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I first read about this in a Forbes article: New Study: Front-Of-Pack Warning Labels Don’t Lower Obesity Rates.

As the FDA mulls interpretive food warning labels, a Georgetown University study shows these schemes have been powerless to halt obesity trends.  In an attempt to tackle stubbornly high adult obesity rates over 40% in the US, the FDA is advancing a proposed front-of-pack (FOP) label that highlights whether a food or beverage contains low, medium or high levels of sugar, saturated fats and sodium. But a new study from Georgetown University titled Can Front-of-Pack Product Labeling Fix the Obesity Crisis says that the FDA has not learned the lessons from other countries using such interpretive food warning labels: there is no hard evidence that they have been effective in improving consumer diets or in arresting rising obesity rates.

The author of this article is Hank Cardello, executive-in-residence at Georgetown McDonough’s Business for Impact.

If you click on the link to the study, you discover than Cardullo himself is its author.

Hank Cardello, executive-in-residence at Georgetown McDonough’s Business for Impact, has published a white paper titled,“Can Front-of-Pack Product Labeling Fix the Obesity Crisis?” This paper argues that front-of-pack (FOP) food labeling has not led to meaningful improvements in public health outcomes. It evaluates data from multiple countries to test the efficacy of other FOP labeling initiatives.

Both the article and his White Papert disclose the funder: the Consumer Brands Association, formerly known as the Grocery Manufacturers of America, which represents Big Food.

Comment

I can understand why the food industry does not like warning labels or any other front-of-pack label that might reduce product sales, which studies of Latin American warning labels show they do.  So this piece is predictable.

If you want people to lose weight, they have to eat less.  Eating less is very bad for business.

What good are front-of-pack labels?  At best they alert consumers to avoid high-calorie foods formulated to get us all to eat more of them.

But that’s just a start.  To lose weight, you also have to make sure the rest of your diet does not replace the calories you just saved.

Cardullo’s suggestion is smalled portions.  Good idea.

In the meantime, warning labels could help and I hope the FDA comes up with good ones.

________________

Published tomorrow!  Information is here.

I just got the first copy of my latest book!  It’s official publication date is June 10.

It’s published by Picador Shorts, short because the books in this series, on Oceans, Rivers, and Streams, are mostly under 100 pages (mine is 86).

Here’s what Macmillan, the owner of Picador, says about the book (and says how you can order 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).

What to Eat Now comes out November 11.  More on that when the time comes.

In the meantime, here are the other books in this series.  I love the covers.

 

A few months ago, Santa Cruz, a small town on California’s coast south of San Francisco, and the home of the University of California Santa Cruz, passed a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages.

It did this, even though the soda industry had gotten the state legislature to ban such taxes until 2031 by passing the “Keep Groceries Affordable Act in 2018.”

But further legislation and court rulings allowed charter cities to pass local taxes to raise revenues.

But now, the soda industry and its allies are suing Santa Cruz on the basis that the law passed because its purpose was not just revenue, but to discourage soda consumption.  The text of the lawsuit is here.

Santa Cruz is engaging in an act of local rebellion: “on matters of soda, city residents and leaders are standing up to the state and to beverage companies. Come and get us if you like, they say. We won’t compromise on democracy and local sovereignty.”

If you want to understand what is at stake, take a look at the plaintiffs in this case.  They include the American Beverage Association, of course but also the

• California Grocers Association
• California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce
• California Alliance of Family-Owned Businesses
• California Chamber of Commerce
• California Fuels and Convenience Alliance

A representatve of the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce explained why it was joining the suit.

“Through representing the interests of over 950,000 Hispanic-owned businesses in California, we see first-hand the challenges faced by small, community-based businesses that are up against inflation, labor shortages and the extraordinary high cost of doing business in California,” said Julian Cañete, president of the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce. “Santa Cruz illegally sidestepped the state legislature’s popular and much-needed preemption of grocery taxes to impose new costs on working families and local Hispanic-owned businesses. It must be overturned.”

As is evident from the soda industry’s attempts to spare no expense in fighting soda taxes, the taxes must be highly effective in reducing sales.

Never mind public health.  Selling sodas is what counts.

Addition

 

 

[Sorry for my error: This post did not get sent out yesterday to subscribers so I am re-posting it.  Apologies if you are getting it twice.]

