In the process of creating ONQI 2.0, we are obligated to look at how the algorithm handles every food, including all of the quirkiest foods. In doing so, I wind up learning all of the intimate details about foods I could not otherwise have cooked up in my nightmares.

The heroes of our flavor-of-the-day news cycles are not those who prove to be right or actually know what they are talking about. The heroes on any given day are the iconoclasts, conspiracy theorists, and -- just plain wing nuts. Affliction is the plat du jour, and these -- its master chefs.

I care deeply about the truth about food, because this particular truth could set us substantially free from the threat of chronic disease and premature death. Chewing and swallowing the truth about food could add years to our lives, and lives to our years.

My career is devoted to the use of lifestyle practices -- and above all, diet and physical activity -- to the promotion of health and the prevention of disease. Feet and forks, along with fingers that do or don't hold cigarettes, are well established as the master levers of medical destiny.

Our cultural attitudes about the use of our feet and our forks are ill-advised, but not crazy; they always made sense before. For most of human history, calories were relatively scarce and physical activity was unavoidable. Our prevailing inclinations are well-suited to that scenario.

We want our kids to eat well because we want them to be healthy, and we want them to be healthy because we love them. They need to know that -- and that job resides with families, not government. They need to know that they can wind up loving foods that love them back.

Feet, forks, and fingers could reshape our personal medical destinies, and modern public health, dramatically, for the better. We have known this for decades. So why doesn't it happen?

A new study indicates that obese children and adolescents, as compared to their lean counterparts, have less sensitive taste buds. The researchers suggest that this difference in taste sensitivity may be an explanation for the development of obesity.

How can we improve the quality of food without increasing the cost? On a surface level, this seems very tricky and complicated.

There is an intrinsic problem with measuring the quality of a system by how well it conforms to what you already believe. Such a system gets bonus points for agreeing with you -- even when you are wrong.

The National Consumers League, claiming to represent consumers' interests, issued a press release this week announcing they had submitted a complaint to the FDA, asking the agency to banish NuVal from the nation's supermarkets.

Pink slime happens to have been outed. But what other things that you never knew you never knew were in your food are still finding their way into you, and your kids?

The religious overlay that nutrition has taken on is neither holy nor wholesome. It precludes us from breaking bread together. It forestalls the public health progress that could occur if we could all find a seat at a common table.

This week, Wal-Mart announced the release of its home-grown, front-of-pack nutrition guidance system. Can we possibly be that gullible? If so, we probably all deserve to be eating whatever the big companies selling food tell us we should.

Even if we were to isolate sugar as public health enemy number one, its regulation would draw us into challenging subtleties.

I live in a world where decent people occasionally eat chips. So I say it's a good thing to offer the best possible nutrition guidance -- and let the chips fall where they may.

We certainly need food, but it has long been clear that taste buds learn to love the foods they are with, and want more of them.

A committee commissioned by the Institute of Medicine just released its report on front-of-pack nutrition guidance. The recommendations are good in that they may help prevent the food industry from doing bad. The recommendations are bad if they forestall the implementation of superior approaches. And the recommendations are downright ugly if...

My lab has completed two studies of walnuts -- our first study showed that adding walnuts to the daily diet of adults with Type 2 diabetes for two months significantly improved blood vessel health.

Under the halo effect of "natural and organic," Whole Foods shoppers may feel they can't go wrong nutritionally. I beg to differ.