Search results: a life in food

What a concept!  A government cracking down on illegally labeled Kellogg kids’ cereals, lots of them.

The Associated Press report of the matter, widely reproduced, does not say which cereals or show photos of the ones that were seized.

Mexico has seized 380,000 boxes of Corn Flakes, Special K and other Kellogg’s cereals, claiming the boxes had cartoon drawings on them in violation of recently enacted laws aimed at improving children’s diets.

These laws put warning labels on foods and beverage high in calories, sugar, saturated fat, trans fat, sodium, artificial sweeteners, and caffeine.  These cover practically all ultra-processed foods.

At the same time, restrictions were placed on the advertising of unhealthy products to children, so that products with warning labels cannot be advertised to children or use cartoon characters.

I’m wondering if some of the seized products violated the law by having cartoons on the package, like this one.

Here is what the boxes of sugary cereals are supposed to look like now.

I want to know more about what got seized.

But how terrific that the Mexican government is taking this public health measure seriously.

Felicidades!

If you want to know what preoccupies the FDA, takes up its time, and keeps it from giving food safety the attention it needs, try this for a burning issue: Revocation of the Standard of Identity for French dressing.

Why would the FDA go to all this bother (and it looks like a lot of bother?

Because it was petitioned to do so by the Association for Dressings and Sauces (ADS).

If, like me, you had never heard of this trade association,

it represents manufacturers of salad dressing, mayonnaise and condiment sauces and suppliers of raw materials, packaging and equipment to this segment of the food industry.

Background: Standards of Identity

These date back to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. They say what a food product must contain, in what proportions, and, sometimes, how it must be manufactured. Foods called things like ‘milk chocolate,’ ‘bread’ and ‘ketchup’ have standards of identity.  Because some of these standards date back 80 years, the FDA has called for comments on modernizing them.

When the FDA extended the comment period, it explained the goals for updating Standards of Identity:

• Protect consumers against economic adulteration;
• Maintain the basic nature, essential characteristics and nutritional integrity of food; and
• Promote industry innovation by giving manufacturers the flexibility to produce healthier foods.

The French Dressing standards

Check this for level of effort over more than 70 years.

In the Federal Register of August 12, 1950 (15 FR 5227), we established a standard of identity for French dressing. We later amended that standard of identity in the Federal Registers of May 10, 1961 (26 FR 4012), February 12, 1964 (29 FR 2382), February 1, 1967 (32 FR 1127 at 1128), May 18, 1971 (36 FR 9010), and November 8, 1974 (39 FR 39554), to allow the use of certain ingredients in French dressing. We also re-designated the French dressing standard of identity as § 169.115 (21 CFR 169.115) (42 FR 14481, March 15, 1977).

The Association for Dressings and Sauces complained—in its January 1998 petition— that nonstandardized pourable salad dressings such as Italian, Ranch, cheese, fruit, and peppercorn, have proliferated as have those reduced in fat, “light,” and fat-free. Because of this variation, and because consumers now expect French dressing to contain tomato-derived ingredients, be reddish-orange color, and sweet, the French dressing standard of identity “no longer serves honesty and fair dealing in the interest of consumers.”

It took more than 20 years, but the FDA now agrees.

Commentary

Ted Kyle of ConscienceHealth.org, who always has thoughtful and interesting things to say about food issues (even when we disagree), asks a good question: Does Anybody Care What’s in French Dressing?  He points out that standards protect the integrity of real as opposed to ultra-processed foods.

The New York Times quotes food historian Ken Albala:

“I can picture the people at Kraft sitting down at a board meeting and the chief marketing guy saying, ‘Do you know the sales of French dressing have dropped off by x and y?’ ” Professor Albala said that the change could allow food companies to revamp their recipes for French dressing as a way to try to boost sales.

 The Times also noted:

In response to the F.D.A.’s announcement of the change on Twitter, some people mocked the agency on Wednesday and said that it should concentrate more on its regulatory role in the coronavirus pandemic. The agency said in the newly published rule that it had received at least one comment as part of its review that questioned its priorities.

