阅读理解：避免垃圾食品，怎样才能让一日三餐更健康？ 2023届高考英语外刊阅读训练

23年高考英语外刊阅读训练——阅读理解：避免垃圾食品，怎样才能让一日三餐更健康？ Diet-related chronic disease is the perennial number one killer in the United States, responsible for more deaths than Covid-19 even at the pandemic’s peak. Yet we cannot manage to define this as a “crisis”. In fact, our response is lame: for decades we’ve been telling people to “eat better”, a strategy that hasn’t worked, and never will. It cannot, as long as the majority of calories we produce are unhealthy. It is the availability of and access to types of food that determines our diets, and those, in turn, are factors of agricultural policy. For a healthy population, we must mandate or at least incentivize growing real food for nutrition, not cheap meat and corn and soya beans for junk food. As omnivores, humans have choices, but most choices available to Americans are bad ones. Literally: 60% of the calories in the food supply are in the form of ultra-processed foods (UPFs, or junk food), which are the primary cause of diet-related diseases. That means almost no one can make a “good” choice every time, and many of us can barely make good choices ever. And it’s not enough to say “eat plant-based”, because most junk food is in fact made from plants; the future of food, especially when you add environmental factors, is plant-centric but minimally processed – plants in close to their natural form, in diets that resemble those eaten traditionally by almost everyone in the world until the 20th century. To make that happen, we must address the functioning of the entire food system. Government mandates around public health, environmental protection and even literacy can yield desirable results: laws or regulations around seat belts, tobacco, light bulbs, recycling, public education, have all improved public welfare. Yet no such efforts have been made in diet, where the mantra of “behavior change” stands in for good policy. We can reduce the consumption of junk food quickly with better labeling laws, taxes on the most egregious