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A Processed-Foods Researcher and Mom of 2 Says There Are 2 Additives on Labels She Avoids at All Costs
Elizabeth Dunford isn’t trying to make grocery shopping an impossible task. Dunford is a nutrition epidemiologist who studies additives in ultra-processed foods and their impact on health. It’s not realistic to avoid packaged foods altogether, Dunford, who is based at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told Business Insider. They make up around 70% of the US food supply.
So, she focuses on buying foods for her family that have a low “additive load” overall.
“I try and avoid things in general that have a lot of additives, but you can’t avoid everything,” said Dunford, who is a mom of two. “If you pick it up, you turn it over, and you don’t recognize half the ingredients, it’s probably not a good choice,” she said.
She has taught her kids that eating enough vegetables, protein, and calcium will “keep their brains and bodies healthy,” and that there’s a time and a place for treats, but it’s not good to have too many. “It is the everyday food and drink choices that really matter to me,” Dunford said.
Ultra-processed foods contain ingredients you wouldn’t find in a regular kitchen, like emulsifiers and thickening agents. They tend to be ultrapalatable, meaning they contain an irresistible combination of sugar, salt, and fat, and have long shelf lives. They can be anything from potato chips and soda to packaged bread and yogurt.
Tiktok Staff Raised Child Safety Alarms. Court Records Show Executives Failed to Act
TikTok employees repeatedly raised concerns internally about the risks the short-form video app posed to children, including sexual exploitation and exposure to suicide content. Previously unreported court records show that the employees were frustrated with how the company’s leadership responded to their concerns.
Depositions of staffers filed in federal court in March 2026 offer new insights into how TikTok has approached child safety since the platform exploded in popularity among young users in 2018. Employees raised the alarm about minors appearing in sexual content on the app, which viewers could pay to access and the company would profit from — a potential financial crime.
They also flagged that users under 18 were using loopholes to bypass age-restricted content and to block parents and guardians from reviewing their activity on the app. TikTok also refrained from conducting surveys to assess the ages of its users because it was concerned that it would have to turn the results over to the Federal Trade Commission, the documents show.
FDA Clears Tool to Help Diagnose Autism
Federal regulators are green-lighting a new tool designed to help clinicians identify children with autism. The Food and Drug Administration cleared Neurora this month to inform decisions about diagnosing children ages 18 months to 12 years.
The device from Argus Cognitive, Inc. uses more than 100 biometrics to assess whether a child has autism. Clinicians can upload video and audio from typical behavioral assessments to the Neurora portal.
The tool measures facial expressions, voice patterns, eye gaze and more to evaluate how a child’s behavior compares to children with and without autism.
Early-Life Stress Leaves a Lasting Mark on the Brain
Stress early in life doesn’t just stay in the past. A difficult start can leave a mark on the brain that stays quiet for years, then shows itself the moment another challenge appears. That’s the core finding of a 2026 study published in Neuron, where researchers traced how early adversity changed the molecular landscape inside a stress-sensitive brain region in mice, and how those changes shaped the animals’ responses to stress much later.
What set this study apart is that the researchers went beyond observing the connection between early hardship and later vulnerability. They identified a specific molecular pathway responsible for it, confirmed that pathway could reproduce the effect on its own and showed that blocking it reduced the heightened sensitivity. The result is one of the most detailed pictures yet of how early experiences can set the stage for stronger stress reactions down the road.
Because this work was conducted in mice, it doesn’t prove that the same molecular pathway operates identically in humans, but it offers a concrete mechanism for something many people sense intuitively — that childhood stress can change how you handle pressure as an adult.
Race Linked to Increased Asthma Severity in Black Children
U.S. News & World Report reported:
Black children are at greater risk for a more severe form of asthma, and it’s not due to the air quality where they live or their families’ means, a new study says. Black race and ethnicity is the single strongest risk factor for “T2-high asthma,” a type of asthma linked to persistently elevated levels of inflammation in the body, researchers reporned recently in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology: In Practice.
Black children are nearly three times more likely to develop T2-high asthma as white children even after taking other potential risk factors into account, researchers found.
These results run counter to the popular notion that asthma is worse among Black children because they come from poor families or live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, researchers said.
“We hope this puts to rest the myth that environmental and social factors are the main drivers of asthma severity,” lead researcher Dr. W. Gerald Teague, a pediatric pulmonologist and asthma expert at the University of Virginia Health System, said in a news release.
Norway Targets ‘Harmful’ Social Media, Games With Under-16 Ban
Norway’s planned social media ban for children will include provisions targeting “harmful platforms”, the government said on Monday, naming messaging and gaming services Roblox, Snapchat and TikTok among those affected.
The Nordic country said in April it would present a bill in parliament by the end of the year to ban children from using social media until they turn 16, making technology companies responsible for age verification. It did not name any platforms at the time.
Several European nations are seeking to rein in children’s social media use after Australia took the lead with the world’s first ban on under-16s last December, which included apps such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube.
