I spent a lot of time last week responding to reporters’ questions about Trump’s appointing Robert F. Kennedy, Jr to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

Here’s what the president-elect said about the appointment on Twitter (X):

For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation when it comes to Public Health…HHS will play a big role in helping ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides, pharmaceutical products, and food additives that have contributed to the overwhelming Health Crisis in this Country. Mr. Kennedy will restore these Agencies to the traditions of Gold Standard Scientific Research, and beacons of Transparency, to end the Chronic Disease epidemic, and to Make America Great and Healthy Again!

Trump has instructed Mr. Kennedy to end chronic disease and “Go wild on food.”

In various statements, Mr. Kennedy has said he wants to get rid of “poisons”

• Ultra-processed foods in schools
• Artificial colors in cereals
• Chemicals, pollutants, pesticides
• Mercury in fish
• Fast food

He also wants to

• Restrict sodas on SNAP
• Promote sustainable, regenerative farming by small farmers
• End conflicts of interest between government agencies and corporations: Corporate capture is the biggest threat to democracy.

These are the kinds of things I’ve been saying and writing about for decades!

[He also is pushing for some things that are much less well grounded in science: getting rid of grains for kids, seed oils, and fluoride in drinking water; deregulating raw milk; and firing all nutrition scientists on day 1].

If he really does do what he’s promising here, it means taking on the food industry, in a way that no government has ever done, and Trump showed no signs of doing in his first term.

What can we expect?  I have no idea, but thist sure will be interesting to watch.

Mother Jones calls Kennedy’s appointment “a genuine catastrophe.”

For charges of hypocrisy, click here.

Civil Eats asked a bunch of people to predict “The Path Forward for Food and Ag.”  Here’s what I said.

I wish I had a crystal ball to say how food and agriculture issues would play out over the next four years, but all I have to go on is what Trump and his followers say. If we take them at their word, then we must expect them to implement their Project 2025 plan, which replaces one deep state with another that favors conservative business interests and ideology. This calls for replacing staff in federal agencies with Trump loyalists and dismantling them, stopping the USDA from doing anything to prevent climate change, reforming farm subsidies (unclear how), splitting the farm bill to deal separately with agricultural supports and SNAP, reducing SNAP participation by reinstating work requirements and reducing the Thrifty Food Plan, and making it more difficult for kids to participate in school meals.

On the other hand, some of the plans make sense: eliminating checkoff programs and repealing the sugar program, for example. So do some of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s goals: Make America Healthy Again by focusing on chronic disease prevention, getting harmful chemicals out of kids’ foods, and getting rid of conflicts of interest among researchers and agency staff. It’s too early to know how much of this is just talk, but I’m planning to do what I can to oppose measures I view as harmful, but to strongly support the ones I think will be good for public health.

No food industry is too small or too obscure to fund research in its own interest.  Try this one, for example.

Effects of Supplementation with a Microalgae Extract from Phaeodactylum tricornutum Containing Fucoxanthin on Cognition and Markers of Health in Older Individuals with Perceptions of Cognitive Decline. Yoo C, Maury J, Gonzalez DE, Ko J, Xing D, Jenkins V, Dickerson B, Leonard M, Estes L, Johnson S, et al.  Nutrients. 2024; 16(17):2999. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16172999

Background: Phaeodactylum tricornutum (PT) is a microalgae extract that contains fucoxanthin and has been shown to enhance cognitive function in younger populations.

Purpose: The present study assessed if PT supplementation affects cognition in healthy, young-old, physically active adults with self-perceptions of cognitive and memory decline.

Methods: Forty-three males and females…with perceptions of cognitive and memory decline completed the double-blind, randomized, parallel-arm, placebo-controlled intervention clinical trial. Participants were…randomly allocated to their respective 12-week supplementation interventions, which were either the placebo (PL) or 1100 mg/day of PT containing 8.8 mg of fucoxanthin (FX).

Results: FX supplementation significantly affected (p < 0.05) or exhibited tendencies toward significance (p > 0.05 to p < 0.10 with effect sizes ranging from medium to large) for word recall, picture recognition reaction time, Stroop color–word test, choice reaction time, and digit vigilance test variables.

Conclusions: The results demonstrate some evidence that FX supplementation can improve working and secondary memory, vigilance, attention, accuracy, and executive function.

Funding: Microphyt (Baillargues, FRA) funded this study through a grant (Microphyt #410991) to Texas A&M University.

