I thought I already knew all the issues raised by palm fats, which I’ve written about previously, but also because I did a blurb for Jocelyn Zuckerman’s forthcoming Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World (New Press).  Nope.  Wrong.

Welcome to “Buttergate,” the latest palm fat scandal.

I thought I knew all the issues raised by palm fats, which I’ve written about previously, but also because I did a blurb for Jocelyn C. Zuckerman.  Planet Palm: How Palm Oil Ended Up in Everything—and Endangered the World (New Press) which is not yet out but coming soon.  How wrong I was.

Welcome to “Buttergate,” the latest palm fat scandal.

This begins with Canadians asking why, all of a sudden, is butter not getting soft at room temperature.

The answer: farmers are feeding cows palm oil, which is high in saturated (hard) fat

Why would they do this?  Because it increases production of milk fat.  And because it makes milk fat more highly saturated, butter gets harder.

The Canadian dairy industry is being asked to stop this practice because it breaches the dairy industry’s “ moral compact with Canadians.”

Do dairy foods need to be harder at room temperature?  No.

Do dairy foods need to be higher in saturated fat?  No.

Is this yet another reason to be wary of palm fat?  Could be.

Are American farmers feeding palm oil to cows?  The U.S. dairy industry is strangely quiet on this question.  US journals report research on its use as cow feed.  And Dairy Farmers of Canada says American dairy farmers do this too.

I did a little investigating.  Here’s what Jamie Jonker, Vice President, Sustainability & Scientific Affairs, National Milk Producers Federation, says about the practices of the U.S. dairy industry:

• Feeding byproducts from other parts of food production to dairy cattle, which recycles ingredients that may otherwise be thrown away, has been a staple of the U.S. dairy industry for decades. Palm oil byproducts fed to dairy cattle in small amounts has been among them.
• The average daily consumption of palm oil per lactating cow in the U.S. is about 0.2 pounds (unpublished data). A lactating cow eats more than 50 pounds of feed (on a dry matter basis) so this is less than 0.4% of total diet.
• There is not a legal limit feeding palm oil byproducts in the U.S., but from a practical standpoint there are dietary limits. Too high fat level in the diet will reduce overall feed consumed which will reduce overall nutrients to the cow decreasing productivity.
• Diet does impact milk composition and dietary fat source can change milk fatty acid profile. There has not been a recent change in use of palm oil byproducts that would cause a discernible difference in butter ‘hardness’ at room temperature.
• The palmitic acid portion of the weight of total fatty acids in butter is roughly 30 percent. That’s a decades-old industry standard that’s remained consistent throughout the pandemic. Palmitic acid is not just from the palm but can also be produced in other plants and organisms at low levels. For example, the amount in human breast milk averages 20 to 25%.

So for U.S. milk users, there doesn’t seem to be anything new here.  The butter I’ve been buying still softens at room temperature, but the ambient temperature has to be really hot to melt it.  Cow’s milk is a source of saturated fat.  Butter is concentrated cow’s milk fat.  Saturated fatty acids are solid at room temperature and that’s why butter is too.

I am staying out of New York City’s campaigns for Mayor, but one of the candidates, Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, is exceptionally interested in food issues.  He, in partnership with NYU’s Stern Center for Sustainable Business, the Cornell University College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and many other food-and-farm groups has produced a report titled The New Agrarian Economy, which outlines why urban agriculture is good for the economy and what needs to be done to support it better.

In the press release, Adams says:

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of our city’s economy and the deep inequities embedded in our food system. Urban agriculture has the potential to revolutionize our urban landscape and play a significant role in an equitable recovery process, helping us to become a greener, healthier, more prosperous city after the pandemic. Our new report lays out a roadmap for achieving that, proposing steps that build on my previous advocacy efforts in Brooklyn. As the past several years have shown, there is tremendous economic potential in this promising sector — we just need the political will to invest the necessary resources to encourage its growth. I thank all of the advocates and industry leaders who offered their input into this report, and look forward to continuing our advocacy to turn our concrete jungle into a green oasis.

This is a serious report, worth serious consideration.  The recommendations in this report are grounded in reality.  I think it’s great that a Borough President/candidate for Mayor cares about food issues in such a constructive way.

“Turn concrete jungles into a green oasis.”  Yes!

Here is the press conference for the report’s release:

The Study:  Maaike J. Bruins and Ulla Létinois. Adequate Vitamin D Intake Cannot Be Achieved within Carbon Emission Limits Unless Food Is Fortified: A Simulation Study.  Nutrients 2021, 13(2), 592; https://doi.org/10.3390/nu13020592

Conclusion: The present study shows that adequate intakes for vitamin D cannot be achieved with the current diet alone within realistic calorie and carbon emission limits, and additional vitamin D sources are needed to overcome the shortfalls. Universal fortification along with small dietary shifts represents an approach to improve the vitamin D status of the general population, at a high acceptability without affecting the carbon footprint.

