Sam's Reading Page

Posted by Alex Hutchinson

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/01/athletic-success-luck/685533/?utm_source=feed

Chief among the burdens weighing upon the weary sports parent—worse than the endless commutes, the exorbitant fees, the obnoxious parents on the other team—is the sense that your every decision has the power to make or break your child’s future. Should your 11-year-old show up to her elementary-school holiday concert, even if it means missing a practice with the elite soccer team to which you’ve pledged 100 percent attendance? What if this turns out to be the fork in the road that consigns her to the athletic scrap heap?

These are heavy decisions—at least they are for me, a soccer dad who happens to have spent years writing about the science of athletic success. Making it to the pros, the conventional wisdom says, is a consequence of talent and hard work. Best-selling books have bickered over the precise ratio—whether, say, 10,000 hours of practice trumps having the so-called sports gene. But the bottom line is that you need a sufficient combination of both. If you’re talented enough and do the work, you’ll make it. If not—well, decisions (and holiday concerts) have consequences.

Rationally, stressing out over missing a single practice is ridiculous. Believing that it matters, though, can be strangely reassuring, because of the suggestion that the future is under your control. Forecasting athletic careers is an imperfect science: Not every top draft pick pans out; not every star was a top draft pick. Unexpected injuries aside, the imprecision of our predictions is usually seen as a measurement problem. If we could only figure out which factors mattered most—how to quantify talent, which types of practice best develop it—we would be able to plot athletic trajectories with confidence.

Unless, of course, this tidy relationship between cause and effect is an illusion. What if the real prerequisite for athletic stardom is that you have to get lucky?

Joseph Baker, a scientist at the University of Toronto’s Sport Insight Lab, thinks that the way talent development is usually framed leaves out this crucial ingredient. Baker is a prominent figure in the academic world of “optimal human development,” who moonlights as a consultant for organizations such as the Texas Rangers. He’s also a longtime skeptic of the usual stories we tell ourselves about athletic talent. The most prominent is that early performance is the best predictor of later performance. In reality,  many cases of early success just mean an athlete was born in the first months of the year, went through puberty at a young age, or had rich and highly enthusiastic parents.

This critique of talent is not entirely new. It’s been almost two decades since Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers spurred a cohort of hyper-ambitious soon-to-be parents to begin plotting January birth dates (or at least to tell people they were considering it). Over time, the debate about what factors actually matter has devolved into a game of whack-a-mole. If physical development isn’t the best predictor of long-term success, then it must be reaction time, or visual acuity, or hours of deliberate practice. The default assumption is that there must be something that reveals the presence of future athletic greatness.

Baker’s perspective changed, he told me, when he read Success and Luck, a 2016 book by the former Cornell University economics professor Robert H. Frank. Frank describes a hypothetical sports tournament whose outcome depends 49 percent on talent, 49 percent on effort, and 2 percent on luck. In mathematical simulations where as many as 100,000 competitors are randomly assigned values for each of these traits, it turns out that the winner is rarely the person with the highest combination of talent and effort. Instead, it will be someone who ranks relatively highly on those measures and also gets lucky.

This turns out to be something like a law of nature: It has been replicated and extended by others since Frank’s book came out. Among the most influential models is “Talent Versus Luck,” created by the Italian theoretical physicist Andrea Rapisarda and his colleagues, which simulates career trajectories over dozens of years and reaches the same conclusion. This model earned a 2022 Ig Nobel Prize “for explaining, mathematically, why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but instead to the luckiest.”

To Baker, these models suggest that it’s not just hard to reliably predict athletic futures; it’s impossible. He cites examples including a youth-soccer player for Northampton Town who missed a text message from the team’s manager telling him that he’d been dropped from the roster for an upcoming game. He showed up for the bus, went along for the ride, subbed in when another player got injured, impressed the manager, earned a spot for the rest of the season, and went on to play in the Premier League. Luck takes many forms, such as genetics, family resources, and what sports happen to be popular at a given place at a given time. But sometimes, it’s simply random chance: a gust of wind or an errant bounce or a missed text.

