That’s the takeaway from a major study published this month in JAMA Internal Medicine. Scientists led by a team from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that people who most closely adhered to at least one of four healthy eating patterns were less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, cancer or respiratory disease compared with people who did not adhere as closely to these diets. They were also less likely to die of any cause.
“These findings support the recommendations of Dietary Guidelines for Americans that multiple healthy eating patterns can be adapted to individual food traditions and preferences,” the researchers concluded, adding that the results were consistent across different racial and ethnic groups. The eating habits and mortality rates of more than 75,000 women from 1984 to 2020 over 44,000 men from 1986 to 2020 were included in the study.
The four diets studied were the Healthy Eating Index, the Alternate Mediterranean Diet, the Healthful Plant-Based Diet Index and the Alternate Healthy Eating Index. All four share some components, including whole grains, fruits, vegetables, nuts and legumes. But there are also differences: For instance, the Alternate Mediterranean Diet encourages fish consumption, and the Healthful Plant-Based Diet Index discourages eating meat.
The Alternate Mediterranean Diet is adapted from the original Mediterranean Diet, which includes olive oil (which is rich in omega-3 fatty acids), fruits, nuts, cereals, vegetables, legumes and fish. It allows for moderate consumption of alcohol and dairy products but low consumption of sweets and only the occasional serving of red meat. The alternate version, meanwhile, cuts out dairy entirely, only includes whole grains and uses the same alcohol-intake guideline for men and women, JAMA says.
The world’s ‘best diets’ overlap with study results
The Mediterranean Diet consistently ranks No. 1 in the U.S. News and World Report’s Best Diets ranking, which looks at seven criteria: short-term weight loss, long-term weight loss, effectiveness in preventing cardiovascular disease, effectiveness in preventing diabetes, ease of compliance, nutritional completeness and health risks. The 2023 list ranks the top three diets as the Mediterranean Diet, the DASH Diet and the Flexitarian Diet.
The DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) Diet recommends fruits, vegetables, nuts, whole grains, poultry, fish and low-fat dairy products and restricts salt, red meat, sweets and sugar-sweetened beverages. The Flexitarian Diet is similar to the other diets in that it’s mainly vegetarian, but it allows the occasional serving of meat or fish. All three diets are associated with improved metabolic health, lower blood pressure and reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes.
Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and co-author of the latest study, said it’s critical to examine the associations between the U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans and long-term health. “Our findings will be valuable for the 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, which is being formed to evaluate current evidence surrounding different eating patterns and health outcomes,” he said.
Reducing salt intake is a good place to start. In 2021, the Food and Drug Administration issued new guidance for restaurants and food manufacturers to, over a two-and-a-half-year period, voluntarily reduce the amount of sodium in their food to help consumers stay under a limit of 3,000 milligrams per day — still higher than the recommended daily allowance. Americans consume around 3,400 milligrams of sodium per day, on average, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people consume less than 2,300 milligrams each day.
Related: Eating 400 calories a day from these foods could raise your dementia risk by over 20%
We’ve all reached for our phones in the middle of the night, only to be pulled into some kind of rabbit hole that keeps us awake. (If you haven’t, please share your secrets for self-control.)
A good night’s sleep is important for your health. Chronic sleep troubles can lead to cognitive impairments and increase the risk of stroke and heart attack. And getting enough rest is a huge problem for teens, who are facing a sleep crisis due to factors including nighttime technology use, busy schedules and heavy homework loads. American adults also have trouble sleeping, with 70% of adults reporting they get insufficient sleep at least one night a month, according to the American Sleep Apnea Association.
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Family + Tech
Columnist Julie Jargon, a mother of three, helps families find answers and address concerns about the ways technology is impacting their lives.
Much ado has been made about the blue light our devices emit, but the ways in which tech hijacks our sleep go far deeper than that. It’s the content we see that has the biggest impact on our slumber, sleep experts say.
So what should we do about it? Sure, you could leave your phone in another room at night, but that might not be feasible for adults who want to be reached in an emergency. The simplest fix is to eliminate the temptation to scroll altogether. Tools from tech companies can help, including new features from TikTok and Instagram, two oft-cited sources of nighttime distraction.
If we come across alarming news, a scary movie or an annoying work email right before bed or in the middle of the night, the stress hormone cortisol can rise. A spike in cortisol provides an energy boost by moving glucose from a stored state in the body to an active state. “It’s like eating a candy bar,” says
Jamie Zeitzer,
co-director of the Stanford Center for Sleep and Circadian Sciences. Coming down from that energy rush can be difficult.
Positive content can be just as disruptive because it can increase the amount of dopamine or norepinephrine in the brain, two neurotransmitters Dr. Zeitzer says can excite the thalamus—the brain’s information-relay center—and disrupt the brain-wave oscillations needed for sleep.
Fretting about not sleeping can make things even worse. When we worry about not being able to go back to sleep, Dr. Zeitzer explains, we actually can’t go back to sleep because that worry is causing more cortisol to be released.
TikTok is testing a new feature that will remind people when it’s time to go to sleep.
Photo:
Watchful.ai
If any of this sounds familiar, don’t despair. Sleep and digital-media experts suggest trying these things:
Know your triggers. Not all screen activities are bad for sleep. Start by assessing what stresses you out or excites you when you look at your phone—and what helps you calm down. You should also be more aware of the time you’re spending on your device. We tend to lose track of time when we’re on our phones, which can eat into the seven hours of nightly sleep doctors say adults need (teens need eight to 10 hours).
Reconfigure your habits. Once you identify which screen-related activities rile you up, shift those activities earlier in the evening and do more relaxing activities closer to bedtime, says
Nitun Verma,
a spokesman for the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. Telling patients not to use screens an hour or two before bed is too jarring for some people, he says, and ends up being unsustainable. Instead, he advises people to taper their level of screen-induced emotion and excitement over the course of an evening so it’s “like landing a plane.”
Make a list. If you’re one to worry at night about what lies ahead the next day, some sleep experts suggest making a to-do list before bed, so you don’t keep yourself awake making mental lists.You don’t have to get out paper and pen: The notes app on your phone makes it easy, or try one of the note-taking apps I mentioned here.
Use tech to combat tech. You might soon be able to curb late-night TikTok scrolling. The video-sharing app, owned by ByteDance Ltd., is testing a new sleep-reminders feature. When you designate a bedtime in TikTok, the app will mute push notifications for the next seven hours and nudge you to close it. TikTok in 2021 began disabling notifications during nighttime hours for teens.
Thanks to a new feature introduced this week, Instagram users have the ability to set times in the app when they don’t want to be bothered. When Quiet Mode is enabled, you won’t receive notifications, and the app owned by
Meta Platforms Inc.
will send an auto-reply to anyone who DMs you to let them know you’re offline. The app will prompt teens to turn on Quiet Mode when they’re on Instagram between midnight and 4 a.m.
