Happy July 4!
FoodPolitics is taking the 5th off. Back on Monday. Enjoy the weekend. And a fruit serving!
FoodPolitics is taking the 5th off. Back on Monday. Enjoy the weekend. And a fruit serving!
I saw this headline in the Washington Post: Bayer lobbies Congress to help fight lawsuits tying Roundup to cancer.
The biotech giant Bayer has lobbied Congress over the past year to advance legislation that could shield the company from billions of dollars in lawsuits, part of a national campaign to defeat claims that its weed killer Roundup causes cancer in people who use it frequently…By erecting new legal barriers to bringing those cases, Bayer seeks to prevent sizable payouts to plaintiffs while sparing itself from a financial crisis.
Apparently, the House version of the Farm Bill contains a provision—drafted by Bayer—to protect the company against further lawsuits claimng that the Monsanto herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) causes non-Hodgkins lymphoma and other cancers.
Bayer helped craft that measure, then circulated it among lawmakers to rally support before later pushing the House to add it to the farm bill, the people familiar with the effort said.
Bayer also
has sought to reshape federal, state and local laws, hoping to erect a blockade against future lawsuits. Over the past year, the company has helped advance bills in Idaho, Iowa and Missouri, according to state lobbying records, each of which could effectively immunize the company against allegations that its chemicals can cause cancer. Top company executives have promised to push these policies more aggressively — and in a wider array of states — in the coming legislative year.
Comment
In 2018, Bayer bought Monsanto for $63 billion. What was it thinking? Lawsuits based on the health effects of glyphsate were already well underway, with the courts sometimes awarding plaintiffs millions of dollars in damages.
Thousands of such lawsuits are in play. Bayer admits to 170,000 in total. Bayer settled a lot of them for billions, but at least a third of these claims are still unresolved.
Bayer says glyphosate is not carcinogenic and the Environmental Protection Agency agrees. But the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, identifies glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic.”
Juries, appalled by evidence that Monsanto had hidden evidence of harm, sometimes rule in favor of plaintiffs.
Bayer’s stock prices have taken a hit.
It’s not clear whether the company will survive.
Bayer’s greed about monopolizing seed stocks brought on this problem.
The Farm Bill is not the place to solve it.
Bayer does not deserve this level of protection.
Food corporations should not be writing the Farm Bill.
Resource
Civil Eats did an investigation of Bayer’s legal strategies. See this report here.
The headline in The Guardian: UK children shorter, fatter and sicker amid poor diet and poverty, report finds.
It’s principal findings:
As it says in the introduction,
Crucially, the report not only highlights a deeply worrying increase in conditions driven by calorie dense diets such as obesity and type 2 diabetes, but also highlights the equally concerning and substantially less talked about results of poor-quality diets and undernutrition….All children should be able to eat in way that fuels their bodies and minds, giving them sufficient calories and nutrients to be free from hunger and diseases of nutritional deficiency, while being protected from the bombardment of ultra-processed, highly sugary and salty foods that most often contribute to excess calorie intake but lack vitamins, minerals, fibre, healthy fats and quality protein.
Comment
I’m guessing if a similar study were to be done in the United States, its results would be similar. Children are the future of our nation and society; they deserve good health and protection against junk food.
I saw this one in a newsletter:
Ashwagandha intake linked to memory and attention benefits: Acute and repeated supplementation with liposomal ashwagandha may boost select cognitive effects, including memory, attention, vigilance and reaction time in healthy adults, says a new study…. Read more
The study: Leonard, M.; Dickerson, B.; Estes, L.; Gonzalez, D.E.; Jenkins, V.; Johnson, S.; Xing, D.; Yoo, C.; Ko, J.; Purpura, M.; et al. Acute and Repeated Ashwagandha Supplementation Improves Markers of Cognitive Function and Mood. Nutrients 2024, 16, 1813. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16121813
Background: “Ashwagandha has been reported to reduce stress and attenuate cognitive decline associated with inflammation and neurodegeneration in clinical populations. However, the effects as a potential nootropic [cognitive-enhancing] nutrient in younger populations are unclear.”
Method: 59 men and women were given either a placebo or ashwagandha and given various cognitive function tests at baseline and one month.
Results: Ashwagandha supplementation improved acute and/or 30-day measures of various tests.
Conclusion: “Results support contentions that ashwagandha supplementation (225 mg) may improve some measures of memory, attention, vigilance, attention, and executive function while decreasing perceptions of tension and fatigue in younger healthy individuals.”
Funding: “The Human Clinical Research Facility at Texas A&M University received a fee-for-service award from Specnova LLC (Tysons Corner, VA, USA) in collaboration with Increnovo LLC (Whitefish Bay, WI, USA). Members of the Exercise & Sport Nutrition Lab collected and independently analyzed the data. Specnova was not involved in data collection, analysis, or manuscript writing.”
Comment: This is your typical industry-funded study with a title triggering my standard question: Who paid for this?
Specnova’s mission: “Sourcing new, concentrated bioactives from the world’s most fertile regions, and applying the latest technologies for yielding an expanded scope of health claims. Our difference is your competitive edge.” Increnovo “offers consultancy to the nutritional supplement and food and beverage industries in the following areas: Research and development, Pioneering of new ingredients and products, New technologies, and Guidance in the areas of product marketing and distribution.”
