by Marion Nestle

Search results: a life in food

May 8 2018

Don’t eat romaine lettuce until this outbreak ends

I’ve been following the E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak caused by eating romaine lettuce grown in Yuma, Arizona.

The CDC says the body count so far is:

  • Cases = 121
  • Hospitalizations = 52
  • Deaths = 1

Where the cases have been found:

Map of United States - People infected with the outbreak strain of E. coli, by state of residence, as of May 1, 2018

 

What the “epi curve” looks like:

Epi curve of people infected with the outbreak strain of E. coli, by date of illness onset, as of May 1, 2018

What’s happening with the FDA’s investigation:

The FDA has identified one farm [Harrison Farms of Yuma, Arizona] as the source of the whole-head romaine lettuce that sickened several people at a correctional facility in Alaska. However, the agency has not determined where in the supply chain the contamination occurred…All of the lettuce in question from this farm was harvested during March 5-16 and is past its 21-day shelf life. Because the growing season in the Yuma region is at its end, the farm is not growing any lettuce at this time.

Most of the illnesses in this outbreak are not linked to romaine lettuce from this farm, and are associated with chopped romaine lettuce. The agency is investigating dozens of other fields as potential sources of the chopped romaine lettuce and will share information as it becomes available.

Some interesting aspects of this and other leafy green outbreaks:

In the meantime, the CDC’s advice to you:

  • Do not eat or buy romaine lettuce unless you are sure it was not grown anywhere near Yuma.
  • Do not eat or buy romaine lettuce if you cannot tell where it was grown.
  • Do not eat salad mixes unless you are sure it is free of romaine lettuce.
  • This applies to romaine lettuce in any form: heads, hearts, chopped, baby, organic, in salads or salad mixes.

But Consumer Reports says to avoid romaine lettuce entirely.

Seems like good advice until this one gets figured out.

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Mar 9 2018

Weekend reading: Organic Profit / Prophet

Andrew N. Case.  The Organic Profit: Rodale and the Making of Marketplace Environmentalism.  University of Washington Press, 2018.

Image result for The Organic Profit: Rodale and the Making

I did a blurb for this one:

Organic Profit is a great read for anyone interested in knowing how the Rodales and Prevention Magazine helped bring organic foods from cult to mainstream and from pesticide-free produce to environmentally conscious lifestyles.  This is biography, social history, and contemporary politics, all viewed through the lens of the fastest growing segment of the U.S. food system.

Here are a few brief excerpts from the last couple of chapters:

  • The surge of public interest and engagement with environmental issues in the 1980s provided the Rodale Press with an opportunity to make a renewed case for reforming the food system.  As a privately held firm that did not need to meet the quarterly demands of shareholders, the company enjoyed the freedom to pursue projects that did not create immediate returns.  To address the farm crisis, the company relied on the tools of the marketplace…to generate public support for reforming how food was grown, distributed, and consumed in the 1980s.
  • Yet the impact of these efforts was limited at best….Rodale’s story does not resolve the tension between prophecy and profits, but it does illustrate the complexities of green consumerism and the many unresolved questions about the choices we face in an era of unprecedented environmental change….
  • The crowded marketplaces of consumer societies have succeeded in providing an array of choices at the exact same time that consumer societies have failed to tackle global climate change and many other issues of health, equity, and sustainability.
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Feb 14 2018

Mars Inc says goodbye to ILSI, hello to science policy

Since it’s Valentine’s Day (have a happy one), we might as well talk about a candy company, in this case, Mars, Inc.

Image result for mars inc candies

Mars, Inc., one of the defectors from the Grocery Manufacturers Association (see yesterday’s post) has also withdrawn from membership in and support of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a group that claims to be independent  but in fact is funded by hundreds of food and beverage companies (hence: front group).

ILSI’s positions on food issues are decidedly pro-industry, and so are the results of its sponsored research.  Mars couldn’t take it anymore.

Mars told Politico Pro (this may be behind a paywall):

After careful consideration, Mars will end its relationship with the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) by the end of 2018, and is withdrawing from ILSI’s nutrition committees immediately,” the company said in a statement to POLITICO. “Increasingly, the presentation of certain studies by ILSI has been at odds with our position and principles. Mars has a long history of engaging in external research that is evidence-based and data-driven, particularly in the area of promoting public health. We wish to thank ILSI for its partnership.

Mars announces this departure as a component of its new research and engagement policy.

The policy applies to all of Mars’ partnerships with universities, governmental and non-governmental organizations, foundations, individuals, food companies, and trade associations (like ILSI).

