Barbara Fredrickson, author of Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (Avery, 2103) and Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, calls them “micro-encounters.”

When you stop raking leaves and talk to your neighbor about the weather, the Philadelphia Eagles, or the reason for last night’s fire alarm, she believes that you’re doing more than being neighborly or taking a needed break. You’re laying the foundation for happiness.

That’s because these quick and seemingly trivial interactions make you feel more connected to others and less alienated from the world.

Health and fitness writers, I imagine, experience something similar when they come across an article akin to theirs. I know I felt that way after reading Dr. Phil Maffetone’s “Junk food kills more people than drugs and tobacco.”

Much of what he expresses in this article reaffirms why I write my column.

Through his “backroad website,” he provides health and fitness information “to encourage self-care” because “sensationalized sound bites are not going to help people eat better.” He always comments upon and interprets the latest health and fitness findings with his audience foremost in mind since “the media reports almost always leave out the most important person - you.”

Maffetone has more than 20 books published, including the first one on heart-rate monitoring for sports performance, and I’ve been learning from his writings for about 35 years. That I mention we share certain beliefs, though, in no way suggests we are peers.

I do so simply to let you know that there are others more knowledgeable than I who feel just as passionately that you need to choose every meal as if your life depends upon it. The quality and length of it really does.

In fact, the conclusion of Maffetone’s article expresses just that: “The myth of moderation is not applicable or acceptable when it comes to bad food. Like heroine, just a spoonful of sugar is deadly.”

I quote Maffetone at length not only because you may see me as a left-winger or a lightweight or both, but also because of a disturbing trend in food research. More and more of it is financed by groups in search of a particular outcome.

According to an analysis published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, for example, 42 of the 44 independently financed studies published between 2001 and 2016 linked sugary soda consumption to an increased incidence of diabetes and obesity. Yet during the same time period, 26 other studies funded by the soda industry or groups with financial ties to it all found that soda consumption had no adverse affect on health.

Is such a discrepancy legitimate or a result of rigged research? Lead investigator of the aforementioned analysis, Dean Schillinger, MD, professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, addresses that question this way. “Since most studies have multiple findings, the researchers may decide to only report favorable outcomes and not report those that are unfavorable.”

Via the media, these favorable outcomes become those “sensationalized sound bites” Maffetone warns about. As you read on, though, you’ll encounter no sensationalism about an important bit of sugar-related research, just a simple analogy.

If you see your body as a well-manicured lawn, the consumption of added sugars serves as fertilizer - the worst sort. They feed the weed that can overrun and ruin even the best tended patch of grass.

Cancer.

That’s been the finding in past studies using rodents as subjects, and the same has now been found in an observational study of more than 100,000 French adults whose age averaged 42 years at the onset.

Published in the July 2019 issue of BMJ, researchers at the Sorbonne Paris Cité Epidemiology and Statistics Research Center in France used data from a prior study and followed it up nine years later to see if there was indeed a human correlation between sugar-sweetened beverages, including soda, fruit drinks, 100 percent fruit juices without any added sugar, sports drinks, and energy drinks and the incidence of cancer.

After accounting for lifestyle factors, such as smoking and exercise, a hereditary risk of cancer, and other potential confounders, the researchers found enough evidence of the link to conclude their paper this way: “The consumption of sugary drinks was positively associated with the risk of overall cancer and breast cancer” while “100 percent fruit juices were also positively associated with the risk of overall cancer.”

Moreover, they discovered that a mere 3.3-ounce-a-day increase in sugary beverages increased overall cancer risk by 18 percent.

One final note for any doubting Thomas: To get their work published in BMJ, the authors needed to sign a disclosure form declaring they have had “no financial relationships with any organizations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years” or engaged in any “other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.”