For years now I have been posting on Mondays something about conflicts of interest in nutrition research and practice on this site .

My goal in doing so is to raise awareness of practices that give the nutrition profession the appearance of undue food industry influence at the expense of public health.

Occasionally someone involved with something I post requests a correction or clarification.

Most recently, I heard from Gunter Kuhnle, a researcher in the UK whom I do not know personally.   He wrote:

In your blog (https://www.foodpolitics.com/2023/11/chocolate-an-update-on-the-food-politics-thereof/), you comment about my article in “The Conversation” on flavanols. This comment concludes with a statement that could be interpreted as if I was paid to write this piece. I would like to make clear that I was not paid to write this article – it was conceived and written in order to address a number of misunderstandings in the reporting of various studies concerning flavanols.  I would appreciate if you could correct this.

Since that was not at all my intention, I clarified the post immediately.

But I also requested his permission to reprint his note so I could do some more explaining about why this issue so concerns me.

I want to start by emphasizing that I do not see this as a personal matter.  My original post did not mention the author’s name and in general I try to avoid mentioning names of authors of industry-funded research unless they report financial ties to companies with vested interests in the outcome of that research.

I see this as a systemic issue.

But to summarize the arguments—and the research—I make and summarize in my book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat:

An enormous body of evidence, most of it derived from studies of tobacco, chemical, or pharmaceutical drug industry-sponsored research, consistently shows:

• Industry-funded research generally yields results that favor the sponsor’s interests.
• Industry funding of research influences its outcome.
• The influence of industry funding usually shows up in the framing of the research question or in the interpretation of results.
• Recipients of industry funding do not recognize the influence, do not intend to be influenced, and deny the influence (“science is science”).
• Denial of influence contradicts an enormous body of evidence to the contrary.
• Disclosure of funding source or relationships is necessary but not sufficient; considerable evidence exists to show that the statement “the sponsor had nothing to do with the design, conduct, or publication of the study” is often misleading or false.
• Exceptions do exist, but they are rare.

That researchers do not recognize the risks of industry funding is disturbing.  At the very least, when nutrition researchers accept funding from food companies, they give the appearance of conflict of interest.

And that is all it takes to reduce public trust in nutrition research, nutrition professionals, and nutrition professional societies.

I think there is something seriously wrong when I can look at the title of a nutrition research article and make a good guess about what company or industry trade association funded it.

I think there is something seriously wrong when I can look at the funder of a study and guess what the outcome is.

One more point: an argument I hear often is that all nutrition researchers are biased because they have dietary or ideological preferences.  There is research on this point too.  It argues that all researchers have personal or ideological biases—that’s what motivates them to do studies to test their hypotheses.  Personal biases, therefore, are universal and do not cause conflicts of interest.

Industry funding introduces a quite different motive: proving the health benefits or safety of a food product for commercial—not scientific—purposes.

Unsavory Truth provides references for all of this.

Also see Science in the Private Interest:  Has the Lure of Profits Corrupted Biomedical Research? by the late Sheldon Krimsky (I miss him terribly).

Professor Kuhnle, I thank you for writing and for the opportunity to respond.

Christy Spackman.  The Taste of Water: Sensory Perception and the Making of an Industrial Beverage.  University of California Press, 2023. 289 pages.

Food Studies scholar Christy Spackman proves that, yes, an entire book—-and a riveting one at that—-can be devoted to how water tastes, thereby explaining how it can be turned into a bland commodity with its non-taste sold at exorbitant cost.

My blurb for it:

After reading this book, I now view tasting water as just the same as tasting food, and so will you.

Here is a brief excerpt:

The tasting work done by the Nestlé team, and subsequent website and print information, paints a specific form of relationship between environment and corporation. Rather than highlighting Nestlé Waters (and one might say, all bottled water producers) as operating via extractive economies that produce PET bottles that then circulate in the environment for millennia in increasingly small particles—the tasting situated Nestlé as a core protector of the environment. Teaching dégustation meant teaching consumers to prioritize terroir, rather than the entire political economy of bottled water production….the stories that emerge through dégustation prioritize attention to long-standing understandings of the relationship between earth, food, and flavor at the expense of more recent environmental impacts of water exploitation. Attending to terroir makes it is easy to miss that the systems and ways in which bottled water is produced are, like municipal water, deeply technoscientific.