My point precisely.

I’m going to take next week off (unless some crisis occurs).  This will be my last post in 2021.  Stay healthy over the holidays.  See you on January 3 2022.

In the meantime, enjoy this announcement from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization: Rome’s traditional Christmas lighting illuminates SDGs.

The SDGs, of course, are the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, which I’ve written about previously.

FAO says:

The official ceremony to inaugurate the 25 meter high fir on Piazza Venezia in Rome’s historic city centre took place today as the Italian capital launched the initiative “Christmas in Rome – Let’s give the gift of a sustainable city”

…Each gift package displays a QR code which, when scanned by visitors with their smartphones provides them with information compiled by FAO experts about concrete actions each of us can take to make our lifestyle more sustainable and start building a better future for the planet, our city and its people.,..Additional content is also accessible to visitors both in Rome and all around the world via a web App and through the FAO website.

How’s that for wishing us all a useful, productive, and optimistic holiday season.  May the new year bring us all peace, prosperity, and healthy and sustainable food systems.

Two studies of the role of nuts in health.

I.  This one comes from ObesityandEnergetics.org’s “Headline vs. Study.”

Headline: Maximum Wellness: Walnuts are a Life-Extension Food:  “Looks like your [sic] nuts not to include walnuts in your diet. For more information and to read this study…go to maxwellnutrition.com, where you can find top wellness and nutrition products made in the United States – shipped to your door.”  [Comment: Clearly, we are dealing here with marketing]

Study: Association of Self-Reported Walnut Consumption with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality and Life Expectancy in U.S. Adults. Maximum Wellness nor Causation Necessarily Established.  Liu, X.; Guasch-Ferré, M.; Tobias, D.K.; Li, Y.  Nutrients 2021, 13, 2699. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/nu13082699

Conclusion: A greater life expectancy at age 60 (1.30 years in women and 1.26 years in men) was observed among those who consumed walnuts more than 5 servings/week compared to non-consumers.  Higher walnut consumption was associated with a lower risk of total and CVD mortality and a greater gained life expectancy among U.S. elder adults.  [Comment: association, not causation, and the difference is small].

Conflict of interest: The last (senior?) author reports having received research support from California Walnut Commission, but states that ” The funder has no role in the design and conduct of the study, in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data, and in the preparation, review, or in the decision to publish the results.”  [Comment: That’s what they all say, but research often demonstrates otherwise, as I review in my book Unsavory Truth].

And now for the second:

II.  Association of nut consumption with risk of total cancer and 5 specific cancers: evidence from 3 large prospective cohort studies.  Zhe Fang, You Wu, Yanping Li, Xuehong Zhang, Walter C Willett, A Heather Eliassen,1Bernard Rosner,
Mingyang Song, Lorelei A Mucci,and Edward L Giovannucci.  The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 114, Issue 6, December 2021, Pages 1925–1935, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqab295

Conclusion: In 3 large prospective cohorts, frequent nut consumption was not associated with risk of total cancer and common individual cancers.  [Comment: What? An industry-funded study that finds no benefuts?]

Funding: Supported by the California Walnut Commission and Swiss Re Management Ltd (to YL),… and NIH grants U01 CA167552 (to LAM and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study), UM1 CA186107 and P01 CA87969 (to the Nurses’ Health Study), and U01 CA176726 (to AHE and the Nurses’ Health Study II). The funding sources did not participate in the study design; or
collection, analysis, or interpretation of the data; or preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript.

Here’s how the authors explain their highly unusual no-benefit result:

Given the scarcity of available high-quality data, our findings add to current evidence to more precisely determine the relation between nut consumption and cancer risk. So far, the population based evidence has not been strong enough to conclude that nut consumption is protective against total cancer and these 5 common cancers. Future studies on other cancer sites are still needed to examine the benefits of nuts on cancer development.

