CNN calls obese kids "coronary time bombs"

The top story on CNN online this morning has the headline: "Obese kids are coronary time bombs."

What is your opinion of that headline?

It is good to be frank about the health consequences of childhood obesity, to motivate a vigorous response from parents and policy-makers alike. At the same time, we should respect and support the quality of life for the many children who will be overweight for much of their lives.

It seems helpful to say, as an expert quoted in the body of the CNN article does, "Our study suggests that more of these young adults will have heart disease when they are 35-50 years old, resulting in more hospitalizations, medical procedures, need for chronic medications, missed work days and shortened life expectancy."

But it seems unhelpful to call obese kids time bombs. It's stigmatizing. As a metaphor or image, "time bomb" doesn't bring to mind a correct impression of the health consequences as a scientist would see them. The article seems at times to be concerned about the teasing that heavy kids get in school, but that nuance is not carried through consistently. The "coronary time bomb" language was not from any of the experts quoted or evidence cited, but was in the CNN author's own voice.

The article is supported by direct advertising for an anti-cholesterol drug, Vytorin. Clearly, the advertising is linked with the content of the article. The fear-enhancing message in the article text serves well to generate interest in the ad. The ad has the same color scheme as the CNN website, increasing the visual sense of linkage. The teaser for the ad is: "What are you doing about cholesterol and the Two Sources -- food and family?"

Here is information, which does not appear in the ad on CNN, but rather on the Zytorin website linked from the ad:

VYTORIN contains two cholesterol medicines, Zetia (ezetimibe) and Zocor (simvastatin), in a single tablet. VYTORIN has not been shown to reduce heart attacks or strokes more than Zocor alone.

Selected Important Risk Information About VYTORIN
VYTORIN is a prescription tablet and isn‘t right for everyone, including women who are nursing or pregnant or who may become pregnant, and anyone with liver problems.

Unexplained muscle pain or weakness could be a sign of a rare but serious side effect and should be reported to your doctor right away. VYTORIN may interact with other medicines or certain foods, increasing your risk of getting this serious side effect. So, tell your doctor about any other medications you are taking.

Baseball gets dietary supplement regulation back in the game

In part due to Major League Baseball, members of Congress are re-considering how the $25 billion U.S. dietary supplement industry is regulated.

Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs heard testimony on whether current laws and regulations are sufficient to protect consumers from ingredients that may appear in supplements, but not on their labels. The interest of Chairman Arlen Specter (Dem-PA) is due in part to the court case of Philadelphia Phillies pitcher J.C. Romero, who was suspended for 50 games this year after testing positive for a banned substance. Earlier this year, Romero sued the manufacturer of an over-the-counter supplement, blaming the company for his suspension on the claim that it misrepresented ingredients in its products.

Under current law, no government agency evaluates the contents of dietary supplements to confirm the presence of ingredients listed on the label (or to discover those unlisted). Furthermore, dietary supplement manufacturers do not have to prove the safety or efficacy of the product to gain Food and Drug Administration approval prior to marketing. Rather, companies must submit some evidence that the product has a history of use or benefit 75 days before selling it. The safety burden falls on the FDA: if it believes a supplement to be unsafe it must demonstrate the public health risk in court. NYU nutrition professor Marion Nestle covers the history of this issue in detail in her book, Food Politics, as well as on her blog.

In his testimony, Michael Levy, the Director of the Division of New Drugs and Labeling Compliance at the FDA, describes this as, “a painstaking investigative and analytical process to show that [the products] are violative.” He states that the process can take many months, during which the product in question remains on the market, limiting the FDA’s ability to effectively protect consumers.

The largest trade association for the natural products industry, the Natural Products Association, also supported stricter enforcement of supplement contents. However, rather than questioning the effectiveness of current procedures, Interim Executive Director Daniel Fabricant called for increased money and manpower to enforce current law. He argues that sufficient resources would enable the FDA to pursue a larger number of investigations and court cases.

Batting averages are not the only outcomes at stake in this regulatory debate. Use of steroid-like compounds has been associated with kidney failure, liver injury, and stroke.

