahead to the takeaway. This is easily one of the most important things you'll read all week, and I can't risk you clicking off before you finish reading.

Here it is: Ladies, don't use the pill, the patch, or the ring. Or any method of contraception interfering with your body's delicate balance of hormones.

It doesn’t matter if it has some “positive” side effects. Any pharmaceutical intervention will upend your body's natural balance, and whatever the “positive” side effects, they are absolutely overshadowed by the multitude of negative side effects: migraines, anxiety attacks, loss of libido, brain alterations, thrombosis, personality disorders, depression, and cancer.

Your best option, to quote Nancy Reagan, is to just say no.

Of course, the former first lady was talking about illegal drugs. But if we've learned anything in the past couple of decades, it's that the stuff the pharmaceutical companies peddle can be just as bad.

Maybe you've heard this kind of talk linked to the slogan Make America Healthy Again. Even if MAHA is a little too similar to MAGA for your taste, don't buy into the propaganda that ditching birth control is somehow a partisan issue.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, 29-year-old pop singer Lorde spoke positively about her decision to stop using birth control for the first time since she was fifteen. Still, she felt the need to issue a disclaimer: “I’ve now come to see my decision was maybe some quasi right-wing programming."

RELATED: Lorde and 5 other celebs who broke up with birth control

alex_skp/James Devaney/Joel Nito/Getty Images

Well, if a woman living in tune with her body and not dependent on Big Pharma is right-wing, welcome to the right wing, Lorde. Welcome, all.

Here's what hormonal birth control does in addition to preventing pregnancy.

It changes who you're attracted to

In 2008, 100 women were asked to sniff the shirts of men and rate them by odor, most to least attractive. The results suggested that women on the pill preferred the scent of men with similar MHC genes. MHC genes are crucial to the development of the immune system; offspring of parents with a well-balanced diversity of these genes tend to be more resistant to disease.

By contrast, women not on birth control were drawn to men with dissimilar MHC genes — selecting for offspring with strong immune systems. You're instinctively drawn to a man whose genes fill in what you’re missing — a match that benefits your future children. Incredible, really.

Birth control distorts sexual attraction. Women are literally put off the scent of the hunt for the right partner.

Also, when a woman goes off birth control, she can find herself no longer attracted to her partner’s pheromones.

It messes with our water supply

We in the West love to point out the detrimental environmental effects of automobiles while ignoring the toxic emissions from our own bodies. All of the drugs we consume end up passing through us and right back into the water system.

This pollutes our drinking water as well as the habitats of aquatic animals. Like the herbicide atrazine, estrogen from birth control can wreak havoc on mating cycles, causing intersex conditions, low sperm count, and population collapse.

It increases the risk of cancer

Users of hormonal contraceptives face a 20% to 30% higher risk of breast cancer. And yet most reports tend to dismiss any alarm this figure might raise. This reassuring passage is typical: "Experts say the increased risk is small and the benefits of hormonal contraceptives still outweigh the risks for many people."

Contrast that with the general attitude toward another known cancer risk: smoking cigarettes. Even just five cigarettes a day increases your risk of lung cancer by almost 8%. Once you get up to pack or two a day, that risk rises to something like 25%.

In other words, about the same increased risk as birth control.

When it comes to cigarettes, however, the "experts" sing a different tune: "There’s no 'safe' number of cigarettes you can smoke per day. Any number of cigarettes can increase your risk of developing cancer."

It messes with your brain

A 2019 study found that women who take oral contraception had a significantly smaller hypothalamus than those who don't. The hypothalamus is the region of the brain regulating any number of bodily functions, from sex drive and sleep cycles to appetite and heart rate.

A smaller hypothalamus correlates with depression and decreased emotional regulation.

Vice soon responded with an article "debunking" the study: Yes, birth control alters the structure of the brain, but who's to say that's a bad thing?

Yeah, no thanks.

A 2023 study revealed that women on oral contraceptives did not experience the typical reduction in the stress hormone ACTH after social activities. This suggests that hormonal contraceptives may alter how the body regulates stress and directly causes elevated cortisol levels.

It makes being a teenager exponentially worse

A 2016 Danish study found that females 15 to 19 using oral contraception were likely to be diagnosed with depression at a 70% higher rate than non-users. The patch and vaginal rings had even higher correlation with depression.

Many of those diagnosed go on to take antidepressants, another lifetime prescription keeping them dependent on the pharmaceutical companies.

Still, birth control defenders say there's nothing to see here. In the words of Dr. Cora Breuner, a Seattle pediatrician who chairs the committee on adolescents for the American Academy of Pediatrics, “An unintended and unwanted pregnancy far outweighs all the other side effects that could occur from a contraceptive."

Oh, and taking birth control during adolescence can also disrupt brain development, especially processes related to the fear response.