It’s easy to see how luck shapes individual moments in sport—how it changes the course of a game, a series, even an entire season. But what’s harder to accept is that luck might also play a role in longer arcs—not just what happens in games but who appears on the court in the first place. The more you reckon with this, the more disorienting it can be, as things start to feel ever more arbitrary and unfair. As Michael Mauboussin, an investor who writes about luck in his 2012 book, The Success Equation, put it to me: “Talking about luck really quickly spills into the philosophical stuff.”

You might think that the growing professionalization of youth sports offers an escape from this randomness—that by driving to this many practices and paying for that many coaches, you’re ensuring the cream will rise to the top. But the opposite is actually true, according to Mauboussin. In The Success Equation, he describes what he calls the “paradox of skill.” Now that every soccer hopeful is exhaustively trained from a young age, an army of relatively homogeneous talent is vying for the same prizes. “Everyone’s so good that luck becomes more important in determining outcomes,” Mauboussin said.

Baker and one of his colleagues at the University of Toronto, Kathryn Johnston, recently published a paper on the role of luck in athletic development in the journal Sports Medicine–Open. I felt a curious sense of relief when I read it. My daughters, who are 9 and 11, both play competitive soccer on teams requiring a level of commitment that I had naively thought went out of style with the fall of the Soviet Union. Seeing the evidence that future athletic success is not entirely predictable felt like a license for parents to loosen up a bit—to choose the holiday concert over the soccer practice without worrying about the long-term ramifications.

Linda Flanagan, the author of the 2022 book Take Back the Game and a frequent critic of today’s youth-sports culture, doesn’t share my optimism. She has no trouble believing that luck is involved with athletic success, but she doesn’t think that acknowledging this fact will change parental behavior. “Hell, they might double down on the investment in time and money, thinking that they need to give their child more chances to get lucky and impress the right coach,” she told me.

But that sort of luck—getting a job on your hundredth interview because the interviewer went to the same high school as you did, say—arguably is more about hustle than it is about serendipity. So is showing up to every soccer practice. Mauboussin’s definition of luck is narrower: It’s the factors you can’t control. No matter how much luck you try to “create” for yourself or your kids, some irreducible randomness might still make or break you.

To Baker, the takeaways from recognizing the role of luck are less about individual parents and more about how sports are organized. His advice to teams and governing bodies: “If there’s any way possible for you to avoid a selection, don’t select.” Keep as many athletes as you can in the system for as long as you can, and don’t allocate all of your resources to a chosen (and presumably lucky) few. When real-world constraints eventually and inevitably do require you to select—when you’re anointing these lucky few as your future stars, and casting out those who perhaps sang in one too many holiday concerts—try to leave the door open for future decisions and revisions. After all, Baker says, no matter how carefully you’ve weighed your predictions, “you’re probably wrong.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/01/athletic-success-luck/685533/?utm_source=feed

Posted by Nicholas Florko

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/01/rfk-jr-dietary-guidelines-food-vaccines/685546/?utm_source=feed

Since he was confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary early last year, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has previewed big changes to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans—the government’s go-to guide on what to eat, and how much of it. Rewritten only every five years, the dietary guidelines are ubiquitous in American life: The food pyramid, launched in the 1990s, is a result of the document. The guidelines determine what millions of kids eat in school cafeterias every day.

Chief among those supposedly forthcoming changes that Kennedy has promised is a dramatic rethinking of how the United States deals with saturated fat. For decades, the dietary guidelines have recommended that people get no more than 10 percent of their daily calories from these fats because they increase bad cholesterol. But Kennedy is a saturated-fat evangelist. The HHS secretary, who has said that he follows a “carnivore diet,” once famously prepared a Thanksgiving turkey by submerging the raw bird in a vat of beef tallow.

Surprisingly, the new guidelines, which were released earlier today, retain the exact same recommendation about saturated fat that Kennedy seems to loathe. During a press briefing, he declared that the guidelines “end the war on saturated fat.” The guidelines do plug beef tallow as a “healthy fat” and say that Americans should get some of their protein from red meat. (The previous version says that a healthy diet includes “relatively lower consumption of red and processed meats.”) But all of that is hardly a dramatic change in how Americans should approach saturated food.

