I found this discussion on David Allison’s remarkably useful weekly collection of articles about obesity and energetics.  His listings include articles in categories, one of them “Scientific Rigor & Scholarly Dialogue.”

I was particularly interested in this example:

• Article: Efficacy of Vitamin C for the Prevention and Treatment of Upper Respiratory Tract Infection. A Meta-Analysis in Children.
• Letter: Meta-Analysis on Vitamin C and the Common Cold in Children May Be Misleading.
• Reply: Authors’ Response to Letter to the Editor: “Meta-Analysis on Vitamin C and the Common Cold in Children May Be Misleading”.
• Retraction: Efficacy of Vitamin C for the Prevention and Treatment of Upper Respiratory Tract Infection. A Meta-Analysis in Children.
• Summary: Vitamin C and the Common Cold in Children: Severe Flaws in the Meta-Analyses by Vorilhon et al. (2019).

This took me back to one of my all-time-favorite research studies: Ascorbic Acid for the Common Cold: A Prophylactic and Therapeutic Trial.  JAMA;1975;231:1038-1942.

Linus Pauling wrote Vitamin C and the Common Cold in 1970.  NIH investigators wondered if there was anything to it.  They got 300 volunteers to take vitamin C or a placebo and measured the number of colds and their duration in both groups.

When they first looked at the data, it looked like the volunteers who were taking vitamin C had fewer and shorter colds.   Exciting!

But these were highly rigorous investigators.

They examined the data closely and noticed that an unusually large number of participants had dropped out of the trial, especially those in the placebo group (44%).  They guessed that participants thought they knew what they were taking and dropped out if they “knew” they were taking the placebo.

They reanalyzed the data to account for participants thought they were taking.

The final result: volunteers who thought they were taking vitamin C reported fewer and shorter colds, regardless of whether they were taking vitamin C or the placebo.

Those who thought they were taking the placebo had more and longer colds, regardless of whether they were taking the placebo or vitamin C.

Comment: This study provides compelling evidence for the placebo effects of vitamin C.  Placebo effects are powerful. I’m all for them.  The authors of the recently retracted study should have read this one first.

Carole Bartoletto, who works with dining services at UCLA, sent me two items.

• A toolkit to encourage dining halls to promote choices of meals with lower carbon footprints.
• A research study: Increasing the Selection of Low-Carbon Footprint Entrées through the Addition of New Menu Items and a Social Marketing Campaign in University Dining.

I started with the research study.

Its title requires translation.  Low-carbon footprint means plant-based.  In this case, it means Impossible brand plant-based meat alternatives.

Their intervention succeeded in encouraging substitution of Impossible for beef, but had unintended consequences.

Although the intervention was followed by a decrease in sales of beef entrées and increase in sales of plant-based meat entrées, sales of other vegetarian entrées also decreased.

Students replaced vegetarian choices with Impossible burgers?

To their credit, the authors acknowledge the problem.

It is also worth discussing the nutritional differences between plant-based meat and other low-carbon footprint options. In general, lower-carbon foods (i.e., plant-based and sustainably-raised fish) tend to be healthier, but this is not always the case. Plant-based meat products such as Impossible™ are ultra-processed and relatively high in sodium and saturated fat. Consuming ultra-processed foods has been linked with higher calorie intake and weight gain (Hall et al., 2019).

The toolkit, in contrast, includes Impossible products but does not focus on them.  It presents a variety of vegetarian and vegan options as low-carbon options with many illustrations of ways to present this information.

This could be useful, and maybe more useful, without the Impossible products, especially if the ultra-processed meal alternatives discourage choices of vegetarian options.

Take a look and see what you think.

Note: an educational intervention in Great Britain that also gave participants free plant-based meats found more of them sto be consumed, unsurprisingly.

ADDITION, July 1: I received this message in response to this post from Hannah Malen, at UCLA:

Dear Marion,

As one of your fans and newsletter subscribers, I was excited to see that you covered the low-carbon footprint dining intervention we did at UCLA! I collaborated with the innovative and talented folks at UCLA Dining as part of my dissertation work. It was an awesome experience to design, implement, and study a real-world intervention.

Unfortunately, I was a bit disappointed by your summary of the study. I felt your assessment overlooked some of the nuances that make this work challenging and important.

1) Low-carbon footprint does not mean only plant-based in this case. We created low-, medium-, and high-carbon footprint cutoffs based on life cycle analysis data and feasibility of real-world implementation. The criteria were created for the purposes of classifying menu items AND educating students about the relative impacts of different foods. Based on our criteria, low-carbon footprint included vegetarian menu items with < 2 ounces of cheese AND menu items with sustainable fish. I think this is worth noting because low-carbon footprint doesn’t have to mean ONLY plant-based or vegan…it also means some vegetarian items with cheese are NOT low-carbon footprint.

