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Thanks to Georgene Grover for sending this one, with this comment: “What about this? Ten prunes a day seems excessive!”

The study:  The Role of Prunes in Modulating Inflammatory Pathways to Improve Bone Health in Postmenopausal Women.  Janhavi J Damani, Mary Jane De Souza, Hannah L VanEvery, Nicole CA Strock, and Connie J Rogers. Adv Nutr 2022;00:1–17.

Purpose:  Prunes (dried plums; Prunus domestica L.) have been studied as a potential whole-food dietary intervention to mitigate bone loss in preclinical models of osteoporosis and in osteopenic postmenopausal women.

Method: This is a review of previous studies.  It summarizes findings from preclinical and clinical studies that have assessed the effect of prunes on oxidative stress, inflammatory mediators, and bone outcomes. Most of the studies that reported effects required 100 grams per day of prunes (about 10 per day).

Conclusion: Overall, evidence from in vitro, preclinical studies, and limited clinical studies suggests the potential role of prunes in ameliorating bone loss.

Funding and COI: Supported by the California Prune Board provided funding to MJDS and CJR. Publication funds came from the Hershey Company endowment, Department of Nutritional Sciences, Penn State University. California Dried Plum Board (grant no. 100804). Author disclosures: CJR is member of the Nutrition Advisory Panel for the California Dried Plum Board. The other authors report no conflicts of interest.

Comment: This is a standard industry-funded paper with a predictable outcome.  As far as I can tell, every food trade association is funding research that can help with marketing.  Even prunes.

Prunes are fine, but studies of one food don’t really tell you anything about diets as a whole.  Eat prunes if you like them.  Ten prunes means ten plums.  Seems like a lot, no?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released its 6th report.  

The news gets worse with each successive report.

Human-induced climate change is causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature and affecting the lives of billions of people around the world, despite efforts to reduce the risks. People and ecosystems least able to cope are being hardest hit…The world faces unavoidable multiple climate hazards over the next two decades with global warming of 1.5°C (2.7°F). Even temporarily exceeding this warming level will result in additional severe impacts, some of which will be irreversible. Risks for society will increase, including to infrastructure and low-lying coastal settlements.

One paragraph (C.2.2) deals with the effects of agriculture on climate change, and the strength of the associations.

• Effective adaptation options, together with supportive public policies enhance food availability and stability and reduce climate risk for food systems while increasing their sustainability (medium confidence).
• Effective options include cultivar improvements, agroforestry, community-based adaptation, farm and landscape diversification, and urban agriculture (high confidence).
• Institutional feasibility, adaptation limits of crops and cost effectiveness also influence the effectiveness of the adaptation options (limited evidence, medium agreement).
• Agroecological principles and practices, ecosystem-based management in fisheries and aquaculture, and other approaches that work with natural processes support food security, nutrition, health and well-being, livelihoods and biodiversity, sustainability and ecosystem services (high confidence).
• These services include pest control, pollination, buffering of temperature extremes, and carbon sequestration and storage (high confidence).
• Trade-offs and barriers associated with such approaches include costs of establishment, access to inputs and viable markets, new knowledge and management (high confidence) and their potential effectiveness varies by socioeconomic context, ecosystem zone, species combinations and institutional support (medium confidence).
• Integrated, multi-sectoral solutions that address social inequities and differentiate responses based on climate risk and local situation will enhance food security and nutrition (high confidence).
• Adaptation strategies which reduce food loss and waste or support balanced diets (as described in the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land) contribute to nutrition, health, biodiversity and other environmental benefits (high confidence).

Here are the documents:

• Summary for policymakers
• Figures for policymakers
• Technical summary
• Full report

The previous IPCC reports

• The Overview of the First Assessment Report (1990)
• The IPCC Second Assessment Report Synthesis of Scientific-technical Information Relevant to Interpreting Article 2 of the UNFCCC (1995)
• The Synthesis Report of the Third Assessment Report (2001)
• The Synthesis Report of the Fourth Assessment Report (2007)
• The Synthesis Report of the Fifth Assessment Report (2014)

I am a big fan and daily reader of ConscienHealth, mainly because its producer, Ted Kyle, invariably and consistently has something interesting to say about whatever he is writing about (obesity and health, usually).

I liked this one so much—it sounds just like something I would say—that I asked his permission to reproduce it.  He agreed.  Enjoy!

Controlled Study Shows How to Sell Less Easter Candy (if you click on the link, you can find the place to subscribe or comment)

Not every study in PLOS Medicine is thoroughly impressive, but this one is pure genius. Researchers at the University of Oxford have discovered that if grocers don’t promote Easter candy, they will sell less of it. But wait, there’s more. Those same researchers showed that promoting “healthy items” – like low fat potato chips – yields higher sales for those health-promoting snacks.

PLOS Academic Editor Jean Adams obviously recognized the genius of this research by Carmen Piernas, Georgina Harmer, and Susan Jebb. So she published an opinion paper alongside them, praising it. She says:

“Piernas and colleagues’ studies add to the accumulating evidence that restricting marketing on less healthy foods and encouraging marketing on healthier foods may be an effective way to support public health.”

But she also lamented the fact that implementation of tighter regulation of food marketing is slow to come. She calls it “a sad indictment of our collective inability to create a world that supports everyone to eat in the way they want to, rather than the way the marketers want for us.”

Easter Egg Hunts and a Trip to the Zoo

There’s a lot of great material in this trifecta of medical research and commentary. Adams tells us that supermarkets are out of control:

“The concentration of food marketing in grocery stores can feel particularly overwhelming with parents describing the ‘temptation’ as ‘like a trip to the zoo every week’ for their children.”

