The soda and the bread did not behave alike

Today’s letter

The three packaged foods you can put back in the cart

Saturday morning, the bread aisle, a woman about sixty standing with a loaf in each hand. She had her phone out and she was reading the back of one of them the way you read a bill you were not expecting. Then she put both loaves down and walked off with nothing in that corner of the cart.

I asked her about it by the carts outside, and she said she had given up trying to tell which ones counted. Her daughter keeps sending her lists. California signed a law at the end of September that will put a stamp on foods that are not ultra-processed, and the study everyone posted last week counted almost nine million people. None of it told her what to do about two loaves of bread.

“Which ones am I allowed to buy?”

She told me she has cooked dinner nearly every night for thirty one years, and that she still makes the soup her mother made. The bread was the one thing she bought instead of baking. For a long time nobody told her that was a problem.

Then the lists started. Everything in a wrapper went on them, and the advice that came with them never changed: cut it all out, cook from scratch, and if you cannot manage that, you are not trying hard enough. So she stopped buying bread, baked on Sundays, and gave it up by November. She blamed herself for giving it up.

Here’s what gets me.

She was not failing the advice. The advice was failing her, because it sorted her groceries with a word that was never built to do that job.

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Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study that went through the same aisle she was standing in.

Researchers followed 71,871 women in the Nurses’ Health Study, 87,918 more in its second round, and 38,847 men in a parallel study of health professionals. Food questionnaires every few years, more than five million person years of follow up, and 19,503 new cases of type 2 diabetes.

They ran the obvious comparison first, and it came out the way the headlines say it does. Then they opened the category up and looked at the groups inside it, one at a time.

What they found

Three U.S. cohorts, 2023. Chen et al., Diabetes Care.

The drinks and the ready meals (risk went up)

Sweetened drinks, the sugar kind and the diet kind, ready to eat mixed dishes, refined breads, and sauces and spreads. Comparing the highest fifth of total intake against the lowest, type 2 diabetes ran about 46 percent higher.

The cereal, the bread, the yogurt (risk went down)

Cereals, dark and whole grain breads, fruit based products, and yogurt and dairy desserts. Every one of those sits in the same ultra-processed category as the drinks, and every one of them was linked to lower risk, not higher.

One word covered both columns. Her two loaves were in different columns the whole time.

In other words, the warning she was handed is about a whole category, and inside that category the foods pulled in opposite directions…

Her willpower had nothing to do with which loaf was which. Yours does not either.

So why does one word cover foods that behave so differently?

The Nova system was written in 2009 to describe how much industrial processing a food has been through, and it was built for population research rather than for a shopping trip. A food lands in the top group if it carries ingredients a home kitchen does not stock, which puts the softener in the sandwich bread and the color in the soda under one heading. What that heading cannot see is fiber, or whole grain, or sugar, or how much of the original food is still in there. So the label describes the factory, and the thing she needed to know was what came out of it.

She never stood a chance with that list. Neither did you, I’d bet.

That’s the part no one says out loud. The research never told her to put the bread back…

Try this today

Tonight, make a keep list of three. Stand in your own kitchen and pick three packaged things you already buy that sit in the groups this study linked to lower risk: a dark or whole grain bread, plain yogurt, oatmeal or a whole grain cereal, canned or frozen fruit with nothing added. Write those three on the back of a receipt and leave it with the shopping list, so next Saturday the decision is already made. Then use one of them tomorrow inside a meal you already eat, the yogurt with the fruit in the afternoon, or the toast next to the eggs. Nothing comes off your list today. Three things go back on it.

You are not starting over. Half that cart was fine all along.

Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick.

I’m in. I’ll try it today →

This works because the sorting was the problem, not your discipline. A keep list puts the decision where the evidence actually points, which is inside the category and not at the door of it.

If you are already managing blood sugar, or your doctor has you on a plan, keep that plan and ask her about this at the next visit. The study is about an aisle. Your doctor is about you.

The woman from the bread aisle got there on her own, a week later. She bought a loaf again, and she circled two words on the ingredient panel, whole wheat, with three question marks beside them. There’s still time for you.

So if you ever put the bread back and felt small about it…

It was never your fault.

— Cole

P.S. What is the one packaged thing you keep buying anyway, lists or no lists? One word, hit reply. I’ll tell you tomorrow which word came up most.

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