Here is my summary of the policy’s long list of principles:

  • High scientific standards in all animal and human research
  • Full disclosure of funding and potential conflicts of interest
  • Appropriate standards of authorship
  • Funding not linked to achievement of a specific research outcome

This new policy adds to Mars’ existing policies on research:

Let’s give Mars, Inc. credit for recognizing that its funded research (especially its earlier research on chocolate and later research on CocoaVia flavanol supplements) appear conflicted, and for trying to do something about it.

Let’s hope the company succeeds in putting these principles into practice.

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Jan 5 2018

Weekend Reading: Trends and Predictions for 2018

The Institute of Food Technology publishes a newsletter.  IIts December 27 issue provides a roundup of food-trend predictions from a bunch of sources.

I’ve picked out a few examples from among the long lists.

The editors of Food Technology: Animal Welfare Versus Price: The stigma of conventionally produced animal products will decrease as consumers realize that they cannot or will not absorb the higher costs associated with “humanely raised” beef, poultry, and pork.  —Toni Tarver, Senior Technical Editor

McCormick: Handheld Flavor Fusion: Take to the streets for the latest fusing of global cuisines. Carts, trucks, and food halls are merging high-flavor fillings with unique crepes, buns, and breads for loaded street fare you eat with your hands. Arepas are a taco-sandwich hybrid made from crispy corn cakes stuffed with sliced meat, veggies, and spicy tzatziki sauce.

Firmenich has announced fig as “Flavor of the Year” for 2018 based on the growing appeal for this healthy and fruity flavor worldwide. Long touted for its culinary uses as well as its health benefits—including its high fiber content and a variety of essential minerals such as magnesium, manganese, calcium, and potassium—fig has surged in popularity in recent years.

Innova Market Insights: the global market for dairy alternative drinks is expected to reach $16.3 billion in 2018, up dramatically from $7.4 billion in 2010….As consumers become more concerned about naturalness and minimal processing techniques, the industry is reviving traditional processes such as fermented foods and cold brew tea and coffee, alongside the development of new ones.

Whole Foods: Because powders are so easy to incorporate, they’ve found their way into lattés, smoothies, nutrition bars, soups, and baked goods. For an energy boost or an alternative to coffee, powders like matcha, maca root, and cacao are showing up in mugs everywhere. Smoothie fans are raising a glass to powders like spirulina, kale, herbs, and roots. Even protein powders have evolved beyond bodybuilders to pack in new nutrients like skin- and hair-enhancing collagen.

Mintel: Concerns over safe packaging disposal will increasingly color consumers’ perceptions of different packaging types, and impact shopper purchase decisions. While collecting waste plastic from the sea to recycle into new packaging can raise consumer awareness, it won’t solve the problem. In order to keep plastic out of the sea, a renewed effort toward the circular economy is needed to keep packaging material in use.

National Restaurant Association: According to the survey, menu trends that will be heating up in 2018 include donuts with non-traditional filling, ethnic-inspired kids’ dishes, farm/estate-branded items, and heritage-breed meats. Trends that are cooling down include artisan cheeses, heirloom fruits and vegetables, and house-made charcuterie.

Sterling Rice Group: Moringa is the Thinga: Consumers just can’t get enough of the green, which is why we predict that moringa—a superfood derived from the dried leaves of the “tree of life”—will be popular in 2018 and beyond. With more protein, fiber, calcium, and vitamins than matcha, watch for moringa to become the next matcha or golden milk.

CCD Innovation: Cannabis Cuisine: Ready or not, modern and artisan THC- and CBD-enhanced cuisine goes beyond brownies in 2018 thanks to “potrepreneurs” at all levels.

Grubhub:  10 dishes expected to rise in popularity in 2018 (based on orders in 2017):

  1. Lettuce chicken wraps
  2. Poke
  3. Bulgogi bibimbap
  4. Roasted cauliflower
  5. Spicy tonkotsu ramen
  6. Kimchi fries
  7. Cinnamon buns
  8. Pumpkin soup
  9. Brisket sandwich
  10. Yellowtail belly

I knew you would want to know.

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Oct 23 2017

Book launch: Alice Waters’ Making of a Counterculture Cook

For those of you in New York, tonight at 7:30 Alice Waters will be at BAM talking with Hilton Als about her new book:

Alice Waters.  Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook.  Clarkson Potter, 2017.