Instagram’s new Quiet Mode setting will let you schedule downtime from the app and inform followers when you’re offline.
Photo:
META
There are even more choices on the phones themselves.
You can turn on Do Not Disturb on an iPhone or an Android phone during the hours you choose, during which time you can allow calls or notifications only from certain people or apps. In the iPhone’s Sleep Focus setting, you can set a sleep goal and create bedtime reminders as well as enable Sleep Screen, which dims your lock screen at bedtime.
iPhones also have a Wind Down feature while Android phones have Bedtime Mode, both of which silence your phones at a time of your choosing.
Only glance at the time. Many of us tap our phone screens to check the time in the middle of the night. That can tempt us to unlock our phones and scroll. If you’ve followed the other steps listed here, you should be able to resist. You can also buy an alarm clock just for that purpose.
Create a family tech plan. Leaving your phone outside the bedroom might not be practical for many adults, but I advise parents to keep all devices out of kids’ bedrooms.
Andrea Davis,
founder of Better Screen Time, a company that educates families about healthy digital habits, suggests parents create a tech plan with their kids, which spells out when, where and how devices can be used. She says parents should follow the rules, too. She didn’t trust herself not to look at her phone while in bed, so she agreed, along with her children, to charge her phone in another room at night. Her husband keeps his phone in the bedroom in case of an emergency.
Restart your sleep routine. If you still wake up in the middle of the night and find yourself ruminating, don’t continue to toss and turn, says
Vijay Ramanan,
a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic. He suggests getting up for 15 minutes and restarting the routine that helped you fall asleep in the first place. Only turn to your phone to find a soothing meditation, audiobook or podcast.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What strategies help you avoid late-night or early-morning scrolling? Join the conversation below.
—For more Family & Tech columns, advice and answers to your most pressing family-related technology questions, sign up for my weekly newsletter.
Parents and doctors are looking for new strategies to help adolescents with obesity. One controversial approach drawing the interest of some families is intermittent fasting, which limits people to eating for just a part of the day or week.
Intermittent fasting has gained traction among adults who use it to try to manage weight and improve health. Doctors have largely avoided trying it with adolescents out of concern that introducing a fasting period to their schedules might result in nutritional gaps or trigger eating disorders when teens are rapidly growing and developing.
Now, a small number of doctors and researchers are evaluating types of intermittent fasting in adolescents, searching for solutions as rates of obesity and Type 2 diabetes rise. One pediatric endocrinologist in Los Angeles is launching a clinical trial looking at eating within a set time window in adolescents with obesity. Researchers in Australia are completing a separate trial, the results of which they expect to publish later this year.
Roughly one-fifth of children in the U.S. are considered obese, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Pediatricians are so concerned that the American Academy of Pediatrics for the first timethis month recommended physicians offer weight-loss drugs for children with obesity.
Any approach that limits when and how an adolescent eats must be handled cautiously, doctors say.
Families and doctors need to be very careful with any form of intermittent fasting in youth as it can be a slippery slope with a potential risk of eating disorders, says
Jason Nagata,
a pediatrician and eating-disorder specialist at the University of California, San Francisco. Doctors have also raised questions about the potential long-term effects of intermittent fasting on developing bodies.
Courtney Peterson,
an associate professor of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who studies intermittent fasting in adults, says she would be worried about adolescents’ getting enough nutrients. “I think it’s worth testing but testing with caution,” she says.
Her research has found that adults with obesity who ate between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. lost on average an extra 5 pounds more than a control group eating over 12 hours or more, and adults with prediabetes who ate over a six-hour period starting early in the day showed improvements in blood-sugar levels.
Intermittent fasting is an umbrella term for eating strategies that involve fasting. One such strategy, time-restricted eating, or TRE, limits eating to a set number of hours a day—often eight—with no limitations on what or how much you eat. In the remaining hours, you refrain from eating or drinking except for water.
Alaina Vidmar,
a pediatric endocrinologist and obesity-medicine specialist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, is starting a clinical trial to evaluate whether an eight-hour window of eating, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., results in changes in insulin and glucose response for teens with obesity.
The researchers are also looking at weight loss and body-fat mass, as well as blood pressure and cholesterol.
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Is intermittent fasting a good strategy to combat childhood obesity? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
The research stems from conversations Dr. Vidmar had with families of patients with obesity in recent years. Some had asked her about time-restricted eating, or had tried it and said they liked it. She tested the concept in teenagers with obesity to see if setting an eight-hour window of eating was feasible in a pilot study published in the journal Nutrients in 2021.
“They enjoyed doing it, they felt like their whole family could do it, and over time they were losing weight,” Dr. Vidmar says of the teens.
Now, her lab is enrolling 100 youth between 12 and 21 years old with Type 2 diabetes and obesity in a 12-week trial. Participants are screened and monitored for any negative eating behaviors, she says. So far, she hasn’t found that time-limited eating “impacts eating behaviors or worsens disordered eating in any way,” she says.
In Australia, researchers are studying how teens with obesity respond to a different form of fasting called intermittent energy restriction.
In this approach, for three days a week you eat roughly one-quarter of the calories you normally do, says
Natalie Lister,
a researcher and dietitian at the University of Sydney. On the other four days, you have no calorie limits.
Dr. Lister says she and colleagues started looking into intermittent fasting in adolescents with obesity a few years ago when patients started asking about it. They conducted a pilot trial with 30 adolescents, published in 2019. Now, the researchers are completing a trial whose results they expect to publish later this year.
The health team monitors for eating disorders and depression, and the study doesn’t enroll anyone with a high risk of disordered eating, says Dr. Lister. Dietitians provide guidelines to help ensure participants are meeting nutritional requirements.
In adults with obesity, the data on TRE is mixed when it comes to weight loss, but two systematic reviews of the existing research both found a modest weight-loss benefit overall, says Dr. Peterson. Studies have also found that adults experience improvements in measures such as insulin resistance, reducing blood-glucose levels, particularly when their eating window starts early in the day.
Matthew Muros, a 15-year-old in Carson, Calif., struggles with his weight and prediabetes. Matthew participated in Dr. Vidmar’s pilot studies last year. The first two weeks were challenging, he notes.
“I did feel really hungry. I just kept on drinking water,” he says.
He says it got easier, and when the study was over he decided to stick with the schedule. He has lost about 30 pounds, and his blood-glucose levels have improved.
He has also changed his diet, having less soda, fast food and carbohydrates. “I’m trying to eat a little bit more healthy,” he says.
is headed to court in a securities-fraud trial over tweets from 2018 in which he floated the possibility of taking
Tesla Inc.
private, with in-person jury selection poised to begin Tuesday.
