Food Politics

by Marion Nestle
Jul 28 2022

Front of pack labeling: Nutri-Score

Since I’ve figured out how to enbed videos, you might want to take a look at this one.

This one is about Nutri-Score, a front-of-package labeling system that started in France but is used in several European countries.  The system balances the healthful and unhealthful aspects of processed foods, and assigns a composite color-coded score, from A (very healthy) to E (oops), and from green to red.

Once you know how the system works, you can easily figure out which ultra-processed foods are best avoided.

The video is in French with English subtitles (but also comes in French without subtitles or with Spanish subtitles).

For more about Nutri-Score go here and here.
For what I’ve written previously about Nutri-Score, go here.

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Jul 27 2022

Taxing sugar-sweetened beverages: a how-to guide to legislation

We have Healthy Food America and the University of Washington, the UCONN Rudd Center for Food Policy & Health, and the Public Health Law Center at Mitchell Hamline School of Law to thank for this guide to tax legislation that will promote health and racial equity.

The report:

  • Reviews tax laws proposed and achieved in the US
  • Summarizes the experience of advocates and policymakers
  • Examines approaches used in alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis taxes
  • Recommends how to draft legislation to promote equity

The full report: Investing Sweetened Beverage Tax Revenues to Advance Equity: Recommendations for Drafting Legislation

The brief report is here.

An infographic provides a quick overview.

Other supporting materials are available on the Healthy Food America website.

Want to give this a try?  Here’s how.

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Jul 26 2022

Tara flour: a quick review of the research

A review article finds it nontoxic.You may recall that on June 17,  Daily Harvest issued a recall of its frozen vegan Crumbles product  after 500 or so adverse event reports, many of  severe liver damage among the 28,000 customers who ordered it.

Here’s what the front of the package looked like.

This product has lots of ingredients:

organic butternut squash, organic hemp seeds, organic cauliflower rice, organic extra virgin olive oil, organic french lentils, organic red lentils, organic tri-colored quinoa, organic cremini mushrooms, organic tara flour, organic leeks, organic parsley, water, organic cassava root flour, organic flax seeds, organic sacha inchi powder, chia seeds, organic porcini powder, himalayan sea salt, organic apple cider vinegar, organic onion powder, nutritional yeast, organic garlic powder, organic tomato powder, organic white pepper, organic coriander seeds, organic mustard powder, organic thyme.

As food safety lawyer Bill Marler predicted, tara flour has been identified as the ingredient at fault.

I had never heard of tara and had to look it up.  Since then, I’ve gotten curious and did some quick research.

Tara is a legume—a bean plant—grown in Peru and other Latin American countries.

Tara is grown for several purposes:

  • Pod tannins for industrial leather, keeping ships free of marine animals, and preparing textiles to accept dyes
  • Cosmetics (polysaccharides isolated from the seeds)
  • Food additives—protein flours and gums (from the endosperm)

The research literature on tara is remarkably extensive (Who knew?).

On the tannins:

On cosmetics:

On tara as a food ingredient:

From everything previously reported about tara over the past 20 years, there is no reason to think it might be unsafe.

So what’s going on?  How to explain “only” hundreds of cases of severe liver injury when 28,000 Crumbles meals were shipped during the time when cases were reported.

Possibilities:

To prevent this from happening again, it’s necessary to identify the toxin.  I hope that happens soon.

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Jul 25 2022

Industry-funded study of the week: more prunes

Several people sent me this one:

Prunes preserve hip bone mineral density in a 12-month randomized controlled trial in postmenopausal women: the Prune Study.  The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition,  nqac189, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqac189

Conclusions: A 50g daily dose of prunes can prevent loss of total hip BMD [bone mineral density] in postmenopausal females after six months, which persisted for 12-months…we propose that the 50g dose represents a valuable non-pharmacological treatment strategy that can be used to preserve hip BMD in postmenopausal females and possibly reduce hip fracture risk

Sources of Support: California Prune Board (Award Number: 180215)

Acknowledgments: We thank the California Prune Board for the funding and prunes…The California Prune Board had no role in the data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of manuscript.in this study.

Comment: The California Prune Board did not have to have that kind of role to get the outcome it wanted.  Research on funding effects shows that industry influence is exerted primarily in the ways the research question is framed and the results interpreted.  It also shows that investigators hardly ever recognize how industry funding exerts influence.

Reference:  Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.

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Jul 22 2022

Weekend viewing: Robert Reich on Big Ag

I came across this from a tweet by Ricardo J Salvador @cadwego
Wherein the former Secretary of Labor clearly lays out one of the major drivers for price increases, as well as a clear way for the Biden administration to use its authority to relieve the problem. The core issue is the anti-competitive, monopoly power of consolidated industries.
Just 4 firms control 85% of the beef market, 66% of the pork market, and 54% of the poultry market. The result? -Lower pay for farmers. -Bigger profits for monopolies. -Higher prices for you. There’s no question: We need to break up Big Ag.
He explains this in a video–How Farmers Are Getting Shafted By Monopolies–which, I am delighted to report, I figured out how to embed here.

 

His bottom line:

Just 4 firms control 85% of the beef market, 66% of the pork market, and 54% of the poultry market.

The result?
-Lower pay for farmers.
-Bigger profits for monopolies.
-Higher prices for you.

There’s no question: We need to break up Big Ag.

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Jul 21 2022

Keeping up with plant-based food products

Replacing animal-based foods with plan-based foods continues to be high on the startup agenda.  Here are some recent items:

On the business side:

Plant-based meat alternatives:

Plant-based chocolate:

Sufficiently delicious?  You decide.

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Jul 20 2022

The Daily Harvest recall mystery: update

Breaking news: The ingredient that caused the illnesses among people who consumed Daily Harvest’s French Lentil + Leek Crumbles has been identified, sort of.  As suspected, it’s the tara flour.  But what’s the toxin in the tara flour?  That, we still don’t know.

