Search results: natural

In the latest episode in the ongoing saga of high levels of arsenic in rice cereal marketed to babies, Beech-Nut says it is going out of the rice cereal business.

In addition to issuing the voluntary recall, Beech-Nut has also decided to exit the market for Beech-Nut branded Single Grain Rice Cereal. Beech-Nut is concerned about the ability to consistently obtain rice flour well-below the FDA guidance level and Beech-Nut specifications for naturally occurring inorganic arsenic.

Background: I have been posting about arsenic in rice since 2013.  In 2015, I wrote about how

• Rice cereals contain higher-than-desirable levels of arsenic.
• Arsenic gets into rice from natural sources but also from arsenic pesticides.
• The FDA says these levels do not pose health problems.
• Consumer Reports recommends not feeding rice cereals to children.
• The U.S. Rice Federation said the CR recommendation was not supported by science.

In August 2020, the FDA finally set guidelines for upper limits of arsenic in baby foods.  I wrote most recently—in May this year—about pressures on the FDA to set and enforce more rigorous standards and to go beyond its “Closer to Zero” plan to reduce heavy metals in baby foods.

Now the FDA announces the recall of Beech-Nut rice cereal with levels of arsenic that exceed those standards.

The Environmental Working Group asks if you should worry about arsenic in rice.  Its answer: Yes.

Rice, it points out, is a “specifically risky crop. Eating less rice and foods with rice-based ingredients will decrease the amount of arsenic in your body.”

EWG also recommends government actions:

• Crop monitoring programs
• Soil testing
• Elimination of use of sewage sludge as fertilizer (this practice is forbidden in organic foods)
• Clear communication of risks

At long last, pressures to fix this problem are having an effect.

Lawsuits also might help, as indicated by this item.

Heavy metals in baby food: 86 lawsuits and counting as Beech-Nut decides to exit infant rice cereal category owing to inorganic arsenic concerns:  At least 86 lawsuits have now been filed against firms named in the recent Congressional Subcommittee report on heavy metals in baby food including Beech-Nut Nutrition, which has just announced plans to exit the infant rice cereal category citing difficulties in sourcing rice flour that is consistently below FDA guidance levels for inorganic arsenic…. Read more

Pet foods may seem unrelated to food politics but they constitute a vital part of the food system  For one thing, they use up a large part of the byproducts of human food production that would otherwise be wasted.

They also are big business.  The US pet foods brought in $99 billion in sales in 2020.

Nestlé (no relation) is one of the largest pet food producers.  As Quartz puts it, Nestle’s big bet on pet food is paying dividends during the pandemic.

A beloved animal friend for you means big business for Nestle. According to an earnings report released today, the Swiss company reported 3.5% organic growth so far in 2020, and 4.9% growth in the third quarter, its highest level of quarterly growth in the past six years…its pet food brand, Purina PetCare, was a main contributor in each of the company’s global markets, growing 10.6% so far this year, CFO Francois-Xavier Roger said on a call for investors.

To my great amusement, pet food marketing closely follows current food fads.  Why am I amused?  Dogs don’t care what they eat, but their humans do.

• Cell-based meat for pets: A handful of startup companies are using cell-based meat in pet food, a large market now supplied by food-bearing animals; one uses cells from mice for cat food and cells from rabbits for dog food. (Modern Farmer)
• Unleash the Power of Postbiotics in Pets:  Pet parents continue to turn towards natural foods, recognizable ingredients, and supplements. As this trend and purchasing pattern continues, we see another ingredient category emerge – Postbiotics.  Read more

And we now have insect-based pet foods.

• Insect protein demand by pet food may be 165k tons by 2030:  As a pet food ingredient, insect meal can serve as an alternative protein source for dogs and cats with allergies or sensitivities. The pet food market currently accounts for the largest share of demand for insect protein and is likely to remain one of the largest, one industry professional said.Read more
• Insect-based pet foods not risk for zoonotic pandemic:  A team of researchers at Ÿnsect has been working to assess potential risks from mealworm farming operations.  Read more
• Insect-based pet food news: Like insects themselves emerging in spring, insect-based pet food ingredient suppliers and the products that use them have been active lately. Mars Petcare plans to introduce an insect-based cat food, Lovebug, in the United Kingdom.

