Coming soon to a supermarket near you: Baby Shark cereal.

I am so out of it.  I never heard of the song, Baby Shark, before seeing this story about Kellogg’s new cereal—aimed at toddlers.

The song, I gather, is adored by babies, less so by their parents, but never mind: it is expected to sell lots of cereal.

I searched for a Nutrition Facts label online, but could not find one (the cereal won’t be available until mid-September, apparently.

I did see this at the bottom corner of the box:

One and one-third cup of this stuff provides 150 calories, 190 mg of sodium, and 15 grams of sugars.  Oh great, 40% of calories from sugars.

Another sugary cereal for kids, this one for little kids!

Do food companies market directly to children?  Yes, they do.

Since writing two books about pet food in 2008 (Pet Food Politics) and 2010 (Feed Your Pet Right), I haven’t said much about this topic but am inspired to comment by this article in Food Safety News.

If you are a pet food maker, and the FDA finds Salmonella in your products and insists you recall them, what should you do?

A.  Recall the products immediately

B.  Apologize to your customers and promise this will never happen again

C.  Hire a food safety expert to review and revise your food safety procedures

D.  Train all employees to follow food safety procedures diligently

E.  Sue the FDA to allow you to continue selling Salmonella-contaminated pet food

The correct answer?  E, apparently.

Incredible as it may seem, Lystin LLC, the parent of Answers Pet Foods which sells raw meat and poultry, is suing the FDA on Constitutional grounds to allow it to sell foods contaminated with Salmonella. Why?

According to this company, people should be able to feed their pets whatever they like, especially because its brands already carry this warning:

WARNING: NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION. THIS PRODUCT HAS NOT BEEN PASTEURIZED AND MAY CONTAIN HARMFUL BACTERIA.

You want to continue buying this pet food?  OK.  You were warned.

Personally, I’d find another brand more committed to the safety of dogs and their owners.

I can’t wait to see who wins this one.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

The Washington Examiner reports on a speech given by Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s acting chief of staff and current budget head, on why the administration chose to move the Economic Research Service from Washington DC to Kansas City:, causing 70 to 80 percent of its researchers to resign:

What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time…It’s really, really hard to drain the swamp, but we’re working at it…Guess what happened? More than half the people quit. Now, it’s nearly impossible to fire a federal worker. I know that because a lot of them work for me, and I’ve tried. You can’t do it.  By simply saying to people, ‘You know what, we’re going to take you outside the bubble, outside the Beltway, outside this liberal haven of Washington, D.C., and move you out to the real part of the country,’ and they quit.  What a wonderful way to sort of streamline government and do what we haven’t been able to do for a long time…even that was difficult to do.

From my standpoint, the destruction of the ERS—now a done deal—is nothing less than an American tragedy.

The ERS was an apolitical research organization, producing carefully done and highly vetted studies on all aspects of USDA’s food programs—agricultural supports, GMOs, pesticides, crop insurance, conservation, trade, food insecurity, food assistance programs, dietary guidelines.

Sometimes their studies produced inconvenient results.  Sometimes truth is inconvenient.

I’ve always viewed the ERS as a national treasure.  I used to think it was Washington’s best kept secret.

Somehow, somebody in this administration found out about it.   It was a tiny agency and must have looked easy to get rid of.

A tragedy indeed.

Some of my previous posts on this topic.  I wish they had done some good.

• September 21, 2018: USDA’s double-speak proposal to “improve” the ERS: brute-force politics
• May 28, 2019: USDA’s destruction of the Economic Research Service: A National Tragedy
• June 18, 2019: The tragic destruction of the Economic Research Service, continued
• July 10, 2019: One more time: the Economic Research Service tragedy

And this just in:

USDA’s inspector general says the department may well have violated laws by moving ERS without congressional permission.

I spotted some tweets about this study from Washington Post writer Tamar Haspel, who has a sharp eye for this sort of thing.  Her first tweet said:

Her second tweet explained the problem:

So of course I had to look up the study.  It’s not one I would ordinarily have noticed because its title does not use the word “probiotic,” which typically refers to the live bacteria (in yogurt, for example).  The evidence for benefits of probiotics is iffy, so this study raises lots of questions.

Let’s take a look at it:

The Study:  Supplementation with Akkermansia muciniphila in overweight and obese human volunteers: a proof-of-concept exploratory study. Depommier C, et al.  Nature Medicine (2019) Letter | Published: 01 July 2019.

