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The meat industry is hard at work these days to overcome concerns about the effect of high-meat diets on health and the climate.  Here are two recent examples.

I.  Early Life Beef Consumption Patterns Are Related to Cognitive Outcomes at 1-5 Years of Age: An Exploratory Study.  Victoria C Wilk, Michelle K McGuire, Annie J Roe.  Nutrients.  2022 Oct 26;14(21):4497.   doi: 10.3390/nu14214497.

II. Approximately Half of Total Protein Intake by Adults Must be Animal-Based to Meet Nonprotein, Nutrient-Based Recommendations, With Variations Due to Age and Sex.  Florent Vieux, Didier Rémond, Jean-Louis Peyraud, Nicole Darmon.  The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 152, Issue 11, November 2022, Pages 2514–2525, https://doi.org/10.1093/jn/nxac150

• Background: Shifting towards a more plant-based diet, as promoted in Western countries, will reduce the animal protein contribution to total proteins. Such a reduction may not only impair protein adequacy, but also the adequacy in other nutrients.
• Conclusions: “this study showed that for this French adult population, the lowest animal protein contributions to total proteins that are compatible with nutritional adequacy, affordability, and eating habits vary from 45% to 60%, depending on age and sex, with the highest contributions needed for older populations and young women.”
• Funding: “MS-Nutrition and MoISA received financial support from the French National Interprofessional Association of Livestock and Meat (Interbev)…Interbev had no role in the design, implementation, analysis, or interpretation of the data.”
• Author disclosures: “The authors report no conflicts of interest.”

Comment: These are classic examples of article titles that make me immediately ask: Who paid for this?   Bingo!   They are also classic examples of studies with conclusions that can easily be predicted if you know who funded them.  The authors may believe that they have no conflicts of interest but it sure looks like they do.

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Chloe Sorvino.  Raw Deal: Hidden Corruption, Corporate Greed, and the Fight for the Future of Meat.  Atria Books, 2022.  

This is the first analysis I’ve seen of the meat industry from a business perspective.  Corvino is a business reporter from Forbes and did an amazing research job to do this book, including visiting CAFOs, slaughterhouses (she doesn’t say how she talked her way into it), chicken houses, and alternative meat places.  She also talked to a vast number of experts on all sides of the meat issue.  Full disclosure: she interviewed me and quoted me in the book in a couple of places.

I was happy to do a blurb for it.

Raw Deal is Chloe Sorvino’s deeply reported, first-hand account of how business imperatives drive the meat industry to mistreat workers, pollute the environment, fix prices, bribe, and manipulate the political process, all in the name of shareholder profits.  She argues convincingly for holding this industry accountable and requiring it and other corporations to engage in social as well as fiduciary responsibility.   Raw Deal is a must read for anyone who cares about where our food comes from.

On meat substitutes

I have yet to meet anyone in this industry who says they do not care about climate change.  In fact, many say they are personally driven by their product’s sustainability and environmental potential.  But it’s still all to a certain point.  There’s a reason Impossible Foods is preparing for a potentially $10 billion public listing, and that neither Impossible nor Beyond Meat is registered as public benefit corporations a move that would legally inhibit the companies from putting profit over their environmental mission.  Half of Impossible’s investors come from venture capital firms and the roster even includes a hedge fund, Viking Global Investors. Backers are no doubt ready for an exit, and they want to get Impossible the best deal.  A sustainability halo helps the cause (pp. 169-170).

On support for small local meat producers

Local infrastructure for livestock producers to cook and package products is a key missing link in making local food systems profitable and viable.  Creating lasting impacts wouldn’t cost much.  “We have the information and we have the evidence.  FaWhat we don’t have are the facilities and shared space where multiple people can leverage that at their business’s scale,” Mickie told me.  “It’s just crazy to me to be in a space where we’re trying to meet so many intersecting issues of inequity, and have to prove it one hundred percent, and then in another realm, people are playing with stem cells and getting two hundred million dollars.  We literally feed people and want to do it better )p. 257).

Chloe Sorvino has also published:

• An adapted essay in the Los Angeles Times on universal food access
• An excerpt in Fast Company about whether good meat exists

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The USDA has just published its latest food dollar series.  (And see below for international data.)

And here’s how all that is distributed.

If you are a farmer, you get an average of just over 7 cents on the dollar.

The real money is in processing, retail, and food service—added value, indeed.

The Food and Agriculture Organization is now providing this information for other countries at its new Food Value Chain domain.  This is an interactive site that is not particularly intuitive to use; it will take some fiddling to lmake it work.