As Rachel Drori, the CEO of Daily Harvest, explains in her latest update (all are here).

At this time, we have identified tara flour as the cause of the issue. Our extensive investigation has involved many experts analyzing data from all sources. We have only used this ingredient in French Lentil + Leek Crumbles and we are no longer sourcing from this producer who does not provide any ingredients for our 140+ other items. This was the first and only time we’ve used tara flour, which has been available and used in the North American market as a plant-based source of protein prior to our use. Our investigation team will continue working with the FDA, the tara flour producer and others to help determine what specifically made people sick.

To review: Daily Harvest is a company that makes and ships preprepared vegan frozen meals, one of which, French Lentil + Leek Crumbles, has been recalled after several hundred people who ate it developed serious problems with their livers and gall bladders.

The big question: what caused these problems?

As Drori says:

We considered all possibilities, including processing issues or infection, and have ruled all of them out: Hepatitis A, Norovirus, a range of mycotoxins, including aflatoxins, food-borne pathogens including Listeria, E.Coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus Aureus (Staph), B.Cereus, and Clostridium Species and major allergens including egg, soy, milk, and gluten. Testing also confirmed there are no pesticides or the presence of heavy metal levels that would have caused the reported adverse effects.

The FDA is on the case.  Its most recent accounting gives these figures:

Total Adverse Illness Events: 277*
Hospitalizations: 96*
Deaths: 0
Last illness onset: July 9, 2022*
States with Adverse Illness Events: AZ, CA, CO, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, IA, MD, MA, MN, MI, MO, MT, NH, NJ, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, UT, VT, VA, WA, WI
Product Distribution: Nationwide
*Estimate based on Consumer Complaint and CAERs reports received by the FDA

The FDA’s previous update noted that the company shipped about 28,000 of these specific meals between April 28 and June 17.

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler, who represents many of the afflicted (and is filing lawsuits), says:

We have filed lawsuits in both state and federal court to more effectively push discovery against both Daily Harvest and the manufacturer of the product, Stone Gate. We need to know what is the likely common ingredient and who supplied it. We need to understand all food safety protocols and what went wrong. We need to know when these companies first were aware of the “Adverse Illness Events” and what was done with that information.

Marler’s latest summary is here.

ABC News reporter Melanie Woodrow (@Melanie Woodrow) spoke with some of the victims and their lawyers (not Bill Marler)  She Tweeted:

Spoke w/ two attorneys today who say #DailyHarvest has filed motions compelling their clients to arbitrate, meaning cases would play out in conference room not court. @DlyHarvest says customers agreed to terms that included an arbitration clause.

I truly do not understand why the toxin has not yet been identified.

This situation reminds me of how hard it was to identify melamine as the toxin in the massive pet food recalls of 2006.  I ended up writing a book about this case: Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine.

While waiting for answers, let’s all wish the victims a speedy recovery.

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Jul 19 2022

The failing FDA: What is to be done?

Everyone is worried about the FDA (or should be) and I’ve been collecting suggestions for how to fix it.  I have three so far.

I.  Move food safety out of FDA and into a new Food Safety Administration. 

This would be housed (as FDA is) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Senators Durbin, Blumenthal, and DeLauro have proposed legislation to do this.  The bill text is here and a fact sheet here.

  • “In recent years, FDA has been plagued by one failure after another—from a failure to properly recognize the dangers of prescription opioids, to a failure to protect children from e-cigarette products, to a failure to properly ensure the safety of our nation’s food supply,” said Durbin. “The sad reality is that FDA seems unwilling or unable to use their authority to protect Americans from preventable illness and death.
  • “Americans deserve to know the food on their plates is safe to eat,” said Blumenthal. “By protecting consumers from foodborne illnesses and acting swiftly to respond to recalls, the Food Safety Administration will improve the safety of our nation’s vital food supply.”
  • “Food safety is currently a second-class citizen at the Food and Drug Administration,” said DeLauro. “Right now, there are no food policy experts in charge of food safety at the FDA.”

II.  Move all food functions out of FDA into a separate agency.

This is proposed by several public action groups:  Consumer Reports, STOP Foodborne illness, the Environmental Working Group, and Healthy Babies Bright Futures.

[The] groups discussed the need for congressional action to separate the food portion of the Food and Drug Administration into a separate agency under the Depart of Health and Human Services. The agency would be solely devoted to the food side of the FDA, which oversees 80 percent of the nation’s food supply.

These groups have not developed specific details about how this might work.

III.  Move FDA’s food functions into USDA.

This proposal comes from Jerry Mande, former FDA and USDA official:  “A Farm to Fork approach to Fixing FDA’s food program.”

USDA is best positioned to succeed due to its history and mission. Created by President Abraham Lincoln to be the “people’s department,” USDA has the comprehensive resources and authorities needed to succeed. These include its 15 nutrition assistance programs and their $175 billion budget, its farm executive directors in every state and its transformative extension agents in literally every county, and the nation’s leading food and nutrition research programs.

Specifically, we propose that the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Nutrition (CFSAN) merge with USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) and Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) under one Food, Nutrition and Health mission area at the USDA.

The Government Accountability Office has been calling for a separate food safety agency since at least 1990.  Its idea would be to combine the food safety functions of FDA (generally, plant foods and food products), USDA (generally, animal foods), and other federal agencies.  From a food safety perspective, that makes sense.

But what about FDA’s other food functions, such as oversight of  food ingredients, labels, and health claims?

And what about food advertising (FTC), health risks (CDC), etc?

What’s good about this is that doing something to strengthen food regulation is on the agenda.

How best to do it?

Ultimately, it’s up to Congress.

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