Big news in nutrition labeling!

The FDA has sent  a WARNING LETTER to 17 food manufacturers notifying them that 22 of their food products violate the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. From yesterday’s FDA press release:

The violations cited in the warning letters include unauthorized health claims, unauthorized nutrient content claims, and the unauthorized use of terms such as “healthy,” and others that have strict, regulatory definitions.

Some prominent examples (see all here):

POM Wonderful – The product makes claims that it will treat, prevent, or cure diseases such as hypertension, diabetes, and cancer. These types of claims are not allowed on food products.

Juicy Juice All-Natural 100% Juice Orange Tangerine and Juicy Juice All-Natural 100% Juice Grape – The product labels imply that the products are 100% juice when they are actuallyjuice blends with added flavors.

Nature’s Path Organic Flax Plus Multibran Cereal – The product label includes the nutrient claim, “excellent source of Omega-3+,” which has not been approved for use on food products.

The warning letters follow an October 2009 statement by Commissioner of Food and Drugs Margaret Hamburg, M.D., encouraging companies to review their labeling to ensure that they were in compliance with FDA regulations, and were truthful and not misleading. Kudos to Dr. Hamburg, who, unlike her predecessors, is unafraid to take on the food industry, just as a strong regulatory body should.

Here’s why these letters are a monumental turning point:

1. They indicate that food labeling truly is a high priority for the FDA
2. They show, by example, that there is no wiggle room for creative health claims (ie – health claims are not supposed to be marketing claims)
3. They warn the entire industry that companies not in compliance need to shape up or else…
4. Going forward, the FDA will be much more proactive in determining the best way to provide front-of-pack nutrition information to consumers.

While some detractors may pull out their “nanny-state” claims, it is our position that the free markets have failed the US consumer, who is today fatter and sicker as a result of too much bad food peddled by manufacturers. A strong regulatory body stands not to interfere with competition, but to make sure the rules of the game are being observed and that profits are not at the expense of public health.

What to do at the supermarket:

While all this is great news, your local supermarket is still choc full of misleading products and health claims. Our suggestion is to invest the time in reading the nutrition fact labels and ingredient lists, skipping the front of pack claims altogether.

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Michael Pollan’s new book Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual came out over the holidays. For those of you not familiar with his work, Mr. Pollan, a professor of journalism and an author, is considered one of the grass roots leaders in the quest for better food and better food production system.

His previous books The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto exposed millions of readers to the ills of the Western Diet and the uber-capitalistic food industry. The result of constant pressure to increase profitability of food companies has wreaked havoc on our collective health, and created a country with 100 million obese people. Where Pollan’s previous books were more academic and philosophical observations and recommendations, Food Rules gives practical advice for day to day perusal.

The preface to the book argues against our obsession with this or that nutrient (fat, vitamin E, calcium) and pretty much disses “nutritionism” as something that has not helped, rather caused confusion among consumers. If we eat real food, in small portions, and mostly from plant sources, we won’t have to worry about saturated fat, added sugars, antioxidants and lycopenes, Pollan argues. Though he’s not a scientist, he did consult experts and researched substantially in preparation of this manual.

Pollan writes very well – some of the rules sometimes seem more like poetry than practical advice:

#19 If it came from a plant, eat it; if it was made in a plant, don’t.

#6o Treat treats as treats.

Others are so simple and smart that even a 4 year old can grasp:

#25 Eat your colors.

#36 Don’t eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk.

As a brownie lovers, we particularly connected with

#39 eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself

The gist of the book is not surprising. Most food at the supermarket is not really food, rather an “edible foodlike substance”:

#11 avoid foods you see advertised on television.

An important rule for families, not just for nutritional purposes:

#58 Do all your eating at a table.

and so forth…

The book is a quick light read. There are no big surprises here. It is the framing of what we all know to be true into a simple guiding rules that makes Food Rules an enjoyable hour or two spent.

The last rule is very important, we’re humans after all, and we celebrate a birthday once a year:

#64 Break the rules once in a while.

What to do at the supermarket:

It’s hard to summarize everything into on sentence but Pollan minimized his thesis into 7 words:

Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly Plants.

To which we add – Buy minimally processed products, mostly plants and whole grains, but also dairy and meat. Prepare meals yourself, enjoy food with your family at the dinner table, have small portions, drink water, and don’t obsess.

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Just as the year is ending, the tireless consumer advocacy group CSPI (Center for Science in the Public Interest) has sent a 158 page report to the FDA, entitled Food Labeling Chaos – the case for reform [download PDF]. In it, the organization claims that nutrition labeling today is insufficient, and that existing regulations are too lax to deal with the marketing brainpower of the food industry.

