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.”
Goodbye GMO, Hello Bioengineered: USDA publishes labeling rules
Trump’s USDA has issued final rules for labeling food products of biotechnology, commonly known to all of us as GMOs.
Since GMOs have taken on a pejorative—Frankenfood—connotation, the USDA wanted to fix that. And did it ever.
It drops GMOs, and substitutes “Bioengineered.”
Its logo depicts food biotechnology as sun shining on agriculture.
And the rules have a loophole big enough to exclude lots of products from having to carry this logo: those made with highly refined GMO sugars, starches and oils made from GMO soybeans and sugar beets.
If the products do not contain detectable levels of DNA, they are exempt. Never mind that GMO/bioengineered is a production issue.
When Just Label It was advocating for informing the public about GMOs, this was hardly what it had in mind.
Count this as a win for the GMO industry.
