Something in the Food

That flat white at a cafe in Bondi Beach cost $6 and changed my life.

Okay, I’m being dramatic. But something really did shift during those three weeks abroad. I ate more than I do at home. Cheese plates, oysters, pavlova, fish and chips by the harbor. I drank wine with every meal (and averaged four meals a day). Yet by the time I landed back at SFO, my pants fit better, my energy was stable, and the low-grade bloating I'd accepted as permanent had vanished.

Unfortunately, within 48 hours of returning to my normal diet, all of it came back.

I've heard versions of this story from friends for years. The colleague who "can eat all the bread in Italy" without issue. The college friend whose chronic inflammation disappears in France. I always filed these accounts under "vacation effect." Less stress, more walking… perhaps the placebo of being somewhere beautiful.

But this time really felt different; the contrast was too stark. So this past weekend, I did what I always do when something doesn't make sense: I fell down a research rabbit hole.

To preface, I always thought I was doing the right things at home. I mostly eat whole foods: meats, dairy, fruits, vegetables. I cook most many of my meals and avoid the obvious junk (save the odd Lunchable and Diet Coke).

What I hadn't fully grasped was that in America, even the "healthy" stuff is compromised. The produce is sprayed with chemicals banned elsewhere. The meat is treated with chemicals prohibited in 160 countries. Our food is contaminated, and I'd been standing on it assuming it was solid ground.

What I found in my research was something I half-knew, but had never fully confronted. The American food supply is chemically and structurally distinct from the food in peer nations. The divergence is systematic, pervasive, and largely invisible to consumers. After a few hours of reading food science papers, regulatory frameworks, and agricultural policy documents, I've distilled what I learned into these three takeaways.

The United States and the European Union operate under opposing theories of food safety.

The U.S. system is "risk-based." A chemical is presumed safe until scientific consensus proves it creates unreasonable harm. The burden falls on regulators to demonstrate danger.

The EU operates on the "precautionary principle." If scientific evidence is inconclusive about a chemical's safety, regulators can ban it until safety is definitively proven. The burden falls on manufacturers to demonstrate harmlessness.

This philosophical split produces radically different grocery stores.

Potassium bromate, a dough strengthener that produces the fluffy texture of American sandwich bread, is classified as a Group 2B carcinogen. Banned in the EU, UK, Canada, China, and Brazil., yet legal in the U.S.

Titanium dioxide, a whitening agent in candies and coffee creamers, was banned by the EU in 2022 after their food safety authority concluded it could cause DNA damage. Legal in the U.S.

Azodicarbonamide, a dough conditioner also used in the production of yoga mats, is banned in Australia and Europe due to links to respiratory issues and carcinogenic byproducts. Legal in the U.S.

The list continues. BHA, BHT, Red 40, Yellow 5, Yellow 6. Each one permitted in American food, each one banned or warning-labeled abroad.

A 2019 study found that 72 active pesticide ingredients banned in the EU are still approved for U.S. agriculture. These substances account for over a quarter of U.S. pesticide use by volume. We spray hundreds of millions of pounds annually of chemicals that other developed nations have deemed unacceptable.

The U.S. also maintains a provision called "Generally Recognized As Safe" that allows food manufacturers to declare new additives safe without formal FDA review. Companies convene their own panels of experts, those panels determine safety, and the FDA may never be notified. Estimates suggest thousands of substances have entered the American food supply through this pathway with minimal oversight.

No equivalent mechanism exists in Europe.

Everyone knows American fast food is junk; that observation is table stakes. The deeper problem is that the contamination runs through the entire supply chain. Produce, dairy, meat, bread are all compromised.

Start with agriculture. From 1995 to 2020, the federal government paid over $116 billion to corn farmers, $48 billion to wheat, $44 billion to soybeans. These subsidies create massive overproduction of specific commodities, generating surpluses that must be absorbed by the market.

High-fructose corn syrup, soybean oil, modified corn starch, just to name a few, all exist in such abundance because federal policy makes them artificially cheap. Food manufacturers are economically incentivized to use these subsidized derivatives rather than whole ingredients. The system pushes corn and soy into everything because corn and soy are what the government pays farmers to grow.

This explains why ultra-processed foods account for 58-60% of total caloric intake for the average American adult. In Italy, that figure is around 10%, a staggering gap.

Then consider livestock. The U.S. permits hormonal growth promotants in cattle, recombinant bovine growth hormone in dairy cows, and beta-agonist drugs like ractopamine to promote lean muscle in pigs. Each of these substances is banned in the EU. Ractopamine alone is prohibited in over 160 countries, including China and Russia.

American wheat presents its own problem. U.S. farmers commonly spray wheat fields with glyphosate days before harvest to accelerate drying. This "desiccation" practice results in residue levels on finished grain products that, while within EPA tolerances, are dramatically higher than anywhere else in the world. The EPA tolerance for glyphosate on wheat is 30 parts per million. New Zealand's limit is 0.1 parts per million. A 300x difference.

The practice of using glyphosate for desiccation is banned or severely restricted across much of Europe.

This explains why so many Americans report they can eat bread abroad without the bloating they experience at home. The wheat varieties differ, the fermentation processes differ, and the chemical residues differ. The "gluten sensitivity" many Americans feel may largely be a reaction to high-gluten wheat, rapid industrial fermentation, and herbicide residues acting in concert.

The strongest validation of this thesis comes from studying what happens when people move in the opposite direction.

Research on immigrants to the United States shows that within a decade, newcomers often gain weight and their disease risk rises. The pattern is consistent across populations. People arrive healthy and gradually adopt the American diet and lifestyle, and their bodies respond accordingly.

This is the inverse of the vacation effect. While Americans feel better abroad, immigrants feel worse after arriving here. The American food environment appears to be the common variable.

An NIH study by Kevin Hall demonstrated the mechanism. When participants were fed an ultra-processed diet versus an unprocessed diet with equal calories and macronutrients available, they ate approximately 500 more calories per day on the ultra-processed diet, gaining weight. On the unprocessed diet, they lost weight. The foods were engineered differently, and bodies responded differently.

The good news: the effects appear to be reversible, and quickly. Studies show that switching to an organic diet can reduce urinary levels of organophosphate pesticide metabolites by up to 90% within a week. The body clears these substances rapidly once exposure stops.

This suggests that the relief Americans feel abroad is a physiological response to a reduction in chronic chemical exposure. An unintentional elimination diet imposed by stricter foreign regulations.

Unfortunately, I can't move to New Zealand permanently. But I can make a few changes that approximate the food environment I experienced in the Southern Hemisphere.

These changes cost more money and require more intention. I recognize that's a privilege. Most Americans will keep eating what's cheap, convenient, and available, unaware that our food is chemically distinct from what the rest of the developed world considers normal.

The structural incentives that got us here aren’t changing soon. While consumer awareness is growing (California recently banned Red Dye 3 and the FDA has begun publicly acknowledging the role of ultra-processed foods in chronic disease) I'm not waiting for the system to fix itself.

My weekend deep-dive confirmed what my body already knew: American food supply is engineered differently than peer nations in ways that demonstrably produce worse health outcomes.

The system isn't hiding anything, it’s just counting on us not to look.

Up and to the right.