Really?  Why?  Do the authors not believe their own data?  Their findings ought to settle the matter and encourage the authors to move on to more significant research.  “More research needed” keeps the California Walnut Commission busy.

Research funded by food companies always requires a degree of skepticism, no matter what the results.

Benjamin Lorr.  The Secret Life of Groceries: the Dark Miracle of the American supermarket.  Avery/Penguin Random House, 2020.

I don’t know how I missed this one when it came out in mid-2020, but I did.*

I saw a reference to it and thought I ought to take a look, largely because I am gearing up to update my book, What to Eat, in a second edition for Picador/Farrar Straus Giroux.

My book, which first appeared in 2006, is about food issues, using supermarkets as an organizing device.

Lorr’s book, which I expected to be a superficial expose of supermarkets, is anything but.

It is a deep, detailed, personal, and utterly powerful indictment of the human rights violations perpetrated on workers in grocery supply chains: truckers, grocery store clerks, Thai workers on shrimp-catching boats.

The personal comes in because Lorr is an experiential immersion journalist.  He embedded himself with a trucker, the fish section of a Whole Foods market, and a Thai fishing boat, as well as spending several years doing interviews.  Using the personal stories, he has plenty to say about truly shameless exploitation of low-wage workers in order to keep food costs low.

If you want to understand what low-wage work—or the Great Resignation—is about, here’s an excellent place to start.

This is an important book about food labor issues, but also about how more general systems of exploitation are maintained.

The “more general” leads me to pick one bone with Lorr’s analysis.

For those of us, he says:

Who want to shake the world aware to the fact that we are literally sustaining ourselves on misery, who want to reform, I very much don’t want to dissuade you so much as I want you to consider that any solution with come from outside our food system, so far outside it that thinking about food is only a distraction from the real work to be done.

His book, I’d say, proves just the opposite.  Food is his entry point into this topic and would not be there without it.

*I shouldn’t have missed it.  It was reviewed in the New York Times.  And Charles Platkin, whose work I follow closely, interviewed Lorr when the book first came out.

Digital marketing, especially when targeted to children, is a rising source of concern and for well-documented reasons.

Two reports provide the data.  The big issue?  Digital marketing promotes unhealthful eating.

I.  From the World Health Organization’s Regional Office in Europe: Digital Food Environments Factsheet

Digital technologies are becoming integrated to varying degrees into everyday life across the 53 countries of the WHO European Region. The increase in digital technologies can increase the convenience of food and prepared meals. A recent unrepresentative survey of 10 European countries found that every fifth meal was consumed outside of the home, with 80% from commercial outlets. The influence of digitalization on dietary behaviour, however, is not well understood, raising questions about its influence on the health and nutrition of adults and children.

II.  From the U.S. Center for Digital Democracy comes Big Food, Big Tech, and the Global Childhood Obesity Pandemic

The full report

Some of the largest food and beverage corporations—including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Pepsi—have, in effect, transformed themselves into Big Data businesses, acquiring specialist firms, establishing large in-house operations, and hiring teams of data scientists and technology experts to direct these systems. With these enhanced capabilities, they can more effectively engage in ad targeting—whether on the leading platforms or through their own mobile apps.

The Executive Summary

A growing body of academic research has documented the increasing presence of unhealthy food promotion in digital media, as well as clear patterns of youth engagement with major brands, and influences on health behaviors.

The Press Release

Tech platforms especially popular with young people—including Facebook’s Instagram, Amazon’s Twitch, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Google’s YouTube – are working with giant food and beverage companies, such as Coca Cola, KFC, Pepsi and McDonald’s, to promote sugar-sweetened soda, energy drinks, candy, fast food, and other unhealthy products across social media, gaming, and streaming video. The report offers fresh new analysis and insight into the most recent industry practices.

Comment: All this calls for regulation, of course.  Any chance of that coming our way?

I learned about this one from an article in FoodNavigator: Study: Walnut consumption linked to improved life expectancy

New research from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health funded by the California Walnut Commission has found a possible link between higher walnut consumption and increase in life expectancy among older US adults.