Like most dietary supplements, this one is said to perform miracles. Also like most supplements, the evidence for those miracles ramains weak.
The NIH Office of Dietary Supplements says
Several randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trials, most of them fairly small in size and of short duration, have found that ashwagandha may reduce perceived stress and anxiety and improve the quality and duration of sleep [6,7,31]. Because studies have used various ashwagandha preparations (with different extraction and standardization processes) and doses, it is difficult to identify specific extracts or recommended amounts [6,32]…In addition, ashwagandha may have potential adverse effects on the liver and thyroid and might not be safe for people with prostate cancer or those who are pregnant or nursing.
The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says:
- Research shows that some ashwagandha preparations may be effective for insomnia and stress. However, evidence is unclear about its effects on anxiety.
- There is some limited evidence that suggests that taking ashwagandha for 2 to 4 months may increase testosterone levels and sperm quality.
- There isn’t enough evidence to determine if ashwagandha is helpful for any other health conditions, such as asthma, athletic performance, cognitive function, diabetes, menopause, and female infertility.
- There is not enough high-quality evidence suggesting that ashwagandha is helpful in treating COVID-19.
When it comes to supplements, evidence is not the issue. Belief is what matters. The mere suggestion that a supplement might work is all it takes to convince people to buy it. And if nothing else, supplements have powerful placebo effects. We could all use some of those these days.
The USDA has just summarized its accomplishments with respect to food and nutrition assisttance since the pandemic. It’s an impressive list.
The report has loads of enlightening charts. This one shows the substantial increase in spending on food assistance over the years, and recently.
This report has the advantage of putting everything in one place.
This report uses preliminary data from USDA, Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) to examine program trends and policy changes in USDA’s largest domestic food and nutrition assistance programs through FY 2023. It also summarizes two 2023 USDA, Economic Research Service (ERS) reports including one that examines the prevalence of household food insecurity in the United States in 2022 and another that documents the share of households with school-aged children reporting difficulty paying for expenses after pandemic waivers allowing schools to serve free meals expired in 2022.
If you want to understand why food assistance is anything but a bipartisan issue, the facts and figures here tell the story. I’m glad to have this one.
If you haven’t been worried about microplastics in your body, perhaps this study will get your attention.
Here’s the abstract:
Its alarming conclusion:
The detection of MPs in penile tissue raises inquiries on the ramifications of environmental pollutants on sexual health.
Our research adds a key dimension to the discussion on man-made pollutants, focusing on MPs in the male reproductive system.
Everyone is worried about the decline in male sperm counts. Could endocrine disrupting plastics be a cause? If so, it’s time to get serious about cleaning them up and not producing more.
This is a big personal loss. I met Narsai David—chef, host, raconteur, radio personality, philanthropist, theater lover, friend—in 1955 when we lived at the student co-ops at Berkeley. These required 5 hours of work a week, and I did mine peeling potatoes under Narsai’s supervision at the co-op central kitchen.
We stayed in touch over the years, sometimes memorably, as when we were both filmed with Craig Claiborne and Frank Blair for the KQED show, Over Easy in 1980 or so (that’s me on the right).
And then there was the 1997 Oldways trip to Crete where Narsai whipped off breads for the hundred or so guests lucky enough to be at that dinner.
He was the most extraordinarily generous person, quietly contributing to food, co-op, theater, and I’m sure other groups throughout the Bay Area. He was on my list for people to see every time I was out there, sometime appearing on his radio show, and sometimes invited to his and Veni’s home for warm and gracious evenings.
We were friends for more than 60 years, it shocks me to realize. I’m so saddened by his loss.
The California Table Grape Commission funds lots of research for an explicit purpose: “to help discover how and why grapes are beneficial to health.”
It lengthy list of funded projects is here. Published studies are here.
You want to do one of these studies? Let them know here.
Grape research is conducted using a freeze-dried table grape powder, designed to facilitate reproducible data and to provide researchers with a grape sample that is available year-round. Additionally, a grape powder placebo is made available.
Comment: If you want funding, you need to design your study to show benefits. The Commission is unlikely to risk funding proposals unlikely to show benefits. [Thanks to David Michaels for sending this one].
And Charles Platkin sent me the press release for one of the Commission’s funded studies: Hu, W., Zheng, R., Feng, Y., Tan, D., Chung-Tsing, G.C., Su, X., and Kim, J.E. (2023). Impacts of regular consumption of grapes on macular pigment accumulation in Singapore older adults: a randomized, controlled trial. Food Funct. 14, 8321-8330. Doi: 10.1039/d3fo02105j. The abstract is here.
Conclusions: Regular intake of grapes may improve eye health in Singapore older adults, specifically in augmenting MPOD, which can be explained by an increase in plasma total antioxidant capacity and phenolic content, and the downregulation of AGEs.
I’m all for eating grapes and every other fruit. Does one kind of fruit have more substantial effects on health than any other? The study did not compare grapes to any other fruit; it just looked at the benefits of grapes.
I’m guessing lots of other fruits will do the same.
The moral: eat a variety of fruits and vegetables. And be skeptical about the importance of studies like this.