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Top headlines
Lead story
Trying to track nutrition advice can be frustrating. Whether it’s eggs, coffee or a daily glass of wine, it can feel like expert recommendations on what’s healthy and what’s not change as often as the weather here in New England.
Every five years, the U.S. government releases its official recommendations, called the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. But the latest update, released in January, seems to have stirred up more confusion than clarity.
Michael Goran, a University of Southern California researcher in child nutrition and obesity, explains that all the noise in and around the new guidelines is distracting from strong, consistent evidence showing that eating more healthfully is actually within reach of most people. In his piece, Goran delivers some clear, evidence-based advice on how to do that by consuming less sugar and highly processed foods, and by eating more whole grains.
“An important point we encountered repeatedly in reviewing the research was that even small dietary changes could meaningfully lower people’s chronic disease risks,” Goran writes. He proposes some targeted, simple swaps that are easy to adopt and, when added up, have an outsize effect on your health.
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Alla Katsnelson
Associate Health Editor
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Consuming less highly processed foods and sugary drinks and more whole grains can meaningfully improve your health.
fizkes/iStock via Getty Images Plus
Michael I Goran, University of Southern California
Red meat and dairy may be grabbing the headlines, but processed foods and sugary drinks remain the real drivers of chronic disease.
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Environment + Energy
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Steven R. Fassnacht, Colorado State University; Sunshine Swetnam, Colorado State University
Innovations have made recent Winter Games possible, but the future climate will have a big impact on where the Olympics can be held and winter sports themselves.
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Nikki Luke, University of Tennessee; Conor Harrison, University of South Carolina
The government directed data centers to turn on backup generation in parts of the US. Expanding distributed generation could improve grid resilience.
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Arts + Culture
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Jared Bahir Browsh, University of Colorado Boulder
Reggaeton star’s comments on ICE have added to a conservative backlash to NFL’s choice of entertainment. But his appeal in Latin America is seen as a big plus.
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Health + Medicine
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Candice Maenza, Penn State; Robert Sainburg, Penn State
Rehabilitation from stroke has traditionally focused on improving the function of the most severely affected arm. But training the other arm might actually lead to more gains.
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Politics + Society
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Nicholas Jacobs, Colby College; Institute for Humane Studies
State resistance to federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota illustrates how federalism keeps authority divided and disputed.
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Ethics + Religion
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David W. Stowe, Michigan State University
Clergy demonstrating against ICE in Minneapolis have turned to classic ‘freedom songs’ – the music associated with protests ever since the Civil Rights Movement.
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Science + Technology
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Christopher M. Filley, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus; Isaiah Kletenik, Harvard University; Patricia Churchland, University of California, San Diego
Armed with new tools that reveal patterns of connection between brain areas, researchers are gaining clearer insights into how the brain regulates behavior.
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Thomas Morgan, Arizona State University
Social inequalities emerge in every human society. New research into how these hierarchies form suggests ‘prestige psychology’ – the tendency to defer to expertise – is at the root.
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Margaret Landis, Arizona State University
Several robotic spacecraft orbiting the Moon can take detailed pictures of its surface, so why send people around the Moon? A planetary geologist explains the benefits.
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Anne Schmitz, University of Wisconsin-Stout
3D printing makes it easier for engineers to design cheap, lightweight materials that reflect patterns found in nature.
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