Another one:

Frankly, from a flavor perspective, for many people accustomed to the taste of bottled water, or filtered tap water, the ingestible argument DPR presents is pretty exciting. DPR [Direct Potable Reuse—i.e., reclaimed] water directly from Scottsdale’s Tap 2 completely lacks the green, musty flavors that plague so many water producers in the metropolitan Phoenix region. It tastes remarkably—or eerily—similar to many mainstream bottled water brands with its lack of minerality. Current proposals for integrating DPR into municipal water sources anticipate blending the purified effluent with treated water from the regular source. Once regulatory bodies take the step of allowing DPR, in the near future water will still slightly taste of the rivers, lakes, canals, wells, and aquifers it travelled through. Just less so.

Full disclosure: Christy Spackman is a doctoral graduate of NYU’s Food Studies program and we could not be more proud of what she has accomplished.  Read her book, judge for yourself, and enjoy!

FoodNavigator–Asia, a newsletter I subscribe to, publishes articles on reformulation and has now collected them in one place.

Reformulation is what happens when companies change the mix of food product ingredients to make them healthier—or at least to appear healthier-.  This is a highly effective sales strategy.

But reformulation raises philosophical questions:

• Is a slightly better-for-you food product necessarily a good choice?
• Does reformulation convert an unhealthy ultra-processed food product into a healthy one?
• Is a food product with a gram or two less of sugar or salt likely to make any difference to your health?

Never mind.  Here’s what food companies are doing these days, at least in Asia.

Special Edition: Reformulation: Sugar, Salts, Fats and Oils

Governments across the region are continuing to enforce policies to reduce sugar, salts, fats, and certain oils. In this special edition, we’ll showcase the companies providing the most innovative solutions and brands at the forefront of this charge.

• Level up: Singapore’s Gryphon Tea Company reformulates RTD teas to meet better-for-you demand, raises Nutri-grade rating:  Singapore-based Gryphon Tea Company has updated its cold-brewed tea range with “no added sugar” formulations, which the firm says has helped it keep up with the better-for-you trend and reach out to a bigger pool of health-conscious consumers… Read
• ‘Prioritising indulgence’: Cargill-owned Aalst Chocolate investing in consumer-driven innovation to solidify market position:  Cargill-owned Aalst Chocolate is putting “substantial investment” into insights-driven R&D, customised products, and strengthening of its bean-to-bar supply chain to push growth in Asia and beyond… Read
• Hitting the sweet spot: India’s The Brooklyn Creamery winning over Middle East consumers with better-for-you options and novel flavours:  India-based The Brooklyn Creamery is making headway in the Middle East by catering to the buying behaviours and eating habits of consumers in the region, including healthier options and innovative flavours… Read
• Slash the salt: High sodium content in condiments poses public health concern in China:  There is an urgent need for government-backed comprehensive reformulation programmes for high-sodium condiments in China, experts claim… Read
• Thai UPF warning: Products routinely exceed fat, sugar, salt RDIs – new data:  New data from Thailand claims almost all ultra-processed food (UPF) products exceed the recommended daily amount of sodium and lack essential nutrients and minerals… Read
• Innovation challenge: How can firms meet reformulation and fortification demands while remaining cost competitive?  Food firms need to be increasingly savvy when it comes to meeting growing consumer demands for fortified and reformulated products, in order to remain cost competitive in the current economic environment… Read
• Magic marination: World-first liquid shio koji brand hopes to ride ASEAN umami and health trends:  World-first liquid shio koji brand Hanamaruki has big plans to ride on the growing umami and wellness trends in South East Asia, after seeing success in western and East Asian markets… Read
• Bull fighters: How Thailand’s Hippo Energy Drink is taking on the big-name competition:  Thailand-based Hippo Energy Drink believes that its combination of health, natural ingredients and low sugar offerings can help it build on its initial success in South East Asia and take on major brand competitors in the category… Read

The FDA says it is proposing to revoke the regulation authorizing the use of brominated vegetable oil (BVO) in food.  In  transslation from FDA-speak, the agendy now intends to ban BVO.

This is the second time I have written an RIP for BVO.  The first was in 2013—ten years ago!— when PepsiCo said it no longer use BVO in Gatorade in response to a petition from a teenage influencer.

BVO, a flame retardent, is made by adding bromine to vegetable oil.  Studies for years have found BVO to cause neurological and other health problems.  The FDA says:

In our 2014 review, we identified four unresolved safety questions with respect to the use of BVO in food: the potential for thyroid toxicity, bioaccumulation, developmental neurotoxicity, and reproductive toxicity. We determined that the safety data and information available did not provide evidence of a health threat resulting from the limited permitted use of BVO as a flavoring stabilizer in fruit-flavored beverages,…We concluded that high-quality data from contemporary studies, performed under current guideline standards, were needed to address the knowledge gaps regarding the safety of BVO …. The rodent safety studies…confirmed previous reports that dietary exposure to BVO is toxic to the thyroid and results in bioaccumulation of lipid-bound bromine in the body at doses relevant to human exposure.

