Currently reading What to Eat Now, by Marion Nestle

Rajiv Vakani

Certainty arrives faster than understanding.

Food, health, evidence, and the space between the first answer and the better one.

Questions I keep returning to

the next study the question before the answer after the headline context changes everything what your grandmother knew after the trend correlation is not enough certainty travels fast food is more than nutrients the harder problem is behavior evidence has limits too better questions first
Why nutrition advice keeps changing Tradition Marion Nestle Ultraprocessed food Is more always better? Seed oils What gets repeated? What counts as evidence?
What “natural” actually means Food culture Cultural memory Michael Pollan Why not a South Asian diet? Is tradition evidence? Food or nutrients?
Where experts disagree Walter Willett Gut health Fasting Sarcopenia Protein obsession? What counts as healthy?

Where this came from.

The questions came later. The first problem was practical: I came home from a year abroad underweight and wanted the weight back. I read what I could find. The weight came back within a year. The reading didn’t stop. At some point I realized I’d stopped reading about how to gain weight. I was reading about ingredients, evidence, gardening, how people eat in different places, behavior, food systems. The original question had turned into a much bigger one. That’s what I write about now.

The rest is on Journey.

What’s open right now.

  • Reading. A long paper on legumes, fiber, and what fermentable carbohydrates actually do in the gut.
  • Drafting. A piece on dal, read as nutrition rather than tradition.
  • Reconsidering. Whether “inflammatory foods” lists hold up once you read past the headlines.

More of what’s open is on Insights.

Where the work lives.

  • Reading the evidence. How nutrition studies, labels, and claims actually work; what they really say versus what they appear to say.
  • South Asian food and nutrition. Dal, ghee, masalas, the meals my parents and grandparents made, and how their nutrition has been read or misread.
  • Food, growing, and systems. Where food comes from before it is food. Gardens, agriculture, sustainability, the longer chain behind a meal.
  • Practical nutrition. What to actually eat. Questions that come up every day at the grocery store, in the kitchen, at the table.
  • Health and the body. What food does in the body. Mechanism, outcomes, the specific health questions nutrition gets asked to answer.
  • Food culture and behavior. How people actually eat. Patterns, rituals, gaps between what we say and what we do.