Turn one box over tomorrow. It takes ten seconds.

Today’s letter

The ten second check that beats the label nobody has written yet

My aunt Ruth sent me a photograph on Tuesday. It was the back of a yogurt tub, taken one handed in the dairy aisle, blurry along one edge, and underneath it she had typed five words. I can’t tell anymore, Cole.

She had read that the government was finally going to say, in writing, what counts as ultra-processed food. On August 10 the FDA and the Agriculture Department sent their definition to the White House budget office for review, and neither agency will say what is in it. My honest answer was that the label she is waiting for is not on any shelf, and nobody outside that building knows when it will be. Ruth has been turning packages over on her own for thirty years. A minute later she wrote again.

“Then why can I never stop at one?”

Ruth raised three children on a school secretary’s pay and never once called in sick. She sat with my mother through the last four months of her life and got her laughing most days. There is very little my aunt cannot do once she decides to do it. The one thing she has never managed… is put the tub back in the fridge with half of it left.

For thirty years she did what she was told to do. She bought the low fat version and the high fiber version, she wrote down what she ate, she walked the loop around the reservoir before work. When the weight came back, and it always came back, she had only one explanation left. The plan was supposed to be the part that worked. So the failure had to be her.

Here’s what gets me.

None of it was her fault.

Hormones, genetics, stress, aging…

They’re all blamed for hair loss.

New research shows the “cause” doesn’t matter.

Yet what does is the bottleneck that stops hair from growing: Clogged follicles.

See, when hair follicles are clogged with dead skin, hardened oils, and other gunk…

No new hair can grow.

Yet once you clear this “Follicle Clog”…

Your hair’s thickness, health, and volume surges back to life.

In fact, a “Follicle Clog” clearing technique we developed is linked to a 32% reduction in hair loss.

Terri, who tried it, said: “There’s way less hair in the drain. It’s actually staying on my head.”

If you’ve struggled with thinning hair for years… and would love to see baby hairs growing again…

I show you how to “unclog” your hair follicles in this short video:

→ “Clogged” follicles causing your hair loss? Do THIS to fix it

To hair that shines with beauty, grace, and vitality,
Dr. Mark Rosenberg

Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study out of University College London.

Researchers there recruited 55 adults, nine out of ten of them women, all getting about two thirds of their calories from ultra-processed food. Everybody did both diets. Eight weeks on one, four weeks off, then eight weeks on the other. All the food arrived at their homes in boxes.

Both menus were built to hit the same national healthy eating guide: the same fat, the same salt, the same fiber, the same fruit and vegetables. One was cooked from whole food in a research kitchen. The other hit those identical numbers using packaged products off the supermarket shelf. Nobody was told to eat less, and nobody counted anything. They were asked to eat as much or as little as they wanted, the way they normally would.

What they found

University College London, 2025. Dicken et al., Nature Medicine.

The packaged menu (1.05% down)

Eight weeks of ultra-processed food that met every guideline on the sheet. Body weight down 1.05%, and their savory cravings hardly gave an inch.

The whole food menu (2.06% down)

Same guide, same eight weeks, same people. Their weight came down 2.06%, about double, and the control they reported over cravings improved roughly twice as much, with savory cravings easing around four times further.

Nobody restricted a thing. The only difference was how the food had been made.

In other words, two menus can satisfy every number a nutrition guide asks for and still do different things once they are inside a body. Studies suggest the processing itself may be part of what does it.

Her willpower had nothing to do with it. Yours doesn’t either.

So what is the packaged version doing that the cooked version isn’t?

Think about what is actually in the box. An ultra-processed food is not a dish somebody cooked. It is an assembly of parts: starch pulled out of corn and dried into powder, oil pressed and rearranged, protein separated out of milk or soy. On top of those go the flavorings, the colors and the emulsifiers that hold the parts together and make the result taste like something you want. Much of the breaking down your gut used to do has already happened in the factory, so the food arrives half finished and leaves almost nothing to slow it. The flavor sitting on top of it was designed by people paid to make you want more of it. That is not a fair fight, and it was never built to be one.

Ruth never stood a chance. Neither did you, I’d bet.

That’s the part no one says out loud… every guideline she followed for thirty years counted the fat and the fiber and the salt, and not one of them ever asked how the food had been put together.

Try this today

Pick the one food you eat almost every day. Your bread, your yogurt, your cereal, the sauce that goes on the pasta. Next time you shop, turn that one package over and read the ingredient list looking for a single thing: anything you could not buy on its own, in that same store, and carry home in a bag. Maltodextrin. Invert sugar. Soy protein isolate. Emulsifiers, flavorings, colors. If you find one, put the package back and read the two beside it. Often one of them is the same food without any of that. Ten seconds, one item, and you are done with that shelf for good.

You are not cutting anything out. It is the same food, cooked instead of assembled.

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 for one reason, and it is not magic. The ingredient list is the only place on the whole package where the processing has to show itself, because the front of the box is advertising and the nutrition panel counts grams without ever saying where they came from. Everything the study split into two menus, it split using that list.

Ruth changed her bread first, then the yogurt in the photograph, and she left the rest of the cart alone. She told me the four o’clock trip to the cupboard has gotten easier to walk away from. It took her most of her life to get here, and she is 71.

There’s still time for you.

So if you take one thing from me today, take this…

It was never your fault.

— Cole

P.S. One word, then you can go. Name the food you buy almost every week, no matter what else lands in the cart. Hit reply and send me that one word, nothing else. I’ll count them up and tell you the top three tomorrow.

SPONSORED

Keep Reading

Twenty minutes outside, and cortisol falls twice as fast

Move one bowl tonight. It takes 4 minutes.

Same tea, one hour later, and the iron gets in

Put one banned food back on your plate today

One hard food at lunch, 118 fewer calories later