It will be interesting to see how the debate unfolds. The Major League Baseball Players Association is reported to be lobbying Congress to require that a federally certified lab analyze all supplements to identify the ingredients that should be listed on the label. Professional athletes may hit a regulatory home run that consumer safety advocates have sought for more than a decade.

Written by Natalie Valpiani, a graduate student at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts. Cross-posted from a University of North Carolina food seminar blog, Eats 101.

Setbacks for Smart Choices

The Smart Choices labeling program has created quite a stir.

Following a critical New York Times article earlier this month, which Ashley Colpaart discussed here, the story has been picked up by other major outlets. Rebecca Ruiz scrutinized the program's funding sources in Forbes magazine [update: sentence corrected 9/25/2009]. Mark Bittman shared his wit in a tour of a supermarket aisle on ABC's Nightline. Tom Laskawy at Grist called the program a dumb move.

My dean at the Friedman School at Tufts, Eileen Kennedy, who is a board member for the Smart Choices program, was quoted in the Times defending the inclusion of Froot Loops, which has become the poster child for questionable products included in the program. She has taken a lot of grief for this, including unfair emails and telephone calls. She argues, in person and in public, that the participating companies deserve credit for the social responsibility they showed in giving up their separate food labeling schemes and agreeing to the stricter "Smart Choices" standards. If Froot Loops meets well-defined standards, then wouldn't it be wrong to exclude the brand simply because one doesn't like its marketing associations?

The Froot Loops example highlights a weakness of the Smart Choices program, which seems to favor reformulated branded manufactured products over traditional simple healthy foods, such as fresh fruits and vegetables. Dean Kennedy responds that all fruits and vegetables without additives qualify for the program, a point that was omitted from the New York Times article.

The Smart Choices program would have been wise to anticipate the criticism that it favors highly processed foods. The program could have considered stricter criteria in some areas, such as sweetened cereals. More importantly, it could have achieved a different emphasis even with the program's current criteria. It could have more strongly highlighted fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, while giving a lower profile to products that have been slightly reformulated and artificially enriched to just barely meet the nutrient criteria. Then, reformulated Froot Loops might still have qualified, but the program would have been on stronger ground choosing a different poster child product -- any of thousands of simple, healthy, delicious, traditional foods.

Instead, the program's one-page fact sheet (.pdf) promotes plenty of manufactured packaged food brands but no traditional healthy foods. The program's board includes major manufacturers, but no producers or retailers of less processed fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

The program should have anticipated criticism of its fee structure also. Although it has a sliding cost scale for food companies, with larger fees for products that have bigger sales, the low end of the scale is still too expensive for commodity producers (comparatively small-scale producers of a non-branded food product). If the program is not just a marketing ploy for food manufacturers, or a revenue stream for the non-profit program itself, then it should permit the seller of an apple without additives simply and freely to use the Smart Choices logo. If an apple automatically meets the program's criteria, it is difficult to see what type of review the program would undertake that would justify even a modest application cost. Currently, if you search for "apple" on the program's website, you find all about Apple Jacks and very little about apples.

Marion Nestle's blog has covered this issue with cutting insight. Advocacy groups have been having a field day. Change.org is running an email campaign, with thousands of signatories already. Somebody has apparently circulated an email list of people to contact that includes faculty like myself. I read every email with interest, even though there is not much mileage in lobbying me on this topic.

The Food and Drug Administration, which oversees federal policy on food labeling, wrote to the Smart Choices Program in August:

In the past five years, competing FOP [front-of-pack] symbols on food labels have proliferated. Consumer research suggests that these competing symbols, which are based on different nutrient criteria, are likely to confuse consumers. In this context, we recognize the potential value of a more standardized approach for FOP labeling.

However, since products bearing the Smart Choices symbol are just beginning to appear in the market, we will need to monitor and evaluate the products as they appear and their effect on consumers' food choices and perceptions.

FDA and FSIS would be concerned if any FOP labeling systems used criteria that were not stringent enough to protect consumers against misleading claims; were inconsistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans; or had the effect of encouraging consumers to choose highly processed foods and refined grains instead of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

Of course, some of FDA's concerns would seem to apply equally well to other front-of-pack labeling programs, not just Smart Choices.