If you have a nutrition label addiction like we do, this report is awesome. The authors break the issues down into 3 areas:

1. Improving the Nutrition Facts Panel
2. Improving ingredient labels
3. Stopping false and misleading health-related claims

They provide examples, from a wide range of product by Kellogg’s , Nestlé, Gerber,  Minute Maid, and others of why regulatory changes are needed ASAP:

Smart Start Cereal by Kellogg’s misleads consumers to believe that half a cup of added sugar a day is approved by the Institute of Health (that’s 125 grams or 600 empty calories!)

Glacéau vitamin water that comes in 20 fl oz bottles misleads people to think that a serving is only 8oz. In fact, most people gulp down the entire bottle receiving 125 calories instead of just 50.

Thomas’ Hearty Grains English Muffins claim to be “made with the goodness of whole grain” and “made with whole grains”, when in fact the primary ingredient is “unbleached enriched wheat flour,” meaning white flour without the benefits of the whole grain (fiber).

“Consumers need honest labeling so they can spend their food dollars wisely and avoid diet-related disease,” said CSPI senior staff attorney Ilene Ringel Heller, co-author of the report. “Companies should market their foods without resorting to the deceit and dishonesty that’s so common today. And, if they don’t, the FDA should make them.”

What you need to know:

The food industry has a very strong lobby and indirectly exerts a lot of pressure on the FDA. Changes will occur slowly, if at all, and the smart folks in the business sector will always find loopholes and tricks to keep consumers just confused enough to want to buy their products.

What to do at the supermarket:

Don’t fall for marketing tricks disguised as nutrition claims. Simply ignore health claims on the front of the package. Read both nutrition facts panel AND ingredient list, to get a better picture of what food you are buying. Buy products with short, understandable, ingredient lists.

HAVE A HAPPY AND HEALTHY NEW YEAR !!!

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We posted a few days ago about how 80% of Kids Commercials on Nickelodeon are for junk food. Junk cereal is also in the mix. If you were wondering how bad the situation is, watch the spot below for Froot Loops and Apple Jacks [Hat tip to Change.org]. Anyone still believe that the food industry isn’t manipulating kids?

For decades, advertisers sold kids cereals as fun, but now they are appealing to a 5 year old’s health and nutrition concerns. Thank you, Kellogg’s, for misinforming our children, creatively, once again.

What you need to know:

Let’s forget for a minute the sexist role play (Male doctor, female receptionist..)

The cutesy commercial fails to mention that Froot Loops includes trans fat, is 44% sugar by weight, and contains controversial artificial colorings that may prevent  any of these kids from being able to concentrate long enough to learn about nutrition. Apple Jacks is not much better.

What to do at the supermarket:

Breakfast cereals should contain much more fiber (5 grams and up) and much less sugar (6 grams or less). A kid oriented cereal will usually not be up to par. But you can buy a “grownup” cereal and sweeten it at home with a teaspoon of honey or sliced bananas.

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Have they gone mad in Great Britain?

SACN, the UK’s Scientific Advisory Council on Nutrition, has just released a draft proposal [download] which claims that the dietary guidelines for daily caloric intake should be revised UPWARDS by up to 16%. In a country where 60% of adults are overweight or obese (2nd after the US), this is quite the shocker.

From the UK’s Times Online:

According to a draft report by the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN), the recommended daily intake of calories — currently 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men — could be increased by up to 16 per cent, suggesting that some adults could safely consume an extra 400 calories a day (equivalent to an average-sized cheeseburger, or two bags of ready-salted crisps). read more…

How could this be?

What you need to know:

The members of SACN are all highly regarded scientists in the UK and there are no apparent food industry affiliations. So why would they propose something outrageous as this? Shouldn’t this kind of data better be “swept under the rug”?

Well, scientists are not politicians, they look at facts. Going back to the early 90’s when the exiting guidelines were set, they discovered that the tests used to measure people’s energy output were underestimating the actual values. Since energy in = energy out, that means that the calorie recommendations were too low as well.

But why then is everyone getting fatter and fatter?

For one thing, people are still way above their target daily values for calorie intake. In the US, the average intake is 3,700 calories per day! And the UK can’t be far behind. So the daily recommended value is really just a theoretical number with no grounded basis in real life for real people?

Or is it?

The groups most likely to gain from raised calorie allowances are food manufacturers. The nutrition labeling laws require them to display the values of naughty nutrients as saturated fat as both grams and percent-of-daily-allowance. The percentage is derived from the total number of calories per day.

