What Science Says About How Much Our Food Choices Matter

Everyone’s got their favorites when it comes to Thanksgiving dinner — stuffing for some, mashed potatoes for others, green bean casserole for a few — which can make it hard to please everyone. But an even bigger challenge for a lot of home cooks is navigating their guests’ dietary preferences. It seems like every week we hear about a new food that we should or shouldn’t be eating, a new miracle diet that’ll fix all that ails us, a new so-called scientific finding that reverses what we thought we knew about healthy eating.

So ahead of Turkey Day — arguably the most food-centric holiday of the year — we dig into what scientists actually know about what we should and shouldn’t eat, and how important our daily dietary choices really are. We hear from nutrition scientist Kevin Hall about how different diets affect our health, talk with several chefs about their favorite meals that balance taste and nutrition, and find out how avian flu could be affecting this year’s Thanksgiving turkey.

ALSO HEARD:

• From paleo to DASH, keto to Mediterranean, it sometimes feels like advice on what we should and shouldn’t eat has gotten very confusing. To help us cut through the noise, we talk with long-time nutrition and metabolism researcher Kevin Hall and health reporter Julia Belluz. They’ve co-authored “Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us.”  
• Youtuber and internet cook Adam Ragusea discusses eating sustainably, some of his favorite staple meals, and why too much good food has become a problem.
• We talk with gastroenterologist and chef Saliha Mahmood Ahmed, best known as the 2017 winner of BBC MasterChef, about eating for joy and health, along with her book, “Foodology: A Food-lover’s Guide to Digestive Health and Happiness.”
• If you noticed your Thanksgiving turkey seems more expensive this year than usual, you’re not alone. The culprit? The continued spread of avian flu. Pulse reporter Alan Yu picks up on his previous coverage of avian flu by checking in with a turkey farmer and several researchers in Minnesota, the largest turkey-producing state, to learn about the current status of the outbreak, and whether it could define our new normal.