Pet food safety is an ongoing issue, particularly from Salmonella contamination.  What interested me about this particular recall—Billy+Margot Wild Kangaroo and Superfoods Recipe Dog Food—was its main ingredient, wild kangaroo, and that it is being marketed as a superfood (no such thing exists).

If you have purchased Billy+Margot Wild Kangaroo and Superfoods Recipe in a 4 lb bag, with lot code V 07 Feb 2022 from any retail store nationally, please stop feeding the product to your dogs, dispose of this product immediately, wash your hands accordingly, and sanitize affected surfaces.

Weight loss in dogs and owners:  If one loses weight, the other does too!

My ongoing interest in this topic is a result of having written two books about pet foods:

• Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine (2008)—an account of the pet food recalls of 2007 and their implications for the health of dogs and cats, but also for the FDA, food safety policy in the United States and China, international food trade, and the pet food industry itself.
• Feed Your Pet Right (with Malden Nesheim, 2010)—an examination of the booming pet food industry—its history, constituent companies, products, and marketing practices.

I got a press release from the USDA last week: USDA Releases 90-Day Progress Report on Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today published the 90-Day Progress Report on Climate-Smart Agriculture and Forestry.

The report represents an important step toward in President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad and shift towards a whole-of-department approach to climate solutions. The Order, signed January 27, states that, “America’s farmers, ranchers, and forest landowners have an important role to play in combating the climate crisis and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, by sequestering carbon in soils, grasses, trees, and other vegetation and sourcing sustainable bioproducts and fuels.”

This report is the result of a presidential executive order in January requiring the USDA to say how it plans to promote climate-friendly agriculture.  It pretty much summarizes what the USDA has been doing and intends to do more of in the future.

Actually, the USDA has a lot to say about climate change.  It just wasn’t allowed to, at least publicly, during the previous administration.

For example, the USDA published Building Blocks for Climate Smart Agriculture and Forestry in May 2016.

The agency has web pages devoted to climate-change topics; each of these comes with additional pages on sub-heading topics.

• Climate solutions
• Climate change
• Climate hubs (regions) 
• USDA agencies involved in climate change efforts
• USDA training programs in regenerative agriculture
• Research on climate change

It looks to me as though this agency is taking a lead role on climate change, at least in some ways.

But what about meat?  Politico notes that the Biden administration is keeping hands off that issue.

President Joe Biden is not going to ban red meat. In fact, his administration isn’t doing much to confront the flow of harmful greenhouse gases from the very big business of animal agriculture.

The Agriculture Department’s newly published “climate-smart agriculture and forestry” outline says almost nothing about how Biden aims to curb methane emissions from livestock operations. But environmentalists argue that any effort to shrink the farm industry’s climate footprint is half-baked if it relies on voluntary efforts and doesn’t address America’s system of meat production.

I saw this question on The Lunch Tray, Bettina Siegel’s column on Substack.

Turns out that lots of people have no idea what’s in these things.

That’s what my NYU colleague Jennifer Pomeranz and Jennifer Harris of the University of Connecticut’s Rudd Center found in their recent study,  Misperceptions about added sugar, non-nutritive sweeteners and juice in popular children’s drinks: Experimental and cross-sectional study with U.S. parents of young children (1-5 years)

Their overall finding: Most parents in their survey did not know what was in these drinks.

• 62% could not identify most drinks that contained diet sweeteners, even when shown the information panel with nutrition and ingredient information.
• Parents overestimated the average percent juice content in sugar-sweetened drinks, believing that these drinks contained 22% juice, when they actually contained 3% juice on average.
• Even with the nutrition information and ingredient list on the information panel, 53% incorrectly believed that unsweetened 100% juice and/or juice/water blends contained added sugar.
• Parents were more likely to believe that statements of identity with the words “natural” and “water beverage” meant the drink did not contain added sugar or diet sweeteners and did contain juice, although they are commonly used on children’s flavored water drinks that contain added sugar, diet sweeteners, and no juice.

These drinks are confusing (deliberately, I’m guessing) and it’s understandable why their contents are obscure.

The authors recommendation is a  good one, in my view.

Put on the front label of juice drinks:

• Added sugars (this is currently buried in the Nutrition Facts label)
• Diet sweeteners
• Juice content

I’ve written previously about the alarming findings of toxic heavy metals in baby foods.  These toxins are in all foods, but are particularly harmful to infants and young children, a situation that calls for immediate FDA action to set limits on the amounts these foods contain.