For example – in a 2000 calorie a day diet you can have just 20 grams of saturated fat. But at 2500 calories a day, the magic number is up to 25 grams. Which means that a trashy meal with 5 grams of saturated fat, previously labeled as 25% of the daily max, will now appear as only 20%.

If you think that is insignificant, consider Britain’s Traffic Light System for nutrition labeling. In stores for the past 2 years, the color coded system give shoppers a quick glance at values for sugar , sodium, and fats. Green means low, amber is so so, and red means high. Manufacturers hate this system because products with red are stigmatized as bad.  The colors are based on thresholds of percent-of-daily-allowance. Guess what happens when the percents go down? More greens and yellows, less reds.

What to do at the supermarket:

Folks, don’t party at the junk food aisles just yet. Whether the theoretical-for-most daily recommendations will change or not, people need to cut down on calories not add to them. A good place to start is the beverage aisles – just skip them and go for tap water. Good for you, your wallet, and the environment

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Food, Inc., the powerful, and slightly depressing, documentary about our modern food industry is out on DVD today. You can buy the movie from Amazon.com here. If you didn’t have a chance to catch this movie in theaters earlier this year, it is highly recommended.

The documentary touches upon many aspects of the modern, industrialized food system, whose quest for efficiency and economies of scale has led to cheap food for everyone. This, at a high cost to the environment, farmers, animals, and our health.

The first part of the movie examines meat and poultry “production” by taking the viewer to CAFO – concentrated animal feeding operation – basically a huge factory for building the biggest, fattest, animal in the shortest amount of time and with the cheapest feed possible.

The next segment focuses on corn and how this single crop, heavily subsidized by the US government,  has completely changed the food industry. This, mostly through using it as cheap feed for animals, and even cheap sweetener in the form of high fructose corn syrup.

The last part discusses food safety, or rather unsafety that is the result of the huge factory farm systems. A mother who lost her two year old son to e-coli, from a hamburger he ate when they were on a family vacation, is now crusading for improved safety standards. Unfortunately for her, she and the few congress-people on her side are facing a massive, well-funded food/ag lobby that likes things just as they are.

The movie is presented straight forward without the over-dramatizations of Michael Moore’s works, yet it is this lackluster narrative that drives the message home.

Some critics view the movie as a one-sided attack on the food industry that does not provide real alternatives to feeding a planet with 6 billion people. The producers stated that they invited all the large food manufacturers to share their views and participate in the movie, but that they had declined.

We’ll let you be the judge, but don’t base your decision on just one movie. Read more about the food you’re eating, how it got to your table, your supermarket, your country.

For us, one big question looms after learning the issues: Is there an inherent conflict between economies of scale and sustainable food production?

What to do at the supermarket:

You’ll certainly view the food you eat and buy differently after watching Food, Inc. While some people may take an extreme approach and revamp their entire pantry, most of us can make slower gradual changes in our eating habits.

Here are some of the changes the movie’s producers suggest:

Stop drinking sodas and other sweetened beverages. You can lose 25 lbs in a year by replacing one 20 oz soda a day with a no calorie beverage (preferably water).

Eat at home instead of eating out. Children consume almost twice (1.8 times) as many calories when eating food prepared outside the home.

Tell schools to stop selling sodas, junk food, and sports drinks. Over the last two decades, rates of obesity have tripled in children and adolescents aged 6 to 19 years.

Meatless Mondays—Go without meat one day a week.

Buy organic or sustainable food with little or no pesticides. According to the EPA, over 1 billion pounds of pesticides are used each year in the U.S.

Make a point to know where your food comes from—READ LABELS. The average meal travels 1500 miles from the farm to your dinner plate.

Remember that whatever small upgrades you choose, you’ll be affecting not only your health, but also impacting the environment, and all the people, animals, and crops along the food chain from farm to the fork.

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This was the subject matter at one of yesterday’s most important and interesting sessions at ADA’s Nutrition Conference in Denver.

Unfortunately, it was one of the least popular sessions, with only 50 or so participants. The American Dietetic Association is a science / evidence based organization. The dietary recommendations consumers receive from its members are the result of scientific research. It is imperative that the information be 100% accurate, unbiased, and scientifically sound. The potential for conflict of interest when companies wanting to sell more products fund research is obviously high and creates a tension that must be resolved.

From a consumer perspective, there is a natural suspicion of research that is funded by companies. Companies usually fund research in areas close to products they sell. It turns out that industry funded studies are 4-8 times more likely to have a favorable outcome to the funder than non-funded studies. This could be explained by the fact that companies have conducted their own preliminary research to begin with, but perhaps the scientists felt in some place obliged to produce certain results.