Could rampant birth control use have anything to do with women's higher rates of anxiety disorders? Seems like a question worth asking.

It gets into breast milk

What we eat goes directly into our breast milk and into our babies. Do we really need a science experiment for this logic? We're advised not to eat too much broccoli because it may give our babies uncomfortable gas.

RELATED: MAHA study unveiled: The truth behind autism

Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

But don’t worry about those drugs you're taking, and have you considered updating your vaccines?

Do you want to fill your babies' bodies with synthetic estrogen or progestin? Logically these synthetic hormones go downstream and directly into our breast milk. If there is a negative risk to my infant’s growth, that is enough warning for me.

We are already aware that oral contraceptives increase chances of cancer and may cause behavioral and personality disorders.

So why is cancer increasing so drastically in children? We actually know. Leukemia is the most common type of cancer in children, and a Scandinavian study found a direct link to birth control.

It messes with your metabolism

Some birth control pills, especially those with certain hormones like androgenic progestins, can negatively affect glucose metabolism, i.e., make it harder for the body to handle sugar. This means blood sugar and insulin levels may spike after eating, which can lead to problems like insulin resistance, a higher chance of developing type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.

It can cause other life-altering side effects

“I would get these migraines that would shock my body into so much pain that I would then have seizures,” said one woman in a 2018 BBC documentary. Also on the menu are anxiety attacks, weight gain, pulmonary embolisms, and blood clots.

Good luck addressing any of these problems. Most doctors aren't trained to recognize birth control side effects, often leading women to seek additional pharmaceutical solutions.

It's coming for men, too

That's right, guys. Thank to the wonders of science, soon all of this can be yours too. Who knows what interesting new effects we'll see when we start tampering with male hormones?

Health begins with the awareness that our bodies are incredibly complex, elegantly constructed systems. My mission with the Solarium is to help us be better stewards of this natural gift.

Smoke-free surge stalled by feds clinging to old habits



The U.S. nicotine market is undergoing a historic shift — one that should be celebrated as a major public health breakthrough. A new Goldman Sachs report forecasts that smoke-free nicotine products will surpass cigarettes in consumption by 2025 and come close to matching them in revenue and profit by 2035.

This shift isn’t the result of government policy. It’s happening because consumers are making better choices. Yet federal regulators appear determined to stand in the way.

Nicotine may be addictive, but it isn’t what causes cancer, heart disease, or emphysema. The culprit is combustion.

The data couldn’t be clearer. Millions of smokers are abandoning cigarettes for reduced-risk products like vaping devices, nicotine pouches, and heated tobacco. Cigarette sales are plummeting — from 12.9 billion packs in 2016 to a projected 2.7 billion by 2035.

This trend should give public health agencies a reason to cheer. Instead, the Food and Drug Administration is dragging its feet, imposing policies that make it harder — not easier — for adult smokers to switch to safer alternatives. The FDA’s obstruction risks slowing one of the most promising developments in decades for reducing smoking-related deaths.

Free market for the win

Despite the flood of misinformation, the market is succeeding where decades of public health campaigns have failed: It’s making cigarettes obsolete. Given the choice, consumers are ditching smoke for safer alternatives that deliver nicotine without combustion’s deadly byproducts. This isn’t just progress — it’s a landmark victory for harm reduction.

The free market deserves credit for this shift. While government anti-smoking efforts have leaned heavily on punitive tactics — higher taxes, grotesque warning labels, and outright bans — real declines in smoking have come where reduced-risk nicotine products are legal and accessible. In the United States, this transformation is unfolding not because of regulators, but in spite of them.

At the heart of the problem lies the FDA’s Pre-Market Tobacco Application process. Supposedly designed to vet new nicotine products, the PMTA system has become a bureaucratic bottleneck. It’s opaque, glacial, and unreasonably strict. The result? A legal market riddled with uncertainty — and an illegal one thriving in its place.

Today, more than 60% of e-vapor sales come from illicit, unregulated products. That’s not because consumers prefer them. It’s because the FDA has made it nearly impossible for legitimate companies to get reduced-risk products approved and onto shelves. The agency has created a regulatory vacuum — and the black market has filled it.

Federal foot-dragging

The dysfunction doesn’t stop with vaping. Heated tobacco products and nicotine pouches — both widely recognized abroad as effective harm reduction tools — face the same bureaucratic purgatory. Meanwhile, traditional cigarettes remain widely available and profitable. If public health were truly the FDA’s goal, it would fast-track reduced-risk alternatives, not prop up the very products causing the most harm.

But the FDA’s foot-dragging has real consequences. More Americans will stay hooked on cigarettes longer than they otherwise would. The data is in: Alternative nicotine products help people quit smoking. Blocking legal access to them doesn’t protect public health — it prolongs addiction and guarantees more smoking-related deaths. By stalling the shift to safer products, the FDA is effectively locking millions into a habit that kills roughly half its users.

