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I read a report in the Washington Post discussing a study done by Neal Barnard and his colleagues associated with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, a group advocating for plant-based diets and animal welfare.

More than 85 percent of the studies in Barnard’s meta-analysis, whether funded by industry or not, showed that eggs have unfavorable effects on blood cholesterol. Industry-funded studies, Barnard found, were more likely to play down these findings.

The study, a meta-analysis, reviewed 153 studies examining the effects of eggs on blood cholesterol levels.  It found the proportion of egg studies funded by the egg industry to have increased since 2010, and the industry-sponsored results to be spun—no surprise—in favor of the benefits of eggs.

This matters because advice in the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans is unhelpful about eggs.

Here’s how I explained the confusion in my January 7, 2016 post:

Cholesterol: the recommendation to limit cholesterol has been dropped, but the document says, confusingly, that “this change does not suggest that dietary cholesterol is no longer important to consider when building healthy eating patterns. As recommended by the IOM, individuals should eat as little dietary cholesterol as possible while consuming a healthy eating pattern.”  Could the dropping of the limit have anything to do with egg-industry funding of research on eggs, the largest source of dietary cholesterol, and blood cholesterol?  The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine has just filed a lawsuit on that very point.

The lawsuit was about undue influence of the egg industry, but the judge threw the suit out of court because no legal standard exists for undue influence.  Oh.

What to do about eggs?  I vote for moderation, of course.

I am still hard at work getting a book manuscript ready to submit.  It isn’t scheduled to be published until October, but I promise to say more about it when it’s in, copy-edited, and further along in production. 

Happiest of holiday seasons to readers near and far!

I have a book manuscript due the first week in January and need to focus on getting it done.

My holiday wish for me:

Except for an occasional holiday greeting, I won’t be posting anything new until sometime that week.

I wish you the warmest, least stressful, and most joyous holidays!

And happiest of new year’s greetings to you all.  May it be a good one (we can and must hope).

Aaron S. Gross, Jody Myers, and Jordan D. Rosenblum.  Feasting and Fasting: The History and Ethics of Jewish Food.  New York University Press, 2020. 

This book comes with heavy-duty endorsements: a Foreword by Hasia Diner, and an Afterword by Jonathan Safran Foer.

I was interested to read it and did a blurb for it.

Feasting and Fasting is a fascinating account of the history of Jewish food, within and outside of dietary laws.   The authors engage in Talmudic debates about how specific foods and diets as a whole do or do not define Jewish identity.  Crisco is for Jews?  Peanut oil caused such debates?  Who knew.  This book is a great read.

What to quote?  So many choices.  Here’s a snippet from Jordan Rosenblum’s chapter on Jews and garlic:

After the Exodus from Egypt, when the Israelites wandered in the desert, they grew tired of eating only manna.  Comparing the varied diet that they ate as slaves in Egypt to the unvaried diet that they now enjoyed as free women and men, a few troublemakers complained: “The riffraff in their midst felt a gluttonous craving; and then the Israelites wept and said, “If only we had meat to eat!  We remember the fish that we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.”

This, as it turns out, is the only mention of garlic in the Hebrew Bible.  In this chapter,

we shall briefly explore the historical association between Jews and garlic that develops over the next three millennia.  In doing so, we shall see how garlic eventually functions both internally (by Jews) and externally (by non-Jews) as a symbol that represents Self and Other—or, in the terminology favored in anthropology and food studies, how garlic operates as a metanym for Jews.

Pet food continues to be an ongoing source of news, and pet food politics an ongoing source of interest:

• The FDA reports and classifies pet food recalls on a dedicated website.  There have only been a few recalls recently, but for the big picture, check the recall archive.
• US pet spending grew at double rate of household income.  Pet owners in the United States spent US$87 billion on pets in 2018, up from 2013’s US$57.8 billion according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Survey of Consumer Finances data analyzed by MagnifyMoney.
• Blog: 2020 outlook: Top human food trends, insights for pet food: Debbie Phillips-Donaldson, editor of Pet Food Industry: Pet food in 2020 and beyond can look to human food trends like storytelling, sustainability and ones focused on ingredients and customization.
• 35 lawsuits combine over Hill’s vitamin D dog food recall:  A Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation consolidated 35 lawsuits against Hill’s Pet Nutrition into a single federal legal action.
• Pet Food Processing is another useful source of news and information.

Comment: My book with Malden Nesheim, Feed Your Pet Right, is actually an analysis of the pet food industry.  It came out in 2010 but holds up pretty well, I think, as a means for understanding recent events in pet food politics.