2) The decision to add Impossible plant-based meat alternative products to the menu was strategic and led by our Dining Director. As we know, it can be hard to appeal to meat-eaters, and Impossible-type products have been more successful than many other alternatives. While sales of the new Impossibile products did coincide with decreases in sales of other vegetarian items, I don’t think it’s accurate to say they discouraged choices of vegetarian options. We studied and saw shifts across basically all categories of menu items, which I think is a strength of the research. We also saw that overall, sales of low-carbon footprint items increased, while sales of medium- and high-carbon footprint items decreased. On average, this corresponded with an 8% decrease in the carbon footprint of entrees sold.

All this to say, it’s complicated, and I’m proud that we are among the first to look at the dynamics of introducing Impossible plant-based meat alternatives into food environments. Of course it’s ideal if eaters swap beans or veggies for meat, but the path to get there is certainly not easy.

Thanks for the opportunity to share our work and respond to your coverage. (And thanks to Carole for being a champion of the work and leader in creating the toolkit!)

Kind regards,

Hannah

When it comes to analyses of agricultural policies, some of the most critical come from conservatives.

From the American Enterprise Institute: Farm Subsidies and the Poor (2022). The key points:

• Despite claims to the contrary, farm subsidies do little to reduce food prices and almost nothing to alleviate rural poverty.
• Payments of farm subsidies are roughly proportional to farm output; therefore, those who operate small farms receive minimal benefits from such programs.
• Other US Department of Agriculture policies that provide low-income households with subsidies to buy food do increase food security and reduce poverty.

An earlier report from the American Enterprise Institute:  Agricultural subsidies aid the wealthy, not those in rural poverty (2017)

Taken together, these programs cost about $20 billion every year…Who gets all that federal money? About 70 percent of all crop insurance and other farm income safety net payments flow to 10 percent of the largest crop-producing farm businesses. This group comprises less than 100,000 farm operations, each of which on average receives more than $140,000 every year…In contrast, 10 percent of the smallest farms receive a mere pittance, on average no more than about $50 — from the federal crop insurance and safety net programs. And the bottom 80 percent, including midsize farms, receive less than 10 percent of all subsidy payments.

From the Cato Institute: Examining America’s Farm Subsidy Problem (2020)

This year, farmers (on net) will derive almost 40 percent of their income directly from the U.S. government. Forty percent.

Comment: The main effect of agricultural subsidies is to encourage Big Ag to grow commodity crops in places where they should not be grown.  Clearly, ag policies need rethinking.  How about revising them to support production of real food, rather than feed for animals and fuel for cars?  How about redesigning ag policy to refocus it on health and sustainability?  These reports suggest that plenty of bipartisan support is available.  Let’s tap into it for the next farm bill.

I am a member of the American Society for Nutrition and received this notice about a sponsored session at it forthcoming annual meeting.

Potatoes generally score high on the Glycemic Index, indicating that their starches are quickly digested to sugars.  The Alliance for Potato Research & Education has a speaker at this session.  I’m guessing that the speakers won’t have anything good to say about the Glycemic Index.  I don’t either, actually, but opinions would be more credible if they came from independent sources.

This made me look up the other sponsored sessions.

Here’s another reason why I don’t think the ASN should allow these sessions at annual meetings.

In my experience, you don’t get much scientific debate at industry-sponsored scientific sessions. Alas.

Meredith Li-Vollmer.  Graphic Public Health.  Penn State University Press, 2022.

Probably because of my cartoon book, Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics, I was asked to do a blurb for this book, which I was happy to do.

In her thoroughly up-to-date, informative, and useful book, Li-Vollmer convincingly argues for the effectiveness of comics in conveying health risks and desired behaviors.  She proves this point with splendid and deeply engaging examples, and provides an instructive how-to for creating your own. This book should be in every public health curriculum; it’s not only informative but also wonderful fun to read.

They only used the sentence in bold face (edited to convert wonderful to wonderfully).

But the rest explains why I think the book is worth reading.   Li-Vollmer works for Seattle’s health department and discovered comics as a way of communicating public health messages.  The book includes lots of examples of the work of comic artists explaining issues related to a host of public health issues.  Although none of the examples focus specifically on food issues, some briefly cover food safety, eating watery foods on hot days, and how climate change affects food production.

I think this is a great way to communicate public health issues.  New York City subway rider that I am, I greatly enjoyed the AIDS story that the New York City Health Department told in posters in the early 1990s.  As the New York Times explained,

Our story so far, as seen in 6,000 New York City subway cars, above the windows and between the advertisements for hemorrhoid, hernia, and foot doctors:

Julio and Marisol run into each other while visiting Raul Rodriguez, who is in the hospital with AIDS. They apologize for the big quarrel several episodes back, when Julio refused to use a condom and walked out. Their romance rekindled, they leave Raul’s room to get some coffee and talk things over.

