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We're gonna have a field day with this one.

@NYTimes hed: Soda consumption "plunges" after Chile adopts new food laws.

Actual study: Consumption drops 7 calories per person per day.

Let's unpack this in a THREAD.
nytimes.com/2020/02/11/hea…
Back in 2015, Chile enacted a set of changed to food laws that required things like front-of-package labeling, restricting ads to kids, and increasing their soda tax. All eyes have been on Chile to see the results. These are the first. journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/a…
The study found that consumption decreased 23 ml, which is LESS THAN AN OUNCE, compared to a counterfactual where the researchers estimate what people would have bought had the law not been enacted.
That translates to 12 calories, but you have to add back in calories from other drinks people opted for instead. Net it out and it's a 7 calorie decrease. (And I don't quite get how they net it out since 11.9-5.7 is 6.2 but hey.)
Why are people reading this as a public health coup? Because lots of folks in this space want government to be able to solve our obesity & health problems. This study shows that it's going to be an uphill battle.
I'm in favor of changing some of our laws! I'm particularly in favor of a tax on sugar in the supply chain. But don't expect any of these measure to have a huge impact. washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food…
In sum: Chile made SWEEPING changes to food laws - packaging, taxes, ad restrictions. Yet, a few years in, people are drinking 7 calories less in soda per day. This is not a trumpet-from-the-rooftops success. It is a cautionary tale.

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More from @TamarHaspel see all

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Tamar Haspel
@TamarHaspel
This is my top priority as a journalist - safeguarding against my own bias and figuring out what I get wrong. I've developed a bunch of strategies to do it, and since this is the season of kumbaya I am going to list them in a thread. Here goes.
1. Believe in your own bias.

We all have them. None of us are the rational, evidence-based decision makers we think we are. If you're not convinced, read @JonHaidt's fine book THE RIGHTEOUS MIND.
2. Assume good faith in people who disagree with you.

There's a lot about people lying, and promoting disinformation, but I think the nature of human cognition is such that it's easier to convince yourself something is true than lie about it every day.
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Tamar Haspel
@TamarHaspel
In this thread, I will tell you my plan for tackling obesity and diet-related disease and explain why it involves STOPPING nutrition research as we know it. Start with this excellent @ceboudreau & @hbottemiller story on nutrition research issues. politico.com/news/agenda/20…
Here’s the problem with nutrition research: the tools are inadequate to the job. We have observational research, which has 2 big problems:
1. People can’t report what they eat accurately
2. All we get are correlations
I wrote about that here: washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food…
We also have controlled trials, and just today @davidludwigmd wrote about the problems with them in the @NYTimes. While we can do a couple easy things (pre-register!) to improve tools, much of their limitations are inherent. nytimes.com/2019/11/13/opi…
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Tamar Haspel
@TamarHaspel
It's not the carbs.
It's not the fat
It's the PALATABILITY, and there's a new paper that tries to define hyper-palatable foods (HPF *sigh*) and figure out their prevalence in our food supply. It's really interesting 1/
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…
They define 3 categories of hyper-palatable foods:
1 Fat+sodium (>25% of cals from fat + >.3% sodium by weight
2 Fat+sugar (>20% cals from both fat and sugar)
3 Carbs+sodium (>40% cals from carbs + .2% sodium)

62% of foods in USDA's nutrition database are in 1 of the categories
You can argue with their definitions, but it's a decent stab at quantifying something that's very hard to quantify. And it's necessary (methinks) to shift the conversation away from macronutrients and toward palatability and environment.
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