It’s a memoir of her early years leading up to the launch of Chez Panisse, her now famous Berkeley restaurant, in 1971 at the age of 27.  The book recounts familiar stories of her discovery in France of the taste of fresh ingredients, and her attempts to recreate those tastes in America.

But it also draws on her experience with Berkeley politics in the 1960s as the inspiration for her life’s work.  Most touchingly, she dedicates the book to Mario Savio, the now-deceased leader of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, and talks about the importance of her work on Bob Scheer’s ultimately unsuccessful run for Congress in 1966.

The book is a lovely food memoir that answers lots of questions about what got Alice started on this path.

What it does not do is explain the enormous effectiveness of her moral force—the movement for fresh, local, seasonal, sustainable foods and ingredients; the White House garden; and the thousands of schools with gardens and food as part of the standard curriculum.

I hope she will do another memoir to explain how all that happened, as well.

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Sep 5 2017

The PURE study warrants some skepticism

I love getting notes like this one from a reader:

Why aren’t you saying anything about the PURE study.  Doesn’t it prove that everything you’ve been saying about eating more fruits and vegetables and about saturated fat is wrong, wrong, wrong.  Admit it.

Not this time.  Whenever I hear the claim that “everything you thought about nutrition is wrong,” I know that skepticism is in order.  Science rarely works that way; it usually progresses incrementally.

What the PURE study is about: The PURE (Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology) study was designed to examine, among other things, the effects of lifestyle behaviors on the health of about 135,000 people in 18 countries over up to 10 years.  Its results have just been published in Lancet journals.

What the headlines say: “Study challenges conventional wisdom on fats, fruits and vegetables.”

What the studies say:  Three papers report results: 

1,  Fruit, vegetable, and legumes vs. cardiovascular disease and death

Higher fruit, vegetable, and legume consumption was associated with a lower risk of non-cardiovascular, and total mortality. Benefits appear to be maximum for both non-cardiovascular mortality and total mortality at three to four servings per day (equivalent to 375–500 g/day).

2.  Fat and carbohydrate vs. cardiovascular disease and death

High carbohydrate intake was associated with higher risk of total mortality, whereas total fat and individual types of fat were related to lower total mortality. Total fat and types of fat were not associated with cardiovascular disease, myocardial infarction, or cardiovascular disease mortality, whereas saturated fat had an inverse association with stroke. Global dietary guidelines should be reconsidered in light of these findings.  [Note: the data do not distinguish types of carbohydrate.]

3.  Association of nutrients with blood lipids and blood pressure

Our data are at odds with current recommendations to reduce total fat and saturated fats. Reducing saturated fatty acid intake and replacing it with carbohydrate has an adverse effect on blood lipids. Substituting saturated fatty acids with unsaturated fats might improve some risk markers, but might worsen others.

Why the need for skepticism:

I like the way James Hamblin explains the problem in The Atlantic:

The practically important findings were that the healthiest people in the world had diets that are full of fruits, beans, seeds, vegetables, and whole grains, and low in refined carbohydrates and sugar.

As a writer and a reader, though, this is very boring. If I pitched that to my editor, he would laugh at me. What is new here? Why is this interesting? You know what would be novel? You getting fired! Now get out there and find me a story, dammit!

Why did they do this study?  

I looked immediately to see who paid for it.  The list of funders is very long (it must have been extremely expensive).  The list begins:

The PURE Study is an investigator initiated study funded by the Population Health Research Institute, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Heart and Stroke Foundation of Ontario, support from CIHR’s Strategy for Patient Oriented Research (SPOR) through the Ontario SPOR Support Unit, as well as the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long­Term Care and through unrestricted grants from several pharmaceutical companies, with major contributions from AstraZeneca (Canada), Sanofi­Aventis (France and Canada), Boehringer Ingelheim (Germany and Canada), Servier, and GlaxoSmithkline, and additional contributions from Novartis and King Pharma and from various national or local organisations in participating countries [the funders that follow are mainly government and private research bodies along with a sugar trade association and more drug companies—the list takes up more than half a column].

Drug companies have a big interest in this topic, especially if dietary approaches to heart disease prevention aren’t proven.

What the PURE study really tells us: For this, I am going to quote from David Katz’s lengthy analysis:

On the basis of all of the details in these published papers, the conclusion, and attendant headlines, might have been: “very poor people with barely anything to eat get sick and die more often than affluent people with access to both ample diets, and hospitals.” One certainly understands why the media did NOT choose that! It is, however, true- and entirely consistent with the data.