OK, but this FDA action has an even longer history, and shockingly so.

In 1970, the FDA ruled that BVO could no longer be considered “Generally Recognized as Safe” (GRAS), but took no further action saying removing it was not much of a priority.

The UK banned it isoon after; the European Union got rid of it in 2008.  But the FDA did not.

In summary, the FDA has been worried about BVO since 1970 but is only just now getting around to banning it.

Why?  I can only speculate.

• The soft drink industry is losing power now that people view it as producing unhealthy products.
• California recently took the lead and banned BVO along with three other questionably safe additives.
• Or maybe it just didn’t judge the evidence for harm as adequate.

Better now than never.

Resources

• Constituent Update: FDA Proposes Rule to Revoke Regulation Allowing the Use of Brominated Vegetable Oil in Food
• FDA Voices: How FDA’s New Approach to Reviewing Chemicals Added to Food Will Strengthen Food Safety
• Constituent Update: FDA Update on Post-market Assessment of Certain Food Ingredients
• Lists of Select Chemicals in the Food Supply Under FDA Review
• Food Chemical Safety
• The full list of products containing BVO

I’ve been collecting items on feeding kids.  Here are four.

I.  FDA Warning Letters: The FDA has sent warning letters to ByHeart, Mead Johnson Nutrition (Reckitt), & Perrigo Wisconsin for violating basic food safety standards in manufacture of infant formula.

They [letters] reflect findings from FDA inspections of these facilities over the last several months. At the time of each inspection, the FDA issued inspectional observations and exercised oversight of each firm as they initiated recalls (in December 2022, February 2023 and March 2023) to remove product potentially contaminated with Cronobacter sakazakii from the marketplace…The FDA is issuing these letters now as part of its normal regulatory process and to reinforce to these firms the importance of instituting and maintaining appropriate corrective actions when they detect pathogens to ensure compliance with the FDA’s laws and regulations. As part of this, the firms must, among other things, thoroughly conduct root cause investigations and perform subsequent cleaning and sanitation activities. Notably, firms also need to properly evaluate their cleaning and sanitation practices, schedules, and procedures before releasing product. 

Comment: What shocks me is the implication that the companies are not already doing this as part of their normal routines.

II.  Baby food pouches with lead sicken children.   

At least 18 more children have been sickened by the recently recalled applesauce fruit pouches due to dangerous lead contamination, the Food and Drug Administration said, in a recent update.  That brings the total number of affected children to 52. Applesauce pouches recall timeline:From recalls to poisoned kids in multiple states

Comment: Yes, I know self-feeding pouches are convenient, but I sure don’t like them much.  They are usually loaded with sugar and they don’t teach kids about diverse food flavors and textures.  Quality control, apparently, is a big issue.  My vote: avoid.

III. Environmental Working Group study finds 40% of commercial baby foods to contain toxic pesticides.

• EWG sampled 73 products from three popular brands: 58 non-organic, or conventional, baby foods and 15 organic.
• At least one pesticide was detected in 22 of the conventional baby foods.
• No pesticides were detected in any of the 15 organic products.

Comment: Pesticides may be in all foods but they get concentrated in baby foods.  The moral here is clear; if you want baby foods free of harmful pesticides, buy organic.  For more on this, see article in The Guardian.

IV. The marketing of ultra-processed foods especially targets infants and young children.   A study done in the UK provides ample documentation of anything you would want to know about this practice.

Comment: Food companies say they have to market to young children in order to meet sales growth targets.  Ethics is not a consideration here.

Given that situation, what to do?

Understand: commercial infant and baby foods are convenient, but enormously profitable to manufacturers.  Profits induce corporations to cut safety and health cautions.  This tension should make you think twice about using commercial infant and child feeding products.

To the extent you can:

• Breast feed when possible, for as long as possible
• If you use infant formula, switch around the brands (they are all the same, nutritionally); buy organic if you can afford it.
• Make your own baby foods (put whatever healthy foods you are eating or have around in a tiny blender).; buy organic foods if you can afford them.
• Feed kids real foods as soon as they can grab, chew, and swallow them without choking.

If you eat a generally healthy diet, get your kids eating it as soon as they can.

This one started out with a notice in NutraIngredients Europe, a newsletter I subscribe to:

Probiotic BG01-4 relieves constipation and discomfort in GI disorders: Probiotic BG01-4 improves specific symptoms of constipation and related GI dysfunction in people with self-reported functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGID), which affects a significant percentage of the global population, a new study concludes…. Read more

That title triggered my usual question, “Who paid for this?”