The Board of Directors page on the Smart Choices website formerly listed affiliations for directors with senior roles at the American Diabetes Association, Baylor University, and Tufts University, but these affiliations have been removed. In an August 5 press release, the American Society of Nutrition (ASN) seemed proud to "jointly administer" the Smart Choices program along with a non-profit organization called NSF International: "Together, ASN and NSF International are committed to ensuring that the Smart Choices Program is credibly implemented, governed, and monitored." Now, however, some of the references to the ASN role have been deleted from the Smart Choices site -- for example, they have been removed from the one-page fact sheet (.pdf). ASN has tried to clarify its role in the program in a letter to members: "ASN does not own the program and does not endorse the products under Smart Choices." I wonder if leading institutions in the nutrition profession are reconsidering the program.

Does obesity even matter?

Healthy food is about much more than obesity prevention. Yet, in its place, without obsession, obesity deserves a place on the list of nutrition concerns, not for cosmetic reasons, but because it is connected to diabetes, heart disease, and other chronic diseases.

The leading theory is that increasingly abundant and inexpensive and palatable food, combined with lower physical activity, has produced rising rates of overweight and obesity. If you just look at the changes in the food system, restaurant industry, sweeteners, sedentary lifestyles, and food advertising to children, it is entirely plausible that calorie balance explains the changes in obesity. In addition, there are a hundred theories about the one thing that obesity is "all about" -- maybe it's the insulin, or the HFCS, or the carbs, or the meat, or the fat, or the chemicals, or the lack of fiber, or the glycemic index, or the volumetrics. Proponents of each of these theories will admonish us to read "the science," by which they mean "just part of the science, please." My advice is to follow each of those theories as their evidence base develops, but don't throw your weight or authority to any of them yet.

A question (not just an answer): How much does a nutritious diet cost?

How much does a nutritious diet cost?

Some say that the high price of healthy food is making us obese and unhealthy. Others wonder how that could be so, because (even with recent inflation) food of all sorts has been comparatively cheap in the United States for many years, due to government policy and technological change in the food system.

The leading source of disagreement about the cost of an adequate diet is different definitions of "adequate," not different price estimates. Your estimate of the minimal necessary cost depends on your opinion on questions like the following:

• whether a high level of meat and dairy is necessary for an adequate diet,
• whether your vision of healthy food includes foods marketed as healthy (organic yogurt, low-fat cereal) or simple basic staples (whole grain rice, cabbage, carrots),
• whether diets should be judged by their adherence to USDA's Pyramid recommendations,
• whether diets should be judged by their adherence to the National Academies' nutrient recommendations, and
• whether you think low-income people can cook at home, or whether instead convenience and restaurant foods are central to your definition of adequacy.

More subtly, your estimate of minimal cost depends on your opinion about whether people can change their diets in order to meet cost and nutrition goals, or whether it is inevitable that any realistic diet closely resembles the current average diet.

Reasonable answers about the cost of a nutritious diet, corresponding to different definitions of nutritious, range from even less expensive than the federal government's Thrifty Food Plan to much more expensive.

No wonder this issue generates a lot of argument! Most people on all sides of this issue leave these key assumptions implicit and unstated. Yet, these assumptions strongly influence conclusions about minimal costs.

In a recent article in the Journal of Consumer Affairs (free abstract, pay site for full article), "Using the Thrifty Food Plan to Assess the Cost of a Nutritious Diet," Joseph Llobrera and I use USDA's Thrifty Food Plan (TFP) framework to clarify the relationship between assumptions and cost estimates for nutritious diets. Let me know by email if your library does not have the journal. There is a related seminar on the Friedman School website. If you would like to play around with these models yourself, see our Thrifty Food Plan calculator. In both the seminar and the calculator, I should have emphasized more strongly that all of the dollars are in 2001 dollars per adult in the household, not adjusted for inflation (if you didn't know this, the amounts would seem unrealistically low).

For some readers, the whole computation will seem beside the point. They may reason that is clearly wrong to set the TFP cost target too low, but harmless to set it too high, so why not just pick the highest estimate? For a number of reasons, I think better food assistance policy comes from trying to choose the right estimate for a minimal cost target, rather than padding the estimate too much.