Conflicts of interest: J.M. and R.P. are sponsor-affiliated researchers who therefore have conflicts of interest in study results. They provided input on study design but were not involved in data collection or analysis. R.B.K. has conducted grant and contract-funded research on nutritional supplements awarded to the universities he has been affiliated with, received an honorarium for making scientific presentations, and served as a paid scientific expert. He has no financial conflicts of interest with the study sponsor or product evaluated in this study. The remaining coauthors report no financial conflicts of interest.

Comment: I like “some evidence.”  That suggests the evidence is not particularly impressive.  The study found positive conclusions, not surprising since two of the authors work for the sponsoring company.  Industry-funded studies almost invariably find conclusions that favor the sponsor’s interests.  Otherwise, why bother to sponsor research.  That’s its point: marketing.

Ashley N. Gearhardt, Kelly D. Brownell, Mark S. Gold, and Marc N. Potenza, editors.  Food & Addiction: A Comprehensive Handbook, Second Edition.  Oxford University Press, 2024.  570 pages.

This is the second edition of a book I wrote about in 2012.

At the time, I said:

Brownell and Gold have produced an instant classic.  Food and Addiction presents a comprehensive, authoritative, and compelling case for considering whether food is addictive.  Its chapters raise serious questions about our current laissez-faire attitude toward food marketing, especially to children.  This book is a must read for everyone who cares about the causes and consequences of obesity and the need for food policies that better promote health.  It is a game changer.  Readers will never look at food the same way again.

Much has happened since then to focus greater attention on the ways food triggers addictive-like eating behavior.

• Michael Moss’s books, Salt, Sugar, Fat, and Hooked.  These document how food companies deliberately formulate products to make them irresistible (“you can’t eat just one”).
• The emergence of the concept of ultra-processed foods as a researchable category.
• Kevin Hall et al’s demonstration that ultra-processed foods encourage people to eat more calories but not realize it.
• The increase in research using the Yale Food Addiction Scale, and
• The research described and reviewed in this book.

All of this makes an increasingly convincing case that the word “addiction” applies to food as well as to other addictive substances, and that similar proportions of people (10% to 15%) meet criteria for addiction; everyone eats, but not everyone meets those criteria.

The editors’ introductory and concluding chapters lay out the diagnostic and policy issues.

The short chapters address biological, behavioral, clinical, and legal correlates of food addiction.

They are written by a authors who address these issues from enormously different , but highly critical, perspectives ranging from the exceedingly personal to the big-picture political.

Is anything missing here?  As with any multi-authored book, this one undoubtedly took years to produce.  That makes it a few years out of date in fast-moving areas.  It does not cover recent research on ultra-processed foods, Kevin Hall’s experiment, the concept of food “noise,” or the way the new GLP-1 drugs might interact with addictive behavior.

But, this is the resource of food addiction, a great gift to the addiction-perplexed and an enormous public service at a time when it is badly needed.

A reader, Lynn Ripley, sent me a link to this article from the New York Times: What a Crackdown on Immigration Could Mean for Cheap Milk

What Peter does know, however, is that without foreign-born workers, his dairy could not stay afloat. Americans are understandably reluctant to perform dirty, dangerous and demanding work — what economists call 3-D jobs — as long as they have better alternatives. Unemployment in southern Idaho has averaged 3.4 percent for a decade; wages for entry-level workers on Peter’s farm are competitive with those for cashiers at fast-food franchises. He can’t pay much more, he insists, and still break even.

The issue for dairy farms is that the system is structured so the cost of production exceeds the price dairy farmers can get for their milk.

The problem, as Peter sees it, is that the price of everything in America has gone up except the price of milk. In the 1980s, a tractor cost him roughly $60,000, the federal minimum wage was $3.35 and his first hundred pounds of Class III milk — the kind used in making yogurt and cheese — sold to a processing plant for $12.24. Since then, many of his expenses have doubled or tripled. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Peter says, his costs soared, and they still haven’t come down. Fuel-tank fittings that cost him about $2,000 in 2014 now run $13,000. Mechanics who once charged $60 an hour now charge $95.

And one other problem: monopsony (market control by a single buyer).

So Peter, like almost every dairyman in the country, sells his milk through a co-op. Twice a day an insulated truck drains about 75,000 pounds of freshly pumped milk from his holding tanks. A couple of weeks later, Peter finds out what he will be paid in return.  “We’re not price makers,” Peter said. “We’re price takers.”

