Simón Barquera, who directs the Center for Research on Nutrition and Health at the National Institute of Public Health in Cuernavaca, sent me a copy of this letter, which he found on Twitter (but it’s no longer there):

It’s from the president of the Mexican Society of Nutrition and Endocrinology thanking Coca-Cola for donating Personal Protective Equipment to deal with Covid-19.

The Mexican Nutrition Society has a cozy relationship with Coca-Cola?

I wonder what that’s all about.

Conflicts of interest anyone?

Thanks to Nate Goldstein (@drnategoldstein), Mitchell Davis (@kitchensense), and the adorable Milo for this photo, discovered in my Twitter feed (@marionnestle).

Milo: Don’t eat my book!

OK, it’s ten years old, out of date, and out of print.  Mal Nesheim and I badly want to do an updated edition with a title that better reflects what the book is about.  It’s really an analysis of the pet food industry and what it produces.  We did include generic recipes for feeding dogs and cats, though, so you can make your own .

Anyone interested in taking on this project?  Let me know @marionnestle.

The report of the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee is now available in online preprint.

It sets a record at 835 pages.

Its conclusions are highly consistent with those of previous Dietary Guidelines.

It recommends eating more of these foods:

Common characteristics of dietary patterns associated with positive health outcomes include higher intake of vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, low- or nonfat dairy, lean meat and poultry, seafood, nuts, and unsaturated vegetable oils.

It recommends eating less of these foods:

The Committee found that negative (detrimental) health outcomes were associated with dietary patterns characterized by higher intake of red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened foods and beverages, and refined grains.

It retained the recommendation: Eat less red and processed meats

It retained the recommendation to eat less saturated fat (replace with polyunsaturated or monounsaturated)

Thus, the Committee recommends that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat intake be as low as possible within a healthy dietary pattern, and that saturated fat intake be limited to less than of 10 percent of total energy intake, as recommended by the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. This recommendation applies to adults and children ages 2 years and older.

It tightened up restrictions on alcoholic beverages from 2 drinks a day for men to 1 drink:

The Committee concluded that no evidence exists to relax current Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommendations, and there is evidence to tighten them for men such that recommended limits for both men and women who drink would be 1 drink per day on days when alcohol is consumed.

It tightened up restrictions on added sugars, from 10% of calories to 6%:

After considering the scientific evidence for the potential health impacts of added sugars intake, along with findings from model-based estimations of energy available in the dietary pattern after meeting nutrient requirements, the Committee suggests that less than 6 percent of energy from added sugars is more consistent with a dietary pattern that is nutritionally adequate while avoiding excess energy intake from added sugars than is a pattern with less than 10 percent energy from added sugars.

What’s missing?

• Salt: The report says remarkably little about sodium beyond that it is overconsumed and people should “reduce sodium intake.”  It’s possible that I missed it, but I could not find suggestions for quantitative limits.
• Ultraprocessed: The word does not appear in the report except in the references.  A large body of evidence supports an association of ultraprocessed foods to poor health.  If the committee considered this evidence, it did not spell it out explicitly.
• Sustainability: This was off the table from the beginning but this committee recommends that it be considered next time in the context of a food systems approach to the Dietary Guidelines (p.771).

Comment

This is an impressive, solid, conservative review of the existing science highly consistent with previous Dietary Guidelines but with mostly stronger recommendations.

This committee was up against:

• A tight time frame
• A first-time mandate to review literature on infancy, pregnancy, and lactation in addition to that for adults
• A first-time process in which the agencies set the research agenda, not the committee
• The Coronavirus pandemic

At the outset, I was concerned that the committee members might be heavily biased in favor of food industry interests.  If they were, such biases do not show up in the final report.  I think this committee deserves much praise for producing a report of this quality under these circumstances.

Want to weigh in on it? 

The agencies are taking public comments until August 13.  On August 11, there will be an online public meeting for even more comments.

What’s next?

This report is advisory, only.  USDA and HHS must boil this down to the actual 2020 Dietary Guidelines.  Whereas the committee process was transparent, the boiling down process is highly secretive, or was in 2015.  It will be interesting to see what the agencies do, especially given the heavy lobbying by proponents of meat, saturated fat, and low-carbohydrate diets.

Food Dive reports: FDA study finds some CBD products are mislabeled: Of the 20 edible and beverage products tested that had an amount of CBD marketed on their labels, five had less than 80% of the amount indicated and six had more than 120%.

I’m particularly interested in CBD edibles so I took a look at the FDA CBD labeling report.

What the results mean:

• For gummies, 7 of 17 products were mislabeled by 20% or more, and 5 contained THC (the psychodelic ingredient they are not supposed to have).
• For edibles, 6 of 17 were mislabeled by 20% or more, and 3 had THC.
• For beverages, 3 of 8 were mislabeled by 20% or more, but none had THC.
• For pet foods, 5 of 22 were mislabeled by 20% or more, and 9 had THC.

If you want THC in your edibles, you’ve got a pretty good chance of getting it, and so do your pets.

Enjoy!

With millions of people out of work, food insecurity is becoming a bigger problem than it has been. Some recent items:

From Politico: “Stark racial disparities emerge as families struggle to get enough food”

The last time the government formally measured food insecurity nationally was in 2018. At that time, about 25 percent of Black households with children were food insecure. Today, the rate is about 39 percent, according to the latest analysis by the Northwestern economists, which is set to be published this week. For Hispanic households with kids, the rate was nearly 17 percent in 2018. Today, it is nearly 37 percent.