In the article, we find that the USDA's Thrifty Food Plan cost level can purchase a nutritious diet if (1) you think nutrient constraints (adequate protein, for example) are more important than food category constraints (plenty of meat), or (2) if you think it is reasonable to expect people to drastically change their current consumption pattern. If, instead, you think substantial meat and dairy amounts are essential to an adequate diet and you defer to the current consumption pattern of low-income consumers, you will probably prefer a more generous TFP cost target.

Update: Slate's Daily Bread food business blog has a thoughtful post about this article (gently needling the online presentation as "a little geeky" -- ha!).

Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee meeting

Briefly live-blogging a portion of the webcast of the third meeting of the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (agenda .pdf).

Presentation by Adam Drewnowski, University of Washington: "There are people who cannot afford many of the foods that are being recommended." Still, for the most part, he doesn't overstate the case that economics drives nutrition problems, noting that there are healthy affordable foods (once one gets above the most desperate minimal budget levels). Committee member Lawrence Appel asks a skeptical question about whether people would really eat much differently if healthy food were free. Drewnowski: "Energy dense foods do taste good. I admit that. Yes, they do."

Presentation by Frank Sacks, Harvard School of Public Health. Says blood pressure benefits are accentuated at particularly low sodium levels. This contrasts with the Salt Institute's input to the committee, arguing that only a fraction of people benefit from salt reduction, and that low-salt diets may have harmful side effects. Reacting to an argument that young and middle-aged people needn't limit salt, because their blood pressure is less responsive to sodium intake, Sacks notes dryly: hopefully, if they survive, the 45 year olds will live to become older.

Sacks also summarizes a growing body of research suggesting that patterns of weight loss and regain over time are similar across weight-loss diet strategies (Ornish, Atkins, Weight Watchers, etc.). Although the Dietary Guidelines have traditionally reflected a reductionist approach, emphasizing nutrient recommendations, Sacks doesn't shy away from the implications of his summary. In response to a question about whether the old Dietary Guidelines recommended range for fat calories is still correct, Sacks takes a line that one might equally have heard from Michael Pollan: perhaps we don't even need a recommended macronutrient range for fat. "Recommendations should be based on food."

Presentation by Patricia Crawford, University of California. In the same vein: "People want food-based specifics for the translation of nutrient guidelines."

Evidence on declining fruit and vegetable nutrient composition

Research by Donald R. Davis who retired from Biochemical Institute at The University of Texas (in my hometown of Austin) and in conjunction with the Bio-Communications Research Institute in Wichita Kansas, has summarized three kinds of evidence that points towards the decline in the nutrient value of fruits and vegetables in the US and UK over the last 50 to 100 years.

The report, published in February 2009 Journal of HortScience, reviews a highly cited research study titled "The dilution effect in plant nutrition studies" published in 1981 by Jarrell and Beverly in Advances in Agronomy. Jarrell and Beverly found that fertilized plants contained larger absolute amounts of minerals than the unfertilized plants, but these amounts were sufficiently diluted by the increased dry matter that all mineral concentrations declined, except for phosphorus, which is the common fertilizer.

Next, Davis looked at historical food composition data derived from three quantitative reports. While these studies are limited by their ability to be compared due to variation in methods, they found:

apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results.

Finally, Davis evaluated studies of collections of cultivars of a single food that was grown side by side for purposes of comparing their nutrient content. The foods were broccoli, wheat and maize. The side by side allows the elimination of using historical data in the form of averages (as was done in the previous section), which allows all environmental conditions (soil, fertilization, irrigation, pest control, climate, harvest, sampling, and analytical methods) to be held constant. He found:

plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect.

In conclusion,

Further studies are needed to assess the generality of dilution effects among foods and to greatly expand the numbers of nutrients and phytochemicals considered. Side-by-side comparisons of multiple cultivars in multiple environments can provide rigorous answers to the many remaining uncertainties. They are also well suited for testing proposed environmental and genetic methods to overcome dilution effects. Specifically, we would like to find ways to decrease the inverse correlation coefficients between yield and nutrient concentration or to decrease the negative slopes in plots of nutrient concentration vs. yield.

