Food Politics by Marion Nestle

by Marion Nestle

Jun 29 2016

Brexit: What it means for the food and drink industries

What Britain’s exit from the European Union (“Brexit”) means for food and agriculture is worth attention.

It is no coincidence that food and drink is at the heart of so much of the debate about whether we are better off in or out of the EU. Worth £80bn a year and employing 400,000 people, it is our largest manufacturing sector and a big exporter and importer. Moreover, 38% of its workers are foreign-born, placing its demand for cheap labour at the centre of arguments about immigration.

The common agriculture policy (CAP) swallows up nearly 40% of the total EU budget…Britain produces just more than half what it consumes and depends on Europe to provide more than a quarter of the rest, while the EU’s population of more than 500 million people provides the UK’s most significant export market for food.

Agrimoney, a London-based concern that reports on commodity markets began its report on Brexit’s impact with these words:

Oh dear.

Tim Lang, professor at City University London’s Centre for Food Policy, told Food Navigator:

People will pay more for food. The British people have voted to raise the food prices…Where do they think their food comes from? Planet Zog?

Bakery & Snacks is especially interested in the meaning of Brexit for the food and drink industries.

It produced a Special Edition highlighting its articles on the topic.

The UK’s decision to leave the European Union goes against the wishes of 71% of the UK food & drink industry, according to a poll by the Food and Drink Federation. William Reed Business Media publications assess the impact for individual sectors such as snacks, confectionery, dairy, bakery and feed as well as food ingredients suppliers. What will Brexit mean for the food, feed and drink industries?

Britain votes to leave the EU: What now?: Britain has voted to leave the European Union and Prime Minister David Cameron has resigned as a result. Across Europe and the UK, the food industry is coming to terms with the outcome… Read
Brexit fallout: Snack sales face threat of drop in discretionary spend: Sweet and savory snacks will be among the hardest hit UK food categories as a result of the Brexit vote, according to analysts Euromonitor International… Read
Brexit: The industry responds: As snacks and bakery businesses across the globe come to terms with the ramifications of the UK’s impending exit from the European Union, we gather responses from businesses, trade bodies and stakeholders… Read
Confectionery to be worst hit UK food sector after Brexit, says Euromonitor: Confectionery volumes are forecast to decline faster than any other packaged food category after the UK voted to leave the European Union… Read
Dairy reacts to Brexit vote: Following the decision of the British public to leave the EU, attention has turned to how business will be affected, how negotiations will take place and the timescales involved… Read
BREXIT: Leave vote poses huge questions for Britain’s agricultural supply industry, says UK feed lobby: The result of the Brexit referendum was announced this morning with a vote in favor of the UK leaving the EU, and the British prime minster, David Cameron, subsequently announcing he is going to step down. Sterling has hit a 30 year low and uncertainty now reigns in the UK feed and agribusiness sector… Read
Industry reaction: What #Brexit means for UK & EU nutrition sectors: For the first time the European Union has lost a member after the British people yesterday voted to leave the bloc which began life as the European Economic Community in 1951… Read

And here is one more.

British food firms set to increase trade with US following Brexit vote: UK confectionery and snack businesses may look to ramp up their trade with the US in light of last week’s vote to leave the European Union… Read

It’s obvious from reading all this that the effects of the Brexit decision are largely unknown. not easy to predict, but unlikely to be good. The follow-up will be interesting to watch.

Fingers crossed that the fallout won’t be as bad as predicted.

Additions

Bee Wilson’s eloquent elegy for the benefits of European Union food for British palates in the New Yorker
Tim Lang’s expanded and referenced discussion in The Guardian

Tags: Agriculture, Food-industry

Jun 28 2016

My Time Magazine op-ed: We are still confused about calories

While I was in Israel last week, Time Magazine published an op-ed it had invited me to write. Here it is.

Even in ‘healthy’ foods, calories can tick up fast

Nutrition professor that I am, if I could teach just one thing to the American public, it is this: Larger portions have more calories.

Please don’t laugh.

If we all understood this, the United States would not have an obesity problem. And the recent revelation that places like Chipotle and Panera serve meals with more calories than McDonald’s would surprise nobody. We would realize the former’s “health” aura blinds people. But this basic rule applies to those places, too.

We would also, strangely, thank McDonald’s for at least one thing: It limits portion sizes. It’s easy to pile on calories by asking for a little more of this, then a refill of that—without realizing that the calories surpass those in McDonald’s meals.