The class-action case originates with an Aug. 7, 2018 tweet in which the Tesla chief executive said, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.”
An investor,
Glen Littleton,
sued Tesla, Mr. Musk and members of Tesla’s board at the time, alleging that Mr. Musk’s tweets were false and cost investors billions by spurring swings in the prices for Tesla stock, options and bonds. In court filings, Mr. Musk has said he was indeed considering taking Tesla private and believed he had the support of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund to do so. The deal, which would have been valued around $72 billion, never materialized.
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U.S. District Judge
Edward Chen,
who is overseeing the San Francisco jury trial that is scheduled to run through Feb. 1, has ruled that Mr. Musk’s tweets about taking the company private weren’t true and that he acted recklessly in making them.
Questions for the jury include whether Mr. Musk’s tweets were material to investors and whether he knew they were untrue.
The case is unusual in that securities-fraud cases usually resolve before going to trial, such as through a settlement, said
Jill Fisch,
a securities-law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. The defendants in this case face “an uphill battle” in light of the judge’s pretrial decision about the veracity of Mr. Musk’s statements, she said.
Attorneys for the lead plaintiff didn’t respond to a request for comment, nor did an attorney for Tesla, Mr. Musk and the other board members.
Twitter has been in turmoil since Elon Musk took over. To get a sense of what’s going on behind the scenes, The Wall Street Journal spoke with former Tesla and SpaceX employees to better understand how Musk leads companies. Illustration: Ryan Trefes
Mr. Musk is expected to take the stand as early as Wednesday, some two months after he did so in Delaware in a trial over his pay package at Tesla. In 2021, he also appeared before Delaware’s business-law court to defend Tesla’s roughly $2.1 billion 2016 takeover of home-solar company SolarCity Corp.
Also on the list of possible witnesses are Tesla board chair
Robyn Denholm,
board members
Ira Ehrenpreis,
James Murdoch
and
Kimbal Musk
—the CEO’s brother. The head of investor relations,
Martin Viecha,
also may be called.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think will be the outcome of the case over Elon Musk’s 2018 Tesla tweet? Join the conversation below.
This week’s trial comes at a busy time for Mr. Musk, who has been scrambling to turn around Twitter Inc. after buying the social-media company last fall in a deal valued at $44 billion. His rocket company SpaceX is pushing for the first orbital launch of a new rocket Mr. Musk wants to use for deep-space missions.
Tesla, meanwhile, has slashed prices across its vehicle lineup, with some of last week’s cuts in the U.S. nearing 20%, in a bid to juice demand. The company’s stock has fallen roughly 70% since its peak in November 2021, erasing around $850 billion in market value. Mr. Musk’s personal wealth has fallen more than $200 billion in that time, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Court proceedings involving Mr. Musk can be feisty. In the SolarCity case, for example, Mr. Musk called opposing counsel a “bad human being.”
Tesla has reduced prices across its vehicle lineup in an effort to boost demand.
Photo:
Jay Janner/USA TODAY NETWORK/Reuters
In advance of this week’s trial, Mr. Musk asked the court to move the trial to Texas on the basis that potential jurors in San Francisco could be biased against him. Judge Chen rejected the request.
“It isn’t that hard it seems to me to find 15 people,” he said.
The court requires nine jurors and six alternates to proceed with the case. Roughly 190 potential jurors were asked to fill out questionnaires about their views of Mr. Musk and other issues. The court plans to bring in about 50 of them for further questioning Tuesday.
Opening arguments could start as early as Tuesday after the jury is selected.
The lead plaintiff is seeking damages for investor losses he alleges stemmed from Mr. Musk’s and Tesla’s statements. Tesla stock closed up 11% the day Mr. Musk initially tweeted about potentially taking Tesla private, later giving back all those gains and falling further as questions emerged about the deal.
The defendants have said the plaintiff won’t be able to prove to a jury that the statements were materially false. Mr. Musk was considering taking Tesla private, the defendants have said, even if some of his assertions about the deal may not have been literally accurate.
Defendants, in a trial brief, said Mr. Musk believed he had secured backing to take the car maker private from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign-wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund. A lawyer for the defendants said Friday that his team had chosen not to enforce subpoenas calling on fund representatives to testify. The sovereign-wealth fund didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Mr. Musk and Tesla each agreed in 2018 to pay $20 million to settle civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission over the same tweets. Mr. Musk also agreed to step down as chairman of the company, while remaining CEO. He later said in legal filings that he felt pressured to settle with the SEC. Last year, a federal judge denied Mr. Musk’s request to scrap his settlement.
Write to Rebecca Elliott at rebecca.elliott@wsj.com and Meghan Bobrowsky at meghan.bobrowsky@wsj.com
Quick facts about federal incentives for electric cars:
The government delayed some rules for EV tax credits until March 2023.
Select GM
GM,
+2.60% and Tesla
TSLA,
+2.47% electric vehicles became eligible (again) for federal tax incentives in January 2023.
Many electric cars do not qualify, but we help you find the ones that do.
Consumers considering an electric vehicle right now may want to weigh how tax credits on zero-emissions cars work and how they could affect any upcoming buying decisions.
The Inflation Reduction Act signed in August 2022 includes electric vehicle tax credits provisions set to reshape how Americans buy electric cars and plug-in hybrids.
Read on to learn the impact. We will tell you about the new changes to federal tax incentives for electric cars. The new tax credits can help defray the cost of buying a zero-emission vehicle when combined with state and local rebates.
How the new EV tax credits work
According to Kelley Blue Book research, a new electric car’s average transaction price came in at about $65,000 in November, nearly a 9% jump from a year ago. The industrywide average that includes gas-powered vehicles and electric cars reached about $48,900 in the same timeframe.
Extends $7,500 tax credit. The Inflation Reduction Act extends the current incentives of up to $7,500 in tax credits for select electric cars, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen-powered vehicles that meet its qualifications. The federal government continues to update the list of qualifying vehicles.
Discount up front. In the future, it’s possible you can qualify to get your EV tax credit at the time of purchase on new vehicles, though if the dealership does not offer it immediately, you can still request the credit on your taxes.
Caps EV price tags. The new incentives restrict qualifying vehicles to low-emissions trucks, SUVs, and vans with manufacturer’s suggested retail prices of up to $80,000 and cars up to $55,000.
No limits for manufacturers. As of Jan. 1, 2023, manufacturers like GM and Tesla were no longer limited on incentives to the first 200,000 EVs sold, which was the case under the old tax credits.
Used electric vehicle rebate. Anyone considering a used electric car under $25,000 could obtain a new $4,000 tax credit, subject to income and other limits. To qualify, used cars must be two model years old. The vehicle also must be purchased at a dealership. The vehicle also only qualifies once in its lifetime. Purchasers of used vehicles can only qualify for one credit every three years, and to qualify, individuals must make $75,000 or less, or $112,500 for heads of households and $150,000 for joint return filers. The credit ends in 2032.
