Search results: google

I’m just back from judging Google’s first Science Fair for kids 13 to 18 at its corporate headquarters in California (yes, those are tomatoes growing in the foreground).

Google’s famous food program: Why famous?  It is:

• Available 24/7
• Totally free
• Varied and delicious
• Designed to promote health as well as environmental values (local, organic, sustainable)

On this last point, the recycling program is comprehensive and the campus is planted with organic vegetables, free for the picking:

But what about the “freshman 15”?

If free food is available 24/7, isn’t Google creating a classic “obesogenic” environment?  Do new Google employees gain weight?

Indeed, they do, and this creates a dilemma for the food team.  I met with Joe Marcus, Google’s food program manager, and executive chef Scott Giambastiani.  Free and very good food, they explain, is an important recruiting perk for Google.   Employees learn to manage it.  And those who are eating healthy food for the first time in their lives find that they actually lose weight.

Google’s food labeling program

Google labels its snacks, drinks, and the foods prepared in its 25 or so cafeterias with traffic lights: green (eat anytime), yellow (once in a while), or red (not often, please).  It bases the decisions about which food goes where on the Harvard School of Public Health’s healthy eating pyramid.   It labels foods at the top of the Harvard pyramid red, the ones in the middle yellow, and those at the bottom green.

In theory this makes sense as a starting point.  In practice, it tends to seem a bit like nutritionism—reducing the value of the foods to a few key nutrients.

The difficulties are most evident in the snack foods, freely available from kiosks all over the campus.   Products are displayed on shelves labeled red, yellow, or green.  For example:

GREEN: Sun chips, 1.5 oz, 210 kcal, 10 g fat, 180 mg sodium, 3 g sugar, 4 g fiber

YELLOW: Lentil chips, 1 oz, 110 kcal, 3 g fat, 170 mg sodium, 1 g sugar, 3 g fiber

YELLOW: Walnuts, 0.8 oz, 150 kcal, 15 g fat, 0 g sodium, 1 g sugar, 2 g fiber

RED:  Luau BBQ chips, 1.5 oz, 210 kcal,  14 g fat, 158 mg sodium, 2 g sugar, 1 g fiber

Note: the weights of the packages are not the same, so the amounts are not really comparable, but the ranking scheme seems to give most credit for fiber.

As for these and the foods cooked in cafeterias, Google uses other strategies to promote healthier choices.  It:

• Puts the healthiest products at eye level
• Uses small plates
• Tries to include vegetables in everything
• Makes healthier options available at all times
• Uses the smallest sizes of snack foods (packages of 2 Oreos, rather than 6)
• Makes it easy to be physically active (Google bicycles!)

The only place on the campus where employees pay for food is from a vending machine.  The pricing strategy is based on nutrient content, again according to the Harvard pyramid plan.  For the vended products, you pay:

• one cent per gram of sugar
• two cents per gram of fat
• four cents per gram of saturated fat
• one dollar per gram of trans fat

On this basis, Quaker Chewy Bars are 15 cents each, Famous Amos cookies re 55 cents, and an enormous Ghirardelli chocolate bar is $4.25.  Weights don’t count and neither do calories.  The machine is not run by Google.  Whoever does it has a sense of humor.

Impressive, all this.  Not every company can feed its nearly 30,000 employees like this but every company can adopt some of these strategies.  It might save them some health care costs, if nothing else.

The Chef Ann [Cooper] Foundation has issued This report.

The report, while recognizing obstacles, explains why scratch cooking matters so much.

To protect and improve children’s health — and to access cascading academic, environmental, and economic benefits — schools must serve students more minimally processed meals cooked from scratch. While most schools want to serve their students more scratch-made meals, their ability to do so is significantly limited by systemic labor, financial, and infrastructure barriers, as well as public perceptions that devalue the critical role school food professionals play in suppporting the well-being of our nation’s children.

Its food policy priorities are well worth attention, especially now when the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement is focusing on schools.

Let’s hope the MAHA leadership takes a good look at this report.  Thanks Chef Ann!

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Published this week!  Information is here.  Get 15% off with this code: FSGPIC15

The Fish Counter.  Picador Shorts, June 10, 2025 (96 pages).

