Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
Weekend reading: health food regulation
Jill Hobbs, Stavroula Malla, Eric Sogah, and May Yeung. Regulating Health Foods: Policy Challenges and Consumer Conundrums. EE Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014.
I did a blurb for this one:
Regulating Health Foods systematically organizes the widely disparate definitions, regulations, and policies used internationally to govern functional foods, supplements and nutraceuticals, and does so from the standpoint of the industry and its regulators. Food scientists, regulators, and industry professionals will especially appreciate its detailed international perspective.
This is a book for policy wonks and students who want to find out how various countries regulate food labels, or who would llike to know such things as how Codex Alimentarius guidelines apply to health claims. The authors, who work at Canadian Universities, have pulled together vast amounts of detailed information about label regulations by country, with commentary. Here is an example:
Japan currently provides an interesting mix between a purely generic system and a purely product-specific one. Although the system is decidedly more product-specific. Standardized FOSHU [Food for Specific Health Uses] lowers the costs to individual firms seeking claims on ingredients with well-established ingredient-health effect relationships. At the same time, there are potentially significant returns to investment for firms wishing to market a new product with health benefits.