Income caps to qualify. The rebates are limited to individuals reporting adjusted gross incomes of $150,000 or less on taxes, $225,000 for those filing as head of household, and $300,000 for joint filers.
Ineligible cars become eligible. Additionally, the measure allows carmakers like Tesla and General Motors, which had run out of available credits under the old plan, to be eligible for them again in January 2023. However, many of their products would still not qualify due to car price caps.
New rules on manufacturing locations. To qualify for the subsidy, electric car batteries must be manufactured in the U.S., Canada, or Mexico, while the batteries’ minerals and parts must also come from North America to qualify. Cars with Chinese-made battery components would be ineligible. These rules render many current EVs ineligible. This requirement phases in over time. That means some cars eligible now could become ineligible over time unless manufacturers change their supply chains. However, the U.S. Treasury Department delayed until March the regulations that govern where battery minerals and parts must be sourced.
Some leased vehicles may qualify.
Hydrogen fuel-cell cars remain eligible. The $7,500 credit also applies to hydrogen fuel-cell cars like the Toyota Mirai or Hyundai Nexo. However, those make sense only for buyers who live near one of America’s few hydrogen refueling stations. Those stations are mostly concentrated in California.
Learn more: What is EV, BEV, HEV, PHEV? Here’s your guide to types of electric cars
What the old EV tax credits provided
Before the Inflation Reduction Act, buyers could claim a tax credit on just the first 200,000 electric cars a manufacturer sold. That meant that the most popular models lost the credit. The incentive did not restrict income or purchase prices.
The old tax credits also applied to plug-in hybrids and fuel cell vehicles, but not used vehicles.
President Biden signed the act into law on Aug. 1, 2022. Most of its provisions kicked in on Jan. 1, 2023. That created a brief window when the law required qualifying cars to be built in North America, but the 200,000-car-per-manufacturer limit still applied. If you bought an electric car between Aug. 16, 2022, and Jan. 1, 2023, it qualified for a credit only if it was built in North America by a manufacturer that hadn’t sold 200,000 or more qualifying cars.
Tesla and General Motors’ electric car tax credits were reinstated in January. So if you have your heart set on a Tesla Model 3 or perhaps a Cadillac Lyriq, now is the time to act.
Also see: 2.1 million EVs and plug-in hybrids on U.S. roads, and here’s how much gas they’ve saved
List of 2023 electric vehicles that qualify
According to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, this is the latest list of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles that qualify if purchased after Jan. 1, 2023. The site notes that several manufacturers had yet to submit information on specific eligible makes and models and for users to check back for updated information.
Vehicle
MSRP Limit
Audi Q5 TFSI e Quattro PHEV
$80,000
BMW
BMW,
+0.07%
330e
$55,000
BMW X5 eDrive 45e
$80,000
Ford
F,
+2.69%
Escape PHEV
$80,000
Ford E-Transit
$80,000
Ford F-150 Lightning
$80,000
Ford Mustang Mach-E
$55,000
Lincoln Aviator Grand Touring
$80,000
Lincoln Corsair Grand Touring
$55,000
Chevrolet Bolt EV
$55,000
Chevrolet Bolt EUV
$55,000
Cadillac Lyriq
$55,000
Nissan
NSANY,
+2.85%
Leaf
$55,000
Rivian
RIVN,
-0.97%
R1S
$80,000
Rivian R1T
$80,000
Chrysler Pacifica PHEV
$80,000
Jeep Wrangler 4xe
$80,000
Jeep Grand Cherokee 4xe
$80,000
Tesla Model 3
$55,000
Tesla Model Y 7-Seat Variant
$80,000
Volkswagen
VWAGY,
+2.00%
ID.4
$55,000
Volvo
VLVLY,
+3.20%
S60 T8 Recharge PHEV
$55,000
State and local incentives near you
Though the federal government’s effort makes up the lion’s share of government EV discounts, some states and local governments offer incentive programs to help new car buyers afford something more efficient. These can be tax credits, rebates, reduced vehicle taxes, single-occupant carpool-lane access stickers, and exemptions from registration or inspection fees.
States like California and Connecticut offer broad support for electric vehicle buyers. However, Idaho, Kentucky, and Wyoming are among the states offering no support to individual EV buyers. The U.S. Department of Energy maintains an interactive list of state-level incentives, while Plug In America posts an interactive map of EV incentives.
Also read: What California’s ban on gas cars could mean for you—even if you don’t live there
Your electric utility may help
Lastly, it’s not just governments that can help you with the cost of a new EV. Some local electric utilities provide incentive programs to help buyers get into electric vehicles. After all, they’re among the ones that benefit when you turn your fuel dollars into electricity dollars.
Read: 3 reasons the Hyundai Ioniq 6 makes the Tesla Model 3 seem a bit boring
Some offer rebates on cars. Others offer discounts on chargers or install them free when you sign up for off-peak charging programs.
For example, the Nebraska Public Power District offers a $4,000 rebate to customers who purchase a new electric car.
All year long, I hear from readers and friends sharing their tech woes. Last year, I wrote about ways to avoid tech problems. This year, I’m sharing how to tackle the most common issues, including laggy internet, Bluetooth fails and public Wi-Fi connection conundrums.
If you have suffered from one of these headaches—or are similarly bombarded with queries as the official family IT person—there’s good news: With patience, you can solve the majority of problems yourself.
Most tech troubles have simple solutions. Not connecting? Turn wireless settings off and on again. Not syncing? Sign out, then sign back into your account. Sluggish performance? Restart the device or clear browser cookies. Here are the settings and tools you need to become your own tech troubleshooter.
Tap the Source
The best place to get guidance is an official support page. Go to Apple‘s website for iPhones and Macs,
Microsoft
‘s for Windows and Google’s for Android and Chrome OS. Popular apps such as Zoom and Slack have good help resources, too.
Don’t rely on hearsay. For instance, if you get your phone wet, people tell you to dunk it in uncooked rice. But
Apple
disagrees, since the grains could get lodged in the phone. Instead, face any open ports down, tap to remove excess liquid and leave the device in a dry area with airflow.
For persistent problems, check to see if the device is running the latest firmware. Software updates often include bug fixes. If your device is no longer supported with updates, it’s best to look into a newer model.
Search Your Settings
Your problem’s solution likely lies in a magical place called Settings. The fix is flipping a specific control on or off—or on and off. But where to find the related menu or button isn’t obvious, unless you use the Settings search field.
iPhone: Once you open Settings, swipe down to reveal the search bar.
Android: Every device manufacturer has a slightly different settings interface. On
Samsung,
tap the magnifying-glass icon on the top right. Other phones show the search field right at the top of settings.
