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Samuel Fromartz, In Search of the Perfect Loaf: A Home Baker’s Odyssey.  Viking, 2014.

 

Fromartz is a journalist, blogger (chewswise.com), and editor in chief of The Food and Environment Reporting Network.

I happily blurbed this one:

Fromartz is a passionate, deeply serious home baker who writes eloquently and gracefully about what it takes in skill and ingredients to produce a delicious baguette or country loaf.  His account of the history and comeback of heritage wheat grains is a revelation that will send even the most gluten-phobic reader to search for breads made from them.  Perfect Loaf is a lovely book–a perfect read for anyone who cares about good food.

Mexico has a new scheme for front-of-package labeling.

Take, for example, this label for Coca-Cola’s “green” Life drink, sweetened with sugar and Stevia.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The label says:

Sugars

9 g

10%**

The asterisks take you to this explanation:

**Of the daily nutrients recommended based on a diet of 2000 calories

Huh?  Since when is sugar intake recommended?  Since when does 9 grams equal 10% of a recommended amount?

How is it possible that Mexico set a daily standard intake (equivalent to our Daily Value) of 90 grams (!)—nearly twice as much as the amount recommended as an upper limit by the World Health Organization  and many other international health authorities?

The answer: food politics, of course.

Most international health agencies recommend an upper limit for added sugars of 10% of calories (50 grams for a 2000-calorie diet).  They consider 5% (25 grams) even better for health and especially for dental health.

The Mexican label covers total sugars.  This hides the copious amounts added by food companies.  All of the sugar in Coca-Cola Life is added.

How did this happen?  From what I’ve heard,

• Mexican public health authorities were not consulted about this standard.
• Although public health scientists filed well-documented objections, these were ignored.
• Critics are now under a gag order.  If they work for the government, they are not allowed to criticize the sugar label.

Officials of the Ministry of Health and the Mexican equivalent of the FDA have close ties to food companies.  They produced this label in collaboration with the food industry, with no input from independent public health experts.

For a country that leads the world in obesity prevention policies, this label is a huge embarrassment.  It should be fixed, immediately.

Ecuador, on the other hand, is using this front-of-package label.  Wouldn’t it be helpful if everyone did?

I’m in Mexico City and María Verónica Flores Bello, who teaches at a university here, gave me this photo taken at a Selecto supermarket.  It, she says, is Coca-Cola’s “brand new green Coca Cola, sweetened with stevia and sugar, as healthy and fresh as eating vegetables….”

Here’s the label:

Soon to a supermarket near you?  Only if Mexicans buy it.

I’ll explain what these labels mean on Monday,

Happy weekend.

I was asked by Time Magazine to write a comment on the soda industry’s recent promises.  It was posted yesterday.

The Soda Industry’s Promises Mean Nothing

Agreeing to decrease soda consumption by 20 percent is easy to do when demand is already falling rapidly

–Marion Nestle, September 30, 2014

The recent pledge by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group to reduce calories that Americans consumd from their products by 20 percent by 2025 elicited torrents of praise from the Global Clinton Initiative, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the national press.The real news: soda companies are at last admitting their role in obesity.Nevertheless, the announcement caused many of us in the public health advocacy community to roll our eyes. Once again, soda companies are making promises that are likely to be fulfilled anyway, whether the companies take any action or not.

Americans have gotten the word. Sodas in anything but small amounts are not good for health.

Although Coca-Cola and the American Beverage Association have funded studies that invariably find sodas innocent of health effects, the vast preponderance of research sponsored by the government or foundations clearly demonstrates otherwise.

Think of sodas as candy in liquid form. They contain astonishing amounts of sugars. A 12-ounce soda contains 10 (!) teaspoons of sugar and provides about 150 calories.

It should surprise no one that adults and children who habitually consume sugary drinks are far more likely to take in fewer nutrients, to weigh more, and to exhibit metabolic abnormalities compared to those who abstain or drink only small amounts.

And, contrary to expectation, diet sodas don’t seem to help. A widely publicized recent study suggests that artificially sweetened drinks affect intestinal bacteria in ways, as yet undetermined, that lead to metabolic abnormalities–glucose intolerance and insulin resistance. This research is largely animal-based, preliminary, and requires confirmation. But one thing about diet drinks is clear: they do not do much good in preventing obesity.

People who drink diet sodas tend to be more obese than those who do not. The use of artificial sweeteners in the United States has gone up precisely in parallel with the rise in prevalence of obesity. Is this a cause or an effect? We don’t know yet.

While scientists are trying to sort all this out, large segments of the public have gotten the message: stay away from sodas of any kind.

Since the late 1990s, U.S. per capita consumption of soft drinks has dropped by about 20 percent. If current trends continue, the soda industry should have no trouble meeting its promise of another 20 percent reduction by 2025.