Suddenly, Rosa bursts in. “I’m scared,” she tells Raul. “I’m . . . I’m . . . I’m H.I.V. positive.”

Hundreds of reports of illness from eating Lucky Charms cereal have intrigued food safety experts.

The FDA is investigating, but being really cagey about it.

Everybody seems to know that reference number 1064 refers to Lucky Charms cereal.

The FDA has received 529 reports of adverse effects.

Food safety lawyer Bill Marler has been following the situation.

Since late 2021, the crowd sourcing website iwaspoisoned.com has received 6,400 reports from people complaining of classic food poisoning symptoms of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea after eating Lucky Charms cereal. General Mills, the maker of the cereal, has said that is has investigated the situation and there is no apparent link between the reported illnesses and Lucky Charms.

The Washington Post quotes experts calling for a recall, Bill Marler among them.

Although, there has been no scientific proven link, be it chemical or an allergen, between the several thousand illnesses and Lucky Charms,” Marler said, “my advice to General Mills is to recall the product and reset its trust with the consuming public until more is known.

Is there a link?  Or is this just a matter of people getting sick, remembering they ate this cereal, and putting the two together—even though no cause-and-effect exists.

The watchdog Environmental Working Group has analyzed the approval process for new food chemicals.  Its disturbing conclusions:

Nearly 99 percent of all food chemicals introduced since 2000 were greenlighted for use by the food and chemical industry,…not by the Food and Drug Administration, the agency responsible for ensuring food is safe.

That’s because food and chemical companies exploited a loophole in the law allowing them to decide which chemicals are safe to consume, contrary to what Congress intended when it enacted food chemical laws in 1958….for 756 of 766 new food chemicals added to the food supply since [2000], or 98.7 percent, these companies have exploited a loophole for substances that are “generally recognized as safe,” or GRAS. The loophole lets them – not the FDA – decide a substance is safe.

The data:

Do we care?  I think we should.

EWG deserves thanks for keeping an eye on this issue.

Last week, the USDA announced its new Framework for Shoring Up the Food Supply Chain and Transforming the Food System to Be Fairer, More Competitive, More Resilient.

The Framework document is long and hard to read.  Here’s a summary:

Framework goals:

• Building a more resilient food supply chain that provides more and better market options for consumers and producers while reducing carbon pollution
• Creating a fairer food system that combats market dominance and helps producers and consumers gain more power in the marketplace by creating new, more and better local market options
• Making nutritious food more accessible and affordable for consumers
• Emphasizing equity

Framework actions: where the money goes:

Food production

• $300 million for an Organic Transition Initiative
• $75 million for urban agriculture

Food processing

• $100 million for the Food Supply Chain Loan Guarantee Program
• $375 million to expand independent meat and poultry processing
• 25 million for Meat and Poultry Processing Capacity Technical Assistance
• $275 million for credit access for processors
•  $100 million to support processing worker training and safety
• $200 million for Food Safety Certification for Specialty Crops
• $600 million to support food supply chain infrastructure

Food distribution and aggregation

• $400 million for regional food business centers
• $60 million to leverage commodity purchases through Farm-to-School
• $90 million to prevent and reduce food loss and waste

Food markets & Consumers

• $155 million for food access in underserved communities (Healthy Food Financing Initiative)
• $50 million for the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program
• $40 million for the GusNIP [Gus Schumacher] Produce Prescriptions Program.
• $25 million for SNAP technology improvements
• $100 million to create a Healthy Food Incentive Fund for schools

Civil Eats has an interview with Secretary Vilsack about all this.  Its point:

While it’s billed as a “transformation,” the framework does not change the foundational structures or practices of the American food system. It does, however, emphasize regionalism, support for organic and urban farming, and nutrition in new ways. That’s a significant shift for the agency, which has historically prioritized efficiency over all else.

The White House was also at work last week.  It released an Action Plan on Global Water Security.

Summary: FACT SHEET: Vice President Harris Announces Action Plan on Global Water Security and Highlights the Administration’s Work to Build Drought Resilience.

Strategies (Pillars):

• Pillar 1: Advancing U.S. leadership in the global effort to achieve universal and equitable access to sustainable, climate-resilient, safe, and effectively managed WASH services without increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
• Pillar 2: Promoting sustainable management and protection of water resources and associated ecosystems to support economic growth, build resilience, mitigate the risk of instability or conflict, and increase cooperation.
• Pillar 3: Ensuring that multilateral action mobilizes cooperation and promotes water security.

Will any of this do real good?  Specific initiatives will benefit from the increased funding.

Transforming the food system?  Not quite yet.