Mac: Open System Settings (formerly System Preferences). Search is on the top left (or top right on older MacOS versions).
Windows: Open Settings and the search box is on top left. You can also type settings: followed by the search term from the taskbar.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What are your favorite easy tech tips? Join the conversation below.
End Public Wi-Fi Madness
Coffee shops, airports, hotels and other public venues have “captive” Wi-Fi networks. When you choose a network from your phone or computer, a pop-up appears asking you to pay or give credentials such as your hotel room number. But sometimes you don’t see the pop-up. Fortunately, you can force it to show up.
iPhone or Mac: Type captive.apple.com into your browser.
Android or Chrome OS: Type google.com/generate_204 into your browser.
Windows: Type www.msftncsi.com/ncsi.txt into your browser.
If a webpage won’t load, tap the three dots, then select Clear browsing data.
Photo:
Nicole Nguyen/The Wall Street Journal
Still not working? You might need to clear your browser cache, which can resolve other wonky website issues, too. Just note, when you clear cookies, you often have to sign back into websites.
Chrome: On a computer, click the three buttons on the top right, then click More Tools, then Clear Browsing Data. In that menu, select “Cookies and other site data” and “Cached images and files.” On mobile, tap the three dots, then History to find Clear Browsing Data.
Safari: On a Mac, go to the Safari menu, then Settings, then Privacy. Click Manage Website Data, select the desired website, then Remove or Remove All. On mobile, go to the Settings app, then Safari and tap Advanced, then Website Data. Select Remove All Website Data.
Fix Bluetooth Fails
Connecting Bluetooth accessories to your phone, computer or car can be a pain. This repairing recipe tends to work: Turn your phone or computer’s Bluetooth setting off. Turn the accessory off. Re-enable Bluetooth on your phone or computer. Turn on the accessory and put it into pairing mode. Look for the accessory’s name in the list.
Still not working? Try removing the accessory from your phone or laptop’s Bluetooth menu, then readding it.
iPhone: In Settings > Bluetooth, tap the “i” info button next to the accessory name, then Forget This Device.
On a Mac, add Sound and Bluetooth controls to the menu bar for quicker troubleshooting.
Photo:
Nicole Nguyen/The Wall Street Journal
Mac: In System Settings, click Bluetooth. Hover over the device name and click the X button to remove.
Android: In Settings, go to Connected Devices, then Connection preferences, then Bluetooth. Tap the device name and then the X button to disconnect.
Windows: In Settings, click Bluetooth & devices, then Devices. Next to the device name, select More options, then Remove device.
Bluetooth headphones can also cause trouble for videoconferencing, so make sure you can access the settings from your computer’s menu bar:
Mac: On MacOS Ventura, go to the Control Center on the top right. In Macs running older system software, the option “Show in menu bar” is found in Bluetooth and Sound settings.
Windows: Pin Bluetooth and audio control to your taskbar.
Speed Up Sluggish Internet
Sometimes your home Wi-Fi problems are out of your control: Maybe your service provider can’t get you higher speed, or wants more money for it. And sometimes the solution is buying a new router. (We recommend a mesh network, if you do.) But before upgrading service or hardware, try to fix it yourself.
First, stand near your router and go to Speedtest.net on your phone or laptop to verify it’s an internet issue, and not a device-performance problem, such as too many open tabs. A bad score would be download speeds under 15 megabits a second, and upload speeds under 5 megabits a second.
If your router is tucked away somewhere, place it in a more central location out in the open if possible, far from metal furniture and large appliances. Also, lots of connected devices can slow down the Wi-Fi, so turn off devices that don’t need it (such as an unused Kindle).
If you’re in a pinch, plug your computer directly into your router using an Ethernet cable.
Fine-Tune Your Notifications
In Gmail, you can turn off notifications for work accounts but leave them on for high-priority personal email.
Photo:
Nicole Nguyen/The Wall Street Journal
Incessant pings from notifications can drive you crazy. Turning on Do Not Disturb will universally mute distractions—including important ones.
Notifications are much messier on iOS than Android, so we’ll just focus on iPhone users: All app notifications can be accessed through the main Notifications setting—you can turn anything on or off there.
But third-party apps such as Slack, WhatsApp and Gmail have their own notification settings, too. If you’re not getting the notifications you expect, check the phone’s settings and the app’s settings for the culprit.
—For more WSJ Technology analysis, reviews, advice and headlines, sign up for our weekly newsletter.
the college student whose Twitter account tracking Elon Musk’s private jet was suspended, is back on the social-media platform with a new jet-tracking account.
Mr. Sweeney, a University of Central Florida sophomore, created @ElonJetNextDay Thursday evening, he said. It follows the same set up as his original account, @ElonJet, except it shares the whereabouts of Mr. Musk’s private jet with a 24-hour delay instead of in real-time.
“I’m kind of surprised it’s made it this far, to be honest,” Mr. Sweeney said on Friday. “For now, it doesn’t automatically post to Twitter. I’m copying it from my Discord account and posting it to Twitter 24 hours later.”
Mr. Sweeney’s initial jet-tracking account was suspended Dec. 14 by Twitter. A message posted on the @ElonJet account said it was suspended for violating Twitter’s rules. The account had about 500,000 followers.
Mr. Musk, who bought Twitter in a deal valued at $44 billion in October, said that real-time posting of people’s locations isn’t allowed under the platform’s policies.
He later said his family had been endangered and he was pursuing the matter further.
Mr. Musk tweeted at the time that “Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”
Twitter posted updated guidance on its website about the sharing of private or live location information. It said sharing publicly available location data “after a reasonable time has elapsed” isn’t a violation. However, “If your account is dedicated to sharing someone’s live location, your account will be automatically suspended,” it said.
Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Mr. Sweeney’s new account.
Mr. Sweeney said he hadn’t heard from Twitter regarding his still-suspended @ElonJet account. It tracked Mr. Musk’s private jet using public data from plane transponders that log longitude, latitude and altitude. In 2020, Mr. Sweeney created an algorithm that calculates the whereabouts of a private jet belonging to Mr. Musk.
The @ElonJetNextDay account shares the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s private jet with a 24-hour delay.
Photo:
Kurt Desplenter/Zuma Press
“There’s been no communication at all,” he said.
Mr. Sweeney also ran automated Twitter accounts tracking planes owned by Russian oligarchs and aircraft associated with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The @PutinJet and @RUOligarchJets accounts, which were created after Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, were also suspended, along with @CelebJets, an account run by Mr. Sweeney that tracked the jets of celebrities.
Mr. Sweeney said he is still tracking Mr. Musk’s jet in real-time on other social-media platforms, but he won’t link to them on @ElonJetNextDay in an effort to comply with Twitter’s latest guidelines.
Mr. Sweeney said he believes his new account is in compliance with Twitter’s policies.
