Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
FDA’s new pet health & safety widget!
After years of complaints about how hard it is to get information about pet food recalls, the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine has taken a big step to solve the problem. It just posted a new widget for pet health and safety. Technophobic dinosaur that I am, I can’t figure out how to load it. I went to the link above, copied the code, and pasted it, but I can’t get the cute web gadget to display. All that shows on my screen is a link to the site.
The FDA hosted a webinar on Tuesday about how to use it. Alas, I was off giving lectures and couldn’t tune in on it, but the FDA posted the conversation on the website.
Gina Spadafori at Pet Connection was on the call, has much better technical skills than I do, and managed the upload. She talks about how the FDA has “gone all widgety” and has some cautiously optimistic things to say about it.
This web gadget ought to make it easy for FDA to give the pet community straight information about foods recalled and not. And anyone who wants to track this sort of thing can look it up on the site or, maybe, download it. Good idea! Cheers to the FDA! And let’s hope the FDA uses is early and often.
