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The USDA has just issued a corporate challenge to food companies to “step up to help end childhood obesity by empowering the household gatekeeper to assist her in modeling a healthy lifestyle and by providing information to help her make healthy food choices for herself and her family.” How? Uh oh. By using MyPyramid. This may indeed be a challenge. Even nutritionists have trouble understanding how to use MyPyramid. USDA provides a long list of suggestions of ways food companies might use MyPyramid.  These make me think we will have to wait and see whether such things as CDs in cereal boxes, placemats, and websites are able to use the Pyramid for real education rather than for marketing the companies’ products.

Unless Congress does something weird, Country-of-Origin Labeling (COOL) will go into effect this spring. Apparently, some companies are already doing it. I’m traveling this week and bought a little packet of Snak Club Tropical Mix at an airport news stand, thinking that it would be mostly raisins and peanuts, which it mostly was. The COOL was an unexpected bonus although I hardly know what to make of it: “Product of U.S.A., may contain ingredients from Thailand and/or Phillipines [sic] and/or Mexico and/or China and/or Chile and/or Argentina.” Somehow, I’m guessing that this is not what proponents of COOL had in mind, exactly.

The USDA has now given us a poster child for the food industry’s good intentions in helping to improve the American diet.  The agency’s new fact sheet on dietary fiber documents how the food industry has used technology to add fiber and whole grains to processed foods.  Even so, the total amount of fiber and whole grains available in the food supply just doesn’t seem to budge.   Why not?  The USDA says the grain-based food industry isn’t giving the agency the data it needs to demonstrate increases and that “a collaborative working relationship” is needed to get better data.   Getting more data from the food industry–especially about food composition–would be nice but isn’t going to help people eat more fiber-rich foods.  For that, how about eating unprocessed foods!

According to Food Chemical News (this link may only be available to subscribers), the USDA is about to launch “Project M.O.M” (Mothers and Others and MyPyramid), a program that challenges food businesses to develop plans to counter childhood obesity through diet and activity. One problem: programs must be based on the Dietary Guidelines and MyPyramid. It will be interesting to see what they come up with. Stay tuned.

The FDA has produced electronic posters giving the nutrient content of raw fruits, raw vegetables, and cooked seafood (purchased raw). Why? I’m guessing because real foods don’t come with Nutrition Facts labels and you have to go to the USDA’s nutrient composition data base to find out what the details are. You can download the posters in small, medium, large, and extra-large, or just in text format. If you care about which fruit or vegetable has the most of any one nutrient, here’s an easy way to find out. Have fun with them!

The USDA says it has just released the data from its “What We Eat in America” survey on nutrient intakes from foods for 21 gender/age groups by race/ethnicity and family income. USDA has also posted historical materials from past USDA surveys and analyses dating back to the 1894. It’s great to have all of these in one place.  They are always a lot of fun to read and play with. Enjoy!

The USDA makes data on farm households and the economics of farming readily available. You can even get the numbers you need by state. A handy resource, no?

One of the things that USDA does really, really well is research designed to develop a basis for food assistance policies. Its Economic Research Service is one of the best kept secrets in American government. Here’s what the ERS investigators have done, discovered, and published over the last 10 years. Best of all, you can access their publications from an electronic data base.