Search results: a life in food

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.

A couple of weeks ago I did a post about a beef industry ad promoting the idea that eating beef promotes sustainability.  The ad claimed that beef contribute only 2% of greenhouse gases.  In rebuttal, I cited the widely quoted figure of 14.5%.

Two readers argued for a correction.

The first, Stephen Zwick, describes himself as a “regenetarianist,” a “huge soil nerd,” and independent of industry interests.  He sent lengthy and highly technical notes.  These, in my interpretation, boil down to:

• The 14.5% figure comes from a study that included land-use change, “specifically in Brazil at peak deforestation rates from 1998 to 2004,” and just for OECD countries.
• In North America, deforestation isn’t a large issue. The 2014 UN Climate Change Conference numbers from countries where land change is not a big factor total 8.1% for all agriculture.  Of that, only a quarter is from enteric fermentation (cattle methane burps).  Adding in manure management, brings it to about 40% of 8.1%  or a bit over 3%.
• These global or regional numbers do not account for soil sinks or tropospheric sinks (elimination of methane).  He cites three references: (1) WTF happens to all that methane?,  (2) Methane: Accounting for both sides of the scale,  (3) Ruminations: Methane math and context

He says:

Enteric methane is a distraction. Poor land management destroying soil sinks and reducing photosynthesis via desertification, deforestation and ocean acidification are also a huge problem. And yes, cattle and palm oil are part of the problem in tropical regions (see The Deforestation Process... )…Cattle is a very conspicuous driver, though it’s not really the primary driver. Human greed is…So, in other words, we need better regional and system data, and we can’t really make universal claims.

The second set of comments comes from Greg Miller, the chief science officer of the National Dairy Council.

While FAO estimates livestock emissions at 14.5% based on LCA [life cycle assessment], the emissions from transportation are only from the tailpipes (not LCA), so comparing apples and bananas – FAO did this, but later retracted because it is an inappropriate comparison, that now keeps getting repeated, thought you should know.

He cites this source on greenhouse gas emissions from the dairy sector:

And he cites this reference:  Recht, L. 2021 An Inclusive Transition to a Sustainable and Resilient Meat Sector, which talks about how to raise cattle sustainably.

How to make sense of this?

The percentage of greenhouse gases due to animal agriculture depends on who is doing the counting, and what factors and assumptions go into the estimations.  Low estimates predictably come from the beef and dairy industries (Stephen Zwick does not, which is why I am quoting him).  The Environmental Protection Agency also produces low estimates: 1.3% of total emissions for dairies.

In contrast, the Humane Society uses 18% (referring to carbon dioxide equivalents), as does Cowspiracy.

A new paper in Sustainability argues that the correct estimate is 16.5%.

It matters whether we are talking about carbon dioxide or methane.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends “strong, rapid and sustained reductions in CH4 [methane] emissions” and notes that the growth in atmospheric methane is “largely driven by emissions from the fossil fuels and agriculture (dominated by livestock) sectors.”

I was interested to see yesterday’s Politico, which had a report about the current politics of methane emissions. (behind a paywall).  It notes:

While oil and gas production is the main reason methane emissions have boomed since 2007, agriculture (namely livestock operations) remains a massive source of the potent greenhouse gas, accounting for 40 percent of methane emissions worldwide. ..Senate Democrats plan to include a “methane polluter fee” in their $3.5 trillion budget resolution that would hit energy producers that vent or burn off excess methane and compressors used to pressurize and transport natural gas.

The precise percentage contributed by animal agriculture?  I’m not sure it matters.  Everyone agrees that cattle produce more greenhouse gases than produced by any other food (as a result of burps, deforestation, feed production, manure, etc).

Raising cattle more sustainably and regeneratively is a really good idea.

That’s where policy needs to be directed.

One Potato

Thanks to David Ludwig for alerting me to an e-mail from the Alliance for Potato Research & Education (APRE), a trade association “dedicated to advancing the scientific understanding of the role potatoes play in promoting the health of all people.”

A new APRE-funded study published in Nutrients investigated the effect of increased dietary potassium from a whole food source – baked/boiled potatoes and baked French fries – or a potassium supplement on blood pressure and other cardiovascular disease risk factors compared to a ‘typical American’ control diet (lower potassium intake) among 30 pre-hypertensive-to-hypertensive men and women.

Results showed that baked/boiled potato consumption had the greatest benefit on reducing sodium retention, even more than the supplement, and resulted in a greater reduction in systolic blood pressure (SBP) compared to the control diet.

Further, despite commonly held misbeliefs about French fries and their role in heart-healthy lifestyles, the authors observed that a 330-calorie serving of baked French fries, when eaten as part of a ‘typical American’ diet, had no adverse effect on blood pressure or blood vessel function.

The study concludes:

This was the first controlled feeding study of potassium from food and supplements on BP and CVD outcomes in an unhealthy population…Of public health relevance is our observation that French fries in amounts typical of a large serving in a fast food restaurant has no adverse effect on blood pressure or endothelial function.

It discloses the funding source: “This research was funded by Alliance for Potato Research and Education.”

Comment: Because some (but not all) observational studies have linked potatoes, and especially French fries, to poor health outcomes, the potato industry wants research to give these foods a healthier image.  This study says that potatoes are high in potassium and a high potassium-to-sodium ratio is good for blood pressure and heart disease.  I could have told them that on the basis of food composition data alone: 100 grams of French fries contains 435 mg potassium versus 295 of sodium.  Does that make French fries a health food?  No, alas, it does not.

Once more for the record: industry-funded research is about marketing, not public health.

Two Potato

Last week, I received an emailed notification from APRE, the Alliance for Potato Research & Education announcing a new study.

For decades, people have often associated higher intakes of carbohydrate-containing foods with less healthy lifestyles. Yet, evidence suggests this view is overly simplistic, and it is instead the type and quality of carbohydrate foods that matter most for supporting health…In a newly published perspective in Nutrients, a group of nutrition researchers, who collectively make up the Quality Carbohydrate Coalition-Scientific Advisory Council (QCC-SAC), outline the opportunity for a stronger, more evidence-based approach to defining quality carbohydrate foods to support overall health and provide clearer dietary guidance.

The study: Toward an Evidence-Based Definition and Classification of Carbohydrate Food Quality: An Expert Panel Report.  Kevin B. Comerford, Yanni Papanikolaou,  Julie Miller Jones, Judith Rodriguez. Joanne Slavin,  Siddhartha Angadi.  and Adam Drewnowski.  Nutrients2021, 13(8), 2667.

Conclusion: The identification of higher quality carbohydrate foods could improve evidence-based public health policies and programming—such as the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.