The FDA has a Q and A on this issue.  It has also issued previous guidance.

• Metals and Your Food
• What FDA is Doing to Protect Consumers from Toxic Metals in Foods
• What You Can Do to Limit Exposure to Arsenic
• Arsenic in Food and Dietary Supplements
• FDA Makes Available Results from Testing of Infant Rice Cereal for Inorganic Arsenic

In response to many complaints, the FDA has now issued a plan for action:  “Closer to Zero.”

Translation: the agency will propose action levels (limits on allowable amounts), consult with stakeholders, finalize the limits, and then evaluate how the whole thing works to reduce intake levels.

Timeline: It plans to do this starting now, with the aim of finishing the process by 2025.

The FDA must not consider limiting toxic metals in baby food to be urgent.

No wonder some members of Congress have introduced la bill to force the FDA to set limits for the most common toxic metals within a year.  It suggests what those limits should be: 10 parts per billion for inorganic arsenic in baby food (15 ppb for cereal); 5 ppb for both cadmium and lead (10 ppb for cereal); and 2 ppb for mercury.

While all this is going on, what are parents to do?

Suggestions from Harvard Health

The FDA is working on doing better monitoring and regulation of heavy metals in commercial baby foods. In the meantime, it’s nearly impossible to know which are completely safe and which aren’t. Babies don’t need solid foods until 6 months of age. At that time it’s perfectly fine to give them soft table foods instead of baby foods. You can also make your own baby food, using steamed or naturally soft foods and a blender. (Storage tip: you can pour a homemade puree into an ice cube tray and freeze it, and then just grab the cubes you need each time.)

Suggestions from Healthy Children

• Give your child a wide variety of different foods (the more natural colors, the better).
• Vary the grains. As mentioned above, it’s best to limit rice and rice products (check labels — rice is in a lot of foods marketed for babies, like “puffs”). Try barley, oats, and other grains. When cooking rice, it’s best to cook it in extra water and drain that water off, and to use white basmati and sushi rice, which have less arsenic.
• Check your water. Old pipes can contain lead, which can leach into drinking water.
• Avoid fruit juices. Not only can they increase the risk of cavities and obesity, but many commercial juices also contain heavy metals.
• Make healthy fish choices. Fish contains nutrients that are very healthy for the developing brain, but some fish can contain unhealthy amounts of mercury. Stay clear of big, predatory, long-living fish like swordfish, shark, or albacore tuna; it’s better to choose fish like cod, light tuna, salmon, or pollock.

In the meantime…

• The lawsuits!  At least 69 had been filed as of April 29.
• The New York Attorney General is also looking into this.

I don’t follow cookbooks closely but was surprised to see Stained Page News’ account of an entire cookbook genre devoted to cooking with Cannabis.

I knew about Elise McDonough’s writings in High Times, but had not paid much attention to her Official High Times Cannabis Cookbook when it came out.  Stained Page News explains:

Author Elise McDonough is foundational to the modern cannabis cookbook space. A cannabis consumer since her teens, she eventually found herself working for the flagship subculture magazine High Times while taking classes at New York’s Natural Gourmet Institute. McDonough says that the magazine would field recipes from contributors, who often sent them in without photography, and they’d have to re-create the dish in order to print it. “That really got me into the idea of cooking with cannabis—learning a lot of techniques, an interest in food style and prop styling for photography, that got me started,” she said.

Here is SPN’s Guide to Cannabis Cookbooks

• The Official High Times Cannabis Cookbook by Elise McDonough and the Editors of High Times
• Brownie Mary’s Marijuana Cookbook
• Marijuana Cooking: Good Medicine Made Easy by Bliss Cameron and Veronica Green
• The Cannabis Kitchen Cookbook by Robyn Griggs Lawrence
• Cooking With Herb: 75 Recipes For the Marley Natural Lifestyle by CI hedella Marley and Raquel Pelzel
• Bong Appetit by the Editors of Munchies
• The Art of Weed Butter by Mennlay Golokeh Aggrey
• The Art of Cooking with Cannabis: CBD and THC-Infused Recipes from Across America by Tracey Medeiros
• Edibles: Small Bites for the Modern Cannabis Kitchen by Stephanie Hua with Coreen Carroll
• Cannabis Drinks: Secrets to Crafting CBD and THC Beverages at Home by Jamie Evans

Disclaimer: I have never cooked from any of these and cannot vouch for the accuracy of the recipes or their quality.  But if you do cook from them,

• Keep the foods away from young children
• Stay home, don’t drive
• And follow this advice from those more in the know than I am

You might not think that avocados need any special sales efforts, but the Haas Avocado marketers are particularly aggressive in funding research to demonstrate the health benefits of this food.