Seeing the brilliance of this research and commentary, headline writers got into the spirit. Our favorite:

Hiding Easter eggs better in supermarkets could rescue UK’s waistlines, Oxford study claims

Clearly, journalists understand how to capture the essence of serious public health science.

Actual Health Outcomes?

Crispy Fruit, photo by Ted Kyle

There’s just one tiny gap in this beautiful story. None of this research offers any evidence of healthier waistlines. It presumes that selling less Easter candy and more low-fat chips will cause waistlines to shrink.

Good luck with that. For decades now, food marketers in the U.S. have been selling us all kinds of food with claims that it’s healthy stuff to eat. Sales boomed and obesity kept rising. Onward and upward.

So count us skeptical that selling more low-fat chips and a little less Easter candy will put a dent in the UK problem with obesity.

Click here for the Easter candy study and here for the study of merchandising for low-fat chips. For the commentary by Adams, click here. And if this screed hasn’t been enough, click here for our further thoughts on the quest for a sustainable, nourishing, food supply.

I received a press release announcing a June conference to be held by the Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences.

I had never heard of it.  It says it “is a non-profit organization that catalyzes science for the benefit of public health” and that it “drives, funds, and leads actionable research and elevates food safety and nutritional sciences—all with the ultimate goal of advancing public health.”

That seemed pleasant, if vague, but I was still puzzled.  Nothing on the Institute’s website helped.

This took some digging, but I soon found a news release announcing its formation in February 2021: Leading Scientists Launch Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences to Promote Collaborative Research:

Today marks the establishment of the Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences (IAFNS), a 501(c)(3) organization focused on catalyzing science for the benefit of public health.

Previously known as the International Life Sciences Institute, North America, IAFNS is building on a proud heritage with a focus on actionable science that promotes nutrition, food safety and public health.

Aha!  ILSI,  The classic industry front group.

ILSI, you may recall, was formed by Coca-Cola.

Within the last few years, lots of articles have appeared describing its lobbying efforts on behalf of the food industry.  Some of these were so blatant that Mars withdrew from in in 2018 and Coca-Cola withdrew in 2021.

I’ve written about ILSI often over the years.  See, for example, this post about IlSI’s effort in China.  Or see this article about scientific integrity (or the lack thereof).

Could all the bad press have anything to do with the name change?

A leopard cannot change its spots, alas.

The USDA tracks food insecurity in the United States.

The percentage closely tracks employment.  The 2008 recession caused an uptick, but then it declined.

Now it’s up again, thanks to the pandemic’s putting so many people out of work and causing food prices to rise.

The 2020 figure is nearly 15%, with 6.8% of children having especially low food security.

The Biden administration is working on this, as well it should.

I like French fries as much as anyone but c’mon; they are hardly a health food.

The Alliance for Potato Research & Education sent me a press release about a new study demonstrating that “adding a daily 300-calorie serving of French fries to one’s typical diet every day for one month does not result in differential short-term weight gain or other biomarker changes associated with impaired blood sugar regulation compared to adding an isocaloric daily serving of almonds.”

The study: French-fried potatoes consumption and energy balance: a randomized controlled trial.  Daniel L Smith, Jr, Rebecca L Hanson, Stephanie L Dickinson, Xiwei Chen, Amy M Goss, John B Cleek, W Timothy Garvey, David B Allison.  The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, nqac045, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqac045

Purpose: “We completed an RCT [randomized controlled trial] testing whether increased daily potato consumption influences energy balance (specifically, fat mass (FM)) compared with calorie-matched almond consumption.”  Participants were given 300 calories a day in either fries (~3 oz) or almonds (~40).

Conclusion: There were no significant differences in FM [fat mass] or in glucoregulatory biomarkers after 30 days of potato consumption versus almonds. Results do not support a causal relationship between increased French fried potato consumption and the negative health outcomes studied.

Funding: This study was supported in part by a grant from the Alliance for Potato Research and Education (APRE) to DBA and DLS, by Core services through NIH grant awards P30DK056336 and P60DK079626 and the donation of study food items by J.R. Simplot Company.

Comment:  I’m not surprised by this result.   Biomarkers depend on everything you eat, not just one food.

The purpose of this study was to take away any guilt you might feel about eating French fries.   The potato alliance got the result it wanted.

I’ve been collecting items on food waste.  Here are four recent ones.

I.  EPA: From Farm to Kitchen: The Environmental Impacts of Food Waste.   The Infographic Summary:

II.  WWF: Driven to Waste: The Global Impact of Food Loss and Waste on Farms.

Driven to Waste: Global Food Loss on Farms, a new report from WWF and Tesco, reveals an estimated 2.5 billion tonnes of food goes uneaten around the world each year. That is an increase of approximately 1.2 billion tonnes on the established estimates of 1.3 billion tonnes wasted each year. These new estimates indicate that of all the food grown, approximately 40 per cent goes uneaten, which is higher than the previously estimated figure of 33 per cent.

III.  Washington State Department of Ecology: Use Food Well Washington: A roadmap to a more resilient food system through food waste reduction].

Food waste is one of the greatest challenges of our time, with significant environmental, social, and economic impacts. Thankfully, our research shows the potential benefits to addressing food waste in Washington are just as enormous (Fig. 1).
Our calculations indicate Washington generates more than one million tons of food waste annually, with a large portion (about 35 percent) being edible food going into landfills.

IV.  How are food manufacturers tackling waste management?  As 2022 gets underway, waste management has moved from arguably to inarguably never more important…. Read more