This system is not sustainable now, and it will be even less sustainable if the threatened roundup of immigrants takes place.

Dairy is not the only industry likely to be affected.  Think: farm work, meat packing plants, slaughter houses, back-of-the-house restaurant and foodservice work, house cleaning, childcare, eldercare, and all the other menial, low-wage jobs nobody else wants to do.

This system is not sustainable either.

Maybe Make America Healthy Again can take this on?

The House of Lords Food, Diet and Obesity Committee has a lengthy (179 pages) new report ‘Recipe for health: a plan to fix our broken food system’.

Key finding: Obesity and diet-related disease are public health emergencies costing society billions in healthcare costs and lost productivity.

Key recommendation: The Government should develop a comprehensive, integrated long-term new strategy to fix our food system, underpinned by a new legislative framework.

Key actions (selected):

• Require large food businesses to report on the healthfulness of their products
• Exclude businesses making unhealthful products from policy discussions on food, diet and obesity prevention.
• Tax products high in salt and sugar; use revenues to make healthy food cheaper.
• Ban the advertising of less healthy food across all media.

No recommendation on reducing intake of ultra-processed foods?  Despite finding the link between ultra-processed foods and poor health outcome “alarming,” the report ducked the issue and recommended only to fund more research.

It also advised reviewing dietary guidelines with ultra-processed foods in mind.

Still, the recommendation to keep food businesses out of public policy discussions is a good one, not to mention taxes and advertising bans.

This, mind you, is the House of Lords.  Impressive.

LINKS

• Full report
• News story
• Shorthand version of the report
• Video
• Audio (Baroness Walmsley)

The FDA has announced its 2025  Priority Deliverables for the Human Food Program.

These cover the microbial and chemical safety of foods, but I am especially interested in what the FDA is and is not doing about nutrition and chronic disease prevention—something mentioned by FDA Commissioner Robert Califf as a priority for American public health.

Based on FDA’s Nutrition Initiatives, the deliverables begin with:

FDA’s Role in Empowering Consumers to Build Nutritious Diets that Support Health and Wellness

Using a risk management approach, we focus our efforts in FY 2025 on labeling and other initiatives to help consumers make more informed choices about the food they eat, and, for those who rely on certain critical foods, such as infant formula, as their sole source of nutrition, we work to make sure those products are safe, properly labeled, and nutritionally sound.

As for the Human Food Program’s priority policy initiatives:

• Update FDA’s Nutrient Content Claim “Healthy”
• Propose Front-of-Package Nutrition Labeling:
• Support Reductions in Sodium in the Food Supply
• Increase the Resiliency of the U.S Infant Formula Market

The deliverables do mention diet-related chronic disease in the contexts of sodium and research.

• We will also collaborate with our federal partners and engage with key stakeholders to enhance sodium-related data sharing and learnings, as part of these efforts to help reduce diet-related chronic diseases and deaths associated with high sodium intake, such as hypertension and stroke.
• We will continue to collaborate with other federal agencies on developing and advancing a nutrition research agenda, including accelerating high-quality research to better understand the mechanisms between ultra-processed foods and poor health outcomes.

Despite Commissioner Califf’s statements, it looks like the Human Food Program is not particularly interested in chronic disease prevention or policy approaches to improving the environment of food choice.

Instead, its policies put the burden of responsibility on you as an individual to make healthier choices—not to find ways to counter the food industry’s marketing imperatives.

The FDA’s Human Food Program is all about empowering consumers.  Good luck with that.

Yes, the FDA is grossly underfunded and handicapped in what it can do, and yes, addressing environmental determinants of chronic disease would encounter opposition from vested interests.

But the FDA is an agency of the Public Health Service.  It needs to do better.

The Human Food Program should be taking the lead in addressing Commissioner Califf’s stated concerns

• The big issue is chronic disease, on which we are “doing terribly.”
• We have to deal with the marketing of ultra-processed foods designed to make you hungry for more.

These issues are consistent with the new administration’s Make America Healthy Again campaign.  Let’s hope that works.

Thanks to Stephen Zwick of Regenetarianism for sending this one.

