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Let’s start this July 4 week with a bit of good news.  Santa Cruz gets to keep the tax it passed in 2024.

The Santa Cruz Sentinel: City of Santa Cruz wins court ruling on soda tax.

The Sacramento County Superior Court denied a petition challenging Santa Cruz’s sugar-sweetened beverage tax….The tax was approved by Santa Cruz voters as Measure Z in November 2024 and requires distributors of sugar-sweetened beverages to pay the city a tax of two cents per fluid ounce, which supports the city’s General Fund.

In May 2025, the tax was challenged by the American Beverage Association and a group of other grocers and retailers, including the California Chamber of Commerce and the California Grocers Association. The petitioners sought to halt the implementation of the tax, arguing that it violated the state constitution.

The advocacy group, ChangeLab Solutions, says of this ruling,

This decision affirms that state law does not preempt home rule authority of California charter cities to enact sugary drink taxes that support community well-being. It is also a significant blow to corporate beverage industry tactics that seek to strip power away from local communities.

“The ruling in California Grocers Association v. Santa Cruz affirms what we know to be true — that local residents are best positioned to make policy choices about the health and well-being of their own communities,” said Sabrina Adler, vice president of law at ChangeLab Solutions.

ChangeLab explained what the California law was about in 2024.

ChangeLab Solutions and the American Heart Association supported a successful 2020 lawsuit that challenged the deceptively named 2018 Keep Groceries Affordable Act, a California law that was heavily backed by beverage industry operatives and passed using shady political tactics. The Keep Groceries Affordable Act tried to prevent cities from voting on new sugary drink taxes. The penalty provision of that 2018 law was declared unconstitutional by an appeals court in 2023. This court decision paved the way for voters in cities like Santa Cruz to once again exercise their democratic right to vote on sugary drink taxes for their community.

This explains the emailed message I received from Steven Maviglio of Forza Communications:

The following statement can be attributed to me as spokesperson for the American Beverage Association: “The court appears to have ignored the law and the legislature’s intent and instead decided to create its own interpretation of the tax. The Keep Groceries Affordable Act was passed by significant majorities in the legislature and could not be more straightforward in its goal to prevent new local taxes on grocery items. We will not relent in our defense of a law that continues to receive overwhelming support from Californians because it has helped hold down costs on groceries at a time of record high prices.”

I will be following the appeal with great interest.  In the meantime, let’s enjoy the win.  We could use one.

I am on the advisory council to the National Food Museum, an online project created by Michael Jacobson, the now-retired founder and president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

It currently hosts three exhibits.

(1) Food Impact Meter: This tells you how specific foods affect health and the environment.

(2) Video Vault: A collection of videos on food topics, some of them famous (the scene from When Harry Met Sally), some not but still interesting.

(3) Selling Candy to Kids: Here are commercials you may have seen (or not), pushing sugary foods to kids or explaining how the marketing works.

Enjoy!

The USDA published occasional “charts of note.”  I thought this one was especially useful.

The chart gives an estimate of total spending on food in the U.S.—an astonishing $2.51 trillion in 2025.

• $1.4 trillion goes for food away from home.
• $1.1 trillion goes for food at home.

The data are from USDA’s Food Expenditure Series, June 2026.

Despite everything that is cutting into food sales—concerns about ultra-processed foods, GLP-1 drugs, inflation—spending on food has risen steadily since 1997, except during the COVID-19 pandemic.

So has the proportion spent on food prepared outside the home.   Home cooking holds steady, but isn’t keeping up.

“Eat real food” means it has to be cooked, and it’s likely to be a lot healthier if cooked at home.

I learned to cook in 8th grade home economics.  We could use some of that now.

I am not a litigious person, so I rarely pay attention to lawsuits, but this notice caught my eye:

Chobani sued by Danone over high-protein yogurt claims:  The Oikos maker said its rival is engaging in “unfair competition and consumer deception” to make its product more appealing to shoppers.

Danone says Chobani is inflating the amount of protein in its yogurt.

The food giant said on Monday that Chobani is manipulating the serving size on its 32-ounce containers of Chobani 20G Protein to inflate the protein content. Danone alleges that in order to claim 20 grams of protein per serving, Chobani sets its serving size at 6.7 ounces instead of the industry standard of 5.3 ounces…If Chobani followed the FDA’s serving-size rules for its 32-ounce containers, the lawsuit said, it would be able to claim only 18 grams of protein per serving — below the key 20-gram threshold for high-protein yogurts.

This may seem absurd, but wait!  This may be the fourth lawsuit between these companies.