Let me start by confessing that I did not review the references in the MAHA Comission report I wrote about last week—except for mine.

The reference to my book, Food Politics, is a bit garbled (In Food Politics?  No.  This is Food Politics), but these are basically OK.  It’s easy to make mistakes like that one and I rely on the help of many proofreaders and factcheckers to try to avoid such errors in my published books and articles.  I checked a couple of the other references related to food topics and they seemed basically OK too.

So I was surprised by the report from NOTUS that The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist,

This finding was immediately attributed by the New York Times and other sources to the report’s having been referenced by Artificial Intelligence (AI), a tool well known to be scientifically inaccurate and to make things up.

To immediately plagiarize (well, quote) Ted Kyle at ConscienHealth: The MAHA Report: Make America Hallucinate Again.

I was also surprised—no, dismayed—by the administration’s response to these discoveries.

According to FoodFix,

White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt told reporters…“I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed,” Leavitt said. “But it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that’s ever been released by the federal government, and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.”

FoodFix also quotes the HHS Press Secretary:

Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children…“It’s time for the media to also focus on what matters.”

Formatting issues?  Oh come on.

Calley Means, the top advisor to RFK Jr, posted “The least surprising thing about the MAHA Report is that the media and failed medical leaders are talking about footnotes instead of its actual content.”

Sorry.  Footnotes matter.  Everything in a report making policy recommendations depends on where its information comes from.  Hallucinating references implies hallucinating data.

The MAHA Report is now being continually updated to fix the citation problem.

Some of the updates are introducing other errors. 

Yikes.

The Washington Post has published details: The MAHA Report’s AI fingerprints, annotated.

I was interviewed by Reuters about all this:

Nobody has ever accused RFK Jr. of academic rigor…The speed (of the MAHA report) suggests that it could not have been vetted carefully and must have been whisked through standard clearance procedures. The citation problem suggests a reliance on AI.”

Science magazine headlined the downplaying of the fake citations and pointed out the irony:

Problems with the MAHA report’s integrity came to light even as Kennedy has threatened to prevent government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals like The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, which he claims are “corrupt” and controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Kennedy has instead proposed a state-run alternative.

Discovery of the fake citations also came just days after President Donald Trump unveiled an executive order that called for “Restoring Gold Science Standards” to government activities…One goal, Trump wrote, is to ensure that “Federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.”

Yeah, right.  The MAHA report cites articles—26—from those “corrupt” journals as sources for its statements.

All of this has led cartoonists like Clay Bennett to ridicule the report.

Here’s another good one from Carlos Muñoz.

Ridicule—or lack of credibility if you prefer—is one reason why this matters.

What I had drilled into me as a graduate student in molecular biology was the importance of reading references, and never under any circumstances citing a reference I hadn’t read.

Why?  Because the credibility of my work depends on where I got my information—how I know what I claim to know.

When I managed the editorial process for the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health, checking references was crucial to supporting the report’s recommendations.  It took years to get the report out, not least because of the enormous amount of vetting involved—from scientists, but also government agencies.

This report, unfortunately, was a rush job.  It astonished me that it got done in only three months (I really want to know who wrote it).

It’s one thing to make editorial errors in citing references (try as hard as I can to get them right, errors invariably get overlooked).

But this report had references that were made up.  Hallucinated.  This means nobody looked at them.

If its references are not reliable, nothing else in the report can be trusted either.

And that’s a shame.  It said a lot of things that badly needed to be said.

Too many corners were cut in throwing this together at the last minute.  I know this was a rush job because I have four versions of the report.

• Version 1: May 22 early morning.  It has no references at all.  My first reaction: What?  No references?
• Version 2: Also May 22, but later in the morning. It has references but not much in the way of formatting.
• Version 3: May 22. This is the one released to the public.
• Version 4: This is the one online on May 31.  Other versions, perhaps multiple, came in between and may come after.

None of this bodes well for the future of MAHA initiatiatives.  Sad.

 

Let me start by confessing that I did not review the references in the MAHA Comission report I wrote about last week—except for mine.

The reference to my book, Food Politics, is a bit garbled (In Food Politics?  No.  This is Food Politics), but these are basically OK.  It’s easy to make mistakes like that one and I rely on the help of many proofreaders and factcheckers to try to avoid such errors in my published work.  I checked a couple of the other references related to food topics and they seemed basically OK too.

