Currently browsing posts about: Food-industry-regulation

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 is once again asking food companies to voluntarily reduce the sodium in their products.

It says that 40% of food categories have done just that.

Prior to 2021, consumer intake was approximately 3,400 milligrams per day on average, far higher than the limit recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans of 2,300 milligrams per day for those 14 years and older.

If finalized, the new set of voluntary targets would support reducing average individual sodium intake to about 2,750 milligrams per day. This reduction is approximately 20% lower than consumer intake levels prior to 2021.

it has published a report on this progress.

A quick reminder: salt is 40% sodium.  The Dietary Guidelines upper limit target of 2300 mg/day sodium means nearly 6 grams of salt per day, or 1.5 teaspoons.

As for why this matters, Sodium Reduction Is A Proven Strategy That Saves Lives—More Work Is Needed To Hold Industry Accountable.

In 2016, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) embarked on a sodium reduction strategy, only to meet repeated political hurdles…there has been little industry engagement, minimal public reporting, and no consequences if targets are not achieved.

Salt reduction across the entire food supply is the only measure that will help people reduce sodium intake.  This issue has been around for a long time.

Voluntary reduction is nice, but does not go nearly far enough and it can always be reversed.

The FDA could and should do more.

OK, granted.  Political opposition to salt reduction is fierce—if foods aren’t salty enough, people might not buy them.

But the FDA also has a long history of protection of commercial interests, which it claims it cannot share because it is obliged to protect trade secrets.  It’s time for that to change too.

I was interested to see this report in the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal): Revolving door: You are free to influence us “behind the scenes,” FDA tells staff leaving for industry jobs. BMJ 2024;386:q1418. doi: 10.1136/bmj.q1418.

The “Revolving Door,” of course, is the term used to describe how officials of federal regulatory agencies leave to take jobs with the industry they formerly regulated, and vice versa.  I’ve written about this previously. Others have written about the FDA’s “revolvement” with the drug industry.

You can easily imagine why a food company would want to hire a former FDA official.  That person will know how to deal with annoying regulatory issues, and will no doubt still have friends and former colleagues in the agency who can help smooth the way.aa

So what does the BMJ add to this?  Plenty, unfortunately.  Evidence from e-mails obtained through FOIA (freedom-of-information) requests.

Internal emails show that the US Food and Drug Administration informs employees leaving for industry jobs that, despite restrictions on post-employment lobbying, they are still permitted to influence the agency…The legal ability to work “behind the scenes” is enshrined in federal regulations2 and highlights a “critical, critical loophole” in US revolving door policy, says a leading consumer advocate.

Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist for the organisation Public Citizen, told The BMJ that the rules forbid various forms of direct lobbying contact but permit lobbying activity that is indirect. “So, people will leave government service and can immediately start doing influence peddling and lobbying,” Holman explained. “They can even run a lobbying campaign, as long as they don’t actually pick up the telephone and make the contact with their former officials—and that’s exactly the advice that’s being given here.”

The BMJ notes:

Since 2000 every FDA commissioner, the agency’s highest position, has gone on to work for industry. These include Robert Califf, the agency’s current chief, who re-established ties with industry in between his two stints at the agency’s helm.

One argument here is that the human resources folks are just explaining existing ethical requirements.

But a legitimate worry is corporate “capture.”  When federal regulatory agencies are “captured,” they neglect public interest in favor of corporate interest.

This has been a concern about the FDA for a long time.  The FDA needs to do all it can to restore public trust in its integrity.

By a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court struck down the Chevron doctrine, which said that the courts were required to uphold regulatory decisions of federal agencies unless Congress said otherwise.  The court majority called the doctrine “fundamentally misguided.”

The decision involves food politics in two ways: (1) the case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, involved fishing, and (2) it has profound implications for food regulations.

(1) The case, as described in SCOTUSblog: “Can fishermen be required to pay for federal monitors? And by the way – should Chevron be overruled?”

Summary: The National Marine Fisheries Service had been requiring “the herring industry to pay for the costs, estimated at $710 per day, associated with carrying observers on board their vessels to collect data about their catches and monitor for overfishing… the agency reimbursed fishermen for the costs of the observers.”  Commercial fishing companies, which do not like having observers on board, challenged the Chevron doctrine.  Koch Industries paid for the challenge, as part of its long-standing deregulatory agenda.

Significance: businesses objecting to agency regulations can sue the agencies and let judges decide.

The courts (politically appointed judges) can overrule the agencies ‘ public health and safety regulations.

(2) Implications for food, nutrition, and public health regulations

The decision is widely interpreted as putting food and nutrition policies at grave risk, particularly those of the FDA.  Here is a preliminary list of what is at stake.

• FDA: food safety, sodium, front-of-package nutrition labeling, the healthy front-of-package label claim, GRAS determinations, dietary supplements, chemical toxins.
• Many of these proposed regulations were already at risk because of disinterest or lack of understanding by agency officials who seem unwilling to argue forcefully for public health measures.  This lack is seen most clearly in a Wall Street Journal interview with Jim Jones, the FDA’s new Deputy Commissioner for Human Foods, who appears uninterested in taking on regulations to reduce production as well as consumption of ultra-processed foods. [this discussion runs from 13:20 to 17:02].
• USDA: meat and poultry safety, Salmonella and E. coli as adulterants, pesticides, herbicides, meat industry consolidation reduction, safe handling instructions, labeling requirements.
• EPA: slaughterhouse pollution, water quality, PFAS
• FTC: dietary supplement health claims

Comment: There are undoubtedly more regulations in play that I haven’t thought of.   Food companies (like businesses in general) do not like being regulated.—too cumbersome, too expensive, too intrusive, too limiting on profits.