What I find particular silly about all this is that it is about protein, a nutrient that has never been a problem in American diets and still is not.  Most people get way more than they need.

But protein is what sells food products these days, so companies care about it a lot.

The context for all this is that our food supply provides roughly twice the calories needed by our population, thereby making the food industry hugely competitive, especially at a time when GLP-1 drugs, inflation, and concerns about ultra-processed foods are cutting into food sales.

Danone must think that protecting its market share is worth the legal challenge and expenditure.

The Supreme Court has just handed Bayer, which owns Monsanto, a “landmark victory.”  The decision may well overturn thousands of pending cases of people suing Bayer in the belief that the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup) caused them to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Monsanto v. Durnell states its premise in the first paragraph:

Monsanto Company manufactures and distributes Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide designed to control weeds. The EPA has repeatedly evaluated glyphosate and repeatedly concluded that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer. EPA’s assessment is shared by many other regulatory bodies around the world. In accordance with EPA’s view that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer in humans, EPA has not required labels on glyphosate-based pesticides like Roundup to include a cancer warning.

Ergo: If the EPA says glyphosate is not carcinogenic, glyphosate is not carcinogenic.

An advocacy group, Protect Our Care, organized an emergency virtual event in Washington, DC, to condemn this “deeply misguided” decision. 

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of industry and the Trump administration by effectively granting Donald Trump’s big chemical industry donors blanket immunity from state-based liability claims involving the cancer-linked glyphosate chemical found in Roundup pesticides. In the administration’s latest betrayal of the MAHA movement, Trump’s DOJ filed an amicus brief in support of Monsanto – now owned by Bayer — and Trump’s Principal Deputy Solicitor General argued alongside the chemical maker in court. The decision is also a major affront to cancer survivors, now denied a pathway to damages for any injuries and financial costs they may have endured following exposure to glyphosate. 

At the event, Senator Cory Booker said:

Today’s a really a grievous day where the people of the United States saw that their Supreme Court corrupted by massive gifts from billionaires and people of interest in matters before them. A court that takes gifts, from RVs to tuition to lavish gifts, sided with the wealthy, powerful multinational corporation reversing years and years of precedent, dismissing ultimately effectively hundreds and hundreds, in fact 1000s of cases. They sided with the big multinational corporations against the people. Worse than that, compounding that, is a president who said he stood with the MAHA movement has betrayed that movement by now siding with the big corporations and those who are poisoning people in our country.

Why is this infuriating?

(1) The EPA relied on evidence developed by Monsanto: The EPA Relied on an Influential Glyphosate Study Even After Learning Monsanto Was a “Ghost Writer”

The US Environmental Protection Agency has known for nearly a decade that an influential 2013 scientific paper that concluded glyphosate is safe was actually ghostwritten by developer Monsanto. But the agency never informed the public and continued to rely on it, according to an EPA memo obtained by Mother Jones and revealed here for the first time.

(2)  Monsanto created its own evidence for the safety of glyphosate: Merchants of Poison: How Monsanto Sold the World on a Toxic Pesticide.

(3)  The Trump administration’s support of Bayer was aided by officials who came from Bayer’s law firms.

(4)  Getting glyphosate out of the food supply has been a stated objective of the MAHA movement and of HHS Secretary, RFK, Jr (although he later changed his stance)

One more thing: let’s not be taken in by President Trump’s executive order “advancing regenerative agriculture.”  This is really about biofuel production: “The new framework creates significant opportunities for America’s leading biofuel feedstock producers.”

By regenerative, this order refers to “cover crops, improved nutrient management, and conservation tillage—including no-till and reduced tillage.”

This is not my idea of the meaning of regenerative.  I much prefer the approach of Real Organic Project:   “is a farmer-led, soil-grown, pasture-raised WHOLE farm certification with labor protections. “

If a farm uses glyphosate, it’s not regenerative, not matter how much no-till it uses.

This one is not over yet.  At least one lawsuit has been filed to disclose how all this happened.

Stay tuned.

I learned about this one from a British public relations firm.

Hey Marion,

Eating an egg a day could cut Alzheimer’s risk by 27%, major new study reveals as UK searches for dementia prevention hit a five-year high.

The press release linked to the study

Egg Intake and the Incidence of Alzheimer’s Disease in the Adventist Health Study-2 Cohort Linked with Medicare Data, followed nearly 40,000 American adults aged 65 and over for an average of 15.3 years — making it one of the largest investigations to date into how diet affects dementia risk.  Compared with people who never ate eggs, the researchers found:

– 5+ eggs per week — 27% lower Alzheimer’s risk

– 2-4 eggs per week — 20% lower risk

– 1-3 eggs per month — 17% lower risk

Why eggs?