Over three billion of the world’s population is malnourished in nutrient elements and vitamin,including in developed countries. Vegetables and fruits are among the richest sources of many nutrients. Thus, declining nutrient concentrations in horticultural products are most unwelcome. Past and ongoing efforts to increase yields, combined with apparent broad tradeoffs between yield and the concentrations of perhaps half of all essential nutrients, work against recent efforts to increase one or a few micronutrients in individual foods.

ADA: National Food and Nutrition Conference

At the end of October 10,000 Registered Dietitians gathered in Chicago for the National Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo. The conference revealed movements in dietetics and educational sessions discussing the latest field research.

As a dietitian, I am grateful for the opportunity to meet up with old friends, network and hear the latest in the nutrition world. I am happy to see a movement in dietetics that seems to be taking a more holistic approach to the field, and the dietitians role in hunger and environmental nutrition.

As you can image, there is no shortage of food products in the Expo center. Why would industry want to exhibit at FNCE? According to the ADA website: to increase access, visibility and time and money.

THE FOOD & NUTRITION CONFERENCE & EXPO (FNCE) gives you the most cost-effective way to meet face-to-face with thousands of qualified foodservice, nutrition and healthcare decision makers. You’ll develop solid new business leads while building on existing relationships.

Every sector of the food industry is represented at over 2200 booths: beverages, supplements, snack foods, 'functional foods', meal bars, as well as trade groups: The Almond Board of California, Peanut Institute, National Cattleman's Beef Association, National Dairy Council, National Chicken Council, even the National Beer Wholesalers Association. Dietitians can be seen ravenously filling their "eco friendly bags" with free samples of protein chews, appetite suppressant pills, gluten free snack foods, pastas, sweeteners, bakery products, cereals.....you get the picture, as well as nutrition information pamphlets and handouts that can be used to educate RD's clients.

Here is an example of the one from Frito Lay:


The highlight of the conference for me was Organic Valley Farm Tour, Elkhorn, Wisconsin sponsored by Organic Valley in conjunction with the Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Dietetic Practice Group. A fabulous, day-long organic farm tour with a host of activities, including a milking parlor and milk house tour and demonstration; a pasture tour and discussion about organic grazing systems; a visit with Dr. Paul Dettloff, Organic Valley staff veterinarian, about herd health and animal well-being; and discussions about the current research and health benefits of organic foods. Lunch was provided on the farm followed by a cooking demonstration by Chef Monique Hooker, author of Cooking with the Seasons.


Some of the topics of the sessions I attended were: Food Access & Community Partnerships - Steps to Reducing Health Disparities, Food or Fuel: The Economic Facts , and the session: The Science of Organics: Nourishing the Land, Animals and People, was co-presented with Helen Costello MS, RD, LD, who currently works at the New Hampshire Food Bank and a former Friedman School graduate, was standing room only.
Food (and Water) For Thought Film Feastival, was a special event Co-hosted by HEN DPG & American Overseas Dietetic Association (AODA) at the Chicago Cultural Center. We viewed films on water conservation, water access, and global food security. After the films, a discussion with expert panelists including one of the filmmakers about how these issues affect our planet, our nation, and our communities.

Attending the session Sustainable Food Systems: Opportunities for Dietitians by speakers: Angie Tagtow, MS, RD, LD Environmental Nutrition Solutions and Alison Harmon PhD, RD, LN Montana State University was pivotal for me as a dietitian. I was pleased to see the room, young and old, captivated by the session. It is refreshing to me to see dietitians interested in how their food system is so connected to health and how excited they are to be exploring solutions.

The role of folate (an interpretation)

Many readers of this blog have probably been wondering about "the role of folate in epigenetic regulation of colon carcinogenesis."

What? As you check your memory banks for things you have been wondering about, this doesn't sound familiar?

Perhaps it will help if I give an interpretation in plain English: many readers have been wondering "whether too much folate raises the risk of colon cancer." Ah, that sounds more familiar. U.S. Food Policy covered that question last Fall.

See, it all depends on the interpretation.

Consider this video.



That is Friedman School Ph.D. student Lara Park's submission to the 2009 "Dance Your Ph.D." contest, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Apparently, the contest outcome depends in part on the number of YouTube views.