So I was surprised by the report from NOTUS that The MAHA Report Cites Studies That Don’t Exist,

This finding was immediately attributed by the New York Times and other sources to the report’s having been referenced by Artificial Intelligence (AI), a tool well known to be scientifically inaccurate and to make things up.

To immediately plagiarize (well, quote) Ted Kyle at ConscienHealth: The MAHA Report: Make America Hallucinate Again.

I was also surprised—no, dismayed—by the administration’s response to these discoveries.

According to FoodFix,

White House Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt told reporters…“I understand there were some formatting issues with the MAHA report that are being addressed,” Leavitt said. “But it does not negate the substance of the report, which, as you know, is one of the most transformative health reports that’s ever been released by the federal government, and is backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.”

FoodFix also quotes the HHS Press Secretary:

Minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children…“It’s time for the media to also focus on what matters.”

Formatting issues?  Oh come on.

Calley Means, the top advisor to RFK Jr, posted “The least surprising thing about the MAHA Report is that the media and failed medical leaders are talking about footnotes instead of its actual content.”

Sorry.  Footnotes matter.  Everything in a report making policy recommendations depends on where its information comes from.  Hallucinating references implies hallucinating data.

The MAHA Report is now being continually updated to fix the citation problem.

Some of the updates are introducing other errors. 

Yikes.

The Washington Post has published details: The MAHA Report’s AI fingerprints, annotated.

I was interviewed by Reuters about all this:

Nobody has ever accused RFK Jr. of academic rigor…The speed (of the MAHA report) suggests that it could not have been vetted carefully and must have been whisked through standard clearance procedures. The citation problem suggests a reliance on AI.”

Science magazine headlined the downplaying of the fake citations and pointed out the irony:

Problems with the MAHA report’s integrity came to light even as Kennedy has threatened to prevent government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals like The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA, which he claims are “corrupt” and controlled by pharmaceutical companies. Kennedy has instead proposed a state-run alternative.

Discovery of the fake citations also came just days after President Donald Trump unveiled an executive order that called for “Restoring Gold Science Standards” to government activities…One goal, Trump wrote, is to ensure that “Federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.”

Yeah, right.

All of this has led cartoonists like Clay Bennett to ridicule the report.

Here’s another good one from Carlos Muñoz.

Ridicule—or lack of credibility if you prefer—is one reason why this matters.

What I had drilled into me as a graduate student in molecular biology was the importance of reading references, and never under any circumstances citing a reference I hadn’t read.

Why?  Because the credibility of my work depends on where I got my information—how I know what I claim to know.

When I managed the editorial process for the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health, checking references was crucial to supporting the report’s recommendations.  It took years to get the report out, not least because of the enormous amount of vetting involved—from scientists, but also government agencies.

This report, unfortunately, was a rush job.  It astonished me that it got done in only three months (I really want to know who wrote it).

It’s one thing to make editorial errors in citing references (try as hard as I can to get them right, errors invariably get overlooked).

But this report had references that were made up.  Hallucinated.  This means nobody looked at them.

If its references are not reliable, nothing else in the report can be trusted either.

And that’s a shame.  It said a lot of things that badly needed to be said.

Too many corners were cut in throwing this together at the last minute.  I know this was a rush job because I have four versions of the report.

• Version 1: May 22 early morning.  It has no references at all.  My first reaction: What?  No references?
• Version 2: Also May 22, but later in the morning. It has references but not much in the way of formatting.
• Version 3: May 22. This is the one released to the public.
• Version 4: This is the one online on May 31.  Other versions, perhaps multiple, came in between and may come after.

None of this bodes well for the future of MAHA initiatiatives.  Sad.

 

Why alas?  I love maple syrup.

But the Quebec Maple Syrup Producers association apparently has decided that it needs to boost sales by promoting maple syrup as a superfood.

Sigh.

The article in the New York Times is titled: “A Scientist Is Paid to Study Maple Syrup. He’s Also Paid to Promote It.”

The subtitle: “Funded by the maple industry, a researcher has exaggerated his findings to suggest that syrup could help prevent serious diseases.”