Researchers say the protective effect comes from the unique cocktail of brain-essential nutrients found in eggs. The standout is choline — used by the body to produce acetylcholine, a brain chemical critical for memory and learning. Eggs are also rich in lutein, tryptophan, and the omega-3 fat DHA.

Lest I forget that this is about public relations, the message ends with this:

If you use the story, could you please link back to our client’s website.

Comment

Guess who paid for this study:

Funding: Initial support for the cohort was provided by the National Cancer Institute (grant 1U01CA152939). The analyses in this study were supported by an investigator-initiated grant from the American Egg Board. The funding sources had no role in the study design, execution, data analysis, interpretation, manuscript preparation, or publication.

Conflict of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Adventists are generally healthier than the general population, so it’s hard to know what to make of this.  Dietary advice in the U.S. even at the height of concerns about cholesterol always said one egg a day is OK.  This study does not change that.

Will eating eggs help you prevent Alzheimer’s?  If only it were that easy.

And again: the authors do not believe that requesting a grant from the American Egg Board constitutes a conflict of interest.  I do.  The egg industry has a vested interest in the outcome of this study, and got the result it wanted.

The Global Food Institute at George Washington University has a new report out: Changing the Default: A Policy Roadmap for Reducing Added Sugars in U.S. Children’s Diets,  by Fielding-Singh, P., D. Cherlin, and M. Maitin-Shepard.  June 2026.

What the report is about:

American children today consume far too much added sugar, and it is harming their health. The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans set the most ambitious target yet for reducing this intake. This brief offers a policy roadmap for what it would take to make meaningful progress toward it.

It calls for reshaping the food environment to help kids eat less sugar.  Its recommendations focus on educating families, but also setting higher school nutrition standards and reshaping sugar supply and demand.

Here’s why this matters:

The advice:

• Reduce sugars in the food supply.
• Tax sugary drinks.
• Restrict marketing of sugary foods and drinks to kids.

Comment

It’s a clear, succinct report with lots of good suggestions.

If only they could be implemented.

Get to work!

The GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) loophole refers to the way the FDA allows food manufacturers basically to decide for themselves whether the additives they are using are safe, voluntarily or not.

Closing the loophole is a key goal of the Make America Healthy Again Movement (MAHA), and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has made closing this loophole a key goal of his administration, and he has directed the FDA to “explore rulemaking” on this issue, meaning write real regulations.

We have yet to see any sign of what the FDA is proposing.

In the meantime, Yuka, maker of the popular product-scanning app, and Consumer Reports have petitioned FDA to get busy on this.

Now, product-scanning app Yuka and watchdog group Consumer Reports are urging the FDA to tighten regulation of food additives and close the GRAS “loophole”, after their investigation found that 25 out of 40 popular food and drink products contain at least one additive at levels identified as concerning by peer-reviewed research.

“Americans shouldn’t need a chemistry degree to eat safely – but today, no one, not even the FDA, can say exactly what’s in our food,” reads the organisations’ petition, which has already surpassed its goal of 35,000 signatures.

This is an old issue.  My contribution to this discussion was published in 2013: Nestle M.  Conflict of interest in the regulation of food safety: a threat to scientific integrity.  JAMA Internal Medicine 2013;173(22):2036-2038. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.9158.

So what’s the holdup?  Two reasons:

1.  RFK, Jr is on record as saying he doesn’t like regulation.  Regulation is nanny state.  He much prefers education.
2.  Lobbying by the users of unregulated food additives; they like it just the way it is.

NOTUS has a remarkable investigative report on lobbying over the GRAS loophole.  The number of lobbyists on this issue has tripled, it says.

After Kennedy directed the Food and Drug Administration to explore closing the GRAS loophole in March 2025, the number of trade associations, companies and organizations that reported lobbying on the pending regulation have nearly tripled, according to a NOTUS analysis of federal lobbying disclosures.

In-house and hired lobbyists for 35 organizations — from food chemical suppliers to packagers and manufacturers — disclosed lobbying specifically on GRAS reform during the first quarter of 2026, up from 12 during the same period in 2025 and one during the same period in 2024.

NOTUS gives one example:

AFIT [Americans for Ingredient Transparency] paid the Russell Group $240,000 between August 2025 and March, including $170,000 in the first quarter of this year, to lobby on “issues pertaining to ingredient transparency,” according to its quarterly lobbying disclosures.

If MAHA wants to close the loophole, it has to take on the food industry, big time.

No wonder RFK Jr is switching to physical activity: shades of Let’s Move!