Conclusion: I’ve left out the statistics to make this easier to read:  “Compared to placebo, pasteurized A. muciniphila improved insulin sensitivity…, and reduced insulinemia…and plasma total cholesterol…. Pasteurized A. muciniphila supplementation slightly decreased body weight…compared to the placebo group, and fat mass…and hip circumference…compared to baseline….In conclusion, this proof-of-concept study…shows that the intervention was safe and well tolerated and that supplementation with A. muciniphila improves several metabolic parameters.”

Competing interests:  Five of the authors “are inventors of patent applications…filed with [patent offices in at least 12 countries]…dealing with the use of A. muciniphila and its components in the context of obesity and related disorders.” Two of the authors are cofounders of A-Mansia Biotech S.A., a Belgian company that sells A. muciniphila supplements, presumably as weight-loss supplements.

Comment: As Haspel points out, the subjects in this study were given either (a) live bacteria, (b) Pasteurized (and, therefore, mostly dead) bacteria, or (c) a placebo.  The Pasteurized ones were associated with metabolic benefits and weight loss.  Pasteurization is what gets done to milk to kill most—not all—of the living bacteria it contains.  In this study, Pasteurized bacteria had the same effect on the microbiome as the unpasteurized.  The point of the study was to show that the Pasteurized supplement would induce weight loss; the observed loss, however, was not statistically significant.   Nature Medicine‘s editors should know better.  So should the New York Times’ editors.  Haspel points out that the New York Times account of the study accepted its conclusion uncritically, headlining it “A Probiotic for Obesity?”  At least the headline included a question mark.  The article did not mention the authors’ patents or conflicts of interest; it should have.

Bottom line: If you want to keep your microbiome healthy, eat a healthy diet.

I’m always interested in recommendations for how we are to solve world food problems—population increase, environmental degradation, climate change—in the immediate future.

Here is one approach from a group of highly official agencies from the United Nations in collaboration with the World Bank.

The report’s five areas of recommendation:

1. Reduce growth in demand for food and other agricultural products
2. Increase food production without expanding agricultural land
3. Protect and restore natural ecosystems and limit agricultural land-shifting
4. Increase fish supply
5. Reduce GHG [Greenhouse gas] emissions from agricultural production

The report is 564 pages.  There is a lot in it.  The one question it does not answer: Where is the political will to make any of this happen?  It mentions political will five times, for example, “Success would depend primarily on political will” (page 406).

How to get political will?  That needs to be the subject of another report, apparently.

FoodNavigator.com has a collection of articles on Innovations in Vertical Farming, this time from an international perspective.

• ‘We are right at the starting gate’: Vertical farming could change the food system: Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) talks vertical farming, demand growth and its unique technological proposition. Read more
• Vertical farming: A sustainable solution to food insecurity? A growing population and urbanisation are expected to support growth of the vertical farming industry, new research suggests. Are vertical farms a sustainable solution? Read more
• Cloud tech tapped for urban greenhouses: ‘This is the return of small farms’: An urban farming business that develops modular, automated greenhouses for the city environment says it is looking to expand beyond Russia into EMEA markets. Read more
•  ‘Revolutionising global horticulture’: Intelligent Growth Solutions on the nascent vertical farming market: Scottish food tech group Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) has opened its first demo indoor vertical farm in a bid to meet rapidly expanding demand for vertical farming solutions. Read more
•  Changing times: Farm.One talks about the growing success of its Vertical Farm: Using LED lighting, hydroponics and climate control, Farm.One vertical farm in New York is growing in success to deliver year-round fresh plants and herbs to its customers. Read more
• Infarm reinventing food supply with vertical urban farms: German urban farming group Infarm aims to expand its network of urban farms to 1,000 locations throughout Europe by 2019. Read more
• Urban farming could reinvent supply chains: Urban farming has the potential to disrupt produce supply chains, bringing production to population centres. While the development of a large-scale urban farming industry is still in its infancy, new technologies and growing public backing mean that urban farms could help shape the future of food. Read more
• ‘Societal impact is at the heart of what we do’: Peas & Love on the disruptive potential of urban farms: Peas & Love is a start-up focused on re-connecting people with the food they eat through the development of urban farms. The group plans to open 150 more farms in European cities over the next five years. FoodNavigator speaks to founder Jean-Patrick Scheepers. Read more
• ‘We are right at the starting gate’: Vertical farming could change the food system: Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) talks vertical farming, demand growth and its unique technological proposition… Watch now

I was fascinated to see this article about how offering kids greater amounts and varieties of snack foods encourages them to eat more and, therefore, take in more calories.  Snack variety has a greater effect than just larger package sizes (1).

This article immediately reminded me of the infamous cafeteria diet studies of the late 1980s.  The investigators fed rats all kinds of junk foods and compared the calories they ate to those eaten by control rats allowed only rat chow.  The cafeteria-fed rats ate more (2).