What happened? Despite all of Kennedy’s bluster, the revisions appear to be built much more around incremental change than around any all-out war on established health wisdom. Kennedy and his staff appear to understand that an embrace of saturated fat is controversial. “It was our goal for this report to not be ‘activist’—and only make statements that are widely accepted by the latest nutritional research,” Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, told me in a statement. “No universal nutrition recommendation will be agreed on by everyone in the nutrition research field—nor should it,” he added. Indeed, there is little evidence to back up the adoption of an explicitly pro-fat diet. The American Heart Association, for example, recommends that fewer than 6 percent of daily calories come from saturated fat.

Overall, the new dietary guidelines focus on a much less controversial take-home message than “Make Frying Oil Tallow Again.” The takeaway, as Kennedy put it in a post on X, is “EAT REAL FOOD.” One of the biggest points of emphasis is on the importance of eating more protein—which already is a popular message among Americans. The release of the new guidelines was paired with a new inverted version of the food pyramid that’s meant to stress that a healthy diet consists of a majority of fruits, vegetables, healthy fats, and proteins. Few people follow the dietary guidelines to a T, but those who actually want to keep their saturated-fat intake to a minimum while upping their protein consumption will have to look to leaner options, such as beans and tofu. The carnivore health secretary may have inadvertently encouraged more Americans to embrace the “soy boy” lifestyle.

For the first time, the guidelines explicitly recommend against eating ultra-processed foods, which they refer to as “highly processed foods.” An accompanying scientific report that was released today notes that processed foods have been “consistently associated with increased risk” for a number of conditions, including type 2 diabetes and obesity. And the guidelines also take a particularly strong stance against added sugar. Both the 2020 and 2025 guidelines stress the need to limit added sugar, but the new guidelines add that “no amount of added sugars or non-nutritive sweeteners is recommended or considered part of a healthy or nutritious diet.”

These new suggestions come with some controversy. Ultra-processed foods constitute a broad and amorphous category, as I’ve previously written, and whether recommending that people stay away from all ultra-processed foods is feasible or desirable remains to be seen. But the guidelines are largely being well received by major health and nutrition groups. The American Medical Association said in a statement that the guidelines “offer clear direction patients and physicians can use to improve health.”

[Read: Coke, Twinkies, Skittles, and … whole-Grain Bread?]

The average American won’t necessarily change what they eat because of these new recommendations, but the guidelines do play a central role in determining what food can be served by a number of programs that provide food to millions of Americans. The lunch menus offered in schools, for example, legally must be “consistent with the goals” of the dietary guidelines. Kennedy has pledged to remove processed food from schools, and these new guidelines could pave the way for this to happen by giving the Trump administration justification for such a ban. That said, doing so would be hard, given the ubiquity of these foods and the limited resources that schools have to make all of their meals from scratch. Any such change would require formal regulation and could take years to finalize, and it’s not actually Kennedy’s call: The rules for school lunches are set by Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

Regardless of the challenges ahead, the release of the guidelines is a milestone in Kennedy’s tenure as HHS secretary, and it’s indicative of the way that he’s approached food regulation generally. Kennedy came into office pledging radical reform, yet he has seemed content with small steps. Before taking office, for example, he implied that he thought a number of chemical additives in foods should be banned. But so far, he’s settled for companies’ promises that they will voluntarily phase out certain synthetic dyes over the course of several years.

The strategy marks a sharp departure from Kennedy’s willingness to impose his own beliefs on another major priority area: vaccines. On that front, Kennedy initially pledged to be a moderate, although he has been anything but. Just this week, the CDC removed six shots from its list of recommended childhood vaccines—after Kennedy told Congress during his confirmation hearing that he would “support the CDC schedule.” In other words, America’s health policy seems like it’s being led by two health secretaries with very different approaches.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/2026/01/rfk-jr-dietary-guidelines-food-vaccines/685546/?utm_source=feed