It’s not easy to understand calories. They are not intuitive because they’re abstract. They cannot be seen, tasted or smelled, and are extraordinarily difficult to count accurately, even for scientists. My colleague Lisa Young, author of The Portion Teller, once asked an entry-level nutrition class to guess the calories in 8-ounce and 64-ounce soft drinks. We didn’t expect students to know that an 8-ounce Coke has 100 calories—but we certainly expected them to multiply whatever they guessed by eight for the 64-ounce drink. But the average multiplier was three.

The unintuitive relationship between amounts eaten and calorie intake is one of the reasons behind public health campaigns like the new soda tax in Philadelphia, which in part aims to get people to think twice before drinking sugary beverages. No nutritionist worries about an occasional 90-calorie mini-can of soda. But many people drink sugary beverages in 12-ounce, 20-ounce or liter sizes. Bigger sizes mean more calories, and more calories means more weight unless you compensate with physical activity.

But exercising off calories takes a lot of work. That was the message of aNew York City health department campaign demonstrating the need to walk the three miles from Union Square to Brooklyn to compensate for the nearly 300 calories in a 20-ounce soft drink.

And let’s not forget that all of the calories in soft drinks come from sugars, which provide nothing but calories—no vitamins, no minerals, no fiber. They may be delicious, but they have no redeeming nutritional value. That’s why their calories get called “empty.”

Does where calories come from make any difference? Yes, but in complicated ways. Weight balance depends on calories. But managing weight—and overall health—very much depends on where those calories come from. It’s not so easy to overeat vegetables, fruits and whole grains, or relatively unprocessed foods of any kind, because these tend to be bulky and fill you up before you eat too much. You can still gain weight on these healthy foods, but it’s harder. Chipotle may have healthier calories than McDonald’s, but its calories still count.

Sugars post particular problems because they induce insulin production, but also because they make foods taste good. We eat something sweet and want more of it. We start loving sweet tastes in infancy. Breast milk is sweet; it contains a tablespoon of lactose per cup and that’s there for a reason—to make babies do the work of nursing.

But sodas are very sweet. A 12-ounce soda contains more than threetablespoons of sugars—and the calories that go with them.

It’s also very hard to separate the effects of sugars from their calories. If scientists want to know whether the calories from sugars are worse than those from any other foods, they need to feed people precisely the same number of calories from diets widely varying in their content of sugar, other carbohydrates, protein, and fat for a long enough period of time to get meaningful results. The only way to do something like this would be to keep the study subjects under lock and key for as long as it takes—inconvenient, to say the least, and very expensive.

Until the science is resolved, we can all agree that eating less sugar is a good idea for just about everyone. Sugars are nutritionally empty, are hidden in foods, and encourage overeating.

Notice that I said less, not none. Personally, I love desserts and would never want to give up sugars entirely or ask anyone else to do so. I just follow my own dietary advice: eat lots of vegetables and other relatively unprocessed “real” foods, and for everything else, pay attention to portion size. This way, an occasional sugary treat is a pleasure and nothing to worry about.

Marion Nestle is professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and co-author of Why Calories Count. Her most recent book is Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning).

Tags: Calories, Sugars

Jun 27 2016

Israel’s solution to peanut allergies

While in Israel, I kept hearing that peanut allergies are virtually unknown in that country. Nobody I met knows anyone with problems with peanuts—not Jews, Arabs, children, nor adults.

The explanation?

Bamba (and its Arabic equivalent).

These things are peanut puffs.

Because they melt in the mouth, they are often fed to babies as a first food. Apparently, babies love them.

How do they taste? Just as you might expect (peanut-flavored straw? peanut-flavored Cheetos?). They are sold everywhere as a snack and I met adults who love them too.

Do they really prevent peanut allergies? Indeed, there might be something to this idea.

Introduction of peanut products into the diets of infants at high risk of developing peanut allergy was safe and led to an 81 percent reduction in the subsequent development of the allergy, a clinical trial has found…Researchers led by Gideon Lack, M.D., of King’s College London, designed a study called Learning Early About Peanut Allergy (LEAP), based on observations that Israeli children have lower rates of peanut allergy compared to Jewish children of similar ancestry residing in the United Kingdom. Unlike children in the UK, Israeli children begin consuming peanut-containing foods early in life.

Translation: Bamba.

These researchers also found that allergic reactions did not return even if the children in that trial stopped eating Bamba for a year.

Their studies were funded mainly by NIH and the UK Department of Health, but the researchers also report that their clinical trials unit was supported by the National Peanut Board, Atlanta, and that the manufacturer of Bamba supplied the products. The lead author, Gideon Lack, reports holding stock in DBV Technologies, the maker of Viaskin Peanut, a product that helps people with peanut allergies tolerate exposure to peanuts.