Americans want healthier drinks and are switching to bottled water, sports drinks, and vitamin-fortified drinks—although not nearly at replacement levels. The soda industry has to find ways to sell more products. It also has to find ways to head off regulation. Hence: the promises.

To deal with sales shortfalls, the leading soft-drink brands, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, have expanded their marketing overseas. They have committed to invest billions to make and promote their products in Latin America as well as in the hugely populated countries of Asia and Africa where soda consumption is still very low.

From a public health standpoint, people everywhere would be healthier—perhaps a lot healthier—drinking less soda.

In California, the cities of San Francisco and Berkeley have placed soda tax initiatives on the November ballot. The American Beverage Association, the trade association for Coke, Pepsi, and the like, is funding anti-tax campaigns that involve not only television advertising and home mailings, but also creation of ostensibly grassroots (“astroturf”) community organizations, petition campaigns, and, when all else fails, lawsuits to make sure the initiative fails. These efforts are carbon copies of the tactics used to defeat New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s portion size cap proposal.

If the soda industry really wants to help prevent obesity, it needs to change its current practices. It should stop fighting tax and size initiatives, stop opposing warning labels on sugary drinks, stop lobbying against restrictions on sodas in schools, stop using sports and music celebrities to sell products to children, stop targeting marketing to African-American and Hispanic young people, and stop funding research studies designed to give sodas a clean bill of health.

And it should stop complaining, as PepsiCo’s CEO Indra Nooyi didlast week, that nobody is giving the industry credit for all the good it is doing.

If the government really were serious about obesity prevention, it could ban vending machines from schools, set limits on the size of soft drinks sold at school events, define the amount of sugars allowable in foods and beverages, and, most of all, stop soda marketing aimed at children of any age.

Because neither the soda industry nor the government is likely to do any of this, public health advocates still have plenty of work to do.

Marion Nestle is professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University. She is currently working on a book titled Soda! From Food Advocacy to Public Health.

My post about the “Revolving Door” elicited a thoughtful response from Jerry Hagstrom, Founder and Executive Editor of the immensely useful Hagstrom Report, to which I subscribe.

He writes: “You seem critical of the “revolving door” but I would ask the following:

• What would you have these people do for employment when they leave government? If they are political appointees,  they can’t stay forever.
• Shouldn’t they use their knowledge? Should they be expected to move into an entirely different field? Wouldn’t it be a shame for the professional world of food and agriculture to lose their expertise?
• What about academics who take government jobs and then go back to academia? Don’t they learn how to get research grants? But their knowledge of how government works is considered valuable to universities and to students.
• Do you see any problem with someone being in government and then going to work for a nongovernmental organization or a foundation or coming from an NGO or a foundation into government? That happens too and those institutions have agendas.

As a reporter I view all these people with a combination of faith and skepticism whether they are in government or out.

Good questions, with no easy answers.

Open Secrets provides many examples of government officials who become lobbyists for the industries they used to regulate.

Conflicts of interest are likely to be even greater for those who revolve the other way—from industry to government–and especially when former industry executives move to high-level positions in regulatory agencies.

If nothing else, I see the revolving door as giving the appearance of conflict of interest.

Readers: What do you think?  How would you respond to Jerry Hagstrom’s questions?

 

 

 

The Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets website is the go-to source for information about undue corporate influence in Washington.

Among other juicy tidbits, it has some things to say about the “revolving door,” the trading of jobs between government and the industries it regulates.

Although the influence powerhouses that line Washington’s K Street are just a few miles from the U.S. Capitol building, the most direct path between the two doesn’t necessarily involve public transportation. Instead, it’s through a door—a revolving door that shuffles former federal employees into jobs as lobbyists, consultants and strategists just as the door pulls former hired guns into government careers.

Here are two recent examples:

• According to the Hagstrom Report, Anne Cannon MacMillan, a deputy chief of staff to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, left the USDA to become the director of government relations for Roll Global, the California company founded by Stewart and Lynda  Resnick, the owners of Pom Wonderful, Fiji water, and other brilliantly marketed food and beverage products.
• Robert Post, left his post as acting director  of the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion, the agency that brings us the MyPlate food guide, to join the Chobani yogurt company, as its senior director for nutrition and regulatory affairs.

Former federal officials come to industry with deep knowledge of how the system works and how to beat it.   They also bring long lists of key contacts who know how to make Washington work in the new employer’s favor.

Oh yes.  They also get paid better.

Ethical?  Revolving door appointments follow the letter of the ethics law.  We can argue about whether they follow its spirit.

The Alliance for a Healthier Generation (founded by the American Heart Association and the Clinton Foundation) and the American Beverage Association (funded mainly by Coca-Cola and PepsiCo) jointly announced this week that the major soft drink companies were pledging to reduce beverage calories consumed per person nationally by 20% by 2025.