I went right to the study:

All articles published in Nutrients (ISSN 2072-6643) are published in full open access. An article processing charge (APC) of CHF 2900 (Swiss Francs) applies to papers accepted after peer review. This article processing charge is to cover the costs of peer review, copyediting, typesetting, long-term archiving, and journal management. In addition to Swiss francs (CHF), we also accept payment in euros (EUR), US dollars (USD), British pound sterling (GBP), Japanese yen (JPY) or Canadian dollars (CAD).

Six items to cheer your holiday (or not):

I.  The cost of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner (in Iowa, at least).

II.  But the pie will cost less, says USDA.

III.  How much of that cost does the farmer get?  Not much, alas.

IV.  Williams Sonoma’s guide to portion sizes.  A half to a whole bottle of wine, per person?

V.  The #FoodNotPhones Thanksgiving challenge.  No phones at the Thanksgiving table; research says 68% of Americans permit phones during dinner (thanks to Phil Lempert, the Supermarket Guru, for this one)

Join the #FoodNotPhones Thanksgiving Challenge to Put Down Your Phone During Mealtime

VI.  Thanksgiving by the numbers (I can’t vouch for these.  Here is one source, unverified).

• 40 million – The staggering number of whole turkeys that Americans gobble up on Thanksgiving day.
• 40% – The percentage of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup annual sales during Thanksgiving.
• $325 – The average American’s spending over the five-day Thanksgiving period. It’s a perfect time for gratitude and, of course, a little shopping too!
• 10 hours – The time an average male would need to spend on the treadmill to burn off the 4,500 calories consumed during a Thanksgiving meal.
• 4 – the number of small towns in the U.S. named Turkey: Turkey Creek, Louisiana, Turkey Creek, Arizona, Turkey, North Carolina, and Turkey, Texas.
• $150,000 – the price tag of the world’s most expensive Thanksgiving meal at a restaurant.

Enjoy your dinner!

Enjoy the holiday weekend.  FoodPolitics takes the day off tomorrow and I hope you get to take it off too.

While producers of sugar cane celebrated National Real Sugar Day on October 14, the New York City Council voted to require chain restaurants to post warning labels on sodas and other menu items that exceed to-be-defined limits on added sugars.

Mayor Eric Adams signed the Sweet Truth Act, which gives the city until 2024 to set standards and design the icon, and gives chain restaurants until 2025 to comply.

Meals at fast food and fast casual restaurants can be exceedingly high in added sugars, amounts that far exceed the FDA’s daily recommendation for consumption of 50 grams per day. Even most “small” fountain sodas sold at leading fast food chains contain more than a day’s worth of added sugars. Added sugars have been linked to weight gain in children and adults. Sugary drinks may also contribute to type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

In a video, New York City Health Commissioner, Dr. Ashwin Vasan, explains why sugar redction is a good idea.

Where is the FDA in all this?  It held a public meeting on the need for sugar reduction.  What it will do as a result remains to be seen, but the New York City action is surely a nudge.

In the meantime, the Government Accountability Office has some things to say about the U.S. Sugar Program.  It sums up the issues concisely.

The Department of Agriculture administers the U.S. sugar program to support domestic sugar production through tools such as limiting the supply of sugar.

The program creates higher sugar prices, which cost consumers more than producers benefit, at an annual cost to the economy of around $1 billion per year.

The program also restricts the amount of sugar entering the U.S. at a low tariff. The tariff restrictions are applied using a method based on 40-year-old data that doesn’t reflect current market conditions. This has led to fewer sugar imports than expected.

We recommended that USDA evaluate its method for restricting imports.

Comment: Here is a situation in which policies for sugar production and import intersect with policies for sugar and health in peculiar ways.  The objective of import policies is to restrict them in order to keep prices higher as a means to protect domestic sugar producers.

Ordinarily, food policies are designed to keep prices low—but not in this case (chalk this up to effective lobbying by cane and beet sugar producers, and the power of lobbyists in sugar-producing states).

Also ordinarily, higher prices would reduce demand, but sugar prices are nowhere near high enough to influence demand, which is one reason why this system continues.

Current policies are estimated to cost the public as much as $3.5 billion a year; divided by 350 million Americans means that the policies cost you an extra $10 per year for the sugar you buy—nowhere near enough to affect consumption.

Disparate goals for sugar are yet another reason why a single food agency overseeing the entire food system would be useful for reconciling these kinds of problems.