Things the food industry doesn't want you to know

Adam Voiland offers the list in U.S. News and World Report, along with a wealth of links to the supporting evidence, based in large part on a recent perspective article by Marion Nestle and David Ludwig in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

1. Junk food makers spend billions advertising unhealthy foods to kids.

2. The studies that food producers support tend to minimize health concerns associated with their products.

3. Junk food makers donate large sums of money to professional nutrition associations.

4. More processing means more profits, but typically makes the food less healthy.

5. Less-processed foods are generally more satiating than their highly processed counterparts.

6. Many supposedly healthy replacement foods are hardly healthier than the foods they replace.

7. A health claim on the label doesn't necessarily make a food healthy.

8. Food industry pressure has made nutritional guidelines confusing.

9. The food industry funds front groups that fight antiobesity public health initiatives.

10. The food industry works aggressively to discredit its critics.

The Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy

For many, September is the season of returning to school.

This blog grew out of a second-year master's-level course each Fall on "Determinants of U.S. Food Policy," at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. Students and alumni frequently share comments and suggest ideas for posts on this site. Though I don't always mention the connection, this blog also links to things former students are doing elsewhere online. Tufts is a great place for this type of engagement with real-world issues. Other faculty members blog as a form of public communication, and the university has a long-standing commitment to active citizenship.

This year, the first food policy class was today. It is a good time to send some links to interesting sources of news and food policy ideas at the Friedman School. For more information, I have just added a permanent image link in the sidebar to the School's web site.

The school covers a diverse area of work, from community interventions to improve diet and physical activity in the United States to humanitarian work in some of the most challenging settings around the world. For many readers, the most relevant academic areas are the Agriculture, Food, and Environment (AFE) program and the Food Policy and Applied Nutrition (FPAN) program. The FPAN program has a working paper series, including recent research on rethinking food security in humanitarian response (.pdf), a major study on diet diversity (.pdf), and hunger mapping in developing countries (.pdf) (image below). More research from the school can be found on the faculty pages.

A high-profile event at the school each Fall is the Friedman Symposium. This year, the event is scheduled for Sep. 24-26, and will feature former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman as the keynote speaker. Despite sponsorship from major food companies, the symposium registration is fairly expensive for most people (though a more reasonable $100 for students). Other important annual events include the graduate student research conference, which last Spring drew diverse contributors from 11 universities, and the annual Gershoff Symposium.

An annual cycle in Google searches for "nutrition"

At what time of year do you think people DON'T want to know about nutrition? Here's the Google trend.

Connect Nutrition

From former student Kelly Horton's project in Seattle, Connect Nutrition.

Welcome to Connect Nutrition

Connect Nutrition was founded to address the need for unique and innovative solutions to solve problems of inadequate nutrition, hunger, and food insecurity.

We create connections and opportunities for Communities, Organizations, and People.

Connect Nutrition supports organizations participating in active food, nutrition, and agriculture policy advocacy efforts and nutrition program planning and implementation to increase community food security, decrease hunger, increase access to healthful foods, and create sustainable food systems.

We do this by assisting local, national, and international non-profit organizations, government agencies, academic institutions, socially responsible businesses, and community groups in all aspects of program design, evaluation, training and management, policy analysis, and advocacy in the areas of food security, community development, and poverty alleviation.

Oftentimes, our clients face unfriendly political environments, operate with dwindling resources, experience budget pressures, and are in need of expert knowledge of food, nutrition, and agricultural policy, nutrition science, or technical expertise for program planning. These problems present a variety of challenges. Connect Nutrition helps organizations to achieve their missions by capitalizing on core strengths and lending expertise in the areas most needed.

In the eloquent words of Doc Hatfield, "We are a community of shared values. . . healthy land, healthful food, healthy community. . . we're all one family."

Contact us today and achieve your mission!

Boston Public Health Commission to hold March 13 hearing on trans fat

The Boston Public Health Commission is considering a requirement that restaurants stop using artificial trans fats, such as hydrogenated vegetable oils, because of scientific evidence that they increase risk of heart disease. There would be exceptions for very small quantities of artificial trans fat and for trans fat in packaged foods such as potato chips. Boston's action follows similar bans in New York City and Boston's neighbor Brookline, MA.