I’d like to see these studies repeated by fully independent researchers.

In the meantime, pediatric allergists are advising parents to let their babies eat peanut butter (but not peanuts because babies can choke on them).

These allergists—and the authors of the Bamba studies—participated in an American Academy of Pediatrics consensus statement:

There is now scientific evidence (Level 1 evidence from a randomized controlled trial) that health care providers should recommend introducing peanut-containing products into the diets of ‘‘high-risk’’ infants early on in life (between 4 and 11 months of age) in countries where peanut allergy is prevalent because delaying the introduction of peanut can be associated with an increased risk of peanut allergy.

If these studies are right, introducing babies to the widest possible variety of foods as soon as they can handle solid foods (usually at 4 to 5 months) may well help prevent allergies later on.

Addition

A reader just sent another paper from the same authors, this one a randomized trial of six allergenic foods given to breastfed babies at 3 or 6 months of age. By one analysis, allergies developed 1 to 3 years later in 7.1% of the later-introduction group and 5.6% of the earlier-introduction group—a result that was not statistically significant. By another, allergies were much lower in the early-introduction group (2.4% vs 7.3%), especially with respect to peanut and milk allergies.

Tags: Allergies, Conflicts-of-interest, Peanuts, Sponsored-research

Jun 24 2016

Israel food: more random observations

Lunch in the old Yemenite section of Tel Aviv, now the up-and-trendy Kerem Ha Teymanim.

The restaurant is Shlomo Doron’s The Joy of the Wipe. This doesn’t quite get at the meaning, which is what you do to eat hummus with pita bread.

The restaurant is near the Carmel Market. These are great bowls of dates, dried fruits, and nuts.

Entire stalls are devoted to halvah, the candy made with sesame seed paste.

IMG_20160621_1233211

I did a day trip to the completely improbable Rutenberg restaurant: unexpectedly lovely food in a place remote from major cities, next to ruins of an electric plant and a bridge that used to cross the Jordan “river” (now a brackish small stream). The restaurant is smack on the border with Jordan, 200 feet below sea level, and 45 degrees centigrade (112 degrees Fahrenheit—I’m not kidding) on the afternoon I visited. The far end of the nearby stone bridge is in Jordan, and so is the watchtower on the hill in the back.

Beautiful food.

The chefs with a portrait of the eponymous Rutenberg, who had something to do with the nearby electric plant, now in ruins.

If ever there were a destination restaurant, this is it. Camels, maybe, but foot traffic? Hence: improbable.

Tags: International

Jun 22 2016

The food scene in Israel—some early observations

Wandering around in the Rehavia neighborhood in Jerusalem, I saw a local park with a just-starting composting program.

Down the street from the official residence of the Prime Minister (that would be Benjamin Netanyahu), is the headquarters of the International Jewish Vegetarian Society.

I’m surprised at how little food advertising I’m seeing. This restaurant overlooking the crater at Mitzpe Ramon is an example that seems typical. Nestlé (no relation) ice cream bars are everywhere.

Coca-Cola is everywhere too, but this venerable truck is the only one I’ve seen. This one was in Tel Aviv.

Tags: Coca-Cola, International, Nestlé, Vegetarian-and-vegan

Jun 21 2016

The Sugar Association’s latest spin on the science

I’m in Israel this week where “eat-less-sugar” is just as big an issue as it is in the United States (translation: “without sugar”)

The U.S. Sugar Association is using an article in JAMA about the rising prevalence of obesity to argue that sugar cannot be responsible. Sugar intake has declined in the U.S. since 2000, largely because of the decline in consumption of soft drinks.

Sugar, says the Sugar Association, cannot cause obesity (it’s energy balance).

Evidence? The numbers don’t add up.

Oops. Better take a look at the actual data from the JAMA paper:

What this figure shows is only a small increase in obesity over the last 10 years for men (on the left) and women (on the right)—for those above the 50th percentile of body mass index.

My interpretation:

Yes, sugar consumption is down. That’s excellent progress but there’s still a long way to go.
Yes, calories count, and physical activity is good for health.
But—the decline is sugar consumption correlates with a leveling off of obesity in adults, just as would be predicted.
Even so, eating less sugar is a good idea for just about everyone.

Most Americans consume twice the sugar recommended. Less would be better, but the “10% of calories” recommendation still leaves plenty of room for dessert.

Tags: Sugars

Jun 20 2016