United Nations agencies have just released their annual report on world food insecurity.
Its main unhappy conclusion:
Food insecurity has increased since 2014:
So has worldwide obesity:
What is to be done?
Alas, that’s not what this report is about.
The BMJ (the new name for what was formerly the British Medical Journal) has just published a report by Susan Greenhalgh, an anthropologist and China specialist at Harvard, of how Coca-Cola, working through the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), got the Chinese government to focus its anti-obesity efforts on promoting physical activity rather than dietary changes.
Professor Greenhalgh documented industry influence on Chinese health policy through review of published work as well as interviews with key players in this drama.
A more thorough report of her investigation with details of her interviews was released at the same time by the Journal of Public Health Policy: “Soda industry influence on obesity science and policy in China.” This report comes with extensive supplemental information about her methods and interview details (these explain why training in anthropology is useful for this kind of work and provides information not otherwise available).
For readers familiar with Coca-Cola’s funding of the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), this is a familiar story.
I tell the GEBN story in a chapter in my recently released book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.
One surprise in writing that book was how often ILSI turns up in its pages. ILSI positions itself as an independent “nonprofit, worldwide organization whose mission is to provide science that improves human health and well-being and safeguards the environment,” but it was founded by Coca-Cola and is largely supported by food and beverage companies. It works in many countries to promote food-industry interests.
Greenhalgh’s articles thoroughly expose how this organization accomplishes its objectives. If you would like to know more about it, UCSF Food Industry Documents Library can help, as I learned about from this tweet.
Greenhalgh’s investigation has received extensive press coverage.
I was particularly interested in the account by Crossfit’s Derek Fields and Russ Greene, which provides further documentation of the close connections between Chinese health agencies, ILSI, and programs funded by Coca-Cola.
The endlessly repeating process of defining health goals for the next ten years continues and the Department of Health and Human Services is now (or will be when the shutdown ends) collecting comments on draft objectives.
You can see the list of categories here.
That site also has links to the history of the objectives (which dates to 1979) and how the whole process works.
The point of the objectives is to set highly specific, measurable goals for health improvement, so that progress toward attaining the goals (or the lack thereof) can be tracked.
Here, for example, are the first two in the Nutrition section:
The problem: the process does not define how these goals are to be accomplished or who is responsible for accomplishing them.
But the scorekeeping is useful and the deadline for weighing on on the proposed objectives is January 17.
Here’s your chance!
Lisa R. Young. Finally Full, Finally Slim: 30 Days to Permanent Weight Loss One Portion at a Time. Center Street, 2019.
I don’t usually write about diet books, but Lisa Young did her doctorate with me and I have followed her subsequent career with great interest. She has taught for years in my NYU department and has a lively private practice counseling clients about weight loss and other nutrition issues.
Her book explains what works best with her clients. She must be fun to work with. The writing is warm, friendly, and to the point. Her advice is easy and sensible: eat what you like (especially of healthy foods), just not too much. She is generous with tips about how to deal with parties, restaurants, and other challenging situations, what she categorizes as “slices of advice,” “bite-size goodies,” and “wedges of wisdom.”
Her main focus is on portion control:
Portion control is like a classic wardrobe: It never goes out of style. It’s not a trendy fad but a proven method for healthful living. When you enjoy balanced meals and nutritious foods in appropriate portion sizes, you can get off the weight-loss merry-go-found. So go ahead and enjoy a glass of wine or an occasional ice cream cone (a single scoop!). Eat brown rice, quinoa, and other healthy carbs. It’s not only okay. It’s the best way to achieve long-term weight loss and maintenance.
Good advice, and easy to take.
No wonder its getting such great press.
Here are a few examples of the latest trends in snack products in the U.S. and Europe, culled from articles in FoodNavigator.com. The purpose of these products is to make money for their manufacturers, the more the better.
Lots of interest in insects and worms these days….
Yum (?)
The Government Accountability Office has just published a report on memory supplements.