“We’ll see what happens,” he said.
Write to Ginger Adams Otis at Ginger.AdamsOtis@wsj.com
A/S flubbed the launch of its buzzy new weight-loss drug Wegovy, missing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in sales and squandering a head start before a rival could begin selling a competing product.
Wegovy is among a new class of drugs that health regulators have approved to cut the weight of people who are obese, a goal long sought by doctors and patients. Their weight-dropping potential became a viral sensation on social media. Elon Musk tweeted about Wegovy in October. And a related drug for diabetes, Ozempic, is a hot topic in Hollywood among celebrities seeking to stay thin, according to doctors.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Will Novo Nordisk A/S be able to retain its competitive edge with its weight-loss drug? Why or why not? Join the conversation below.
Yet Denmark-based Novo underestimated how big demand for the drug would be, and wasn’t ready to make enough to fill the prescriptions that flooded in after U.S. approval last year. Then a contract manufacturer halted production to address inspection issues.
“We should have forecasted better, which we did not,” Novo Chief Executive
Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen
said. “Had we forecasted that, we would have built a different supply chain.”
The missteps have proven costly for Novo, which was forced to ration Wegovy to patients who already had started taking it. The company has recorded around $700 million in sales to date, well short of the $2 billion in 2021 and 2022 sales that some analysts had projected before supply issues hit.
Novo Nordisk Chief Executive Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen admits the drug company misjudged how popular Wegovy would be.
Photo:
Carsten Snejbjerg/Bloomberg News
Amber Blaylock, a music teacher from Springfield, Mo., said she has been trying to get Wegovy to help her reduce weight since hearing about the drug on TikTok and YouTube. She asked her doctor in September to prescribe it, but hasn’t been able to find it.
“Frustrated and impatient for sure,” said Ms. Blaylock, 29 years old.
To turn things around, Mr. Jørgensen said Novo has increased its capacity to make Wegovy and plans a “relaunch” early next year, which should fulfill all orders.
Novo, however, lost valuable time establishing a beachhead in the lucrative obesity-drug market before rival
Eli Lilly
LLY 1.20%
& Co. can enter. Lilly is expected to launch a similar, competing drug named Mounjaro late next year or in early 2024.
The market for anti-obesity drugs, now worth $2.4 billion worldwide, could reach $50 billion in 2030, Morgan Stanley estimates.
“Novo has left the door open for Lilly,” said BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan David Seigerman.
Mr. Jørgensen said the company can regain lost ground because of high demand for Wegovy and the large potential for what is still a mostly untapped market. He said he was unconcerned with the looming competition with Lilly’s drug, because there is room for both products.
“We disappointed physicians and patients in the first round,” he said. “The company wants to be better prepared for the second round.” Novo lists Wegovy at $1,349 a month. Some commercial insurers cover the drug.
Wegovy works by imitating a hormone called GLP-1, which occurs naturally in the body and suppresses appetite, among other effects.
Novo developed GLP-1 drugs to treat diabetes. In 2017, the company began selling semaglutide, the active ingredient in Wegovy, under the brand name Ozempic to treat diabetes.
During the drug’s development, Novo found that weight loss was a side effect, prompting the company to probe using semaglutide to treat obesity. A key trial found that Wegovy helped people with a high body-mass index shed up to 15% of their weight, surpassing the results for older obesity drugs like Novo’s Saxenda.
Saxenda and other older weight-loss drugs had sold modestly, partly due to their limited weight loss, as well as some unpleasant side effects and the refusal of many health insurers to pay up.
Novo worked with Catalent to fill its Wegovy weight-loss drug into syringes.
Photo:
yara nardi/Reuters
Given the experience, Novo figured Wegovy sales would increase gradually. To augment its own production, Novo contracted with a single manufacturer,
Catalent Inc.,
to fill the drug into syringes. Novo said it thought it would have time to add manufacturing capacity to meet a gradual increase in demand.
Wegovy may be superior to older drugs, but “we thought it would still be a journey to open up the market,” Mr. Jørgensen said.
When Novo started selling Wegovy in the U.S. in June last year, however, demand took off. Doctors with large followings on social media touted Wegovy as groundbreaking, while users posted photos holding injection pens and shared their progress losing weight.
“Demand for these new agents has been unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my time in medicine,” said Dr. Michael Albert, a physician specializing in weight-loss treatment at telehealth provider Accomplish Health who has consulted for Novo. Many of his patients began asking about Wegovy, he said, after they heard about it in Facebook groups or on TikTok.
It took only five weeks for doctors to write new prescriptions for Wegovy at the same weekly volume that Saxenda took four years to reach, according to Mr. Jørgensen. “It’s a completely different ballgame that we’re in,” said Ambre Brown Morley, the company’s vice president of media and digital global communication.
Within weeks, supplies were strained. Novo warned that patients might experience delays in receiving their prescriptions. Then in December 2021, Catalent temporarily stopped deliveries and manufacturing at its plant after Food and Drug Administration inspections found faulty air filters and damaged equipment.
To date, Novo has recorded around $700 million in Wegovy sales compared with the $2 billion in 2021 and 2022 sales that some analysts had projected before supply issues emerged.
Photo:
JACOB GRONHOLT-PEDERSEN/REUTERS
Many people who couldn’t get Wegovy for weight loss have sought prescriptions for Novo’s Ozempic and Lilly’s Mounjaro, according to analysts, even though the FDA hasn’t approved the latter two drugs for such use. Ozempic sales increased so much that certain doses are in short supply through at least January, the FDA said.
Lilly is studying Mounjaro, its GLP-1-containing drug for diabetes, for weight loss.
Novo and Lilly said they don’t promote their diabetes drugs for the “off-label” use treating obesity.
A Catalent spokesman said the company is still making improvements to the plant and working with customers to limit the impact of supply constraints on patients. The company restarted filling Wegovy syringes at the facility in the spring.
Novo has been amassing a sufficient inventory before the Wegovy relaunch, Mr. Jørgensen said. When Wegovy relaunches, he said, insurance coverage will be broader than when the drug first went on sale.
Write to Peter Loftus at Peter.Loftus@wsj.com and Denise Roland at denise.roland@wsj.com
Three years ago, YouTubers who go by Vlad, Niki, Diana and Nastya were friends cruising around Miami on a 97-foot yacht to celebrate a birthday. Today, they are locked in a fierce rivalry over YouTube supremacy.
They’re not even 10.
The children are stars of three YouTube channels—“Vlad and Niki,” “Like Nastya” and “Kids Diana Show.” They are the three most popular live-action YouTube kids channels in the world, with nearly 300 million YouTube subscribers between them. Now they’re expanding into everything from streaming shows to branded toys to licensing deals, all worth tens of millions of dollars.
