Information and registration is available HERE.  

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As a follow up to the White House Conference on Hunger, I’ve been collecting fact sheets (my version of what happened at the conference is here)

Official information is available on the conference website.   You can even watch it; links to videos of the sessions are posted here.

Note that everything in the fact sheets refers to the conference “Pillars.”  As a reminder, these are:

1. Improve Food Access and Affordability
2. Integrate Nutrition and Health
3. Empower Consumers to Make and Have Access to Healthy Choices
4. Support Physical Activity for All
5. Enhance Nutrition and Food Security Research

Fact sheet #1: The Biden-⁠Harris Administration Announces More Than $8 Billion in New Commitments as Part of Call to Action for White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health

These [commitments] range from bold philanthropic contributions and in-kind donations to community-based organizations, to catalytic investments in new businesses and new ways of screening for and integrating nutrition into health care delivery. At least $2.5 billion will be invested in start-up companies that are pioneering solutions to hunger and food insecurity. Over $4 billion will be dedicated toward philanthropy that improves access to nutritious food, promotes healthy choices, and increases physical activity.

Fact sheet #2: From Senate Agriculture Committee Chairwoman Debbie Stabenow:   Anti-Hunger and Healthy Food Successes

As long as we have hunger and food insecurity in America, we have work to do…We’ve put policies in place that take big steps to strengthen the food safety net, incentivize purchases of healthy fruits and vegetables, and provide more resources for food banks and other organizations to address hunger and nutrition issues in their communities.

Fact sheet #3: From USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS): Leveraging the White House Conference to Promote and Elevate Nutrition Security.

FNS’s work aligns closely with the National Strategy, which outlines steps the government will take, while calling on the public and private sector to address the intersections between food, hunger, nutrition, and health.

It is fair to ask what the conference will produce and how government and private agencies will be held accountable for their commitments.  For that we must wait and see.

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My book talk today: Online with Hunter’s Food Policy Center in conversation with Charles Platkin, 9:30 to 10:30 a.m.  Registration is HERE.

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The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) announces that it and the Consumer Federation of America and the National Consumers League are filing a lawsuit calling on the Treasury Department to compel a decision on mandatory alcohol content, calorie, ingredient, and allergen labeling on alcoholic beverages.

Plaintiffs seek relief from Defendants’ nearly nineteen-year delay in responding to a 2003 petition submitted by Plaintiffs, 66 other organizations and eight individuals, including four deans of public health.  [See Petition]…The Petitio urged TTB to reequire alcohol labelig with the same basic transparency consumers expect in foods.  For alcohol, that means labeling that has alcohol content, calorie, and ingredient information—including ingredients that can cause allergic reactions.

Nineteen year delay?  Yes.  Why?  The alcohol industry would much rather that you don’t know what you are drinking.  It has opposed virtually every attempt to expose what’s in its products.

Just for fun, I looked up the alcohol labeling chapter in my book with Malden Nesheim, Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics.

We titled the chapter, “Alcohol labels: industry vs. consumers.”

Here, for your amusement, is the table illustrating current labeling requirements.

CSPI deserves much applause for trying to fix this situation and for its patience.

We need something a lot better than this.

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My book talk today:  Online with NYU’s Fales Library in conversation with Clark Wolf.  5:00-6:00 p.m.  Registration is HERE.

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The FDA has come under heavy criticism this year for its failure to handle the infant formula crisis adequately and for its internal disorganization and lack of leadership.

To deal with this, the FDA commissioned the Reagan Udall Foundation for the FDA to do an operational evaluation of its human foods and tobacco programs.  This Foundation is “an independent 501(c)(3) organization created by Congress ‘to advance the mission of the FDA to modernize medical, veterinary, food, food ingredient, and cosmetic product development, accelerate innovation, and enhance product safety.’”

As announced on July 19, 2022, the Reagan-Udall Foundation will facilitate, via two Independent Expert Panels, operational evaluations of FDA’s human foods and tobacco programs. Each evaluation will yield a report with operational recommendations to the FDA: one for human foods and the other for tobacco. Each evaluation, and therefore report delivery, is on its own 60-business-day timeline. Both reports will be delivered to the FDA Commissioner and made available to the public.

The Foundation began its work by

• Appointing a committee to oversee the evaluation
• Opening a stakeholder portal where you can file anonymous comments
• Holding hearings: Agenda

The two-day hearings were held right after the White House Conference on Hunger.  Videos are posted on YouTube

• First day
• Second day

As far as I can tell, no reporter covered these hearings except for Helena Bottemiller Evich at Food Fix, which is what makes her newsletter an invaluable resource and essential to subscribe to (at least for me).

Her overview:

Wow, were people honest in their assessment of shortfalls at the agency.

There was a strong consensus among the nearly three-dozen experts who spoke that things are not working very well and serious changes are needed. The panel got an earful about problems with leadership structure, culture, inadequate funding and staffing, poor oversight of inspections and a lack of responsiveness to the public and Capitol Hill – as well as plenty of complaints about how painfully long it takes to get anything done.

