Was America ever healthy?

Welcome to the weekend!

Emmy nominations for television were announced this week, and both the drama and the comedy with the most nods revolve around fictional companies. What are the names of those two companies? Find out with this week’s Pointed quiz.

Our audio playlist, available in the Bloomberg app, deserves all the awards. This week we’ve got five stories on everything from China’s factory-floor chaos to the human body scans giving researchers insights into disease.

Don’t miss Sunday’s Forecast, in which we unpack depopulation. For unlimited access to Bloomberg.com, please subscribe.

The Past Is Prologue

In the late 19th century, nutrition experts told consumers to load up on bread and pork but avoid produce — not enough calories. In the early 20th century, trans-fat-laden Crisco was peddled as a healthy alternative to lard, and by the 1950s fat anxiety had given cereal its own health halo. All of these missteps, writes F.D. Flam, expose a truth missing from Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again campaign: There is no past era in which Americans had health figured out. The MAHA movement is right to be skeptical of mainstream nutritional advice, but wrong to take science’s setbacks as evidence that it isn’t working.

Our collective quest to be healthy is a matter of pressing forward, not romanticizing old thinking. That’s a familiar message for Jennifer Sciubba, a political demographer and the latest subject of the Weekend Interview with Mishal Husain. All of our assumptions about the way the world works, and about economic growth, were formed in a time when we believed the global population would continue growing. We now know it won’t, and is in fact likely to start shrinking this century. That doesn’t necessarily make for a crisis, Sciubba says, but it will require new insights, flexible solutions and a focus on care at all ages.

Children of immigrants know all about growing into a world that makes little sense to the world from which you came. In poet Ocean Vuong’s bestselling debut novel, the narrator pens a letter to his mother who — like Vuong’s mother — is illiterate. It’s just one example of the ways in which Vuong has been thrust into the uneasy role of translator for immigrants, in large part because of his own story. “There’s an earnest desire to understand, along with the fetishization,” he tells Madison Darbyshire. “Americans really want you to be an expert, because we also love to come to a point of sale and get the expertise, get these check marks.”

Dispatches

China
At a factory in southern China, hundreds of assembly-line workers churn out kitchenware and grilling accessories for global retailers. The shop floor — almost the size of six soccer fields — is a hive of activity as everything from grill tongs to food containers are assembled and packaged. It’s one of four factories in China run by Velong Enterprises, which has spent years adjusting its strategy to meet shifting trade regimes. Despite those efforts, Velong faces a 20% revenue gap this year, as Trump's trade wars make it even harder for manufacturers to adapt.

United Kingdom
One day last summer, Alison slipped off her jewelry, stepped into a hospital gown and laid down inside a full-body MRI scanner. As the machine issued calming instructions, it captured thousands of images, from her head to her toes. A mother of two in her 50s, Alison had joined a nationwide health study after spotting a flyer in her local library. What she didn’t realize was that she was part of one of the most ambitious studies of human health ever undertaken: UK Biobank, which is offering scientists an unprecedented window into how diseases take hold.

Agree or Disagree?

Fed independence is now high-stakes reality TV. Beneath the spectacle is a vision. But it seems to rest on a misread of the one time a president effectively fired his Fed chair, John Authers writes for Bloomberg Opinion.

It’s time to bring back the business novel. Capitalism may have gone out of literary fashion, but this summer’s Drayton and Mackenzie offers a reminder of why it shouldn’t have, Adrian Wooldridge writes for Bloomberg Opinion.

Rare Earth Rebels

Weekend Plans

What we’re mourning: the Sycamore Gap tree, which grew alongside Hadrian’s Wall in England for 150 years. The men who cut it down just received lengthy jail terms, but the punishment is moot if we don’t stop broader harm to the natural world.

What we’re smelling: an opportunity. So is Europe’s defense industry, which sees an opening to compete with America as NATO countries spend more on weapons. Leaders in Denmark, Poland and Canada are reevaluating deals with the US.

What we’re reading: The Almightier: How Money Became God, Greed Became Virtue, and Debt Became Sin. Paul Vigna looks at how the Western world shed its Christian disapproval of commerce and turned money-making into a virtue.

What we’re stressing: work. So are the US customs brokers who guide millions of imports through an increasingly complicated terrain of regulations, changing tariffs and executive orders. It used to be a low-drama gig — not anymore.

What we’re wearing: glitter freckles. A beauty company’s signature product went viral at a Kansas City Chiefs game (cough cough, thank you Taylor Swift) and private equity firms have been courting its 29-year-old co-founder ever since.

Monday Plans

Golden visas allow wealthy foreigners to gain legal residence by making significant financial investments, often in property. Across Europe, these schemes are sparking furious debate. To answer your questions on the controversy, Bloomberg journalists will be standing by for a live Q&A on July 21 at 9 a.m. ET. Listen here.

One Last Thing

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