My teachers assumed I was being the class clown when I voted for Gus Hall, the Communist Party nominee for president of the United States in 1972. But I saw my role in their mock election differently.

I was acting as a concerned citizen, working as a restaurant waiter, and serving them their just deserts.

Regardless of the reason, my vote shouldn’t have surprised my teachers to the degree that it did. That is, if they truly believed something they kept telling my sixth-grade class.

A something I believed to be so wrong and so insulting that it brought out something only my parents had previously seen: the rebel in me.

Our sixth-grade class was admittedly a handful, containing many disobedient individuals. They often received a paddling as a result, and I had no problem with that.

I didn’t even have a problem with teachers doing the paddling in front of the class to add embarrassment to the punishment. But what irked me to no end was that before putting a hurting on whomever, they would harp on about how at 11 or 12 or even 18 years of age, you’re not yet an adult.

You’re a work in progress.

So this work in progress cast his bogus ballot for the communist instead of the Nixon or McGovern.

It’s something I now regret, but not because the teachers summoned me to their insufferably smoky faculty room, expressed their profound disappointment in me, and then issued a one-hour detention. But because I’ve come to embrace the phrase that once bothered me worse than nails dragged against a blackboard.

I now know I was, am, and will always be a work in progress.

That’s true for you, too, and no reason to become a rebel, just grateful. For it means you can still improve.

So here’s the key info from two recent papers that just might allow you to do so. Published online by the journal PLOS Biology in August, the first features yeast cells and the sugar in milk and dairy products, lactose.

From the digestion of lactose comes galactose, which is then transformed by the liver into glucose to be used or stored as energy. Interesting maybe, but what’s important to know is when galactose was the sole energy source given to developing yeast cells, it reduced their rate of aging later.

Though this is far from absolute proof of anything, it does suggest that if you get your energy from the proper mix of foods, you can minimize the aging of your cells, too.

The researchers also found that an early diet of galactose led to less aging in yeast cells when compared to any type of energy being provided intermittently in an attempt to simulate the diet style that’s now so popular.

If dairy sugar dripped onto yeast cells in petri dishes isn’t real world enough for you, how about two real-world problems a population-based cohort study published online by JAMA Network Open in August uncovered?

That the occurrence of all cancers among those under 50 years of age increased from 2010 to 2019 and that gastrointestinal cancers had the fastest-growing incidence rates among them.

In this study, the incidence rates of “early-onset cancers” increased from 2010 to 2019. Although breast cancer had the highest number of incident cases, gastrointestinal cancers, like colorectal cancer, had the fastest-growing incidence rate.

This is the gist of the study titled “Patterns in Cancer Incidence Among People Younger Than 50 Years in the US, 2010 to 2019.” To help people ingest the gist, Stephanie Brown wrote an article for Verywell Health about it.

In it, she cites two prior studies linking the incidence of more than a dozen forms of cancer to being overweight or obese. Which is just one of the many reasons why I regularly rant about another stat she cites: that 73% of the U.S. food supply now comes in the form of ultraprocessed foods.

As well as why I will once again mention an article already written about here and mentioned by Brown. Published online by Cell Metabolism in May 2019, it showed a diet of UPFs created overeating and weight gain.

In this study, 20 people were instructed to consume as much or as little as they desired while following a diet of either UPFs or whole foods for two weeks. They then followed the other diet for the same time.

When the participants were on the UPF diet they, ate on average a bit more than 500 additional calories a day and gained about 2 pounds.

Granted, neither this study from 2019 nor any of the others previously mentioned offer indisputable proof of anything. But they don’t have to in order to help to you.

You already know for the most part which foods are and aren’t healthy. So let this article serve as a gentle reminder.

Works in progress, like me and you, can always become a little bit better.

One way to do so is to limit your ingestion of ultraprocessed foods and eat a rotation of healthy foods. And don’t count calories simply to allow yourself to eat unhealthy ones.