Information about the book is here.   You can preorder it—ISBN 9781250391193—from Amazon   Barnes & Noble   Books-a-Million   Bookshop   Powells   Target

Here’s what the publisher says about it:

America’s leading nutritionist teaches you how to navigate the fish counter.

A standalone extract from the newly revised edition of her groundbreaking What to Eat (which is being reissued as What to Eat Now).

Marion Nestle, America’s preeminent nutritionist and the scholar widely credited with establishing the field of modern American food studies, takes us through every aspect of how we grow, market, shop for, store, label, and eat fish in America.

With her trademark persistence and unerring eye for detail, Nestle pulls the curtain back on the complicated routes that fish have to go through to make it to our supermarket fish counter. What is the history of methylmercury contamination in our fish supplies? How have government agencies dealt with it in the past? How have they communicated its dangers to us, and how do they do that now? What should we consider when we think about food safety and fish? How healthy is fish, in fact?

Marion Nestle answers these and many more questions at the heart of how we consume fish. These chapters are a master class for anyone looking to eat more sustainably, mindfully, and with a full awareness of the many complicated factors at play when you’re standing at the fish counter trying to make a decision about what fish you ought to buy for your dinner.

The Fish Counter is part of the Picador Shorts series “Oceans, Rivers, and Streams” in which excerpts from beloved classics speak to our relationship with our water bodies, great and small.

Media coverage

May 7, 2025  Which fish are healthy and sustainable?  Its complicated.  Interview with Bonnie Leibman.  Nutrition Action.

June 25, 2025  Food Tank’s 20 Must-Read Books on Food, Culture, and Climate for Summer Reading

13. The Fish Counter by Marion Nestle

The Fish Counter explores the commercial production, processing, marketing, and safety of seafood in the United States. Marion Nestle unpacks key issues like mercury contamination, government regulations, and what to consider when choosing healthy, sustainable fish. The Fish Counter is an updated excerpt from her What to Eat–a broader revision titled What to Eat Now is coming in November 2025.

The Study: Whole cranberry fruit powder supplement reduces the incidence of culture-confirmed urinary tract infections in females with a history of recurrent urinary tract infection: A 6-month multicenter, randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial.Stonehouse, Welma et al. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 121, Issue 4, 932 – 941

Methods: “This multicenter, 6-mo, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind study enrolled 150 healthy females [18–65 y, body mass index (BMI) >17.5 and <35 kg/m²] with rUTI defined as ≥3 UTIs in the last year or ≤2 UTIs in the last 6 mo, excluding those with >5 UTIs in the last 6 mo. Participants consumed either 1 capsule of 500 mg/d of whole cranberry powder (Pacran) or placebo.”

Results: “Whole cranberry powder capsules reduced culture-confirmed UTI risk compared with placebo by 52%…reduced Escherichia coli UTIs…reduced incidence of UTI with urinary frequency and urgency symptomatology; delayed time to first UTI episode…and reduced the mean total number of UTIs per participant.”

Conclusion: “This study shows that whole cranberry powder capsules do not impact safety markers and reduce the incidence of culture-confirmed UTI and several other UTI-related outcomes in healthy females with rUTI history.”

Conflict of interest: “Financial sponsorship for the study was provided by Swisse Wellness Pty Ltd to the Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation. All authors report no conflicts of interest.”

Funding: “Swisse Wellness Pty Ltd was the trial sponsor and Givaudan Flavors Corp was the raw material supplier.”

Disclaimers: “The funding source and the raw material supplier, in collaboration with the research scientists, designed the trial and monitored its implementation, but had no influence over the analyses, reporting, interpretation of the data and preparation of the manuscript. The manuscript was reviewed by the sponsor and the raw material supplier before the submission to the journal, but they had no influence over the manuscript content.”

Comment: You should not be surprised to learn that the funder, Swisse Wellness Pty Ltd, makes “supplements for everyday lifestyle.” among them cranberry supplements.  The raw material supplier, Givaudan, sells cransberry oil.  The disclaimer reveals that both companies  designed the trial, were involved throughout, and reviewed the manuscript.  The authors consider all this to constitute “no influence,” in quotes because it is impossible to avoid influence under these circumstances.  At the very least, the companies would make sure the study design had little chance of coming up with the wrong result.  This is an industry-funded study with predictable results that will help them sell cranberry powder.  I hope it works.