If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. I’m sure you are all tired of me referencing this, but I did an investigative piece on FDA earlier this year, based on more than 50 interviews, that found many of the same things.

Her piece goes into the details.  Subscribe and you can read them.

More complaints

• One criticism of this entire procedure is that the Center for Veterinary Medicine (CVM) was excluded from the review.  This is a serious oversight, as noted by a letter from several groups to the FDA.
• Senator Richard Burr says in a letter to the FDA that he won’t support funding until the agency cleans up its ac

We only have one food supply: it serves people and animals inextricably (an issue discussed in my books Feed Your Pet Right and Pet Food Politics).

In the meantime I want to know:  Why aren’t more journalists covering this issue?

The FDA is responsible for regulating the safety and health of 80% of the foods we eat.  If we want foods to be safe and healthy, we need a strong, vigilant FDA willing to stand up to lobbying and industry pressure.

This needs press attention.

The Reagan Udall Foundation has to issue reports within the next couple of months.  Let’s see how well those reports reflect what was said at the hearings.

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Last week, STAT News asked if I would write something about the FDA’s definition of “Healthy” for them.  I agreed because I was planning a blog post on it anyway (posted here).

I wrote a draft and had a great time working with a STAT editor, Patrick Skerritt, to fill in some missing pieces.  Here’s how it came out (with a couple of after-the-fact embellishments).

First Opinion: FDA’s plan to define ‘healthy’ for food packaging: Better than the existing labeling anarchy, but do we really need it?   STATNews, Oct. 7, 2022

The FDA has announced the set of rules it proposes to enforce for manufacturers to claim that a food product is “healthy.” The proposed rules are a lot better than the labeling anarchy that currently exists. But here’s my bottom line: health claims are not about health. They are about selling food products.

The FDA says that a “healthy” product must meet two requirements: It must contain a meaningful amount of food, and it must not contain more than certain upper limits for saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars.

To illustrate the “healthy” claim, the FDA is also researching a symbol that food makers can use, and might be testing examples like these.

[Source: https://www.regulations.gov/document/FDA-2021-N-0336-0003]

Doing all this, the FDA says, would align “healthy” with the 2020-2025 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and with the Nutrition Facts label that is printed on food packages.

This action is the latest in the FDA’s attempts to simplify food label information so it’s easier for consumers to identify healthier food choices. It is also an attempt to head off what food companies most definitely do not want: warning labels like those used in Chile, Brazil, and several other countries. These have been shown to discourage purchases of ultra-processed “junk” foods, just as they were supposed to, a message understood even by children or adults who cannot read. No wonder food manufacturers will do anything to prevent their use.

If we must have health claims on food packages, the FDA’s proposals are pretty good. They require any product labeled “healthy” to contain some real food (as opposed to a collection of chemical ingredients or, as author Michael Pollan calls them, “food-like objects”), and for the first time they include limits on sugars.

Here’s an example given by the FDA: To qualify for the “healthy” claim, a breakfast cereal serving would need to contain at least three-quarters of an ounce of whole grains and could contain no more than one gram of saturated fat, 230 milligrams of sodium and 2.5 grams of added sugars.

These proposed rules would exclude almost all cereals marketed to children.

But do Americans really need health claims on food products? You might think that any relatively unprocessed food from a plant or animal ought to qualify as healthy without needing FDA approval, and you would be right. But health claims aren’t about health. They are meant to get people to buy food products, not real foods like fruit, vegetables, grains, nuts, meat, poultry, dairy, eggs, or fish.

Food companies love the term “healthy” because it gets people to buy food products.

 

The history of “healthy”

How did we get to where the FDA needs to require a product to contain real food to be considered “healthy”? Blame KIND bars.

In 2015, KIND (then a small private company, but now owned by Mars) advertised its bars as healthy because they contained whole foods like grains and nuts. But nuts have more fat than the FDA allowed at the time for products to be labeled as “healthy.” The FDA warned KIND that its bars violated the rules for health claims.

KIND fought back. It filed a citizens’ petition arguing that even though nuts are higher in fat than the FDA allowed, they are healthy. The FDA could hardly argue otherwise — of course nuts are healthy — and it backed off. It permitted KIND to use the term and said it would revisit its long-standing definition of “healthy.” That was good news for KIND.

At the time, the FDA’s definition of “healthy” set upper limits for fat, saturated fat, sodium, and cholesterol; required at least minimal amounts of one or more vitamins or minerals; and said nothing about sugars. So the new FDA proposals break new ground in simplifying the nutritional criteria and in putting a limit on sugars.

 

Front-of-package symbols

These, too, have a long history with the FDA. In the early 1990s, when the agency was writing the rules for Nutrition Facts labels on food products, it tested public understanding of several prototype designs. As it happened, nobody could understand any of the samples very well, so the FDA picked the one that was the least poorly understood. Soon afterward, food companies and health organizations developed symbols that would allow buyers to recognize at a glance which products were supposed to be good for them.

By 2010, more than 20 such symbols were on food packages. The FDA commissioned the Institute of Medicine to do studies of front-of-package labeling. The Institute’s first report on the subject examined the strengths and weaknesses of all of the symbols cluttering up the labels of processed foods, and recommended that the FDA develop a single symbol that would cover just calories, saturated fat, trans fat, and sodium. Why not sugars too? The Institute said calories took care of them.

