election corner
What Trump's connections to Project 2025 mean for health care
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Donald Trump has sought to distance himself from Project 2025. But the New York Times reported yesterday that out of 307 authors and contributors to the document, more than half have served in Trump's administration or been part of his campaign or transition teams.
What do these connections mean for health care policy if there's a second Trump presidency? Over the summer, a team of STAT reporters (myself included) explored how Trump's statements on health policy stack up against the plans laid out in Project 2025. We covered Trump's proposals on drug pricing, gender-affirming care, addiction and the overdose crisis, chronic illness, reproductive care, and more.
"The first and best source of what a future Trump administration would want to do — I'm not telling you anything shocking here — is the former president himself," said former Trump adviser Theo Merkel. Read more.
science
People who can't smell may breathe differently
Would you rather give up your sense of smell or your cell phone? A 2022 paper found that one-quarter of college students, and 15% of the general public, said that they would choose their trusty devices over their olfactory abilities. But people who have anosmia, the loss of smell, are more often depressed, experience muted emotions, have dietary complications, and literally aren't able to sniff out dangers like smoke — outcomes that actually result in a reduced life expectancy. A study published yesterday in Nature attempted to illuminate the cause of these associations.
After observing the nasal airflow of 21 people who couldn't smell and 31 people who could, researchers found that people who couldn't were breathing differently both while awake and asleep. People who can smell had many more of small "inhalation peaks" per hour while awake — likely meaning they were doing some "exploratory sniffing," the authors wrote.
More long-term research is needed, as the study only observed participants for 24 hours. But this is "potentially a profound difference in brain activity," the authors write. And based only on the breathing data, the team was able to predict which participants could smell with 83% accuracy.
food
Dietary experts plan for next five years of guidelines
How should Americans be eating? Scientific experts tasked with advising federal officials on updated dietary guidelines had their final meeting this week to discuss their recommendations, which will be published in December. STAT's Liz Cooney had some takeaways:
- The data on ultra-processed foods are too limited to draw conclusions. Experts said they'll advise skipping any recommendations on these oft-criticized food products — for now. "Ultra-processed foods are not going to be an issue that goes away," Deirdre Tobias of Harvard University said. "I think in the next five years, research is going to explode. In five years, hopefully this isn't sort of punted again." Read more on the first day's discussions.
- No major overturn, but guidelines should emphasize plant-forward diets. We've known since the '80s that saturated fats are bad for us, but only about 1 in 5 Americans successfully limit the amount they consume. But it's not as simple as emphasizing one type of meat over another, experts said. "If we want to make a meaningful difference," said Christopher Gardner of Stanford University, "choosing leaner or the lower-fat version isn't going to get us there." So what to do? Read more on the conclusions from day two.
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