The Alliance, Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper Snapple, PepsiCo, and the American Beverage Association placed a full-page ad in yesterday’s New York Times:

The Alliance says:

This is a tremendous undertaking by the industry, one that should be applauded, and also one that will not come easily. The industry will leverage every ounce of their national and local influence, product innovation and marketing muscle to reach this ambitious and necessary goal. And when this goal is reached, we believe it will not only signal a shift in access to reduced-calorie options, but also a positive shift in consumer interest in these no-and lower-calorie options.

The New York Times quotes former president Bill Clinton (it also quotes me*):

This is huge…I’ve heard it could mean a couple of pounds of weight lost each year in some cases…in low-income communities, sugary sodas may account for a half or more of the calories a child consumes each day.

In a statement, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said:

We congratulate the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and the beverage industry for continued action towards reducing the beverage calories consumed by people across the United States. We are especially pleased that this commitment will target communities with disproportionately high consumption rates of sugar-sweetened beverages. We look forward to working with the Alliance and beverage industry to measure and monitor the impact of this commitment on the health of our country.

Despite the congratulations, I can’t take this as anything more than public relations.

Soda sales are going to decline by that much anyway.

Although the Alliance says the companies will do this through national initiatives to educate consumers about smaller portions, lower-calorie beverages, and water, and to focus these efforts in lower income communities, they really don’t have to do a thing.

All they have to do is wait for these trends to continue.  The Times quotes me on this point:

While they’re making this pledge, they are totally dug in, fighting soda tax initiatives in places like Berkeley and San Francisco that have exactly the same goal,” said Professor Nestle, who has just finished a book about the industry.

Here’s what I mean:

The American Beverage Association and soda companies are putting millions into fighting soda tax initiatives in San Francisco and Berkeley.

As the Center for Science in the Public Interest says, if the soda industry really were serious about helping Americans drink less of sugary products, it

could accelerate progress by dropping its opposition to taxes and warning labels on sugar drinks. Those taxes could further reduce calories in America’s beverage mix even more quickly, and would raise needed revenue for the prevention and treatment of soda-related diseases.

And, CSPI says, the soda industry should stop opposing and, instead, should support Representative Rosa DeLauro’s Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Tax Act of 2014 (the SWEET Act), which aims to tax caloric sweeteners.  This would raise $10 billion a year to help prevent and treat diseases caused by excess soda consumption.

But the CEO of Pepsi says the soda industry isn’t getting enough appreciation for its efforts to counter obesity.

Politico ProAg‘s Helena Bottemiller Evich reports that at a meeting sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to applaud the soda industry’s announcement, Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s CEO,

expressed frustration with the endless criticism from activists who blame much of the obesity epidemic on the food industry despite what she sees as significant progress from the biggest brands in America…“Why not give industry a compliment and then talk about the next step?…We have now stemmed the growth in calorie consumption, which is huge…I look at those trends and think industry has done pretty well, as a whole.

Why the RWJF, a major funder of initiatives to counter obesity, seems so cozy with Pepsi is curious.

The coziness is especially curious because of Mrs. Nooyi’s “We.”  If the industry is “doing well,” it’s because health advocates, some of them funded by RWJF, have forced soda companies to change their practices.

The one significant accomplishment: an admission that sodas contribute to obesity

As the Wall Street Journal puts it,

The move is an implicit acknowledgment by the soda industry that longtime staples like Coke, Pepsi-Cola and Dr Pepper have played a role in rising obesity rates.

Now that really is a sign of progress.

Last Friday, I received a phone call from Todd Kerr, the publisher of The Berkeley Times, a community newspaper in Berkeley, CA.  He was preparing a story on the Berkeley soda tax and could not find University of California (UC) faculty who were willing to speak with him.

They were, they told him, under a gag order from the president’s office not to talk to reporters about the soda tax.

I can understand his frustration.  I spoke or e-mailed about 10 people with knowledge of this issue and only two would allow me to quote them for attribution.

For starters, the idea of a gag order seems contrary to current practice.

• Michael Pollan, a Berkeley journalism professor, says he publicly endorses the tax, and so have other professors.
• Chancellor’s Professor Robert Reich wrote a column endorsing it, and UC Berkeley posted his comments on its website.
• UCSF has featured research on the health implications of a soda tax on its website.
• The 50th anniversary celebration of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement (FSM) starts this week.

But the rumor is serious and deserves investigation.

I sent out queries to try to find out if the rumor could have any basis in fact.

Mr. Kerr kicked off the process by giving me the names of the three faculty members he said had refused to speak with him about the soda tax.

