The USDA has produced four infographics on its purchasing practices for school meals.

• USDA Foods in Schools – This infographic summarizes nationwide USDA Foods purchases including the average cost per pound by food group and the breakdown of total spending and pounds received by food group.
• USDA Foods in Schools: Summary by Program – This infographic shows a summary of purchases from all three programs: USDA Foods Bulk for Processing, USDA Foods Direct Delivery, and USDA DoD Fresh. It is important to note that the USDA Foods Bulk for Processing section only includes items classified as a bulk product on the USDA Foods Available List.
• USDA Foods in Schools: State Overview– This infographic shows the average number of products ordered by States and the top five products by dollar value and volume. This infographic also displays the value of food orders by State.
• USDA DoD Fresh in Schools – This infographic provides an overview of USDA DoD Fresh purchases including a summary of the top five fruit and vegetables received and the total pounds purchased. It is important to note that the items available through USDA DoD Fresh may vary by State.

I took a look at the first one and got stopped cold by this:

Protein?  What’s that?  The answer:  meat, poultry, fish, eggs, peanut butter, and sunflower seed butter.

I also wondered what DoD Fresh was about.  It is an agreement between USDA and the Department of Defense to supply fresh fruits and vegetables to schools.

For school food aficionados, there is much information here in a readily accessible format.  Enjoy!

Perspective: The Role of Beverages as a Source of Nutrients and Phytonutrients. Mario G Ferruzzi, Jirayu Tanprasertsuk, Penny Kris-Etherton, Connie M Weaver, Elizabeth J Johnson.  Advances in Nutrition, nmz115, https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmz115.  Published: 22 November 2019

Conclusions: “Modest shifts in beverage choices can help close the gaps between current intakes and dietary recommendations…[e.g.] Replacing SSBs with water, low-sodium tomato juice, nonfat milk, or unsweetened coffee or tea.”

Funder: “Supported by The Tea Council of the USA (to EJJ).”

Comment: This is a lengthy review of the health effects of a range of beverages—milk, soft drinks, sports drinks, alcohol—as well a coffee and tea.  Of tea, it says:

Tea is a major contributor to beverage intake in the US adult population with ∼1 of 3 adults reporting regular consumption on any given day. Tea provides few nutrients (∼2% of potassium intake in the United States), although it is considered to be a significant contributor to total fluoride intake….Green tea consumption was significantly inversely associated with CVD and all-cause mortality, whereas black tea consumption was significantly inversely associated with all-cancer and all-cause mortality…The evidence is accumulating that coffee and tea also have health benefits (see above) and are concentrated sources of dietary phytonutrients.

The discussion of tea is a small part of this review.  Did the Tea Council get what it paid for?  You decide.

It’s pretty exciting when a major international science journal starts a satellite journal devoted to food issues.  Welcome to Nature Food.

NutraIngredients.com, one of those industry newsletters I follow closely, publishes numerous articles on probiotics, gut health, and the microbiome.  I have a few examples here, but let’s start with this one:

• Postbiotics show promise, even if method of action is unclear:  The use of postbiotics could be an attractive alternative to prebiotics in immunocompromised children and adults, according to a recent review. But the lack of a definition of the term is still a complicating factor in determining effectiveness.

Postbiotics?  For this, a glossary may help:

• Probiotics:  Beneficial microbes in the intestinal tract
• Prebiotics:  Food substances that promote the growth of probiotics
• Synbiotics:  Probiotics and Prebiotics together
• Postbiotics:  Bioactive substances produced by probiotics (e.g., microbial cells, cell constituents, metabolites).
• Parabiotics:  Heat-killed microorganisms

More articles on these topics:

• Bill Gates: ‘Probiotics key to solving malnutrition’:  Probiotics could be key in addressing malnutrition, according to Bill Gates, who calls the nutritional imbalances affecting around 200 million children under five ‘the greatest health inequity in the world.’ Read more
• Gut health collaboration: Carbiotix and Food Marble to team up over microbiome health research:  Swedish gut health analysis player Carbiotix is set to collaborate with Dublin-based digestive health tracking firm Food Marble to conduct an eight week study to understand the correlation between digestive health data and gut microbiome data. Read more
• Microbiome profiling: Study uncovers ‘comprehensive’ list of organisms that make a healthy gut:  There are 157 organisms that form the ‘baseline biome’ of a healthy human gut, according to new research published in PLoS One. Read more
• Study: Gut health most influenced by teams of bacteria:  Gut microbial species work in teams to perform different functions, suggesting that cultivating certain groups of bacteria is more important than single species, according to an international team of researchers. Read more
• Strategic thinking: Brilliant science is only half of the battle for microbiome success:  When it comes to commercialising microbiome-related products, having really amazing science is only 50% of the journey towards market success, says industry expert Julian Mellentin… Read
• Nespresso-style gut health: Bioengineer creates personalised probiotic yoghurt machine:  A Swedish startup is on a mission to make yoghurt truly good for the gut with a kitchen counter machine that makes personalised probiotic and prebiotic filled yogurts, the founder tells NutraIngredients ahead of her debut as a Probiota Pioneer next month… Read
• Pioneering scientists create designer prebiotics to disrupt the microbiome health space:  A team of top scientists leading the way in designer prebiotics has been selected as one of the most pioneering startups in the microbiome health industry… Read
• Prebiotics stamp authority in deciding gut health and overall wellbeing:  Studies pointing to prebiotics as modulators of the microbiome-gut-brain axis could see the non-digestible food ingredient become a basis for preventing the rise in obesity and diabetic cases… Read
• Hitting a nerve: The link between vagal stimulation, the gut and depression:  Recognising biologically similar pathways in those with depression could result in a precision led approach that points people towards more effective methods to address the neurological condition… Read