Conflicts of Interest: M.J.B. and U.L. are employed by DSM Nutritional Products, a manufacturer of nutritional ingredients.

Comment: Study after study shows that vitamin D supplements do not make healthy people healthier, but the idea persists and supplement companies take advantage of faith in these products.  Well, there isn’t much evidence for harm either, but sunshine on skin is a better source by far.

OK.  I know there’s a big controversy about this.

Here’s a study that shows benefits for patients with COVID; supplements were associated with keeping people out of intensive care.  One of its authors has financial ties to supplement companies, but the study has been criticized on other grounds as has a member of the British Parliament who thinks it provides evidence for supplementing everyone.

And here’s an independently funded study in JAMA shows that vitamin D to have no effect on patients hospitalized with Covid-19.

This one, comes with an editorial.

Given the lack of highly effective therapies against COVID-19, except perhaps for corticosteroids, it is important to remain open-minded to emerging results from rigorously conducted studies of vitamin D (despite smaller sample sizes and important limitations of some studies). However, taken together with existing randomized clinical trials of vitamin D administration in hospitalized patients with respiratory infection and critical illness, the results reported by Murai et al¹² do not support routine administration of vitamin D in hospitalized patients with moderate to severe COVID-19.

Fortunately, vitamin D supplements are unlikely to be harmful unless taken in very large doses.

Sunshine, anyone?

Nick Freudenberg.  At What Cost: Modern Capitalism and the Future of Health.  Oxford University Press, 2021.   

I did a blurb for this terrific book:

At What Cost is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why food insecurity, low-wage work, chronic disease, and environmental degradation are such widespread and seemingly intractable problems.  Capitalism may not be their only cause, but it is common to all of them.  This important book provides compelling evidence for the need to join together to change this system to one better for people and the planet.

Here are a few excerpts to give you the idea:

…how capitalism has evolved now undermines health, widens inequality, worsens climate change, and erodes democracy.  Food, education, healthcare, labor, transportation, and social relationships constitute the most basic necessities of life.  Converting them into commodities that must bring profits to their producers if they are to be offered imposes a cost on human and planetary well-being (p. 15).

[Goals for food justice require] changing the dominant corporate system of food and agriculture.  Focusing on the separate goals of each strand rather than the common overarching ones has made the food movement less powerful, less able to win concessions from the highly organized alliance of food and agriculture businesses, and more vulnerable to co-optation by trade groups who offer some factions grants or a seat at the policy table (p. 274).

Corporate-controlled globalization, financialization, deregulation, monopoly concentration, and the corporate capture of new technologies, the defining characteristics of twenty-first-century capitalism, are fundamental causes of multiple and growing threats to well-being.  This commonality justifies a sharp focus on the system that is the underlying cause (p. 277).

To fix food system problems, means fixing capitalism.  That’s the problem that needs our focused attention.  He’s got some ideas about that too.

Here’s another nutrition question that doesn’t go away.

This new study is just out: Egg and cholesterol consumption and mortality from cardiovascular and different causes in the United States: A population-based cohort study.

Its conclusion:

In this study, intakes of eggs and cholesterol were associated with higher all-cause, CVD, and cancer mortality. The increased mortality associated with egg consumption was largely influenced by cholesterol intake. Our findings suggest limiting cholesterol intake and replacing whole eggs with egg whites/substitutes or other alternative protein sources for facilitating cardiovascular health and long-term survival.

This gets right into the funny business of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines.  As I explained,

the recommendation to limit cholesterol has been dropped [from the 2015 Guidelines], 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 lawsuiton that very point.

Well, here we go again.  My thoughts:

This is association, not causation.  The paper gives this caveat: “At baseline, participants with higher whole egg consumption had a higher BMI and lower household income. They were less educated, less physically active, more likely to smoke and have a high cholesterol level, and less likely to take aspirin. They also had higher red meat intake; lower intakes of fruit, dairy products, and sugar-sweetened beverages; and lower HEI-2015 score.”

Eggs, it seems, track with other unhealthful dietary behaviors.

The egg situation is a mess to sort out because the egg industry funds so many studies in its own defense and these invariably show no effect.

But eggs are one food in complicated diets and it’s really hard to look at them independently of everything else in the diet and lifestyle.

What to do?  Moderation is always good advice.

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.

I can’t believe we are even talking about this, but the FDA, USDA, and CDC have just issued a rare joint statement addressing it [my emphases throughout].

After more than a year since the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak was declared a global health emergency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continue to underscore that there is no credible evidence of food or food packaging associated with or as a likely source of viral transmission of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus causing COVID-19.

This, no doubt, is in response to statements from the World Health Organization team that visited Wuhan to determine the source of the virus causing Covid-19.  This team has not yet issued its report, but members of the team have talked to reporters.