I was able to track them down.  Here is what they told me (not for direct quotation or attribution):

• Source #1: Mr. Kerr had asked scientific questions outside the respondent’s area of expertise.
• Source #2: Mr. Kerr stated that his paper does not take a stance on issues, so HE can’t write for or against the tax.  This respondent’s understanding is that Berkeley faculty members can state opinions on any voting matter as long as they do not claim to speak for the university.
• Source #3: University counsel advised this respondent that faculty can say what they want as private citizens, but not as UC employees.  This source’s understanding is that state employees are not permitted to work to alter the conduct or outcome of matters on which the public is voting.  And, if the food industry were to sue a faculty member for something said in the course of an election campaign, the university would not provide legal resources or defense.

Source #3’s comments especially demanded further inquiry.  I did some more consultation of UC faculty, legal staff, and professional staff.

UC policy on political speech is governed by state law

As one source explained, there is no gag order on faculty.  There are, however, state statutes that limit the University’s ability to take positions on ballot measures that are before the voters (be sure to look at the Webinar slide show).  These state in a Q and A:

May a University employee endorse a ballot measure in his/her private capacity and identify himself/herself by University title?

Yes. A University official may allow use of his/her name and title for identification purposes in the same manner as others who sign an endorsement. An express disclaimer of University endorsement is required only where the context might reasonably cause confusion as to whether the endorsement is made in an official or unofficial capacity.

My queries eventually landed in the Office of the President of the UC System.  Steve Montiel, Media Relations Director, one of only two people in all of this who was willing to be quoted by name, said:

All University of California employees, including faculty, have the right to express their personal opinions about any matter of civic importance, including ballot measures. Consistent with state law, however, longstanding University policy prohibits university resources from being used to oppose or support a ballot measure. Only the UC Board of Regents can take a public position on a ballot measure, and it has done so in the past.

I also consulted Michele Simon (the second quotable) about state policy.  She notes that this is standard policy for institutions receiving state funding.  UC is a state school and, therefore, is not allowed to use state funds to take political positions.

She reminded me that at Stanford, a private institution, Henry Miller of the conservative Hoover Institute violated Stanford’s no-position policy on ballot measures when he did a TV ad opposing Proposition 37, the GMO labeling initiative, using his Stanford affiliation.

When we learned of the ‘No on 37 ‘ commercial, we immediately asked to have it changed so it would be in compliance with Stanford policies,” said Debra Zumwalt, the university’s vice president and general counsel. “While everyone at Stanford is entitled to espouse whatever political view he or she may choose, we do not allow people affiliated with Stanford to take a political position in a way that could imply that it is Stanford’s position.”

In my own experience, UC’s policy also sounds like standard practice.  When the Sugar Association threatened me with a lawsuit (see documents under Controversies at the bottom of the Media pages), that’s pretty much what NYU lawyers told me.  If I said something libelous, I would be responsible for the legal consequences.  Luckily, the Sugar Association never sued.

So—how did this rumor get started?  

Here’s what I learned.

A group of faculty advocating for the soda tax asked to meet with university legal counsel for advice about how to protect themselves and the university against potential lawsuits filed by, for example, the American Beverage Association (ABA), which has been especially aggressive in fighting the tax.  The ABA’s actions reminded them of the cigarette industry’s fight with the UC system over the tobacco control archives now housed at UCSF.

Some of the legal advice to faculty—if you speak at a soda tax rally, represent yourself as an individual,not a representative of the university, and do so on your own, not the university’s time—can be interpreted as restrictive even if it is not meant as such.

UC’s policy on academic freedom

Please note that UC, since the time of the Free Speech Movement, has developed a clear policy on academic freedom:

…academic freedom depends upon the quality of scholarship, which is to be assessed by the content of scholarship, not by the motivations that led to its production. The [policy]…does not distinguish between “interested” and “disinterested” scholarship; it differentiates instead between competent and incompetent scholarship. Although competent scholarship requires an open mind, this does not mean that faculty are unprofessional if they reach definite conclusions. It means rather that faculty must always stand ready to revise their conclusions in the light of new evidence or further discussion. Although competent scholarship requires the exercise of reason, this does not mean that faculty are unprofessional if they are committed to a definite point of view. It means rather that faculty must form their point of view by applying professional standards of inquiry rather than by succumbing to external and illegitimate incentives such as monetary gain or political coercion. Competent scholarship can and frequently does communicate salient viewpoints about important and controversial questions [my emphasis].

My translation: if faculty opinions about the soda tax are based on research—and plenty of research is available to back up the rationale for and potential efficacy of such a tax (see Rudd Center and Bridging the Gap)—faculty not only have the right but also have the responsibility to express opinions about them.

UC faculty: get out there and support the tax!

And wish the FSM a happy 50th anniversary.