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CNN
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Gobbling up too many refined wheat and rice products, along with eating too few whole grains, is fueling the growth of new cases of type 2 diabetes worldwide, according to a new study that models data through 2018.

“Our study suggests poor carbohydrate quality is a leading driver of diet-attributable type 2 diabetes globally,” says senior author Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University and professor of medicine at Tufts School of Medicine in Boston, in a statement.

Another key factor: People are eating far too much red and processed meats, such as bacon, sausage, salami and the like, the study said. Those three factors — eating too few whole grains and too many processed grains and meats — were the primary drivers of over 14 million new cases of type 2 diabetes in 2018, according to the study, which was published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.

In fact, the study estimated 7 out of 10 cases of type 2 diabetes worldwide in 2018 were linked to poor food choices.

“These new findings reveal critical areas for national and global focus to improve nutrition and reduce devastating burdens of diabetes,” said Mozaffarian, who is also the editor in chief of the Tufts Health & Nutrition Letter.

Mozaffarian and his team developed a research model of dietary intake between 1990 and 2018 and applied it to 184 countries. Compared with 1990, there were 8.6 million more cases of type 2 diabetes due to poor diet in 2018, the study found.

Researchers found eating too many unhealthy foods was more of a driver of type 2 diabetes on a global level than a lack of eating wholesome foods, especially for men compared with women, younger compared to older adults, and in urban versus rural residents.

Over 60% of the total global diet-attributable cases of the disease were due to excess intake of just six harmful dietary habits: eating too much refined rice, wheat and potatoes; too many processed and unprocessed red meats; and drinking too many sugar-sweetened beverages and fruit juice.

Inadequate intake of five protective dietary factors — fruits, nonstarchy vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains and yogurt — was responsible for just over 39% of the new cases.

People in Poland and Russia, where diets tend to focus on potatoes and red and processed meat, and other countries in Eastern and Central Europe as well as Central Asia, had the highest percentage of new type 2 diabetes cases linked to diet.

Colombia, Mexico and other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean also had high numbers of new cases, which researchers said could be due to a reliance on sugary drinks and processed meat, as well as a low intake of whole grains.

“Our modeling approach does not prove causation, and our findings should be considered as estimates of risk,” the authors wrote.

New York
CNN
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McDonald’s, which has been focusing on upgrading its core items to boost sales, is rolling out a series of changes designed to improve its signature burgers.

Buns will be softer. Cheese, gooier. Onion will be added to patties right on the grill. And the Big Mac sauce? There will be more of it.

“We found that small changes, like tweaking our process to get hotter, meltier cheese and adjusting our grill settings for a better sear, added up to a big difference in making our burgers more flavorful than ever,” said chef Chad Schafer, senior director of culinary innovation of McDonald’s USA, in a statement Monday. The upgrades apply to the Big Mac and the McDouble burger as well as the classic cheeseburger, double cheeseburger and hamburger.

The improvements were first made to burgers in international markets, the company said, and have already arrived in some US cities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, Phoenix, Las Vegas. They’ll be available nationally by early next year.

The changes follow other improvements to key menu items.

In 2018, McDonald’s announced that it was switching to fresh beef for its Quarter Pounders, a complicated move with a big sales payoff. In 2021, it launched a crispy chicken sandwich to replace previous iterations — a relatively late arrival in the chicken sandwich wars, but one that seems to have resonated with McDonald’s customers. .

“We are gaining market share in both chicken and beef,” thanks to improved burgers and items like the chicken sandwich, said McDonald’s

(MCD) CEO Chris Kempczinski during a January analyst call. “In an environment where our customers are looking for the simple and familiar, our core menu items have never been more relevant,” he said. In the US, sales at stores open at least 13 months jumped 5.9% in the fourth quarter of 2022, rising 10.3% for the whole year.

Focusing on promoting its core menu items, rather than introducing new products, is a way to keep processes simpler and reduce friction in the kitchen. And McDonald’s has been using promotions like celebrity meal platforms and the adult Happy Meal to create buzz around its signature items.

“Throughout 2022, some of our most successful campaign platforms brought our customers closer to the core menu items,” Kempczinski said during the January call.

McDonald’s isn’t the only brand trying to improve its main offerings.