The article quotes the senior author:

What we’ve learned from this study is that even a few handfuls of walnuts per week may help promote longevity, especially among those whose diet quality isn’t great to begin with. It’s a practical tip that can be feasible for a number of people who are looking to improve their health, which is top of mind for many people.

Washington Post columnist Tamar Haspel tweeted about this study: “I have a pretty big beef with nutritional epidemiology, and there’s a new study on walnuts that pushes all my button[s].”

Her beefs:

• Difficulties interpreting information from food frequency questionnaires
• Complications of correcting for confounding variables (18 in this case)
• Implications of causation (“lots of talk about the cardioprotective aspects of walnuts”)
• The study was not pre-registered
• It was funded by the walnut industry

Her view (with which I concur):

• “Studies like the [sic] have helped create the mess that is nutrition advice”
• “We DO NOT have the tools to assess the health impact of specific foods.”
• “Eat a wide variety of whole-ish foods you enjoy in quantities consistent with the weight you want to be.  Eat walnuts if you like them.”

The study: Association of Walnut Consumption with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality and Life Expectancy in U.S. Adults.  Xiaoran Liu, Marta Guasch-Ferré, Deirdre K. Tobias, Yanping Li.

Method: Correlated information on dietary intake of walnuts from two large epidemiological studies  with mortality.

Conclusions: We reported that higher consumption of walnut was associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality and CVD mortality in two large prospective studies of U.S. elder adults, especially among those with suboptimal dietary quality. We estimated a greater life expectancy at age 60 of 1.3 years in women and 1.26 years in men, among those who consumed walnuts more than 5 servings/week compared to non-consumers.

Conflicts of interest: Li has received research support from California Walnut Commission. The funder has no role in the design and conduct of the study, in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data, and in the preparation, review, or in the decision to publish the results. All other authors have reported that they have no relationships relevant to the contents of this paper to disclose.

Comment: In addition to Haspel’s comments, I would add that the statement that the funder had no role is difficult to evaluate.  Industry funders generally do not pay for research likely to come out with results unfavorable to their products and much evidence suggests that influence is exerted at an unconscious level.  I provide evidence for this and other observations about industry “funding effects”—observations that research sponsored by food companies almost invariably produces results favorable to the sponsor’s interests but that recipients of industry funding typically do not recognize its influence—in my book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.

I must also point out that walnuts are not the only nuts singled out for specific health benefits.  See, for example, “Pecan-Enriched Diets Alter Cholesterol Profiles and Triglycerides in Adults at Risk for Cardiovascular Disease in a Randomized, Controlled Trial” in a recent issue of the Journal of Nutrition.  Its sponsor was the Georgia Pecan Commission.

The bottom line: eat whatever nuts you like.

I learned about this one from a tweet:

This seemed worth a follow up.

Here’s the article from The Standard:

Drinking tea from the age of four helps children to combat obesity, stress and heart disease, according to a new study.

I checked the study: Tea and Wellness throughout Life

Overall, this review concludes that tea consumption contributes to health and wellness throughout life and that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy three cups daily as part of a healthy lifestyle pattern.

Who paid for this?

Conflicts of interest: The authors received funding provided by the Tea Advisory Panel (www.teaadvisorypanel.com), which is supported by an unrestricted educational grant from the UK TEA & INFUSIONS ASSOCIATION (UKTIA), the trade association for the UK tea industry. UKTIA plays no role in producing the outputs of the panel. Independent panel members include nutritionists, biochemists, dietitians, dentist and doctors.

I don’t really care who was on the panel.  This was an industry-paid project with a predictable—if eyebrow-raising—result.  Tea is lovely and there is no reason to think it unhealthy, but surely some skepticism is called for here?

Reference: For a summary of research on the “funding effect”—the observations that research sponsored by food companies almost invariably produces results favorable to the sponsor’s interests and that recipients of industry funding typically did not intend to be influenced and do not recognize the influence—see my book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.