“‘These kids who came from nowhere have more influence than Mickey Mouse.’ ”
“These kids who came from nowhere have more influence than Mickey Mouse,” says Eyal Baumel, a longtime strategist for YouTube personalities, including “Like Nastya.”
Across the three channels, the videos play like live-action cartoons in a suburban fantasy land. Kids dress up like superheroes, crawl over giant vegetables and drive around in motorized toy cars. Mom and dad are sidekicks.
The more success the kids have found, the swankier the toys and outings have become. In one video, Vlad and Niki snub mom and the Range Rover she bedecked in fluffy pink boas for a ride in dad’s hot red Ferrari.In another video from this year, the “Kids Diana Show” hits the road, staying in a resort in Maldives where the kids and parents hop aboard a yellow submarine.
Videos feature lots of “oohs,” “aahs,” applause and minimal dialogue—which makes it easy to redub the YouTube posts, which are mostly in English, into other languages including Arabic, Spanish or Indonesian.
“Kids feel that Vlad and Niki are their friends,” says their mother, Victoria Vashketov, of her children, who are 9 and 7 years old, respectively.
Toy makers pay the young celebrities to play with their products. Rates can range anywhere from $75,000 to more than $300,000, according to a person familiar with such deals.
The YouTubers also have exclusive lines of playthings branded with their names and likenesses. There’s a caped Vlad action figure and palm-sized figurines of Diana’s entire family, which can be purchased at big U.S. retailers like
Walmart
and Target as well as in countries including Sweden and Mongolia, according to the channels’ representatives.
Shenzhen, China-based Zuru Toys produced a specialty line of “Vlad and Niki” toys after entering into a partnership with the family in 2020. The company’s co-founder,
Nick Mowbray,
says he got into business with the boys because they have appeal globally.
The Youtube awards the Vashketov family has received are on display in their home just outside Miami.
Major streaming services are putting the videos on platforms including HBO Max and Amazon too.
“You can create a global franchise without a major studio,” says Dan Weinstein, who represents “Vlad and Niki” under the banner of his company Underscore Talent and has helped other internet sensations cross over to traditional media channels. “I think that’s pretty mind-blowing to think about.”
Timing is everything
Around the time that Vlad, Niki, Diana and Nastya were toddlers, iPads were becoming the new babysitters and videos featuring toddlers unboxing new toys on camera were taking over children’s content on YouTube.
Among the young personalities that began influencing consumer behavior was Evan from EvanTubeHD, a toy and gaming YouTuber who started posting videos featuring Angry Bird toys when he was 5 years old and became one of the first kid YouTubers to achieve stardom on the platform. Ryan Kaji—often hailed as the reigning kid king of YouTube—was reviewing popular toys like Thomas the Tank Engine and raking in millions. They created a formula for the kinds of videos that could rack up millions of views: Give a cute kid a coveted name-brand toy, film them playing with it, then post.
The three families leaned into that formula.
Vlad and Niki’s parents started making videos out of their home in Moscow. Sergey Vashketov was a midlevel executive at a food manufacturer; Victoria, a former gymnast. Early videos, which are in Russian, show Vlad and Niki guzzling bottles of
Coca-Cola
and frolicking with life-size bags of M&Ms and Skittles.
Nastya, whose full name is Anastasia Radzinskaya, comes from Krasnodar, Russia. Her parents say they started posting videos of their daughter on YouTube to show off her speaking skills after a doctor falsely diagnosed her with cerebral palsy and said she might never speak. Some of Nastya’s first videos show her playing with Legos and opening a
Disney
-themed mystery egg.
Diana’s parents—Olena and Volodymyr Kidisyuk—started making videos out of their home in Kyiv, Ukraine, training their camera on their daughter and older brother Roma, who played with popular toys in videos like Peppa Pig, Hot Wheels and Play-Doh.
Each of the three channels began humbly, staging the videos in basic locations like at the kitchen table or in a local park, shooting with smartphones and employing very little, if any editing. After videos began racking up millions of views on YouTube, the parents saw an opportunity to create a business around them, and they began investing in making more polished videos involving more extravagant locations and toys. The more popular the videos, the more often YouTube’s algorithm recommended their posts to kids.
Eventually, the families moved from Ukraine and Russia to sunnier spots like Dubai and Thailand that allowed for filming outdoors year round. About four years ago, the three families met in Miami and began a friendship, according to Ms. Vashketov. Nastya, who was having a birthday party, invited Vlad, Niki and Diana. Through the years the families have hosted several other birthday parties together, filming their kids playing together while the lucky birthday boy or girl opens mountains of flashy new toys.Birthday videos also perform really well on YouTube, says Ms. Vashketov.
Traveling to amusement parks and going on vacation also often feature in videos. Between them, the three families have filmed and posted videos from places like Thailand, Italy, Hawaii and the French Alps. They’ve also spent time together in Dubai where two of the families lived full time for a spell.
Luck and timing were important. So too were analytics, said Mr. Weinstein, who has been advising digital creators like the Vashketovs for more than a decade.
YouTube helps creators build their audiences by providing data-driven tools that can analyze how their videos perform and help plan their content. That includes knowing what YouTube audiences are searching for, what the creator’s viewers are searching for, when they are on YouTube, other channels that the audience watches and other data points. It allows creators to engage in their own brand of A/B testing, tweaking each nuance of a channel’s presentation to see how it might impact viewership, including the color scheme, titles for the videos and even what types of thumbnail photos impact viewership.
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What makes these YouTubers successful? Join the conversation below.
“Sergey and Victoria are voracious students of YouTube and content creation,” said Mr. Weinstein.
Today, the families have teams of people working behind the scenes.
“Vlad and Niki” has a film crew of up to five people at a time, including location scouts, camera operators and people to help secure props. They also work with people to help translate videos for their foreign-language channels, a mobile-gaming applications design team and an assistant who helps manage social media.
The Kidisyuks signed with pocket.watch, a company that helps YouTube kids and family creators build franchises around their channels, including additional branding and merchandising opportunities, consumer products, mobile gaming and the development and licensing of additional content. Pocket.watch represents more than 30 kids and family creators, including Ryan Kaji.
The Vashketovs recently bought a $12.5 million, eight-bedroom mansion.
Hollywood studios have taken interest too.
Nastya’s team is developing an animated series with Will Smith’s production company, Westbrook.
Netflix
has shown interest in the series and talks are ongoing, according to a person familiar with the matter.
HBO Max spent seven figures licensing “Vlad and Niki” content for its service, according to another person, who added that the streamer is considering producing two scripted shows including an animated series based on the two boys.
Netflix and HBO Max didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Diana and Roma starred in a promotional video for Paramount’s recent “Paw Patrol” movie and at one point hadcontent available on both Amazon Prime and
Roku.