Regulatory inertia also risks stifling competition in the industry. Cigarettes still generate 66% of industry revenue and 70% of profits. The companies leading the charge toward a smoke-free future — those that don’t sell cigarettes — face the stiffest regulatory headwinds. In effect, the government is shielding the cigarette market rather than accelerating its collapse.

A better way exists. Federal regulators could champion this shift instead of obstructing it. The FDA should fast-track approvals for products with significantly lower health risks than cigarettes. Doing so would give consumers legal access to safer options while shrinking the black market.

The public also deserves the truth. Nicotine may be addictive, but it isn’t what causes cancer, heart disease, or emphysema. The culprit is combustion. And the longer that confusion persists, the more smokers the FDA leaves behind.

Outcomes or optics?

Federal regulators should stop protecting the tobacco industry and start supporting companies that are moving the U.S. away from combustible cigarettes. That means giving independent vape makers and harm-reduction innovators a fighting chance, instead of letting Big Tobacco tighten its grip through regulatory capture.

Regulation should make cigarettes less appealing — not safer alternatives harder to get. Risk-proportionate rules would prioritize public health by nudging smokers toward lower-risk products, not driving them into the black market or back to Marlboro.

Goldman Sachs’ latest data shows the market is doing what public health campaigns never could: making smoking obsolete. If regulators got out of the way — or better yet, helped — the fall of Big Tobacco could come even faster.

Cigarettes are dying. The FDA can either help bury them or keep dragging out their final act. The question is whether public health officials care more about optics or outcomes. The market has already chosen. It’s time for the government to catch up.

Cigarettes and beer: The heady perfume that transports me to my childhood



I remember the smell of cigarette smoke in the 1990s. It was the last time in America when you might smell cigarettes in a bar or a restaurant. It’s a smell that always reminds me of my childhood.

Nostalgia. Memories. The world that was. The world we saw, heard, and smelled.

Those were the smells of our dads. Cigarettes, beer, liquor, gasoline, sawdust, the garage. They make me smile.

I sound like an old-timer memorializing another era. But it was only yesterday, wasn't it?

Thirty years ago now.

Gas on pump two

My dad smoked. Marlboro Lights. I remember standing next to him in the gas station countless times. “Gas on pump two, and two packs of Marlboro Lights in the box.” That’s what he would always say. He would motion to the boxes with his hand or lean over the counter a little as he asked in a voice he never used at home.

He smoked in the car. The window cracked, his elbow on the door, the cigarette hanging right above the glass. I could smell it so faintly in the back seat. Just barely.

I remember late at night, on long road trips, the sight of that orange ember on the end of the cigarette in the dark night. The green lights of the dashboard and his hand on the steering wheel.

My dad didn’t smoke in the house. He would stand at the door to the garage. Crack it about six inches with his hand on the doorframe so the smoke wouldn’t come in. The smell of Stroh’s, cigarette smoke, and cold air. I remember standing in the kitchen talking to my dad right there. The smell of all those things together. That’s a memory.

Bacon and eggs

My grandparents smoked, too. Salems. They bought them in the carton. They smoked inside the house. We didn’t live too far away, and we visited them often. Sometimes we would stay over the weekend.

I remember my grandpa standing in the kitchen frying eggs in an electric frying pan, an ashtray on the counter and a burning cigarette turning to ash. The smell of syrup and bacon grease, smoke and coffee. Still in my pajamas.

My grandparents drank 7&7s at night. I would watch my dad sitting with my grandpa, smoking and drinking. The sweet smell of the 7-Up tainted by the unappealing, all-too-adult scent of Seagram's. The look of the sweaty glass. Cigarette smoke in the air.

These are old memories, places I haven't been to in years. Moments I can’t find in a picture or a video. But certain smells linger. They connect to some place behind my eyes, and I am there again. My grandpa and my dad. The smell of cigarettes.

Basics and Bud

My wife’s dad smoked. Basics. He worked out in the garage a lot. For her, it’s sawdust mixed with the smell of Basics and the faint aroma of Bud Light. Those are her memories, her dad. I knew my wife in high school. I remember walking through that garage and saying a quick “hi” to her dad as he stood back there behind his workbench.

Those were the smells of our dads. Cigarettes, beer, liquor, gasoline, sawdust, the garage. They make me smile. Our dads; they seem so big when we are little. They seem so grown and so old.

I am his age now. Do I loom so large over my son? Those smells felt so familiar, yet so strange and unappealing at the same time. Beer and cigarettes don’t sound good when you are little kid, but they are the smell of your dad.

My dad always smoked when he was working on some home improvement project. I close my eyes and I can see him putting all his weight on a screwdriver with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Muttering profanities under his breath, cursing the cheap screws.