The new FAOSTAT domain, which will steadily expand coverage, has information for 65 countries from 2005 through 2015. It shows that around 20 percent of expenditure on food at home accrues to the farmer, around one-fourth to processing, and nearly half to retail and wholesale trade.

Meanwhile, only around 6.7 percent of consumer expenditure on food away from home accrues to the farmer. That figure is steadily decreasing even, highlighting the need to pay attention to the post farm-gate dimension of the food value chains.

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TODAY: @Stphn_Lacey will moderate at 1:00 p.m. ET. Register HERE.

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The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (GHAI) has just released this report.

The report documents how marketing of unhealthy food and beverages is linked to complex political, social, historical, cultural and economic forces that make it a key driver of unhealthy food environments:

• Ultra-processed food and beverage product (UPP) marketers…saturate the marketplace with junk products through tactics that are aggressive, insidious and everywhere.
• Consumers are ambushed with food marketing through the sponsorship of their favorite sports teams, the hidden product placements in their children’s educational shows and the free products that they receive at events.
• The dangers are even more apparent when UPPs target children and adolescents who lack the developmental maturity to distinguish advertisements from entertaining or educational content.
• The UPP industry is notorious for failing to take responsibility for its participation in creating an unhealthier planet.
• The industry instead places blame solely on the individual or the guardian of the child.
• UPP corporations exploit consumers through deception and undue influence, and also gain privileged spaces in policymaking tables.
• UPP marketing threatens public health by decreasing state action to regulate food environments.

More evidence for the need to regulate ultra-processed foods and beverages (see my paper on this precise point).

Let’s get to it !

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Two items about inappropriately targeted marketing.

I.  Online marketing to kids

A coalition of 21 leading advocacy groups, led by Fairplay, a nonprofit children’s advocacy group, and the Center for Digital Democracy, has filed a petition with the Federal Trade Commission to stop online platforms from manipulating children into spending excessive time online.

The petition describes how the vast majority of apps, games, and services popular with kids:

• Generate revenue primarily via advertising
• Employ sophisticated techniques (e.g., autoplay, endless scroll, and strategically timed advertisements) to cultivate lucrative long term relationships between minors and their brands.
• Use platforms like TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat to keep kids online.
• NYT account NYT on advocacy on adv to kids

The New York Times has a story on this report.

II.  Targeting junk food ads to people of color

The University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health has released a new Rudd Report on food marketing targeted to Black and Hispanic consumers.

Its key findings:

• Food and beverage TV advertising is highly concentrated among a small number of companies; 19 companies are responsible for 75% of all food and beverage ad spending, and 82% of marketing targeted to Black consumers.
• The proportion of junk food ads targeted to Black and Hispanic consumers is increasing.

I particularly appreciate Shiriki Kumanika’s comment (in the U. Conn press release) on industry arguments that it is giving customers what they want:

I challenge that view,” said Shiriki Kumanyika, PhD, MPH,professor at Drexel University, Dornsife School of Public Health, and founding chair of the Council on Black Health.“More likely, racialized marketing of unhealthy products reflects a flawed business model in which leveraging the demographics of social disadvantage to maximize profits from unhealthy foods and beverages is acceptable.”

Resources:

• The Rudd Center 2022 update’s executive summary
• The Rudd Center’s Fast Food FACTS 2021 report.
• Infographics, examples of targeted social media campaigns, and fast facts for advocates available HERE
• A USRTK [U.S. Right to Know] fact sheet on targeted junk food marketing
• An account of the report in  The Guardian

More on junk food marketing tomorrow.

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Beyond Meat is taking a beating these days, and this study only adds to its  woes.

Assessing the effects of alternative plant-based meats v. animal meats on biomarkers of inflammation: a secondary analysis of the SWAP-MEAT randomized crossover trial.  Crimarco A, Landry MJ, Carter MM, Gardner CD.  J Nutr Sci.  2022;11:e82.  doi:10.1017/jns.2022.84

Abstract: Alternative plant-based meats have grown in popularity with consumers recently and researchers are examining the potential health effects, or risks, from
consuming these products…the purpose of this work was to conduct a secondary analysis of…a randomised crossover trial that involved generally healthy adults eating 2 or more servings of plant-based meats per day for 8 weeks (i.e. Plant phase) followed by 2 or more servings of animal meats per day for 8 weeks (i.e. Animal phase). Results of linear mixed-effects models indicated only 4 out of 92 biomarkers reached statistical significance. The results were contrary to our hypothesis, since we expected relative improvements in biomarkers of inflammation from the plant-based meats.

Conflicts of interest: “Gardner [the senior author] received gift funding from Beyond Meat which was used to conduct the original research study.”