Burger King, which last year announced a plan to turn its business around, has been focusing on improving the Whopper and making it more visible in advertising. In the fourth quarter last year, it held Whopper trainings for franchisees. The brand said in February that the Whopper contributed to higher US sales in that quarter.

Editor’s Note: Abigail Disney is an Emmy-winning documentary filmmaker, activist, and member of the Patriotic Millionaires. Her latest film, “The American Dream and Other Fairy Tales,” co-directed with Kathleen Hughes, made its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. Morris Pearl is the chair of Patriotic Millionaires, and former managing director of BlackRock. The opinions expressed in this commentary are their own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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Tuesday is Tax Day in America, one of the most stressful days of the year, when many taxpayers will finally end their procrastination, file their federal returns, and hope for a refund from the IRS. But for many of the nation’s wealthiest, it’s just another Tuesday.

Tax Day isn’t just a filing deadline — it’s also an annual reminder that the ultra-rich exist in an entirely separate world when it comes to taxes. For us, the loopholes are bigger and the rates are sometimes lower. Meanwhile, the rich keep getting richer, with the wealth of billionaires in particular growing by more than $1.5 trillion over the last few years.

This status quo is unfair, but even more importantly, it’s unsustainable. Such high levels of inequality are pushing our economy and our democracy to their breaking points. That’s why we should examine how we can set our country up for long-term stability and prosperity. And we should start by ensuring that the ultra-rich pay more of what they owe the country that made their success possible.

There are three changes to the tax code that would help us do just that:

Right now, the US tax system values money over sweat. If you work hard for your money instead of earning it passively, you’re essentially penalized for it. People who earn a salary pay significantly higher tax rates on their income than wealthy investors who passively earn capital gains income.

Inheriting money is an even better deal. Thanks to former president Donald Trump’s 2017 tax law, the first $12.92 million (or $25.84 million for a married couple) is completely exempt from any estate tax, and the stepped-up basis loophole allows wealthy families to permanently erase millions in capital gains taxes by resetting the market value of those assets to their value at the time of the original owner’s death. With this, it becomes relatively simple for the rich to inherit tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars, and pay almost nothing in taxes. Someone working for that money, on the other hand, would pay over a third of it in federal income taxes.

Why do we have a tax code that says working people should be taxed more than wealthy investors and those who got rich just by virtue of being born into the right family? At the end of the day, money is money, whether you worked for it or whether you inherited it. As an heiress and an investor, we should not be paying lower tax rates than people who earn their money from working.

It’s time for the tax code to treat all income equally by taxing all capital gains over $1 million at the same rates as ordinary income, and replacing our loophole-ridden estate tax with a simpler inheritance tax that treats inherited wealth as income.

We can’t just focus on income, however, because many of the richest Americans earn basically no taxable income of any kind in a typical year. Capital gains are only taxed when assets are sold, so instead of selling them, the ultra-rich use their assets as collateral to borrow vast sums of money at extremely low interest rates to live on, and then declare little or even negative “income” on their tax forms. This “Buy, Borrow, Die” strategy is a major reason billionaires paid a lower effective tax rate over recent years than working-class families.

By rethinking what is taxable, we can get access to the trillions of dollars of billionaire wealth that is untouchable under our current tax structure. That’s why President Biden has proposed the Billionaire Minimum Income Tax, which would tax the unrealized capital gains of the wealthiest households and why others have proposed wealth taxes on billionaires.

Finally, one of the most straightforward changes needed is to simply tax the extremely rich more than the merely rich. Our income tax caps out at a top rate of 37% for any income over $578,125 (or $693,750 for married couples). No matter how much more someone makes, they’ll never pay more than 37% in federal income taxes.

While someone earning $600,000 is certainly making enough to live a very comfortable life, they’re in a different world than someone making $600 million a year. In order to reflect the real differences between the rich and the ultra-rich, we need to return to the top rates we had through the most prosperous decades of the 20th century and add significantly more tax brackets. They should reach up to 90% for people making more than $100 million a year.

These three changes certainly won’t fix all our country’s problems on their own, but they would go a long way in stopping the steady flow of our country’s wealth toward a smaller and smaller group of people, a change that would make both our democracy and our economy more stable. The tax code can be a powerful tool for both social and economic change. We just need to use it more effectively.