Search results: a life in food

This has not been a good year for artificial sweeteners.

The World Health Organization says don’t use them for weight control and don’t give them to children.

The recommendation is based on the findings of a systematic review of the available evidence which suggests that use of NSS does not confer any long-term benefit in reducing body fat in adults or children. Results of the review also suggest that there may be potential undesirable effects from long-term use of NSS, such as an increased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and mortality in adults.

US Right to Know says: Aspartame: Decades of science point to serious health risks  

• Dozens of studies have linked the artificial sweetener aspartame to serious health problems, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, seizures, stroke and dementia, as well as negative effects such as intestinal dysbiosis, mood disorders, headaches and migraines.
• Evidence also links aspartame to weight gain, increased appetite and obesity-related diseases.

Thanks to Bill Marler for keeping us all up to date on the Daily Harvest saga.  He keeps up with the literature and writes, Is the Tara mystery closer to being solved?

My most recent post on this mystery was almost a year ago.

To review: Daily Harvest is a company that makes and ships preprepared vegan frozen meals, one of which, French Lentil + Leek Crumbles, has been recalled after several hundred people who ate it developed serious problems with their livers and gall bladders.

This was no trivial incident.  The FDA reported “As of 10/18/2022, there were 393 adverse illness reports in 39 states with 133 hospitalization and 0 deaths.”  But it could not detrmine the specific cause or route of contamination.

My post had breaking news:

The ingredient that caused the illnesses among people who consumed Daily Harvest’s French Lentil + Leek Crumbles has been identified, sort of.  As suspected, it’s the tara flour.  But what’s the toxin in the tara flour?  That, we still don’t know.

Now we have a new study: Is Baikiain in Tara Flour a Causative Agent for the Adverse Events Associated with the Recalled Frozen French Lentil & Leek Crumbles Food Product? A Working Hypothesis. 

In summary, the results of these initial studies support a working hypothesis that the adverse events reported by individuals consuming the Daily Harvest Crumbles product originate from the tara flour ingredient and are due, at least in part, to high levels of nonprotein amino acids (e.g., baikiain). It is further hypothesized that in vivo metabolism of metabolically unstable baikiain results in a toxic metabolite(s) that depletes glutathione and/or is an irreversible enzyme inhibitor (for L-pipecolate oxidase), resulting in adverse events which are dependent on the dose consumed and potentially exacerbated for individuals that have specific genetic predispositions.

Baikiain, which I had never heard of, is an analog of the amino acid proline.  In bacteria, it catalyzes proline destruction.  If it does this in humans, it also might account for the liver toxicity experienced by people who ate the Daily Harvest frozen meals containing tara.

The authors of the tara flour study identified baikiain in the flour.  They gave baikiain to mice, who did not fare well with it.

The hypothesis here is that some people are more susceptible to the toxic effects of baikiain than others.  The French Lentil + Leek Crumbles were sent to 26,000 customers, of which 400 or so got sick, more than 100 of them badly enough to have to be hospitalized; some required surgery.

The lesson here is that food ingredients need better testing.   Whoever makes tara must consider it GRAS (generally recognized as safe) for human consumption.

As Tom Neltner writes,

Tara flour is yet another example of how FDA’s GRAS program is broken—putting the health of Americans at unnecessary risk. FDA should use its big food reboot to fix the program so that we can have confidence in the safety of our food. The agency should also work with members of Congress who have introduced bills intended to fix GRAS and to have FDA reevaluate old food safety decisions in light of new science.

Amen to that.

Here’s another one that several readers have asked me about: Multivitamin Supplementation Improves Memory in Older Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial.  Authors: Lok-Kin Yeung, Daniel M. Alschuler, Melanie Wall, Howard D. Sesso, JoAnn E. Manson, Adam M. Brickman.  American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ajcnut.2023.05.011

The study: “Participants were randomly assigned to a daily multivitamin supplement (Centrum Silver) or placebo and evaluated annually with an Internet-based battery of neuropsychological tests for 3 y.”  Primary outcome measure: change in episodic memory (immediate recall performance on the ModRey test, after 1 y of intervention).  Secondary outcome measures: changes in episodic memory over 3 y of follow-up,  and in performance on neuropsychological tasks of novel object recognition and executive function over 3 y.

Results: “Compared with placebo, participants randomly assigned to multivitamin supplementation had significantly better ModRey immediate recall at 1 y, the primary endpoint (t(5889) = 2.25, P = 0.025), as well as across the 3 y of follow-up on average (t(5889) = 2.54, P = 0.011). Multivitamin supplementation had no significant effects on secondary outcomes…we estimated that the effect of the multivitamin intervention improved memory performance above placebo by the equivalent of 3.1 y of age-related memory change.”

