Mark Bittman Speaking at Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity

Mark Bittman, author, New York Times columnist, and television host, discusses the future of food as part of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity's Spring Seminar Series.

I highly recommend watching his presentation, which is almost 30 minutes long - so if you don't have the time to watch the whole thing, here are some highlights:

• Compares soda and cigarettes, particularly how they affect our health (soda is to obesity what smoking is to lung cancer).
"Here's an industry that hires experts to back up its specious claims, maintains it's not marketing to children (when it is), endorses bad science, funds front groups, lobbies like mad, claims its new products are safer and better and it's making healthier ones all the time - is that tobacco or food? Both."

• Soda is the #1 source of calories in the US and leading cause of obesity.

• For the first time in history overnutrition killing just as many people as undernutrition.

• Describes "Snackwells phenomenon" of the 1980s and 90s: if you were choosing lower fat foods, it didn't mean you were eliminating high fat foods, it meant you could eat as many Snackwells as you wanted to. This led to the biggest weight gain in America in the history of foods.

• The key to a sound diet = eating real food, prepared or cooked yourself.

• Americans claim they are too busy to cook, and yet the irony is we now spend an average of 40 hours per week watching TV (increasingly watching people cook).

• Healthy processed food = oxymoron; if you have to label something "healthy," it probably isn't.

• Ends with a long list of immediate, initial goals; start with soda tax.