But the Institute’s second report did include sugars. It recommended a front-of-package labeling system that would give food products zero, one, two, or three stars (or check marks) depending on how little they had of the undesirable nutrients.

This idea so alarmed food manufacturers that they quickly developed the Facts Up Front labeling system in use today.

This, in my view, is so obfuscating that nobody pays any attention to it. But this scheme, coupled with industry pushback, was all it took to get the FDA to drop the entire idea of a symbol that would tell people what not to eat.

Here we are a decade later with the FDA’s current proposal. This plan is strong enough to exclude huge swaths of supermarket products from self-identifying as “healthy.” Products bearing the “healthy” symbol will have to contain real food and be low in saturated fat, salt, and sugar, as called for by federal dietary guidelines.

The new rules won’t stop “healthy” products from being loaded with additives and artificial sweeteners. And the FDA won’t require warning labels for unhealthy products, which work better than other symbols. But these proposals are a marked improvement over the current situation.

And the FDA might do more. It could look into the idea of warning labels. It already promises to make a decision about the other ambiguous marketing term, “natural.” A decision on that one can’t come soon enough.

As for “healthy,” the FDA is seeking feedback on its proposals. Instructions for filing comments, which can be made until Dec. 28, 2022, are at Food Labeling: Nutrient Content Claims; Definition of Term “Healthy.”

I can’t wait to see what companies wanting to sell ultra-processed food products as “healthy” will have to say about this.

Marion Nestle is professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, author of the Food Politics blog, and author of the new memoir, “Slow Cooked: An Unexpected Life in Food Politics” (University of California Press, October 2022).

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The study: Health Functions of Egg Protein.  Ryosuke Matsuoka, Michihiro Sugano.  Foods 2022, 11, 2309. https://doi.org/10.3390/foods11152309.

Purpose: “In this review, we have summarized the available information regarding the health benefits of egg proteins based on human studies.”

Conclusion: “This review summarizes the health effects of egg proteins, especially EWP, as reported in human studies. Two major functions have been clearly identified: (1) they improve muscle mass and have muscle-strengthening and antifatigue effects when
consumed during exercise; (2) they can improve lipid metabolism by reducing visceral fat and lowering serum cholesterol levels. The intake of egg protein may, thus, contribute to the prevention of physical frailty and metabolic syndrome.”

Conflicts of Interest: M.S. declares no conflict of interest. R.M. is an employee of Kewpie Corporation. There are no other patents, products in development, or marketed products to declare.

Comment: M.S. declares no conflict but is Chair of the Japan Egg Science Society, Tokyo, respectively.  The purpose of this study was to examine the benefits of egg proteins, not to evaluate them in comparison to any other proteins or to assess the role of eggs in diets.  Studies that look for benefits invariably find them.  The Kewpie Corporation sells products using eggs.  It can now advertise them as health foods.

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Margo Anne Kelley.  Foodtopia: Communities in Pursuit of Peace, Love & Homegrown Food.  Godine, 2022.  

I was asked to do a blurb for this book and readily agreed.

Foodtopia gives us a generous overview of Americans’ historic and contemporary involvement in utopian communities through the lens of their dietary beliefs and practices.  From Thoreau’s Walden to Penniman’s Soul Fire Farm, the search for agrarian values and food justice should inspire us to support—and join—these movements.

If you don’t know the history of  back-to-the-land movements, this is a great place to begin.

Some quick excerpts:

• Thoreau could dwell safely and comfortably on the outskirts of town not because his mom fed him or washed his clothes but because he was white, male, single, able-bodied, a local son, a keen observer, a practiced outdoorsman, a skilled forager and gardener, a capable craftsman, and friend of the landowner.  Without any one of those attributes, he’d have had a tougher go of it….He could move back to town whenever he wanted. 
• In turning away from mainstream food, many back-to-the-landers became vegetarian.  Some wanted to eat lower on the food chain for environmental, financial, ethical, or political reasons; others simply liked thumbing their nose at the meat-eating bourgeoisie.
• …each generation of back-to-the-land utopians has been personally connected to members of an earlier one, has learned from, admired, and often loved them….by enacting their beliefs, b dreaming into being a more capacious world, the changed the existing one for all of us.

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TODAY:  Slow Cooked: An Evening with Marion Nestle in conversation with Laura Shapiro,  7 – 8:15 pm, The Greene Space (44 Charlton Street, NYC 10014).

Tickets and info: https://www.mofad.org/calendar/10062022/slowcooked

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A food industry newsletter I subscribe to, NutraIngredients.com, has a collection of articles on Omega-3s.

These are long-chain fatty acids from fish or algae (EPA, DHA) or plants (ALA).  They are said to prevent or cure anything that ails you.  Most studies show seafood to be associated with good health, but supplements not so much.

Omega-3s are terrific for marketing, which is why ingredient suppliers love them.

Alas, I remain skeptical.

Special edition: Omega 3s