And Natural Products Insider has a report on prebiotic supplements available for downloading.

The USDA has issued a guide for meat and poultry sellers explaining what they need to do to claim that their products are non-GMO.  This, apparently, will do.

What, you may ask, are they to do if their products are GMO?  Here’s your answer.

That USDA is allowing the use of non-GMO rather than non-bioengineered must be considered some kind of miracle or oversight.

AgriPulse says producers want more guidance before trying to comply with whatever the biotech labeling law means.

I can’t wait to see if meat sellers use any of this.

If it weren’t so tragic, we could all have a big laugh at the USDA’s latest announcement of how it plans to weaken the nutrition standards for school meals.   Here’s how it starts:

Delivering on his promise to act on feedback from dietary professionals, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue announced two proposals today that will put local school and summer food service operators back in the driver’s seat of their programs, because they know their children best. Under the school meals proposed rule, school nutrition professionals have more flexibility to serve appetizing and healthy meals that appeal to their students’ preferences and subsequently reduce food waste…These improvements build on the 2018 reforms that preserve strong nutrition standards while providing schools the additional flexibilities they need to best serve America’s students [the words in red are my emphasis].

This is USDA doublespeak.  My translation:

• Dietary professionals: USDA is not talking about me here.  It is referring to the School Nutrition Association, which represents school food service workers, and receives nearly half its funding from food companies that sell products to schools.
• Driver’s seat: This is Trump’s USDA saying that it is not bound by anything accomplished by Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign.
• Flexibility: This means that schools can decide on their own to ignore nutrition standards and let kids eat all the junk food they want.
• Improvements: This refers to benefits for the companies that sell junk foods in schools.
• 2018 reforms:  In USDA-speak, “reform” usually means rollback of rules or budget cuts; it never means real improvement.

I just can’t get my head around why there is so much political pressure to feed junk food to kids.  Doesn’t everyone want kids to be healthy?  Apparently not.

Bettina Siegel, author of Kids’ Food and blogger at The Lunch Tray, has her own analytical deconstruction of what this announcement means.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest interprets USDA’s proposals as an “assault on school meals.”

In an email, a reader who wishes to remain anonymous sent me some notes on the large body of research, some of it from the agency itself, countering USDA’s claims that the current nutrition standards are not working.

• USDA’s own research shows that meals are healthier, plate waste has not increased, and most schools are complying with nutrition standards.
• Healthy Eating Research shows that the nutritional quality of school meals has improved under the current rules.
• A study from the Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity shows that low-income kids are eating better under the existing standards.
• Surveys from Bridging the Gap show that most kids like the healthier school lunches.
• A poll conducted by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Pew Charitable Trusts, and American Heart Association shows that more than 70% of parents support healthier school nutrition standards, and more than 90% want fruits or vegetables served with every meal.
• A Harvard study stimates that the current nutrition standards will prevent more than 2 million cases of childhood obesity and save nearly $800 million in health care costs over 10 years.

In short, school meals are not broken and do not need fixing.  This is about politics, in this case USDA’s pandering to food company interests at the expense of kids’ health.

Shameful.

I could not keep up with the number of e-mails I got last week with the subject line “Have you seen this?”

“This” referred to an opinion piece in JAMA entitled Backlash Over Meat Dietary Recommendations Raises Questions About Corporate Ties to Nutrition Scientists.

Definitely up my alley.

The article describes the outraged reaction to a series of papers in the Annals of Internal Medicine last year arguing that recommendations to eat less meat are unfounded (I posted about this at the time).  Some of the investigators involved in the meat papers turned out to have undisclosed ties to meat industry interests.

The JAMA article points out that the most outraged objections to the Annals papers came from investigators who have plenty of industry ties (plant-based) of their own.

My book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, provides loads of evidence for a basic observation: research funded by food companies, regardless of the particular food studied, tends to produce results favorable to the sponsor’s interests.

It also describes how industry influence occurs at an unconscious level; recipients are unaware that they are being influenced.

How the influence gets expressed is also the subject of research.  Bias most frequently turns up in the framing of the research question.  It also turns up frequently in the interpretation of results.

Here is an example from a study of a healthy plant food—walnuts.