Conflict of interest: HDS, JEM, and AMB received investigator-initiated grant support to their institutions from Mars Edge. Pfizer Consumer Healthcare (now Haleon) provided support through the partial provision of study pills and packaging. HDS received investigator-initiated grants from Pure Encapsulations and Pfizer Inc and honoraria and/or travel for lectures from the Council for Responsible Nutrition, BASF, NIH, and the
American Society of Nutrition during the conduct of the study. No funding sources had a role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.

Funding: This work was supported by an investigator-initiated grant from Mars Edge, a segment of Mars Inc dedicated to nutrition research. Pfizer Consumer Healthcare (now Haleon) provided support through the
partial provision of study pills and packaging.

Comment:  This study continues to surprise me.  As I’ve written before, it is part of the COSMOS trial, which is also supported by grants from NIH and a private foundation.  In my previous post on it, I noted that despite being funded by Pfizer (which makes Centrum Silver multivitamin supplements), the study did not show benefits of the supplement for prevention of cardiovascular disease or cancer—a rare exception to the rule that industry-funded studies tend to favor the sponsor’s interests.  But here we go again, this time with an equally surprising result but for a different reason: most multivitamin studies have shown no benefits whereas this one says if you take Centrum Silver, it will give you another three years of no loss in memory.  Wow!  I’ll be Pfizer is thrilled.

Here’s what the NIH National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health says about multivitamins:

I’m just getting to this report from Food and Water Watch: The Economic Cost of Food Monopolies: Dirty Dairy Racket

Food & Water Watch took a look at what’s happening to the U.S. dairy industry.  Its conclusions are not surprising if you have been following these trends.

• Big dairies have driven out small.  Only about 30 percent of all U.S. milk is produced on family-scale farms.
• Dairy is not profitable.  “Thanks to the gutting of federal supply management policy,” overproduction and increased production costs gave caysed milk prices to plummet.
• Consolidation doesn’t help.  Three dairy coops control 83 percent of milk sales: DFA (Dairy Farmers of America), Land O’ Lakes, and California Dairies, Inc.).

Here’s one comparison: Dairy association CEP salaries as compared to dairy farmer income.

The next Farm Bill could help fix some of this by:

• Restoring supply management
• Stopping proliferation of factory dairy farms
• Reforming the farm safety net
• Setting fair prices

Welcome to New York City ‘s new “Eat A Whole Lot More Plants” campaign “to put scrumptious sprouts and piquant produce on New Yorkers’ menus.”

The Health Department launched a new campaign that urges New Yorkers to put plants on their plates and adopt a healthy balanced diet full of whole foods. Whole and minimally processed plant foods like fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, and nuts are good for health as they are high in fiber, vitamins, and minerals and don’t come packaged with high amounts of sodium, added sugar, or unhealthy fats. The campaign titled “Eat A Whole Lot More Plants” highlights how eating a diet with lots of plants is one way to improve health and can help manage and reduce risk of type 2 diabetes.

The campaign begins with video ads.

It includes  ideas to increase intake of tasty shrub grub, like fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, and whole grains.

It “builds on the Mayor’s commitment to improve the food environment and combat climate change throughout New York City. ”

The campaign includes:

• Plant-powered Fridays in public schools.
• Updated NYC Food Standards for Meals and Snacks Purchased and Served and for Food, Vending Machines on City Property.
• Plant-based meals in public hospitals.
• Commitment to reduce absolute carbon emissions from food purchases across city agencies by 33% by 2030.
• A new partnership with the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) to provide every New York City health care practitioner with free introductory training in lifestyle medicine with a special focus on plant-based nutrition.
• An expansion of NYC Health + Hospitals’ (H+H) groundbreaking lifestyle medicine services at six new sites across all five boroughs to provide patients living with chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure the tools, support, and guidance to treat and prevent common conditions using lifestyle interventions including a plant-predominant eating pattern.

I hope it also includes an evaluation.  Let’s try it and see if it works!

Quaint as it may be, I still read the print edition of the New York Times.  That way, I don’t miss things like this (May 7, pages 16 and 17).

My phone security system would not allow me to use the QR link so I went to Oatly’s climate website to find out what this was about.

Oatly’s product climate footprints are expressed in carbon dioxide equivalents (shortened to ‘CO₂e’) per kilogram of packaged food product, calculated based on a life cycle assessment approach from grower to grocer. CO₂e considers the effect of different greenhouse gasses, including, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. The calculation, which is validated through a partnership with a leading climate change organization CarbonCloud, aggregates the emissions into one single unit based on how much of each of those greenhouse gasses is emitted and their global warming potential over a 100-year period.

This required a detour to Carbon Cloud, which, alas, does not give away its algorithm for calculating. CO₂e.

The Oatly explanation continues:

Unlike nutrition labels, there is no common or mandated methodology for CO₂e labeling. Until standardization and a mandate become reality, Oatly wants to encourage other companies in the food industry to put their CO₂e figures on their packaging. If Oatly is only one of a few to make this commitment, it’s difficult for consumers to make informed purchases against other products in the market.