Charoenwoodhipong, P., Zuelch, M. L., Keen, C. L., Hackman, R. M., & Holt, R. R. (2024). Strawberry (Fragaria x Ananassa) intake on human health and disease outcomes: a comprehensive literature review. Critical Reviews in Food Science and Nutrition, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2024.2398634

From the Abstract

Of the 60 articles included in this review, 47 were clinical trials, while 13 were observational studies. A majority of these studies reported on the influence of strawberry intake on cardiometabolic outcomes. Study designs included those examining the influence of strawberry intake during the postprandial period, short-term trials randomized with a control, or a single arm intake period controlling with a low polyphenolic diet or no strawberry intake. A smaller proportion of studies included in this review examined the influence of strawberry intake on additional outcomes of aging including bone and brain health, and cancer risk. Data support that the inclusion of strawberries into the diet can have positive impacts during the postprandial period, with daily intake improving outcomes of lipid metabolism and inflammation in those at increased cardiovascular risk.

Funding: This work was supported by the California Strawberry Commission (CSC). PC, MLZ, and RRH received financial support from the CSC for this work.

Disclosure statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Comment: I can never get over how industry-funded authors do not view industry funding as a conflict of interest when so much evidence confirms that such funding strongly influences research design and interpretation.  For the record, I review that evidence in my book Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.

This sure looks like a standard industry-funded study with a predictable outcome favorable to the strawberry industry in this case.

Strawberries are a fine food, delicious, nutritious, and obviously healthful.  But a superfood responsible on their own for disease prevention?

How I wish.

This is marketing research.

Sara B. Franklin.  The Editor: How Publishing Legend Judith Jones Shaped Culture in America.  Atria Books, 2024.  316 pages.

I badly wanted to read this book.  Sara Franklin got her doctorate in Food Studies in my NYU department and I met Judith Jones several times in the 1990s and 2000s (she died in 2017).

Judith Jones is famous in food circles for rescuing Julia Child’s manuscript for Mastering the Art of French Cooking and getting Knopf to publish it.

But the best way to understand her impact is to take a look at the jaw-dropping list of authors she edited; it takes up two and a half double-columned pages, and includes poets (WH Auden, Sylvia Plath, Sharon Olds) and writers (Andre Gide, John Hersey, Langton Hughes), as well as a breathtaking list of food writers: MFK Fisher, Marion Cunningham, Elizabeth David, Scott Peakock, Elisabeth Rosin, Jeffrey Steingarten, and on and on.  And, oh yes, Anne Frank.

The story here is of a woman who began her editing career in 1949 when the best women could aspire to was secretarial work.  She worked her way up through the system, but did not fight it and was always treated as someone who didn’t matter much, despite that incredible list of authors, many of them deeply devoted to Judith for what she did for them.

As an author, I can tell you that a good editor is a treasure and she was a terrific one.  She got her authors to clarify, explain, focus, and make their books readable, understandable, and enjoyable for wide audiences.  This takes insight and the ability to inspire authors to do their best work—genuine talent.  It also requires stepping back and letting the authors shine.  This book details Judith’s way of staying in the background, not always to her advantage.

Sara Franklin got to know Judith Jones, was given access to her papers, and conducted loads of interviews as the basis for this book.  She tells the story of one woman’s career, but sets it against the background of changes in society and in the food world since the 1950s and in the lives of the authors she edited—the era that I too have lived through and these are people I know, explaining why I so enjoyed reading this.

I especially like the way Sara weaves herself into the book but mostly lets Judith speak for herself.  An excerpt:

“Dick [Judith’s husband] didn’t take criticism well,” Judith told me, “And I thought it awkward to play the two roles,” editor and wife at once, “so I just shut up.  I would have liked more back and forth, but people have their hang-ups”…Judith had been caught off guard by how overwhelmed she’d become by family life, and the perpetual juggle of working motherhood.  Keeping up with the demands of her career while remaining attentive and available to Dick and the children, Judith found, was an almost impossible balancing act, with “so much,” she remarked, “dumped on the woman.”  With no models to look to, Judith was flying blind. “I hadn’t really thought about it,” she told me.  “It just seemed natural.”

As I said, a classic woman’s story of the era.

Much of the book describes Judith’s acquisition of important books and the ways she worked with their authors.  I wish I had had the chance to work with her.  I know I’m not alone in thinking that would have been an honor and a privilege.

Sara’s book is terrific.  And we are so proud of her.

The book was reviewed in the New York Times: She Was More Than the Woman Who Made Julia Child Famous: In “The Editor,” Sara B. Franklin argues that Judith Jones was a “publishing legend,” transcending industry sexism to champion cookbooks — and Anne Frank.