ultra-processed food
McBabies
Sarah Todd strolled the aisles of the global market for baby and toddler food and found a whole lot of ultra-processed products.
It's a fast-growing trend. Studies show that toddlers in countries such as Canada and the United Kingdom now get almost half of their calories from products made of food that has been broken down, its ingredients modified, and reconstituted into new forms.
Not all ultra-processed food is unhealthy. Infant formula, for example, is highly processed, yet can be essential. But many products are high in sugar and sodium.
We're not talking about orange mush in a tiny jar. Companies are targeting busy parents with such products as Yoplait's Go-Gurt, Crayola Kids edition, which contains 18 grams of added sugar per serving, or about 75% of the recommended daily limit for kids ages 2 and up.
Read Sarah's story to learn about the challenges to regulation and what worries nutrition experts most.
congress
Surviving to fight another day
House Republicans passed a budget bill, but just barely.
It was a rough start for House Republicans, who want to renew Trump's tax cuts from 2017 and provide additional tax cuts. A budget resolution sets the maximum deficit increase allowed for tax cuts and the minimum spending cuts that would partially pay for those tax cuts. Passing it is the (relatively) easy part, and the House and Senate still must reconcile major differences between their respective resolutions.
The hard part is figuring out how to cut government spending, which inevitably will involve cutting Medicaid. And House leadership had to make promises to individual lawmakers to get the budget resolution through the House, which will complicate the budget reconciliation process once Republicans, presumably, get to that stage.
hospitals
Full disclosure
Trump signed an executive order Tuesday to make health care prices public and easier for people to understand, my colleague Bob Herman writes.
It's not the first time Trump has tried to get hospitals to be more transparent, and the authority to do so comes from the Affordable Care Act, the Obama administration's signature achievement that Trump tried to repeal in 2017.
Drug prices are included in the price transparency executive order, which increases the chance of drawing insurers and drug middlemen into lawsuits against the directive. Will it work this time?
doge
Not so transparent
The U.S. DOGE Service has reportedly fired thousands of employees at HHS. STAT has written about that plenty. (A few examples are here, here, here, and here.) Every reporter here has been part of efforts to locate people who have lost their jobs to make sense of how many people were fired and where they are concentrated. (Have you been fired from a federal agency? Tell us about it confidentially here.)
The easiest way to handle this would be for HHS to disclose how many employees were fired, but an HHS spokesperson declined to provide that information. When Musk was asked Wednesday how many employees are targeted for layoffs government-wide, he said he plans to fire employees who are not doing their jobs well.
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