Also, by way of reminder: the HIGHEST levels of both total fat, and saturated fat intake observed in the PURE data were still LOWER then prevailing levels in the U.S. and much of Europe, providing no basis whatsoever for headlines encouraging people already exceeding these levels to add yet more meat, butter, and cheese to their diets. Absolutely none.

My translation: This study confirms that the single most important risk factor for poor health is poverty.  The study results are consistent with the idea that largely plant-based diets are good for health.  No single study can settle the fat vs. carbohydrate debate because people eat complicated combinations of foods and diets containing those nutrients.  What we really need are well designed studies of dietary patterns—the ones done to date suggest that largely plant-based diets are associated with excellent health and longevity.  

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Aug 30 2017

Another ongoing saga: the legacy of Ancel Keys

I cannot understand the revisionist attack on the work of Ancel Keys, who died at the age of 100 in 2004.  Most scientists are lucky to have made important contributions in one area.  Keys produced outstanding work in several:

  • High altitude physiology
  • The physiology of starvation (for this alone, he should be honored)
  • Mediterranean diet benefits
  • Heart disease epidemiology

The fuss, of course, is over this last one, particularly his role in the Seven Countries Study.  The arguments falls right into today’s absurd debate about sugar vs. fat as a cause of disease (absurd, because we don’t eat sugar or fat; we eat foods and diets that provide energy measured as calories).

What started off this most recent fuss is Ian Leslie’s The Sugar Conspiracy, which begins with the question “How did the world’s top nutrition scientists get it so wrong for so long?”  This alone is a red flag.  “Everything you thought you knew about nutrition is wrong” is a sure signal for caution; that’s not how science works.

The attack on Keys’ work induced the True Health Initiative to develop a ​White Paper in defense (here’s its press release).  Its authors: Katherine Pett (who had written a blog post in defense), Joel Kahn (who also wrote a blog post) Walter Willet (long a champion of Mediterranean diets), and David Katz (who wrote about it in his own blog post).

In response, Michael Joyner pointed out that R.A. Stallones (a professor of mine at the School of Public Health at Berkeley) had made the same arguments years ago.

Another defense of Keys’ work comes from Kevin Klatt, a nutrition biochemistry PhD student at Cornell.

Sarah Tracy, a science historian at the University of Oklahoma, has been working on a biography of Ancel Keys for years.  I can’t wait for it to come out.  We need to have Keys’ life and work put in reasonable perspective.

While waiting for the fat v. sugar debate to resolve (I’m predicting it won’t), eat a healthy diet, enjoy what you eat, and be skeptical when writers write about nutrients, not food.

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Jul 10 2017

Rotating crops in Iowa–a better way to farm

I am a big fan of Wendell Berry, the inspiring Kentucky professor and farmer, long a leading and inspiring proponent of agrarian values.  He displays these values in his own life—he walks the talk—as well as in his many books, poems, and, these days, tweets (@WendellDaily).

Now there is a movie about him, “Look and See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry.”  It’s a lovely and touching film about Berry’s early start and young family.  His wife and daughter appear in the film, but the contemporary man does not.  He says he doesn’t do movies (a position with which I am increasingly sympathetic).

The film documents what industrial agriculture has done to rural America—emptied it of people, communities, and a way of life (as Berry puts it, the Russians did this with police; we did it with economics).

The film also shows how going  back to a more sustainable production system is good for soil, animals, and food, and makes farmers better off and happier.

This may sound like fantasy, but here is the Union of Concerned Scientists with a new report documenting precisely those benefits: Rotating Crops, Turning Profits.

 

As UCS scientific director Ricardo Salvador wrote me in an email:

A valid critique of the [crop rotation] system, for all its benefits (saves soil, cleans water, reduces inputs and chemical pollution, increases biodiversity, reduces pest pressure, boosts yields and profitability), is that not all Iowa farmers could adopt the system without reducing supply of corn/soy, increasing their price, and thereby driving farmers back to the system. What is the economic equilibrium point? It is an important question.

The short of it, after our economist’s painstaking analysis, is that 20 – 40% of current Iowa corn/soy acreage could be transferred into the system without distorting market dynamics. Interestingly, approximately that amount of corn/soy land in Iowa is highly erodible and should not be in that system to begin with. Farmers attempt to force the issue because of current policy incentives. If instead that ground were put into the extended rotation, it would save megatons of soil and billions of dollars of environmental and health damage annually… All of this, at great profit to the farmer—it should not be forgotten.

This is important work and it’s just thrilling that the Register is writing about it.  I hope everyone in Iowa reads the editorial and pays attention to its lessons.

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