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.

Just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday, government agencies are, at long last, taking action on food issues.

Two examples:

I.  The Federal Trade Commission has issued warning letters to trade associations and dietitian-influencers they paid to promote sugar and aspartame on social media.

The letter to AmeriBev detail concerns about posts on Instagram and TikTok by Valerie Agyeman, Nichole Andrews, Leslie Bonci, Keri Gans, Stephanie Grasso, Cara Harbstreet, Andrea Miller, Idrees Mughal, Adam Pecoraro, and Mary Ellen Phipps, each of whom also received an individual warning letter.

The letter to The Canadian Sugar Institute expresses concerns about Instagram posts by Jenn Messina and Lindsay Pleskot, each of whom also received an individual warning letter.

The letter to American Beverage (formerly the American Beverage Association) gives the “or else.”

We strongly urge you to review your social media policy. You should also review the Instagram, TikTok, and other social media posts made by your endorsers as to whether they contain sufficiently clear and conspicuous disclosures of any material connections to the American Beverage Association. To help guide your review, please see the Endorsement Guides3 and the staff publication FTC’s Endorsement Guides: What People Are Asking. Violations of the FTC Act may result in legal action seeking a federal district court injunction or an administrative cease and desist order

This action comes as a result of the investigative report in the Washington Post (it is cited in the letter).  I wrote about the Post article here and also posted the the response from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

The Post investigative team had this to say about the FTC’s warning letters.

Federal regulators announced warnings against two major food and beverage industry groups and a dozen nutrition influencers Wednesday, as part of a broad action to enforce stricter standards for how companies and social media creators disclose paid advertising.

Comment: Let’s hear it for the power of the press!

II.  New York State Attorney General sues PepsiCo for plastic pollution

New York Attorney General Letitia James today filed a historic and groundbreaking lawsuit against PepsiCo Inc. (PepsiCo) for harming the public and the environment with its single-use plastic packaging. The Office of the Attorney General (OAG) found that single-use plastic produced by PepsiCo contributes significantly to high levels of plastic pollution along the Buffalo River, pollution that is contaminating drinking water and harming wildlife.

…PepsiCo, which is headquartered in New York state, manufactures, produces, and packages at least 85 different beverage brands and 25 snack food brands that predominantly come in single-use plastic containers. Plastic packaging has become a persistent and dangerous form of pollution along the shores of the Buffalo River and in its watershed. In 2022, OAG conducted a survey of all types of waste collected at 13 sites along the Buffalo River and its tributaries and found that PepsiCo’s single-use plastic packaging was the most significant. Of the 1,916 pieces of plastic trash collected with an identifiable brand, over 17 percent were produced by PepsiCo. PepsiCo’s plastic packaging far exceeded any other source of this identifiable plastic waste along the river, and it was three times more abundant than the next highest contributor.

According to the New York Times, PepsiCo:

has said it aims to make all of its packaging “recyclable, compostable, biodegradable or reusable” by 2025. The company also says it wants to cut virgin plastic by 50 percent by 2030, compared with 2020.

The company is now being held accountable for that promise.  What a concept!

Comment: While soda-and-bottled-water companies profess commitments to reducing plastic waste, they fight recycling laws (those that require bottle deposits returnable when the bottle is returned) in every way possible.  Attorney General James is doing something quite remarkable; she is holding PepsiCo accountable for some of the externalized costs of producing sodas, bottled water, and snacks.  I hope this sets a strong precedent.  Kudos!

Just because all of the major nutrition professional organizations partner with food companies, does not make it a good idea.  If nothing else, partnerships with food companies raise reputational risks.  They give the appearance of conflicted interests, as David Ludwig and I warned in 2008.  I have also written about the hazards of food industry sponsorship of professional organizations in Food Politics, Soda Politics, and Unsavory Truth.  Here’s what they are doing now.

Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND, formerly the American Dietetic Association)  OOPS.  My error.  This should be the American Diabetes Association (even worse).  Abject apologies.  This is what I get for not reading more carefully.  Apologies again.

If I seem to be picking on AND, it’s because it is bigger and gets into more trouble than other nutrition professional societies.

The latest example: According to Reuters, a former AND officer, Elizabeth Hanna, has sued the organzation for “firing her for objecting to what she called a “pay to play” scheme to promote the no-calorie sweetener Splenda.