Comment:  This is a follow up to the original research, which I wrote about previously.  That study found a positive result:

A diet that includes an average of two servings of plant-based meat alternatives lowers some cardiovascular risk factors compared with a diet that instead includes the same amount of animal meat…This study found several beneficial effects and no adverse effects from the consumption of plant-based meats.

The investigators tested the effects of substituting Beyond Meat for animal meats on 92 biomarkers of inflammation.  They found hardly any to be improved by the Beyond Meat substitution.

This disappointed the investigators but I’ll bet it disappointed Beyond Meat even more.

This study was not specifically funded by Beyond Meat.

This work was supported by Stanford University’s Precision Health and Integrated Diagnostics Center (PHIND) and in part by a training grant from the NIH National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute [T32 HL007034].

It is consistent with the overall observation that industry-funded research tends to find results favorable to the sponsor’s interest; independently funded research can go either way.  See my book, Unsavory Truth, for details and references.

Thanks to Stephen Zwick for sending this one.

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Let’s start with this good thought:

The Farm Bureau has released its annual survey of the cost of Thanksgiving dinners, and the results will not surprise anyone who has been to a grocery store lately: up by a whopping 20%.

Food Politics will be back on Monday.  Enjoy the holiday!

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Uh oh.  Plenty of bad news in the plant-based meat arena.

I.  Partnership with health organizations. 

The plant-based meat company, Beyond Meat, is partnering with the American Cancer Society to sponsor research on the potential benefits of plant-based meat to cancer preventon.

Beyond Meat, Inc., a leader in plant-based meat, and the American Cancer Society (ACS), today announced a multi-year agreement to advance research on plant-based meat and cancer prevention, as well as to help ACS continue to build the foundation of plant-based meat and diet data collection. The commitment aims to advance the understanding of how plant-based meats contribute to healthy diet patterns and their potential role in cancer prevention and is a crucial step towards long-term research in the plant-based protein field.

Here’s the Cancer Society’s rationale:

Since 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified red meat as a carcinogen that increases the risk of colorectal cancer, and recent studies also suggest a possible role of red and/or processed meats in increasing the risk of breast cancer and certain forms of prostate cancer.  For years, the American Cancer Society investigators conducted foundational work identifying the link of red and processed meat to cancer…ACS guidelines point to evidence of a significant link between high red and processed meat consumption and an increased risk of colorectal cancer as the primary reason for the recommendation to limit those products.

OK, but research sponsored by a company that stands to benefit from studies showing a benefit of highly processed plant-based meat substitutes?

My prediction: the studies will show benefits.

If the ACS wants such studies, it should fund them on its own.

II.  Dirty factories.

Bloomberg News has a report on unclean and unsafe conditions in a Beyond Meat factory.

III.  Loss of customers.

The New York Times says Beyond Meat is struggling.

But these days, Beyond Meat has lost some of its sizzle.

Its stock has slumped nearly 83 percent in the past year. Sales, which the company had expected to rise as much as 33 percent this year, are now likely to show only minor growth…In late October, the company said it was laying off 200 people, or 19 percent of its work force. And four top executives have departed in recent months, including the chief financial officer, the chief supply chain officer and the chief operating officer, whom Beyond Meat had suspended after his arrest on allegations that he bit another man’s nose in a parking garage altercation.

What investors and others are debating now is whether Beyond Meat’s struggles are specific to the company or a harbinger of deeper issues in the plant-based meat industry.

IV.  Business issues.

The Wall Street Journal reports: “Beyond Meat’s Very Real Problems: Slumping Sausages, Mounting Losses.”

Mr. Brown has said Beyond and other meat-alternative companies are facing challenges as they compete with less expensive real meat at a time of inflation and consumer uncertainty over the health benefits of what many see as highly processed products.

IV.  More research needed.

A study looking at the implications of replacing meat with plant-based alternatives makes that point clearly.

See: Santo RE, et al.  Considering Plant-Based Meat Substitutes and Cell-Based Meats: A Public Health and Food Systems Perspective.  Front. Sustain. Food Syst., 31 August 2020.

Research to date suggests that many of the purported environmental and health benefits of cell-based meat are largely speculative…The broader socioeconomic and political implications of replacing farmed meat with meat alternatives merit further research.

An additional factor to consider is that much of the existing research on plant-based substitutes and cell-based meats has been funded or commissioned by companies developing these products, or by other organizations promoting these products.

Of course we need more research.  Don’t we always?

The bottom line:  It’s hard to convince people to like fake foods, especially when they are expensive.

Soylent Green, anyone?

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