For more than a decade, Navindra Seeram, a biomedical researcher, has praised maple syrup, calling it a “hero ingredient” and “champion food” that could have wide-ranging health benefits…As he straddles the realms of scientific inquiry and promotion, he has distorted the real-world implications of his findings and exaggerated health benefits…In videos and press releases, he has suggested that consuming maple syrup may help stave off diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes.

The article continues…

At the University of Rhode Island, where he worked until last year, Dr. Seeram oversaw projects that were awarded $2.6 million in U.S. government funding, including a grant explicitly intended to increase maple syrup sales. That promotional work produced a stream of social media posts like, “Maple Syrup’s Benefits: Anti-Cancer, Anti-Oxidant, Anti-Inflammatory.”

Oh how I wish.

As for who pays for this,

The Quebec Maple Syrup Producers, an industry association that markets and regulates most of the world’s maple syrup, has long funded Dr. Seeram’s work. The association and the Canadian government have together provided at least $2.8 million for his research, according to a 2019 grant applicatio

Maple syrup is just a form of sugar, and mostly sucrose at that.  It does have a few minerals in small amounts, along with its fabulously delicious flavoring ingredients.

But a nutritional powerhouse?  Alas, no.

Sylvia R. Karasu.  In Essence: A Tapestry of Selected Writings. 2025.

I wrote a blurb for this gorgeous book.

In Essence collects Dr. Sylvia Karasu’s elegant essays from Psychology Today and other publications.  These cover a broad variety of topics–vegetarianism, twins, opium, gullibility–each full of unexpected information, and all stunningly illustrated with artworks chosen to precisely illuminate the subject under analysis.  The book is breathtaking—a treasure not to be missed.

A brief excerpt from her essay on Collecting: A Demonic Passion:

Key Points

• The accumulator, rationalizing that someday things will come in handy, amasses an assortment of objects without any discernment.
• The collector, different from the accumulator and the hoarder, engages in a voluntary activity of selecting and ordering.
• People can collect objects, but also ideas and experiences.
• Collecting may include elements of exhibitionism, addiction, and obsession when the collection possesses the collector.

She writes:

“Let me look at my demon objectively. With the exception of my parents, no one really understood my obsession,

and it was many years before I met a fellow sufferer,” wrote the internationally renowned novelist Vladimir Nabokov in his autobiography Speak, Memory (1999). Continues Nabokov, “Few things indeed have I known in the way of emotion or appetite, ambition or achievement, that could surpass in richness and strength the excitement of entomological exploration.”

I’m hoping the Making America Healthy Again includes keeping us safe from food pathogens.

Four items relevant to food safety.

I.  Food Safety News: Salmonella outbreak sickens over 100; Animal operations blamed for leafy greens risk.

II. And the FDA is investigating yet another outbreak.

Cucumbers grown by Bedner Growers, Inc., and distributed by Fresh Start Produce Sales, Inc., to retailers, distribution centers, wholesalers, and food service distributors from April 29, 2025, to May 19, 2025. Cucumbers distributed before this timeframe should be past shelf life and should no longer be available on the market…FDA has posted a list of additional recalls being conducted by retailers that may have received potentially contaminated recalled cucumbers from Bedner Growers, Inc. This list includes recalls conducted by companies that further processed the cucumbers by using them as ingredients in new products or by repackaging them.

III.  The Journal of Food Protection just published this article: An Overview of Farm Investigation Findings Associated with Outbreaks of Shiga Toxin-Producing Escherichia coli Infections Linked to Leafy Greens: 2009 – 2021

These investigations showed that the outbreak strain can be found throughout the lifespan of leafy greens products, from the agriculture water used for the leafy greens, sediment from irrigation reservoirs, manure in nearby land, to retail product.

The contaminants come from animal manure leaching into water and soil.  Leafy greens should not be grown near CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations).

IV.  And what are FDA (plants) and USDA (animals) doing about all this?  The budget cuts are unlikely to help.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) recently laid off approximately 6,000 employees of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). Additionally, the Trump administration has proposed almost $40 million in budget cuts to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and a $1 billion decrease in the USDA budget, which recently resulted in workforce cuts and the suspension of services such as milk quality tests…The budget cuts and layoffs are partially intended to lessen federal government oversight and to shift many of the responsibilities to the state level. However, some states simply do not have the resources to serve as equally effective replacements.

This could have significant impacts on food safety and quality assurance.

How’s that for an understatement?