Restraining trans fats in Massachusetts restaurants

The Massachusetts Senate shortly may take up a bill passed by the House (HB 4346), which would ban artificial trans fats in restaurants. The small amount of naturally occurring trans fats in food would not be affected. Like saturated fats, or perhaps worse, trans fats appear to affect blood cholesterol in a way that increases the risk of heart disease. Because heart disease is a leading killer, a small improvement in risk can save many lives.

Senate President Therese Murray will try to move this bill shortly, perhaps today, according to David Seltz, a senior policy advisor. (A wonderful thing about State legislatures is that citizens can easily place a call directly to relevant staff on issues like this. Try it yourself on an issue you care about!)

The bill is supported by the American Diabetes Association, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the American College of Cardiology, the American Academy of Pediatrics, MassPIRG, and the Massachusetts Hospital Association. In the House, HB 4346 was supported by long-time public health and nutrition champion Peter Koutoujian.

Senate minority leader Richard Tisei may oppose the bill. An earlier opinion piece by him worried about "nanny state" implications. In the case of trans fats, these concerns are misplaced. Artificial trans fats are a recent invention with little merit in terms of the taste and food quality goals that consumers seek to achieve by expressing their freedom of choice. Trans fats are disappearing from manufactured foods already, because new labeling rules reveal which food products contain them, and food companies quickly realized that no consumers want trans fats. A similar approach doesn't work in restaurants, because consumers do not have such easy access to nutrition information, so they can't protect their own interests in the restaurant marketplace without government action.

In many cases, good government policy should defer to consumers, but for trans fats the simple and economically reasonable approach is to do away with them. I hope Senator Tisei keeps raising these considerations on other food policy issues, but relaxes his opposition in the case of trans fats.

Interesting blogs

I occasionally get emails about interesting blogs.

Here is chomposaurus, which features astonishing quantities of meat.

Here is Stirring and Whirring, a journey of cookbook writing.

In case you were wondering (I did), chomposaurus is not sponsored by the beef and pork checkoff programs, and Stirring and Whirring's campaign to replace high-fructose corn syrup in soda was not sponsored by cane sugar industry interests.

Far out

The fascinating food behavior researcher Brian Wansink, who was appointed last year to head USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion (see earlier post), certainly breaks the mold of previous holders of that position (see my video interview with him last year). The CNPP is responsible for the Dietary Guidelines, MyPyramid, and the Thrifty Food Plan.

An electronic mailing this week from Wansink's Mindless Eating site, with his name at the bottom, invited readers to check out a program of web classes called HealthTeleClass.

The "renowned" teachers include Dr. Tea (owner of an "Herbal Emporium" in LA) ...


... John Basedow (a "fitness celebrity") and John Rowley (a "motivational guru") ...


... Karen Curry (a "long time student of prosperity teachings," who has used them "to create miracles in her own life") and Brad Yates ("internationally known for his creative and often humorous use of EFT").


I don't even know what EFT stands for, unless it is Electronic Funds Transfer.

I am sure these are excellent teachers, and I think it is safe to guess that no endorsement by USDA of this seminar series was implied. Still, I wonder if the upcoming revision of the Dietary Guidelines will be a little less staid than usual.

FTC estimates the extent of food marketing to children

Using unprecedented data collected through subpoenas to 44 major food and beverage companies, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today estimated that $1.6 billion was spent in 2006 on food marketing to children.

The FTC study, which was requested by Congress, will provide a benchmark or baseline for evaluating marketing changes under the current system of industry self-regulation, especially the effectiveness of the Children's Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative established in 2006.

That Initiative has been criticized as weak and voluntary, and several major companies including Yum! Brands and Nestle have declined to participate. FTC officials said today that they believed that the Nestle company will announce its participation in the Initiative later today.

The FTC officials said all food companies should join this self-regulatory Initiative and, moreover, that the voluntary company pledges under the Initiative should be seen just as a starting point. Lydia Parnes, who leads the FTC Division of Consumer Protection, quoted SpiderMan: "With great power comes great responsibility."

The data used by the FTC are different and in some ways better than anything else used previously in research on this topic. The FTC subpoenas asked companies to account for not just traditional "measured media," such as television and print advertising, but also the whole gamut of commonly unmeasured marketing techniques. Furthermore, FTC required breakdowns by food category.

FTC reported today that television advertising was 46% of total expenses for marketing to children. Internet advertising is very important in marketing to children, but comparatively inexpensive to produce, accounting for only 5% of expenses. Premiums or prizes were also a modest percentage, unless one counted the toys in fast food meals to children, in which case premiums ranked second only to television advertising.

Mary Engle, who leads the FTC's Division of Advertising Practices, described how companies integrate across media types in supporting a coherent branded message. Children might see an ad on television, for example, and have the message reinforced by packaging on a supermarket shelf. Or, the television ad might send the child toward more marketing at an internet site. The description makes clear that mild restrictions in one setting, such as a pledge to advertise only comparatively healthy products in a particular branded line on television shows for children, can be overcome by using similar branding and images that promote sales of the whole line, including lucrative less healthy products, in a wide variety of other settings.