The study: Effect of a 2-year diet intervention with walnuts on cognitive decline. The Walnuts And Healthy Aging (WAHA) study: a randomized controlled trial.  Aleix Sala-Vila, Cinta Valls-Pedret, Sujatha Rajaram, Nina Coll-Padrós, Montserrat Cofán, Mercè Serra-Mir,  Ana M Pérez-Heras, Irene Roth, Tania M Freitas-Simoes, Mónica Doménech, Carlos Calvo, Anna López-Illamola, Edward Bitok, Natalie K Buxton, Lynnley Huey, Adam Arechiga, Keiji Oda, Grace J Lee, Dolores Corella, Lídia Vaqué-Alcázar, Roser Sala-Llonch, David Bartrés-Faz, Joan Sabaté, and Emilio Ros1.  Am J Clin Nutr 2020;00:1–11.

Conclusions: Walnut supplementation for 2 y had no effect on cognition in healthy elders. However, brain fMRI and post hoc analyses by site suggest that walnuts might delay cognitive decline in subgroups at higher risk. These encouraging but inconclusive results warrant further investigation.

Conflicts of Interest: AS-V, SR, JS, and ER have received research funding through their institutions from the California Walnut Commission, Folsom, CA, USA. JS and ER were nonpaid members of the California Walnut Commission Scientific Advisory Council. ER was a paid member of the California Walnut Commission Health Research Advisory Group. JS has received honoraria from the California Walnut Commission for presentations.  AS-V has received support from the CaliforniaWalnut Commission to attend professional meetings. All other authors report no conflicts of interest.

Comment: This looks to me like a classic example of interpretation bias.  Although the study showed no effect of walnut supplementation, the authors interpret its overall results as encouraging.  This is putting a positive spin on null results.

Walnuts—and other kinds of nuts—are plant foods with healthy fats.  Why does the California Walnut Commission need to do this?  So you will buy walnuts rather than hazelnuts, pecans, or macadamia nuts (all of which are sponsoring their own positive-result studies).  Studies like these are mostly about marketing.

Questions of whether meat is healthy or unhealthy—and, if unhealthy, at what level of intake—are about much more than marketing.   They need to be studied as objectively as possible.  It’s best to keep industry influence far away from such studies.

Even if the science is done well from start to finish, researchers’ ties to food company sponsors give the appearance of conflicted interests.  Such ties are best avoided from the get-go.

Follow-up

• A detailed analysis of the JAMA piece by the anonymous CarbSane blog
• Naomi Oreske’s comment in Scientific American
• Texas A&M’s letter to Harvard requesting an investigation of faculty belonging to True Health Initiative (who complained about the meat guidelines)
• Texas A&M’s Chancellor Calls on Harvard to Look Into Faculty’s Beef-science Ethics (AgDaily)
• Beef with Harvard (Inside Higher Ed)
• From Beef to Bots? Harvard Professors Mired in Debate over Spam Emails, Industry-Funded Research (Harvard Crimson)
• Conflict of Interest in the Post-Truth Era: What Is It, Now? (David Katz)
• Processed Meat “Guidelines:” Why the Exceptional Reaction? (David Katz)
• Tobacco, Soda, and the Beef with Truth (David Katz)
• Massive Meat Mayhem, Part 3 (ConscienHealth)
• Perspective: Red and Processed Meats and Health Risks: How Strong Is the Evidence? (Frank Hu et al)

Marcia Chatelain.  Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America.  Liveright, 2020.  

I did a blurb for this book, and was happy to do it:

Marcia Chatelain uses the complex interrelationship of black communities with McDonald’s to explore the history of American racism and the struggle for civil rights.   Franchise is an eye-opener for anyone who cares about why diet-related chronic disease is more prevalent in these communities and what it is really like to be black in America.

Here are a few selected excerpts to give you the idea:

The contemporary health crisis among black America—like all of our society’s most pressing problems—has a history.  By unmasking the process of how fast food “became black,” we are able to appreciate the difficult decisions black America has had to make under the stress of racial trauma, political exclusion, and social alienation.  This story is about how capitalism can unify cohorts to serve its interests, even as it dissembles communities…Ultimately, history encourages us to be more compassionate toward individuals navigating few choices, and history cautions us to be far more critical of the institutions and structures that have the power to take choices away (p. 23).

To ignore the positive impacts of franchise networks among communities of color that appreciate their contributions would be shortsighted.  It is equally shortsighted to ignore the government subsidies, civil right organization endorsements, limited community resources, and economic desperation that supports the dubious idea that fast food—and business on the whole—can breathe life into an underdeveloped community (p. 253).

The idea of financially sound black institutions is alluring across the ideological spectrum because it allows white conservatives and liberals alike to claim plausible deniability in their role in supporting systems and politics that maintain racial capitalism (p. 260).

This book is concerned with the reasons that places like Ferguson are more likely to get a fast food restaurant than direct cash aid to the poor, oversight over the police department, or jobs that pay more than $8.60 per hour (p. 263).

This book was reviewed in the New York Times:

“Franchise” is a serious work of history….“History encourages us to be more compassionate toward individuals navigating few choices,” Chatelain writes, “and history cautions us to be far more critical of the institutions and structures that have the power to take choices away.”