This, of course, is what Kevin Hall and his colleagues found when adults were allowed to eat as much as they wanted of ultraprocessed junk foods (3).

The message is clear: junk food encourages overeating; overeating means taking in more calories; more calories means more weight.  Eating a lot of junk food is a sufficient explanation for obesity.

References

1.  Kerr JA, et al. Child and adult snack food intake in response to manipulated pre-packaged snack item quantity/variety and snack box size: a population-based randomized trial. International Journal of Obesity (2019).
2. Prats E, et al.  Energy intake of rats fed a cafeteria diet.  Physiol Behav. 1989 Feb;45(2):263-72.
3. Hall K, et al.  Ultra-Processed Diets Cause Excess Calorie Intake and Weight Gain: An Inpatient Randomized Controlled Trial of Ad Libitum Food Intake .  Cell Metabolism 2019; 30:67–77.

Every time I think the USDA has done the worst damage it possibly can—I’m still reeling from the destruction of the Economic Research Service—it comes up with another bad idea.

This time, the USDA has proposed to “close a SNAP eligibility loophole,” in quotes because this is USDA-speak for throwing people off the rolls.

The “loophole” refers to permitting states to automatically enroll low-income people on SNAP (and low-income children on school meals) if they qualified for temporary financial assistance.

But, as the agency explains in its press release,

The proposed rule would fix a loophole that has expanded SNAP recipients in some states to include people who receive assistance when they clearly don’t need it. In fact, the depth of this specific flexibility has become so egregious that a millionaire living in Minnesota successfully enrolled in the program simply to highlight the waste of taxpayer money.

The press release goes on to say that

This proposal gives USDA the ability to save billions of dollars, ensuring nutrition assistance programs are delivered with consistency and integrity to those most in need.

Yeah.  Right.

A USDA Fact Sheet explains that 3.1 million SNAP recipients get benefits because of the loophole.

USDA officials told reporters that 300,000 children will become ineligible for school meals unless their parents now go through application processes.

The USDA’s cost/benefit analysis, has interesting things to say, first about how much money will this measure save:

$9.4 billion over the five years 2019-2023. Included in this is an estimated reduction in Federal transfers of approximately $10.543 billion over the five-year period as well as a $1.157 billion increase in Federal administrative costs. The Department estimates an additional $1.157 billion in administrative costs to State agencies (for a total of $2.314 billion in additional administrative costs).

Bottom line: Just under $2 billion per year in savings, if the USDA’s numbers are right.

But what about costs?

The Department estimates that approximately 9 percent of currently-participating SNAP households will lose eligibility for SNAP because
their incomes or resources exceed Federal SNAP eligibility standards (an estimated 1.7 million households in FY 2020, containing 3.1 million individuals).

In addition, the Department estimates that households that remain eligible for SNAP (approximately 17.2 million households containing 34.7 million individuals) and new SNAP applicants will face additional burden associated with the application process, at a cost of approximately $5 million annually.

And all of this is likely to be an underestimation:

While overall about 9 percent of all households currently participating in SNAP will lose eligibility under this proposed rule, households with one or more elderly individual(s) and/or earned income will be disproportionately affected. Approximately 13.2 percent of all SNAP households with elderly members will lose benefits (7.4 percent will fail the income test and 5.8 percent will fail the resource test), as will 12.5 percent of households with earnings (8.6 percent will fail the income test and another 3.9 percent will fail the resource test). Households without children will also be disproportionately affected, with 10.1 percent losing eligibility (approximately 5.5 percent will fail the income test and an additional 4.6 percent will fail the resource test.).

You don’t like this?  File comments.  The deadline is September 23.

HOW TO FILE COMMENTS: Click the Comment button here.

The Food and Nutrition Service, USDA, invites interested persons to submit written comments on this proposed rule. Comments may be submitted in writing by one of the following methods:

• Federal eRulemaking Portal: Go to http://www.regulations.gov. Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.
• Mail: Send comments to Program Design Branch, Program Development Division, Food and Nutrition Service, USDA, 3101 Park Center Dr., Alexandria, VA 22302. Email: Send comments to SNAPPDBRules@usda.gov. Include Docket ID Number [FNS-2018-0037], “Revision of Categorical Eligibility in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance” in the subject line of the message.
• All written comments submitted in response to this proposed rule will be included in the record and will be made available to the public. Please be advised that the substance of the comments and the identity of the individuals or entities submitting the comments will be subject to public disclosure. FNS will make the written comments publicly available on the internet via http://www.regulations.gov.