But Oatly: if there is no agreed upon methodology for these calculations, and Carbon Cloud gives no details, how are we supposed to know how seriously to take this challenge?

Cute.  Will it increase Oatly sales?

Oatly, according to Food Business News, lost money in 2022.

While management sees better days ahead, the company struggled in fiscal 2022, ended Dec. 31. Oatly incurred a loss of $393 million, greater than the loss of $212 million the year before.

Maybe two-page ads in the New York Times will help?  We will find out today.

Additions May 10

Oatly posted reduced losses in the first quarter, 2023.

Oatly’s communications director sent further information about its climate calculations:

• Oatly’s Climate Footprint Page (oatly.com/footprint) this page then provides a link to the following from CarbonCloud
• CarbonCloud’s Methodology Page

CarbonCloud’s growth marketer sent this information:

Most of the products we have calculated footprints for – unfortunately not Oatly products – have their own footprint page on our ClimateHub with traceability through ingredients and methodology descriptions. Here’s an example from Dole: https://apps.carboncloud.com/climatehub/product-reports/038900004736/USA

Here’s also a couple of links to our methodology description, if you would rather read up on it on your own.

The short version / The long version

Thanks to both for sending all this.  Most helpful.

A reader sent me a PepsiCo job announcement sent to dietitians.

CONTRACTOR, SENIOR SCIENTIST: LIFE SCIENCES, SCIENTIFIC ENGAGEMENT TEAM

The PepsiCo Life Sciences Engagement Team is responsible for strategic coordination and execution of Life Science related internal and external science communication and partnership programs to help achieve growth by transforming our product portfolio to meet our PEP+ goals for added sugars, saturated fat and sodium reduction.

We are looking for a Senior Scientist to support our team that drives engagement to build external scientific credibility of our brands among key opinion leaders and consumer influencers and to help deliver internal education to equip our PepsiCo colleagues with relevant nutrition knowledge about our portfolio transformation journey.

Among the job responsibilities are to work on:

• The AND conference and expo (the exhibits) in Denver, October 2023
• Education tools and messages for PepsiCo Life Science
  Social media, website
• Competitor assessment on scientific communications
• Educational materials related to sports nutrition and hydration

The job requires

• Master’s degreMe in nutrition or a closely related field
• Registered Dietitian preferred, but not required
• 0-2 years of experience at a major food manufacturer or related experience (recent graduate acceptable)

Pepsi Life Sciences offers continuing education credits to dietitians.  Examples:

• Unpacking Preconceptions About Packaged Foods
• The Science of Sweetness: Taste and Learn

Comment

• PepsiCo may own Quaker Oats, but most of its products are ultra-processed and best minimized or avoided.
• Dietitians ought to be advising clients and the public to avoid ultra-processed foods (especially sugary drinks). from PepsiCo.
• PepsiCo employs dietitians.  That way it can boast about its nutrition initiatives.
• Dietitians who choose to work for PepsiCo are co-opted; they become part of the company’s marketing initiatives.

I just hope the job pays really well.

*******

For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.

I was surprised to see a press release from the American Society for Nutrition (ASN—of which I am a member) announcing publication of a research paper the Society had commissioned and published on sugars and body weight: Important food sources of fructose-containing sugars and adiposity: a systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled feeding trials.

The paper, the press release said, “Illustrate[s] The Need for Nuance in Public Health Guidance Related to Consumption of Sugars: Findings call into question recommendations that imply all sources of fructose-containing sugars carry the same risk.”

The press release notes that “this comprehensive review is timely as the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee currently assesses the latest science to inform updated evidence-based recommendations,” and it quotes the lead author: “There is an opportunity for more food-based guidance around sugars to help ensure Americans don’t inadvertently eat less health-promoting foods containing fructose – especially at a time when most people don’t eat enough of all forms of fruit, which offer significant health benefits.”

Uh oh.  This is an easily misinterpreted message.

My immediate question:  Who wrote the paper ?

No surprise.: authors with extensive conflicts of interest.

I’ve written about some of these authors’ conflicts of interest disclosures previously.  See, for example. this, this, and this.

Just for fun, I’ll post this particular statement of the conflicted interests at the end of this post.

Basically, these authors do not understand the difference between a conflict of interest (financial ties, which are discretionary) and non-discretionary viewpoints (all researchers have them).  In this case, consulting for a sugar company is a conflict; being a vegan or avoiding sugar-sweetened beverages is not.

My second question: Why did ASN commission this paper, and from these particular authors no less?

I contacted John Courtney, the long-time executive director of the ASN.  He said this was a leftover from an initiative started ten years ago.  Since then, the ASN has decided not to commission papers on controversial topics and this will not happen again.

Good.  It shouldn’t.  Commissioning papers like these make the ASN look like an arm of the food industry.  The ASN should avoid even teh appearance of conflicts of interest as much as it possibly can.

You don’t believe this is a problem?  Take a look at this conflict of interest statement.  Enjoy!