I’ve written about Haas-funded avocado research previously (most recently, here and here) but here’s yet another, this time initiated by a tweet:

I think avocados are fine foods, love them, but wish their marketers would not do this.  Here’s the Good News Network headline: “An Avocado a Day May Keep Your Gut Microbes Happy, Study Shows.”  As always, the operative word is “may.”  The headline would be equally correct saying “may not.”

The study: Avocado Consumption Alters Gastrointestinal Bacteria Abundance and Microbial Metabolite Concentrations among Adults with Overweight or Obesity: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Sharon V Thompson, Melisa A Bailey, Andrew M Taylor, Jennifer L Kaczmarek, Annemarie R Mysonhimer, Caitlyn G Edwards, Ginger E Reeser, Nicholas A Burd, Naiman A Khan, Hannah D Holscher.  The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 151, Issue 4, April 2021, Pages 753–762.

Conclusions: “Daily avocado consumption resulted in lower fecal bile acid concentrations, greater fecal fatty acid and SCFAs, and greater relative abundances of bacteria capable of fiber fermentation, providing evidence that this nutrient-dense food affects digestive physiology, as well as the composition and metabolic functions of the intestinal microbiota.”

Funding: Support for this research was provided by the Hass Avocado Board and the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Hatch project 1009249.

Author disclosures: NAB, NAK, and HDH received grant funding from the Hass Avocado Board.

Comment: All fruits and vegetables provide nutritional value and the best way to get the nutrients you need is by eating a variety of them.  If you like avocados, include them in that variety.  If not, don’t.

The Haas marketers want you to think that avocados are a superfood.  Alas, there is no such thing.  All fruits and vegetables provide nutritional value.  By that criterion, all fruits and vegetables are superfoods.

Here’s an example of how Haas advertises:

Did you know fresh avocados can be part of the MyPlate food guide?

• Make half your plate fruits and vegetables.

Avocados are a nutrient-dense fruit with naturally good fats and are easily incorporated into various meals and snacks. One serving (50g or one-third of a medium avocado) has only 80 calories and contributes nearly 20 vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients along with dietary fiber.

The same could be said for most other fruits and vegetables, although most will be lower in calories.

I don’t usually pay attention to press releases for food products but this one caught my eye.

Just announced, Nature’s Fynd, the buzzworthy food-tech company growing a nutritional fungi protein named Fy™ that recently raised over $150M in equity and debt financing, opened preorders for a limited release for its Fy Breakfast Bundle…Nature’s Fynd is solving a massive agricultural (and business) need.

The business need I get.  As one of my readers, Kristin Ohlson pointed out, this is an example of “veganism meets venture capital.”

The agricultural need?

Their breakthrough fermentation technology only requires only a fraction of the water, land, and energy of traditional protein sources. And thanks to the natural resilience and efficiency of Fy’s base organism, they make Fy emitting 99% less greenhouse gases, and using 99% less land and 87% less water than processing beef. Plus, the products are incredibly tasty and Fy is good for your body—containing all nine essential amino acids and fiber, with no cholesterol or trans fats. It’s also vegan and certified non-GMO.

Does this remind anyone of Quorn, which the Center for Science in the Public Interest has been complaining about for years?

Despite what some of the manufacturer’s marketing materials indicated, the fungus used in Quorn is only distantly related to mushrooms, truffles, or morels. While all are members of the fungus kingdom, Quorn is made from a less appetizing fungus (or mold) called Fusarium venenatum (venenatum is the Latin word for venomous).

Fy protein comes from Fusar­i­um  flavolapis, which they got out of some Yellowstone hot spring (with permission).

I hope they have done some allergy testing.

I’d like to see the ingredient lists for some of these products.

For the moment, I’ll stick with food.