Nature, for example, reports:

The researchers largely discounted the controversial theory that the virus accidentally leaked from a laboratory, and suggested that SARS-CoV-2 probably first passed to people from an animal — already a leading hypothesis among researchers. But the team also offered two hypotheses promoted by the Chinese government and media: that the virus, or its most recent ancestor, might have come from an animal outside China, and that once it was circulating in people, it could have spread on frozen wildlife and other cold packaged goods….Dominic Dwyer, a medical virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, Australia, and a member of the WHO team, says there is some evidence that the coronavirus could have spread on contaminated fish and meat at Chinese markets, and more details will be included in the written report.

According to the Wall Street Journal,

Beijing has blamed frozen-food imports as one cause of a string of recent outbreaks, and it has introduced mandatory testing and disinfection of foreign goods, saying it found traces of the virus on packaging of products including American pork, Saudi shrimp and Brazilian beef.

This idea has had a profound effect on sales of frozen foods.

Everyone seems to agree that there are four key hypotheses to explain the origin of this particular Coronavirus: 

• Direct animal vector
• Intermediary animal vector
• Laboratory accident
• Frozen food products,

The team could not identify a specific animal vector, dismissed the idea of a laboratory accident, but left open the possibility of frozen food.

The frozen food idea was suggested by the Chinese.

Several top Chinese scientists have further suggested that the Sars-CoV-2 virus that causes the Covid-19 disease may have arrived in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan city, the location of the world‘s first known outbreak, via frozen food imports, or what’s referred to as cold-chain transmission.

The WHO team’s report is considered a public relations win for the Chinese.

The W.H.O. team opened the door to a theory embraced by Chinese officials, saying it was possible the virus might have spread to humans through shipments of frozen food, an idea that has gained little traction with scientists outside China.… The virus was circulating in Wuhan several weeks before it appeared at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where some of the earliest clusters were initially reported, the experts said. It most likely emerged in bats and spread to humans through another small mammal, though the experts said they have not been able to identify the species.

The team, as I mentioned, considered a laboratory origin unlikely.

The team called for further investigation into the possibility of “cold chain” transmission, referring to the transport and trade of frozen food.

US Federal agencies don’t believe this for a minute; hence, their joint statement.

So if frozen foods are not at fault, and no animal vector can be conclusively identified, that leaves us with the dismissed-out-of-hand laboratory origin.

So what’s up with that?  Wuhan, where the pandemic started, happens to be the site of a laboratory that works on Coronaviruses.  

• New York Magazine has a long investigative report on this topic.
• Independent Science News has published several articles examining this possibility (the latest is here).
• US Right to Know has a reading list on Covid-19 origins

Why does the origin of the pandemic matter?  

• If we don’t know how this one happened, how can we take steps to prevent the next one?
• And it matters a lot to the makers of frozen foods.

As a general rule, industry-funded studies produce results favorable to the sponsor’s interests.  But what have we here?

The study: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials on the Effects of Oats and Oat Processing on Postprandial Blood Glucose and Insulin Responses.  Kathy Musa-Veloso, Daniel Noori, Carolina Venditti, Theresa Poon, Jodee Johnson, Laura S Harkness, Marianne O’Shea, YiFang Chu.  The Journal of Nutrition, Volume 151, Issue 2, February 2021, Pages 341–351.

Results: the consumption of thick—but not thin—oat flakes was associated with significant reductions in postprandial blood glucose and insulin responses.

Conclusion: “Relative to a refined grain control food with the same amount of available carbohydrate, the postprandial glycemic and insulin responses elicited by intact oat kernels and thick oats were significantly reduced. The postprandial glycemic and insulin responses with thin/instant/quick oats were not significantly different from those elicited by the refined grain control.”

Funding: The systematic review and meta-analysis, as well as the writing of the manuscript, were funded by PepsiCo, Inc.

Author disclosures: “KM-V, DN, CV, and TP are employees of Intertek Health Sciences Inc., which has provided consulting services to PepsiCo, Inc. JJ, MO, and YC are employees of PepsiCo, Inc., which manufactures oatmeal products under the brand name Quaker Oats and which funded this systematic review and meta-analysis. LSH is a former employee of PepsiCo, Inc.  The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or policies of Intertek Health Sciences Inc. or PepsiCo, Inc.”

Comment:  This is a PepsiCo study paid for by the company and conducted by employees or contractors.  PepsiCo owns Quaker Oats instant oatmeal.  In the late 1980s, oat bran was a craze.  Everyone I knew was sprinkling oat bran on everything they ate as a means to reduce their blood cholesterol levels.  Even then, there were real questions about whether oats had any special effects on blood cholesterol levels.   But the idea has persisted.  This study demonstrates that oats might have metabolic benefits, but only if they are thick, whole-grain, and minimally processed.  Instant oatmeal is not in that category.  I wonder what the company’s reaction is to this study, whether it intends to fund more like it, and whether it will us thicker oats in its Quaker products.