In its 2022 annual report, the ADA said Splenda was one of a group of “elite” supporters that had given more than $1 million, along with Bayer Healthcare, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Illinois, Helmsley Charitable Trust and others.

On its website, Splenda publishes “diabetes-friendly recipes,” endorsed by the ADA. Hanna, a registered dietitian nutritionist, said she refused to approve the endorsement of several of these recipes in July.

…The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states on its website that some studies have found possible health risks associated with the sweeteners, but that more research is needed.

American Society for Nutrition (ASN)

I am a member of this society and raise objections every time I get something like this in my e-mail.

Sponsored Webinar: Oral Health and Nutrition: Imperative for Healthy People 2030 and US Dietary Guidelines   Sponsored By: Mars Wrigley and the Oral Health Alliance.  The 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines (DGA) identified dental caries as a major diet-related chronic disease of public health concern….

Doing this sort of thing risks reputation.

Evidence:  In a video on ultra-processed foods, the Financial Times identifies the ASN as “food industry advocacy group.”

The ASN’s executive director assures me they will ask for a correction.

Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior

Et tu?

It just announced a webinar, “Latinos love affair with Mangos: Maintaining Generational Food Traditions to Improve Health Outcomes.”

This is “a webinar sponsored by the National Mango Board, SNEB Organizational Member.”

The mango is…one of the world’s most popular fruits, and a staple food across Spanish speaking countries of North America, South America, and the Caribbean. Beyond its culinary popularity, an expanding body of research shows associations with mangos and risk reductions for inflammation and metabolically- based chronic disease, many of which disproportionately impact Hispanic American populations.

Mangos as opposed to any other fruit?

I am also a member of this society.

Overall comment

Are the reputational risks—and the loss of integrity—worth the money?  I don’t think so.

I received an e-mailed news release from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) about its latest report.

The press release headline: Hidden costs of global agrifood systems worth at least $10 trillion.  154-country study makes case for true cost accounting to guide policy.

Our current agrifood systems impose huge hidden costs on our health, the environment and society, equivalent to at least $10 trillion a year, according to a ground-breaking analysis by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), covering 154 countries. This represents almost 10 percent of global GDP.

According to the 2023 edition of The State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA), the biggest hidden costs (more than 70 percent) are driven by unhealthy diets, high in ultra-processed foods, fats and sugars, leading to obesity and non-communicable diseases, and causing labour productivity losses. Such losses are particularly high in high- and upper-middle-income countries.

This report, FAO says, presents initial cost estimates.  A report next year will focus on ways to mitigate these costs.  Governments, it says, “can pull different levers to adjust agrifood systems and drive better outcomes overall. Taxes, subsidies, legislation and regulation are among them.”

The FAO director says: “the future of our agrifood systems hinges on our willingness to appreciate all food producers, big or small, to acknowledge these true costs, and understand how we all contribute to them, and what actions we need to take. ”

The report urges governments to use true cost accounting to address the climate crisis, poverty, inequality and food security.

True cost accounting (TCA), according to the report is:

A holistic and systemic approach to measuring and valuing the environmental, social, health and economic costs and benefits generated by agrifood systems to facilitate improved decisions by policymakers, businesses, farmers, investors and consumers.43

Translated, this means trying to assign numbers to the externalized and hidden costs of food production and consumption, meaning not just what you pay at the cash register but also the costs you pay in other ways for health care, animal welfare, biodiversity, polluted water and soil, and climate change.

These, says this report, add up to about $12.7 trillion a year.

The idea is to get food producers to pay their fair share of these costs—issues of accounting and accountability (according to the Scientific Group of the UN Food Systems Summit). 

The report comes with a big collection of resources:

• Read the full digital report
• Read the In Brief
• Read the Interactive story: Beyond the price tag
• Watch the Video: State of Food and Agriculture 2023. Revealing the true cost of food to transform agrifood systems
• Read the press release: Hidden costs of global agrifood systems worth at least $10 trillion

Read the background papers:

• Hidden costs of agrifood systems and recent trends from 2016 to 2023
• Revealing the hidden costs of agrifood systems to enhance their value
• Accounting for the hidden costs of agrifood systems in data-scarce contexts
• The role of true cost accounting in guiding agrifood businesses and investments towards sustainability
• True cost accounting applications for agrifood systems policymakers

That should be plenty to keep us all busy for quite a while.  Enjoy and ponder.