Available data indicate that memory supplements constitute a small segment of the overall dietary supplement market, but their sales nearly doubled in value from 2006 to 2015, increasing from $353 million to $643 million. Consumers searching to prevent or treat age-related memory loss, including Alzheimer’s disease, have increasingly turned to dietary supplements for help.
What did the GAO do?
This report examines the extent to which selected memory supplements contained: (1) their stated ingredients at the quantities stated on their labels and specific adulterants, and (2) certain contaminants.
Uh oh. Never mind whether memory supplements do any good (a dubious claim). They don’t even contain what they claim to contain:
- One product, marketed as Ginkgo biloba, did not contain that ingredient. Instead it contained an unknown substitute; as such the safety of the product is unknown.
- The second product was marketed as a supplement that included Ginkgo biloba. It also contained an unknown substitute, instead of Ginkgo biloba.
- The third product, marketed as a fish oil supplement, contained the stated ingredients.
Supplement products, you will recall, are essentially unregulated, by Congressional fiat (see the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994).
Since none of these supplements has been shown to improve memory, what’s in them only matters if it causes safety problems. Fortunately, the study found contaminants to be a low levels.
When it comes to dietary supplements, caveat emptor.
Trump’s USDA has issued final rules for labeling food products of biotechnology, commonly known to all of us as GMOs.
Since GMOs have taken on a pejorative—Frankenfood—connotation, the USDA wanted to fix that. And did it ever.
It drops GMOs, and substitutes “Bioengineered.”
Its logo depicts food biotechnology as sun shining on agriculture.
And the rules have a loophole big enough to exclude lots of products from having to carry this logo: those made with highly refined GMO sugars, starches and oils made from GMO soybeans and sugar beets.
If the products do not contain detectable levels of DNA, they are exempt. Never mind that GMO/bioengineered is a production issue.
When Just Label It was advocating for informing the public about GMOs, this was hardly what it had in mind.
Count this as a win for the GMO industry.
Christopher Gardner, the Stanford scientist who studies the ways various dietary patterns affect body weight, sent me this study to add to my post-book collection (I wrote about such things in Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, just out).
Soon after Dr. Gardner sent this to me, I read about this study in DairyReporter.com. Its account had this headline: “Mediterranean diet with added dairy shown to improve heart health in Australia.” It said nothing about funding source (it should have).
The study:
Title: A Mediterranean diet supplemented with dairy foods improves markers of cardiovascular risk: results from the MedDairy randomized controlled trial. Alexandra T Wade, Courtney R Davis, Kathryn A Dyer, Jonathan M Hodgson, Richard J Woodman, and Karen J Murphy. Am J Clin Nutr 2018;108:1166–1182.
Rationale: The Mediterranean diet (MedDiet) “may not meet Western recommendations for calcium and dairy intake.” Translation: Australians don’t eat enough dairy foods.
Objective: Determine the effect of a MedDiet supplemented with dairy foods (MedDairy) on blood pressure and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD).
Design: The study compared the effects of consuming two different diets, (1) a MedDiet with 3–4 daily servings of dairy (MedDairy) versus (2) a lowfat control diet (LowFat).
Results: Participants on MedDairy reduced their blood pressure and other CVD risk factors.
Conclusion: “The MedDiet supplemented with dairy may be appropriate for an improvement in cardiovascular risk factors in a population at risk of CVD.”
Funding: “Supported by a Dairy Australia Research Grant.”
Dr. Gardner’s comments: the study does not compare the MedDiet to MedDairy. Instead, it compares MedDairy to LowFat—whatever people habitually eat, but restricted in fat.
In this study, compared to the LowFat group, the MedDairy group ate:
Even so, the LowFat group lost more fat mass and gained more lean body mass than did the MedDairy group, but the authors do not mention that in the abstract and don’t make a big deal about it.
But they do say this in their discussion:
However, the use of an LF [LowFat] control diet may limit the generalizability of our results, as well as our capacity to evaluate the benefits of adding dairy to a traditional MedDiet.
Precisely.