In January, the commission gave preliminary approval to a ban on trans fats, but some of the real decisions are still coming up. A public comment period is almost over, so write quickly if you'd like to express your views on trans fats. There will be a public hearing on Thursday, March 13, 2008, from 3 to 4pm, in the Hayes Conference Room, 1010 Massachusetts Avenue. For more information, see the brochure from the Boston Public Health Commission (.pdf).

The Boston Globe in January summarized the scientific case for the commission's proposal:

Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health conducted much of the landmark research into trans fat, establishing the link between the substance and cardiovascular disease in people. Primate studies have also shown that consuming trans fat can elevate the risk of a condition that is a precursor to diabetes and also pack fat around the belly, where it is believed to be more dangerous than elsewhere. Studies estimate that having as few as 40 calories of trans fat a day can boost the risk of a heart attack by 23 percent. A fast-food meal of chicken nuggets and French fries, if prepared with artificial trans fat, can easily contain more than 100 calories of the substance.

A ban on a particular ingredient is seldom an economist's preferred policy lever, and many progressive food policy advocates prefer to focus on real foods and foodways rather than single ingredients. Still, in the case of trans fat, a ban might be simpler and more efficient than other policy options. In contrast with salt or caloric sweeteners, there is no major economic constituency lined up in favor of trans fats, and no large economic cost to a ban.

The Boston action is just part of what is going on nationally to address trans fats. For example, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has recently been taking on Burger King, the only one of the major three burger chains without plans to move away from hydrogenated vegetable oil.

Meat cloning as art

Xeni Jardin from boingboingtv today tries her hand at cloning meat, under the tutelage of a crew of artist/scientists.



If you're interested in meat that is not so much cloned as merely processed nearly beyond the point of recognition, see another boingboing post recently from Cory Doctorow, which links to a particularly clever and usable web-based display of nutrition facts for hamburgers and other fast food offerings. The application comes from a calorie counter, which also allows easy searches of the USDA database of nutrition facts for other foods.

Short links

The September issue of Scientific American has a special on nutrition and food policy issues, including writing by Marion Nestle, Barry Popkin, Paul Raeburn, Fuzhi Cheng, and Per Pinstrup-Andersen.

Because we covered the restaurant industry in U.S. Food Policy class last week, a student forwarded an article in Slate earlier this year about Sysco, a company that sells more of the restaurant food you eat than you may realize.

I like linking to blogs whose authors comment at U.S. Food Policy. It gives me a chance to share with readers part of a conversation that is endlessly interesting, in part because of the differences in perspective and emphasis. Granny Miller is an agrarian philosopher, home canner, and Ron Paul fanatic. The Sugar Shock! Blog -- an accompaniment to Connie Bennett's book -- takes on bad carbs and their providers. "What do vegans eat?" is a group blog full of vegan recipes. [Update: I forgot to mention foodperson.com, with a nice mix of food blogging and commentary.]

NPR's Bonny Wolf, host of the Kitchen Window podcast, reports on the high standard set by a small number of colleges whose dining halls emphasize great food from local sources. Is healthy food too severe a regimen for today's college students? Consider Bowdoin, where the local food is Maine lobster!

Wild world of nutrition supplements to get just a little oversight

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on June 25 announced new rules for the manufacture of dietary supplements, which will help ensure that they they have proper labels and contain what their labels say. The announcement is accompanied by instructions for public comments.

Despite the new rules, nutrition supplements are still wildly unregulated by comparison to drugs. Under a controversial 1994 law known as the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), Congress denied FDA the power to regulate existing dietary supplements as pharmaceuticals and prevented FDA from requiring manufacturers to prove that supplements are safe or effective (see the mildly stated FDA view of this limitation and a quote from the Consumers Union).

Leading nutrition researchers, such as Alice Lichtenstein and Robert Russell here at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts University, have spoken out with increasing vigor in recent years about the importance of getting nutrients from real foods (see a scholarly statement of their views and a Tufts news article).

[Update: another colleague here points out the pace of the federal government's progress on this issue: the new rule took 13 years to prepare and it will be another 1-3 years for implementation.]