Supporters of industry funded research acknowledge that there is a potential for bias, but potential does not mean bias actually exists. In fact, some will say that unfunded studies may have just as much potential for bias, based on the researchers’ personal beliefs, aspirations, and lifelong attempts to prove a certain hypothesis.

So should all ties between industry and academia be severed?

In an ideal world, perhaps yes. But reality is more complex. Universities and the government do not have enough money to fund all food related research. So as researchers want to reach new frontiers, they must accept additional sources of money. Conversely, maybe in utopia industry would fund studies freely, but the ethics of all sides would be so high that it wouldn’t matter.

There must be a middle ground. The speaker presented a set of guidelines for future research. Here are some of their suggestions:

1. Full disclosure of each researcher’s past and current affiliations with industry.
2. Full disclosure of conflicts of interest among researchers and among peer reviewers of the research results. (In academia, before a research paper is published, it goes through a long review process by “peers” from other universities).
3. Firewalls between the research functions and the money functions.
4. Publication of ALL research efforts, not just favorable ones. As one researcher explained after the session, sometimes companies will pay MORE to play down and even stop publication of unfavorable results.

Will these guidelines be adopted? Will they suffice? As always, there won’t be a clear-cut answer. We support any and all activities than provide increased transparency.

And we reserve the right to remain highly skeptical of the manifestation of research as “Health Claims” on food packages in the supermarket.

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Add this to your list of reasons not to stuff children silly with sweets. From BBC News:

[A UK] University study involving 17,500 people is the first into effects of childhood diet on adult violence. It found 10-year-olds who ate sweets daily were significantly more likely to have a violence conviction by age 34. Researchers suggested they had not learnt to delay gratification, but other experts said already “difficult” children might be given more sweets. Read more…

The response from the British Food and Drink Federation (FDF):

This is either utter nonsense or a very bad April Fool’s Day joke.

Whether it’s true or not, everyone will agree that too many sweets are not beneficial to children; but more and more candy sales are very beneficial to manufacturers.

Total abstinence from sweets is a big No No, and in many cases causes the opposite of the original intent.

Children and adults should enjoy snacks and sweets as part of a mentally healthy life. Though we dislike the industry coined “consumed in moderation”, moderation is the key. While “moderate” for beverage and snack companies may be 2 soft drinks a day or 3 candy bars by dinner, a more sensible approach could be sugary drinks only at special events, and a few candy bars a week. There are plenty of sweet snacks such as fresh and dried fruits that children can be encouraged to enjoy on a daily basis.

What to do at the supermarket:

NOT bringing children along to the grocery store will substantially reduce the amount of sweets you buy. If you do bring the next generation with you, preplan the trip so that each child gets to choose just one or two products to buy.

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The Tufts University Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy is one of the nation’s foremost leaders in the field of nutrition. They are hosting the 4th annual Friedman Symposium this weekend, a 2 day affair devoted to current affairs in the nutrition and diet arena.

Fooducate was lucky to partake in the conference as an online participant. (thank you Mark Krumm,  Director, Events & Marketing at Tufts, for helping set us up).

Judging from the titles and professional experience of the presenters and lecturers present, the people seated at the Jaharis Conference Center represented a highly capable group. Could some magic happen here that would help put America back on the health track? Read more…

Image via Wikipedia

We often complain about the FDA’s weakness as the regulating body dealing with the food industry. Thankfully, the new FDA leadership is starting to add more bark and bite. Here are two steps forward:

1. The FDA is doing a huge Internet survey of 43,000 people to learn about Barriers to Food Label Use . Apparently, there is a decline in label use in the “under 34″ age bracket. According to the FDA the purpose of the study is to explore possible explanations for food label use and non-use among U.S. consumers. The information collected from the study will be used to help to improve consumer understanding and use of the food label.

We would like to see the FDA take a bolder step, of course, and improve the requirements for food labels. Some easy examples – require manufacturers to specify how much added sugar is present. Or provide more realistic serving sizes, a serving of 2 Oreo cookies is not logical. And how about getting rid of those silly health claims, like that of a sugary cereal reducing cholesterol levels.  For a full list, see a previous Fooducate post – 16 Ways to Improve Nutrition Labels.

2. The FDA has issued a rule that requires food manufacturers to notify the government agency within 24 hours if they discover a contamination that poses a health threat to consumers. It may surprise you that manufacturers don’t report this immediately or that up to now companies could have taken weeks to let the FDA know about a health issue. But that’s the sad reality. Hopefully the new measure will help stop the spread of food borne illnesses at an earlier stage, potentially saving lives and suffering.

Kudos, FDA. There’s still much more work ahead. Don’t let the food industry bullies lobbies stop you from protecting consumers.

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