Summer Friday: Health & Ultraprocessed Food & America's History with God

On this Summer Friday, we've put together some of our favorite recent interviews, including: Each year WNYC hosts a "health convening," with support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as an opportunity for healthcare experts and practitioners to inform WNYC's health reporting. This year, the topic is ultra-processed foods and how they affect our health.  First, Kevin Hall, Ph.D., former senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) , discusses his groundbreaking, tightly controlled metabolic ward trials and mathematical models tracking how human bodies respond to ultra-processed foods. Then, Fang Fang Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., cancer epidemiologist and chair of the Division of Nutrition Epidemiology and Data Science at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, discusses her population‑based research on how ultra-processed foods influence cancer prevention, cancer survivorship and long‑term health outcomes. Then, David Kessler, MD, former FDA Commissioner, breaks down a citizen petition he filed with the Food and Drug Administration last summer which would, among other things, declare that some of the core ingredients in ultra-processed foods were no longer “generally recognized as safe (GRAS)” -- a classification  that means ingredients are exempt from strict premarket approval process. Plus, Ilan Stavans, publisher of Restless Books, professor of humanities and Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College and the author of A Nation Wrestles with God: American Prophets, Philosophers, and Firebrands (Restless Books, 2026), talks about the broad spectrum of American religious thought, from Cotton Mather to Lana Del Rey.   These interviews were lightly polished up and edited for time, the original versions are available here: What Are Ultra-Processed Foods and What Are They Doing to Us? (June 16, 2026) Ultra-Processed Foods and Colon Cancer (June 16, 2026) Ultra-Processed Foods Policy Proposals (June 16, 2026) American Believers (July 9, 2026) photo: Potato chips and other junk food in Walmart, Wenatchee Washington (Thayne Tuason, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons) Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.