The sister and brother duo also have an animated YouTube series featuring Diana’s alter ego, Princess of Play, sparring with her nemesis Boris the Baron of Boredom.
Competition
With such lucrative deals up for grabs, the rivalry among the channels has intensified over the years, causing the families to drift apart, according to people close to the families.
Competition is especially stiff between Diana and Nastya, who both appeal to girls. The two are neck and neck on YouTube. Nastya currently has 102 million subscribers while Diana has 104 million. Sometimes battles erupt between merchandising partners fighting over things like prime shelf space at major retailers, said one person.
Vlad and Niki’s mom says she sometimes will check to see how well Nastya or Diana videos have performed. But Victoria Vashketov plays down the competitiveness: “As parents, we all get along, and all the kids enjoy playing together.”
The families also share a brewing dilemma. Soon, their kid stars will grow into adolescents, perhaps too old to be making videos for preschoolers.
Vlad already has an eye on the future, saying he dreams of following in the footsteps of YouTube’s top creator, MrBeast, who regularly produces elaborate contests or challenges he posts to his channel. Additionally, Mr. Weinstein is lining up opportunities for Vlad and his brother to get into the music business, hiring producers and songwriters who have worked with both Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez to help put together some original songs.
For now the Vashketovs are enjoying being settled right outside Miami, something that helps give the boys consistency with school, the parents say. They recently bought a $12.5 million, eight-bedroom mansion located in the swanky town of Golden Beach.
And the Vashketovs say their kids can stop making videos any time they want. “Our inspiration really comes from Vlad’s and Niki’s interest,” says Sergey. “If we try to do something that they are not into, it doesn’t look authentic.”
As Vlad gets older, his 3-year-old brother Christian may step in. Ms. Vashketov says, even though Christian has appeared in several videos already, there are no plans to create a channel for her youngest son. That also goes for the baby girl Ms. Vashketov gave birth to in September.
A study published in July 2022 in Neurology, a journal from the American Academy of Neurology, suggests that eating whole foods might decrease dementia risk. The research was done on 72,083 adults over age 55 with no dementia at baseline in the UK Biobank.
The authors investigated the association between ultra-processed foods (UPF) and dementia, where participants’ diets were evaluated based on how much UPF was consumed. The highest group had a diet of 28% UPF compared to the group with the lowest consumption of UPF at 9%.
The results implied that for every increase of 10% in the daily dietary intake of UPF, the risk of dementia increased by 25%. Conversely, replacing 10% of UPF foods with whole (unprocessed or minimally processed) foods was associated with a 19% lower risk of dementia.
“Ultra-processed foods are meant to be convenient and tasty, but they diminish the quality of a person’s diet,” said study author Huiping Li, Ph.D. of Tianjin Medical University in China.
“These foods may also contain food additives or molecules from packaging or produced during heating, all of which have been shown in other studies to affect thinking and memory skills negatively.”
“Our research not only found that ultra-processed foods are associated with an increased risk of dementia, but it also found replacing them with healthy options may decrease dementia risk.”
More: 4 things you can do to fight dementia and improve your memory
UPF vs. whole foods
UPF is made for convenience. Think ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat. These foods are high in sugar, fat, and salt and low in protein and fiber. A few examples of UPF include fatty, sweet, savory, or salty packaged snacks.
Also, baked products made with ingredients such as hydrogenated vegetable fat, sugar, yeast, whey, emulsifiers, and other additives, ice creams and frozen desserts, chocolates, candies, pre-prepared meals like pizza and pasta dishes, and distilled alcoholic beverages such as whisky, gin, rum and vodka.
On the other hand, whole foods are unprocessed or minimally processed, such as fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, seafood, legumes, milk, eggs, grains, spices, meat, and fermented alcoholic beverages (think alcoholic cider and wine).
Minimally processed foods leave the nutrients intact. This contains methods like canning, vacuum packing, and refrigeration – which extend the food item’s life, including adding vitamins and pasteurization (as in milk).
How to tell the difference?
Lena Beal, media spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, says that labeling is the answer.
“Ultra-processed foods involve baked goods, snack cakes, chips, and candy at the grocery store’s check-out counter. They also include soft drinks, sweet breakfast cereals, ice cream, mass-produced bread, and flavored yogurts.”
Beal advises, “Look at two labels: Cheetos and tortilla chips. Then, look at the long list of ingredients on the Cheetos bag compared to tortilla chips. Tortilla chips have corn, salt, and some plant seed oil, right? So, it could be safflower, sunflower, or canola. Three ingredients.”
Related: Want to slow, delay or reverse dementia? Try this classic game.
Why are UPFs so popular in the U.S.?
“Two words: convenience and cost,” says Beal. In the U.S., UPF consumption increased from 53.5% of calories (2001-2002) to 57% (2017-2018). During the same period, whole food consumption decreased from 32.7% to 27.4% of calories.
According to Beal, “Americans eat 31% more packaged food than fresh foods than nearly any other country. Ultra-processed food comes from substances extracted from food through processes like milling or extrusion with added ingredients. They are highly manipulated and take on more of a chemical presence than food.”
The perceived convenience and the cost of UPF play a factor in their popularity. Not to mention advertising. Marketing UPF makes them seem delicious and harmless, but learning to read nutritional labels is essential.
In addition, choosing to eat healthier might entail prepping your meals at home. Why? Because it can be a special time shared with family or a partner as well as a nutritious path to adding more fruits and vegetables (fresh, pre-cut, or flash-frozen) to one’s diet.
When it comes to wholesome go-to’s, “use nuts (full of Omega-3s for heart and brain health), raisins, and dark chocolate to make a trail mix,” suggests Beal. “Seeds, nuts, cut-up fruits, and vegetables are nature’s fast food. Make a smoothie out of fresh fruit and dairy. Use peanut butter on celery sticks.”
Traveling and eating out
Beal suggests asking for condiments and dressings on the side when dining out. For instance, choose a sauce you can see through instead of cream sauce. Also, order baked meat or fish instead of fried, skip the pre-meal bread or eat less of it (whole wheat is also a better alternative to white bread).
Lastly, when traveling, locating a grocery store near where you are staying will make finding whole foods easier than getting all your food from restaurants.
Related: This is now the No. 1 preventable cause of Alzheimer’s in America
The bottom line
Good news! You are in charge of your diet. So each time you choose what to eat or drink, ask yourself: what is the best, minimally processed, healthy choice for nutrition?
Learning to evaluate food labels and ingredients is critical. Begin to prepare food at home and opt for small healthy lifestyle changes to improve how you age and feel your best.
Rebecca Myers, MSN, RN is a freelance health journalist with over 15 years of nursing experience (including critical care, vascular access, and education). Through her writing, Rebecca has a passion for uplifting others and helping them live their healthiest lives. She lives with her husband outside Houston, and they enjoy spending time at the beach together.