My son won’t have the same scent memories that I do. His grandfather doesn’t smoke in the kitchen over a pan of fried eggs. His dad doesn’t request the smoking section when we go out to eat. There aren’t any smoking sections any more. Some of his memories will be the same as mine, but not these. Those scents are from another time.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Yeah, we all know that cigarettes aren’t the healthiest thing in the world. I’m sick of hearing about it. I’m starting to think there are a lot worse things than a pack of butts, if we are being honest.

I’ve become anti-anti-smoking.

Those scent memories that still hang deep in my nose remind me of being a kid and looking up at my dad. How he held his cigarette between his fingers and how he brought it to his lips. Feeling so little and like nothing would ever happen to me because my dad would always protect me. Like everything would always be OK. I miss the smell of cigarettes.

Smoking out, vaping in: A new CDC report offers cause for optimism



The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the 2023 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey results, an annual assessment of various health-related behaviors among U.S. adults. Tobacco control advocates have reason to celebrate: The adult smoking rate has reached record lows, and in some states, young adult smoking rates are nearly nonexistent.

According to the BRFSS, only 12.1% of adults across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., smoked in 2023, down from 14% in 2022. This drop represents a decrease from 36.4 million smokers in 2022 to 31.7 million in 2023, a reduction of approximately 4.7 million. The decline among young adults aged 18 to 24 is even more notable: Only 5.6% smoked in 2023, marking a 23.5% decrease from 2022 and a dramatic 76.5% decline over the past decade.

Inaction and sporadic enforcement by federal agencies have contributed to widespread misperceptions about products that are less harmful than traditional cigarettes.

While tobacco control advocates credit these historic lows to policies like taxes and smoking bans, the rise in e-cigarette use also appears correlated with the reduction in smoking rates. From 2016 to 2023, vaping among young adults rose by 90%, while their smoking rates fell by 63.8%. Interestingly, young adult vaping rates have also started to decline, dropping 23.5% from 20.9% in 2022 to 18.9% in 2023.

In some states, such as Utah and New York, young adult smoking rates are exceptionally low, at 2.6% and 3.4%, respectively. Even Oklahoma, which has the highest young adult smoking rate at 9.1%, is still significantly lower than the national adult average of 12.1%.

These trends extend to youth smoking and vaping statistics. According to the CDC’s National Youth Tobacco Survey, only 1.6% of U.S. middle and high school students reported current cigarette use in 2023. Youth vaping has also declined significantly, with only 5.9% of U.S. youth vaping this year — a 70.5% drop from 2019, when 20% were vaping. In just five years, America went from one in five youth using e-cigarettes to one in 20.

Despite these positive trends, many tobacco control advocates continue to push for strict policies and high taxes, while the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been slow to process authorizations for newer tobacco harm-reduction products. This has contributed to public misunderstandings about the relative risks of these products compared to traditional cigarettes.

Numerous organizations, including the American Lung Association, Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, and the Truth Initiative, recognize the significant declines in youth vaping but remain concerned about the frequency of use among current users, particularly criticizing flavored tobacco and vapor products.

The ALA describes vaping as “a serious public health concern,” while CTFK emphasizes that youth e-cigarette use “remains a serious public health problem” and calls for an end to this “crisis” by urging federal agencies like the FDA and the U.S. Department of Justice to intensify their efforts to eliminate all illegal e-cigarettes from the market. Similarly, the Truth Initiative asserts that “youth nicotine addiction remains a serious public health concern.”

All these groups criticize flavored products, despite adults using these flavors in innovative tobacco harm-reduction products to remain smoke-free. These groups also focus their efforts on newer oral nicotine pouches, even though less than 2% of youth report using such products.

These groups are not alone. The inaction and sporadic enforcement by federal agencies have contributed to widespread misperceptions about products that are less harmful than traditional cigarettes.

Since 2015, the FDA has issued only 56 marketing orders for newer tobacco products introduced in the United States after February 2007. Despite authorizing more than 16,000 other tobacco products since 2012, the FDA has approved marketing for only 34 e-cigarette products. In contrast, in 2023, the agency issued more than 660 orders for combustible cigarettes, despite declining smoking rates among American adults. This disparity likely contributes to public confusion about the relative health benefits of e-cigarettes.

Policymakers and tobacco control groups should recognize and celebrate the historic reductions in cigarette use among both adults and youth. This is a significant public health achievement that may be driven by the availability of tobacco harm-reduction products, such as e-cigarettes and oral nicotine pouches.

Instead of resisting these market trends and products that have been associated with significant declines in smoking rates, these groups should advocate enhanced access to these alternatives to help end the use of combustible cigarettes once and for all.

‘A Devastating Impact’: Harris’s Silence On Key Biden Policy Leaves American Farmers In The Lurch

'A Devastating Impact': Harris's Silence On Key Biden Policy Leaves American Farmers In The Lurch