From Northwestern, a new report: “Food Insecurity During COVID-19 in Households with Children: Results by Racial and Ethnic Groups”

Disparities in food insecurity across racial and ethnic groups are large. Across the eight weeks for which CHHPS microdata are available covering April 23–June 23, 41.1% of Black respondents’ households have experienced food insecurity in the prior week, as have 36.9% of Hispanic respondents’ households and 23.2% of White respondents’ households.

From the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project: “About 14 million children in America are not getting enough to eat”

Accounting for the number of children in these households, I find that 13.9 million children lived in a household characterized by child food insecurity in the third week in June, 5.6 times as many as in all of 2018 (2.5 million) and 2.7 times as many than did at the peak of the Great Recession in 2008 (5.1 million). During the week of June 19-23, 17.9 percent of children in the United States live in a household where an adult reported that the children are not getting enough to eat due to a lack of resources.

From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities: “Boosting SNAP: 5 Reasons Why Households Need More”

The Families First Coronavirus Response Act of March included much-needed measures to temporarily increase SNAP benefits for many households and let state SNAP agencies temporarily modify procedures…But these temporary benefits didn’t help everyone who needs them, and they aren’t enough to help families afford food, given the challenges that COVID-19 and the downturn have presented. Here are five reasons why the next relief package needs to include an additional boost in SNAP benefits:

From The Counter: “Covid-19 has increased online SNAP purchases twentyfold—and Amazon, Walmart have a lock on virtually all those sales”

The USDA has been pushing online food sales for SNAP recipients, and COVID-19 is accelerating the trend.  The Counter article explains that

more than 750,000 households had used food stamps benefits online as of late June. That’s up from just 35,000 in March….As of early July, 43 states are approved to accept SNAP benefits online, and 39 have the program up and running.

The Counter also notes:

One thing is certain: At this point, two big retailers stand to benefit from the explosion in online SNAP sales. In 34 of the 39 states, Amazon and Walmart are the only participating grocers. The reasons why are likely logistical.. Few independent grocers have the web infrastructure to display and update their inventory online, making Amazon and Walmart a kind of duopoly by default. Even fewer have enough staff to assemble complex orders and deliver them to people’s homes. By contrast, Amazon and Walmart have been investing heavily in grocery delivery for years.

Comment

No matter how useful they are, online deliveries cost more and SNAP does not pay delivery costs.  Online also requires a computer and broadband access.  Do SNAP participants have these things?

The 750,000 housaeholds using the online system constitute a small fraction of the 19 million households enrolled in SNAP.

We have a long way to go to solve problems of food insecurity in this country.

A reader, Max Hultberg, sends this amazing item, which I thought was a joke but apparently is not:

Hey Marion!

I’d like to pitch this news tip from Burger King Sweden.

Repurpose your Swedish passport as a stamp card at Burger King

Sweden’s been criticized for their relaxed COVID-19 strategy, which has made it difficult for citizens to travel abroad. Even when some countries start open up, Swedes in particular are not welcome.

So Burger King Sweden now offers another use for dust collecting passports – by letting you repurpose them and use them as stamp cards. Instead of a regular passport stamp, you’ll get a BK stamp. Each new stamp equals one free burger from their new ”World Gourmet”-series.

As I keep saying, when it comes to food marketing, you can’t make this stuff up.

You can even watch a film of how this works.

CAST [Council for Agricultural Science and Technology: Economic Impacts of COVID-19 on Food and Agricultural Markets:  This is a collection of 16 articles by various experts on the effects of Covid-19 on food, agriculture, and forestry.  The report is here.

IATP (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy): Milking the Planet: How Big Dairy is Heating Up the Planet and Hollowing Rural Communities: The report is here.

FAIRR (a global network of investors addressing issues in meat production): An Industry Infected: Animal Agriculture in a post-COVID world.  The report is here.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds globally, we are presented with a real-time case study into the vulnerability of animal agriculture systems to external shocks. It has reminded us of the vulnerability of human health to disease risks stemming from both wild and domestic animals, and has served as a warning of the role modern animal production systems can play in increasing zoonotic disease risk.

The British Meat Processors Association is not happy with this one, it seems.

While we are seeking ways to support farmers and feed hungry people, Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is a good model.  Civil Eats ran an especially interesting article about it.

CSAs are rooted in Black farmers in the South: In the 1960s and 70s, farmer and Tuskegee University professor Booker T. Whatley began advocating for what he called “Clientele Membership Clubs.” In the mid-1980s, two farms in New England started what has now become the model for today’s CSAs: small-scale farmers invested in agricultural stewardship, organic and other sustainable practices to build direct relationships with consumers. The idea is simple: members pay a small fee up front and commit to buy produce throughout a season…the CSA provides a sustainable financial model for farmers…In return, CSA members get regular boxes of fresh, local produce delivered to neighborhood pick-up spots…Today there are close to 13,000 CSAs across the country listed by USDA’s 2012 farm census data.

My partner and I belong to a bread CSA run by Stefan Senders’ Wide Awake Bakery.

Deliveries these days are in the middle of a parking lot for a mall that’s mostly closed.  The rule: masks and 6-food distancing.

Sometimes the lines are very long, but the bread is worth waiting for.

In addition to its world class bread, Wide Awake now provides sour dough starter, flour, and recipes, along with a how-to guide to dealing with this new member of your family.

The bakery uses grains grown locally.  So it is helping farmers.

CSAs aren’t for everyone.  Not everyone can afford to pay for food in advance.  But helping this bakery stay in business seems good for everyone, as do CSAs in general.