Now, a company fviewing any of these rules as inconvenient can take the FDA to court.  Doing so:

• Leaves scientific and public health matters to the personal views of judges.
• Ties up federal agencies in legal challenges.
• Reduces agency resources for inspections and other regulatory work.
• Casts a chill on developing new regulations development.

This decision has been applauded by the business community.

For those of us wanting diets to be healthier and more sustainable, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

I’ll bet we won’t have to wait long for the first cases to be filed.

I’m just getting around to reading this report from three groups in the UK: Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), the Obesity Health Alliance (OHA) and the Alcohol Health Alliance (AHA): Holding us back: tobacco, alcohol and unhealthy food and drink.

I learned about it from an article in The Guardian:

The report gives the health statistics: 13% of adults in England smoke, 21% drink above the recommended drinking guidelines, and 64% are overweight or living with obesity,.

NOTE: this report—unlike so many others—examines the political and economic causes of poor health.  It says practically nothing about personal choice or responsibility.  Instead, it focuses on industry profits and the costs of industry profiteering to society.

Big businesses are currently profiting from ill-health caused by smoking, drinking alcohol and eating unhealthy foods, while the public pay the price in poor health, higher taxes and an under-performing economy.

The wage penalty, unemployment and economic inactivity caused by tobacco, alcohol and obesity costs the UK economy an eye-watering £31bn and has led to an estimated 459,000 people out of work.

Meanwhile each year, the industries which sell these products make an estimated £53bn of combined industry revenue from sales at levels harmful to health.

The press release emphasizes the need to curb industry practices: More needs to be done to tackle the unhealthy products driving nearly half a million people out of work.

It recommends, among other things:

• The Government should take a coherent policy approach to tobacco, alcohol and high fat, salt and/or sugar foods, with a focus on primary prevention.
• Public health policymaking must be protected from the vested interest of health-harming industry stakeholders.

To do this, it suggests these actions to decrease sales of harmful products (my summary):

• Restrict advertising
• Set age limits  for purchase.
• Do not allow prominent placement in shops.
• Raise prices; tax.
• Educate the public about risks (the one place where personal responsibility is considered).

This week, I’m posting some items that surprised me.  Here’s the first: How to deal with bribery in your supply chain.

Really?  This is an international problem?  Apparently so, at least for the U.K.

We have approximately 160 coudntries from all over the world contributing to our food supply and this can lead to vulnerabilities in respect of fraud and financial crime.

The vulnerabilities:

• Bribery and corruption
• Food fraud such as adulteration and mislabeling
• Dealing with entities on international fraud and sanction lists
• “Dealing with individuals or entities that do not share your own approach to issues such as sustainability and modern slavery.”

This particular article deals with bribery.  A few excerpts from this discussion:

• It is not necessary to show the payment was made with a corrupt motive or intention to persuade or influence the agent; the payment is presumed to have been corrupt if the principal was unaware.
• There is also no need to show the principal suffered a loss as a result of the agent being bribed.
• Given the serious consequences which can flow from bribery (corporate criminal conviction, fines, reputational damage) and the cost of carrying out your own investigation, prevention is clearly better than cure.
• In the food industry, supply chains can be particularly long and complex, with suppliers involved from all over the world; therefore, it is crucial that businesses invest time in getting to know their suppliers.
• The key message is to keep the risk of bribery in mind at all stages of dealing with suppliers and ensure that all counterparties are aware of your organisation’s understanding of how the civil law of bribery can protect and help scrutinise suppliers, so to maintain a robust supply chain with in-built deterrents for rogue parties.

One more thing to worry about if you are in the food business.

IPES—the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems—states the problem:

Over recent decades, corporations have succeeded in convincing governments that they must be central in any discussion
on the future of food systems. [No, they should not.]

Publicprivate partnerships and ‘multi-stakeholder’ roundtables (e.g., on ‘responsible soy’, or ‘sustainable palm oil’) have normalized a prominent role for corporations and given them an inside track to decision-making. [This is wrong.]

Public governance initiatives have also become reliant on private funding. [Also wrong.]

Why wrong?  IPES says:

Behind the scenes, leading corporations have consolidated their grip by ensuring an industry friendly regulatory environment (via lobbying and ‘revolving door’ approaches), shaping trade and investment agreements, putting up barriers to competition, sponsoring research, and making political donations.

What is to be done?  For starters:

• Keep food corporations out of public health policy discussions.
• Hold corporations accountable.

Take a look and see if you agree.

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The Food Foundation in Great Britain has produced a report on the status of the British food industry.

The full report is here.

Here’s what the writers of the report would like the food industry to do:

Like American food companies, British food companies put profits to shareholders as their top priority.  Knowing this, the report calls on government to set mandatory standards.

We need to do this too.