Updates (late afternoon 7/29):

-- Are the FoxNews.com headline writers are a bit weak on the math, or am I missing a subtle distinction of some sort? "Federal Trade Commission: Kids Target of $1 Billion in Food Ads." But what's $600 million between friends?

-- A press release and copy of the report are now on the FTC site.

High food prices

I didn't notice until this morning that a Reuters report a couple weeks ago quoted me on the food price dilemma:

Ultimately, economists point out that demand for food is simply rising as the world's population grows along with its appetite for higher quality food.

"Higher food prices are here to stay. I don't know if that means that the current high rate of inflation will continue, I just wouldn't expect a substantial retrenchment," said Parke Wilde, an agricultural economist at Tufts University.

"It's a clear signal to people that resources are scarce."

Of course, my guess about future trends is just a guess. The more interesting question is whether an economist's understanding of what prices are makes any sense to anybody else. When I see food prices go up, I think not just of the hardship they cause -- though I do think of that, too -- but also of the signal the prices send about choosing foods that use fewer resources and hence cost less. I also think of the farmers around the world, including some of the poorest people in the world, who benefit from high prices. The tough question, on which comments are welcome, is: "Are high food prices unambiguously bad?"

AAEA / ACCI conference in Orlando, July 27-29

We noted earlier that the AAEA is holding its annual conference this year jointly with the American Council on Consumer Interests (ACCI), in Orlando, FL, this coming week: July 27-29.

To better describe the breadth of its member interests, AAEA is also changing its name from the American Agricultural Economics Association to the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association. The association will keep the same acronym.

I helped organize a symposium session, Hard Hitting and Well-Informed: A Conversation Between Food Safety Policy Advocates and Researchers. A section of the press release from Consumers Union and Consumer Federation of America:

Orlando, FL—Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union food safety experts will discuss how new food technologies are also creating potential new risks for Americans at the 2008 ACCI & AAEA Joint Annual Conference, the nation’s largest gathering of consumer researchers and agricultural economists, taking place at the Caribe Royale Resort in Orlando, Florida from July 27 to 29. At 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 29, CFA’s Chris Waldrop and CU’s Dr. Michael Hansen will identify the myriad food challenges facing U.S. consumers in a session in the Boca II room entitled: “Hard Hitting and Well Informed: A Conversation Between Food Safety Policy Advocates and Researchers.”

Food Safety: USDA and FDA Policies toward Bacterial Contamination in Meat
Chris Waldrop, Director of the Food Policy Institute at the Consumer Federation of America, will discuss needed efforts to prevent food-borne illness; providing consumers with better information about recalled food; labeling foods with their country of origin; and establishing a food traceability system that can track foods from the farm to the table. He will outline how consumer advocates will present their case for needed regulations before Congress and federal agencies.

New Food Production Technologies-New Risks
Dr. Michael Hansen, Senior Scientist at Consumers Union, the non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports, will discuss genetically engineered food and pharma crops; meat and milk from cloned animals and their offspring; and the use of nanotechnology in food and in food contact substances. He will identify the scientific, ethical, social and safety (human and environmental) issues raised by these new technologies—which are little known by consumers.

The Consumer Policy Symposium, co-sponsored by ACCI and AAEA, is the first in a series that will bring academic consumer researchers and policy activists together to discuss ways to strengthen consumer advocacy through sound, up-to-date research.... More information on this conference and a conference program can be found at www.consumerinterests.org and www.aaea.org/2008am.

The AAEA's Food Safety and Nutrition Section will have its annual meeting over breakfast early Tuesday morning. The section's "track" of symposium sessions on interdisciplinary topics related to food, nutrition, and economics, is listed on the section website.

Thomas Hager: The Alchemy of Air

Thomas Hager shares an essay from his forthcoming book, The Alchemy of Air, which explores the implications of the 1909 invention of the Haber-Bosch process for creating nitrogen fertilizer. Without it, for better or worse, there would be no modern agriculture. Here is a sample.

Before Haber-Bosch, there were only two ways to get nitrogen out of the air and into food. One was lightning. But the most important one was the slow, steady process by which a few types of bacteria ate atmospheric nitrogen, broke it apart, and reformed it into substances plants could eat. The process is called bacterial nitrogen fixation. Some of these bacteria set up homes in nodules attached to the roots of plants, notably legumes like peas and beans, forming a symbiotic relationship in which they exchanged their fixed nitrogen for sugars and other food provided by the plants. These bacteria, working for millions of years, slowly built a stockpile of fixed nitrogen that fed most of the earth’s plants, which fed all the animals. Life on earth depended on that stock of fixed nitrogen.

Haber-Bosch turbocharged the process. Today, Haber-Bosch plants produce an amount of fixed nitrogen equivalent to that produced naturally, doubling the amount available on earth. While this massive change in natural cycles means little to the basic composition of the atmosphere -- there is so much N₂ in the air that the amount used by Haber-Bosch is negligible – it does mean a great deal to the biosphere, the places on the earth where life dwells....