If you are going to do advocacy (or be an activist, if you prefer), it’s likely to be far more effective if done right.  The steps begin with identifying the problem you want solved, deciding what you want to do to solve it, and figuring out who or what you have to convince to solve the problem.

Note: the best thing I’ve ever read about how to do this is the Midwest Academy’s how-to manual for activists, Organizing for Social Change.

Research is a crucial component of effective policy advocacy; it’s the basis of convincing change agents to agree to make the change.

The Global Health Advocacy Incubator (“Changing Policies to Change Lives”) and the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids have  just published Research for Advocacy Action Guide: Five Stretegies to Use Research in a Policy Change campaign.

This tells you what to look for, how to find it, what to highlight, and how to present it. Download the Guide.

The research piece extends the information in these groups’ Advocacy Action Guide, a shorter version of the information from the Midwest Academy.

Advocacy done “by the book” has a much better chance of success than what might seem intuitive.  These guides are well worth reading.

Advocacy, by the way, is one of the words on the government’s new forbidden list.  This alone is why we need it more than ever.  Get to work!

The United Nations has issued a digital Food Systems Thinking Guide for UN Resident Coordinators and UN Country Teams with tools and information for working collectively towards food system transformation.

It is intended as a working draft.  It provides an easy mechanism for immediate feedback.

You have to do a lot of scrolling.  When you do, you will get to key questions:

• What is a food systems approach and why does it matter?
• What is the state of food systems in my country?
• Who are the actors influencing the foods system?
• What are barriers and entry points to food system transformation?
• How can I integrate foods systems approach into programming?
• How can I communicate and advocate for foods systems transformation?

I took a look at the actors.  This section provides resources for engaging with stakeholders.

I also looked at barriers.  It lists things to consider and provides resources.

And I looked at communication strategies.  This one is much more complete and has useful videos and key messages along with the resources.

I see this as an advocacy toolkit focused on food system transformation.  Happy to have it.  Try it and give the UN some feedback on it to make it even better and more complete.

Several groups under the auspices of Healthy Eating Research got together to produce this guide for kids ages 5-18.

To summarize:

• • Drink: water or milk
  • Limit: 100% juice (too much sugar), plant-based milk alternatives (except for medical reasons), flavored milk (too much sugar)
  • Avoid: beverages with caffeine and other stimulants, sugar-sweetened beverages, beverages with non-sugar sweeteners

Resources

• Press Release
• Consensus Statement  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]
• Technical Report
• Summary
• Tips for Families
• Provider Toolkit

Translated Materials

• Consensus Statement  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]
• Recommendations Graphic  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]
• Added Sugars  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]
• Caffeine Facts  [(Spanish) (Vietnamese) (Tagalog)]

I spoke on a panel last week in support of New York State bills sponsored by my local Greenich Village Senator, Brian Kavanagh, and assemblymember Dr. Anna Kelles, who represents the district that includes Ithaca, where I live part time.

Their bill is S.1239/A.1556, The Food Safety and Chemical Disclosure Act.  This act,

• Bans red dye #3, potassium bromate, and propylparaben from foods sold in New York State.
• Removes petroleum-based dyes from all schools in the state that have been banned in New York City (red 3 and 40, blue 1 and 2, green 3, and yellow 5 and 6).
• Closes the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) loophole, which allows food companies to decide for themselves whether the additives they are using are safe.
• Requires food companies to report all ingredients in their products and demonstrate their safety.

You probably have the same reaction I did: aren’t food companies and the FDA already doing this?

No, they are not.

If you live anywhere in New York State and want to support the bill, call or send a note to your state representatives saying so.  They are easy to find and contact.

• Find my New York State Senator
• Search for my New York State Assembly Member

If enough states do this, the federal government will have to follow.  And this bill fits with Robert Kennedy Jr’s Make America Healthy Again campaign.  Let’s give it some bipartisan support.

Breaking news: West Virginia is the first state to ban food dyes.