by Marion Nestle

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Jul 12 2016

The latest in food-industry sponsored research: Pears!

I completely understand that the food business is fiercely competitive, not least because the U.S. food supply provides about twice the calories needed by the population on a daily basis—4000 calories each in 2010—and companies have to sell all that.

The makers of processed foods and drinks spend fortunes marketing their foods in this environment.  Now producers of fruits and vegetables feel that they too need to compete.  They form trade associations to do this for them and to pay for research they can use to market their products as “superfoods.”

Meet, for example, the Pear Bureau Northwest, which pays for research and sends press releases about its only-to-be-expected positive results, in this case “New Research Indicates Regular Fresh Pear Consumption May Improve Blood Pressure in Middle-Aged Men and Women with Metabolic Syndrome” (my emphasis).

I like pears.  They are delicious when ripe.  But superfoods?  Really?

As always, the operative word is “may.”

This study compared the effects of eating 2 medium-sized fresh pears or or 50 g of a pear-flavored drink per day for 12 weeks.  Well, duh.

In my collection of industry-funded studies last year were two sponsored by the busy Pears Bureau Northwest.

Systematic Review of Pears and Health. Holly Reiland, BS Joanne Slavin, PhD, RD.  Nutrition Today November/December 2015 – Volume 50 – Issue 6 – p 301–305.  

  • Conclusions: Animal studies with pears suggest that pears may regulate alcohol metabolism, protect against ulcers, and lower plasma lipids. Human feeding studies with pears have not been conducted. In epidemiological studies, pears are combined with all fresh fruits or with apples, because they are most similar in composition. The high content of dietary fiber in pears and their effects on gut health set pears apart from other fruit and deserves study.
  • Funding: The authors received a grant from USA Pears in the past. The authors provided their own funding to allow this article to publish as Open Access.
  • Comment: Pears are a great fruit but the marketing purpose of this study is evident from this press release from the Pear Bureau Northwest: “While the body of evidence connecting pear intake and health outcomes is still limited, USA Pears has been contributing to research efforts by commissioning independent studies to learn and affirm the heath attributes of pears. Visit www.usapears.org for additional pear research, nutrition resources and recipes.”

Fresh Pear Consumption is Associated with Better Nutrient Intake, Diet Quality, and Weight Parameters in Adults: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 2001-2010.  O’Neil CE, Nicklas TA, Fulgoni VL (2015) J Nutr Food Sci 5: 377.

  • Conclusion:  Compared to non-consumers [of pears], consumers were 35% less likely to be obese (p<0.05). Fresh pears should be encouraged as a component of an overall healthy diet.
  • Funding: Partial support was received from the United States Department of Agriculture/ Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS)…Partial support was also received from Pears Bureau Northwest.
  • Comment: I’m guessing the same result could be obtained by looking at consumption of any other fruit.  And to prove my point that this is about marketing, here’s the press release.

Will this research help sell more pears?  We will see.

Is it wrong to want to have more pears sold?  Not at all, but why do this at the expense of any other fruit, all of which contain valuable nutrients.

If pears are superfoods, all fruits are superfoods.

Eat the ones you like.

 

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Jul 11 2016

Congressional Non: Non-Labeled GMO Food

Alan Guebart, the food and farm columnist for the Lincoln Journal Star, has written the best analysis of the Senate’s GMO bill that I’ve seen to date: “The Land of Non.”

Now, courtesy of Congress, our non-legislating legislature, we might soon be buying non-label labeled food.

Congress reached this state of higher non-ness by carefully noting what the American public overwhelmingly and repeatedly has said it wants—country of origin labeling (COOL) for meat and poultry and the labeling of all food that contains ingredients derived from genetically modified organisms (GMOs)—before choosing to do just the opposite.

In 2015, the U.S. House of Representatives tackled the public’s GMO labeling demand by punting; it voted 275-to-150 in favor of voluntary GMO labeling. In the Land of Non, voluntary labeling means, of course, almost everyone will voluntarily not label food that contains GMOs.

Not to be outdone by the non-labeling labelers in the House, the U.S. Senate finally [passed]…a mandatory labeling standard—albeit one with more dodges in it than a used car lot. The shiniest clunker is something the Senate chose to call the “bioengineered food disclosure system.”

The name alone is certain evidence that Big Food’s lawyers and Big Ag’s lobbyists have already washed, rinsed, and waxed the pending bill to ensure it contains the highest possible level of effective ineffectiveness. With this outside help, anti-government government insiders reshaped the Senate bill into pure shapelessness.

His analysis is well worth reading.  It concludes:

But that’s the trick in running a non-legislating legislature, right? If you actually do anything, it must—by definition—end up doing exactly nothing.

As I’ve posted previously, some companies have already put GMO labels on their products and neither their nor our world has come to an end.

The only reason not to do this is because of industry opposition—politics.

And to summarize the politics:

  • The industry says: if GMOs are safe, they are totally acceptable.
  • Others say: even if GMOs are safe (and questions remain), there are other reasons to be concerned about them.

The food industry is always talking about consumer choice.  So how about giving consumers a real choice, not one that depends on bar codes and cell phones.  Mr. Guebart’s analysis is spot on.

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Jul 8 2016

And now protein: Bakery & Snacks’ special edition

I’ve written about fats and carbohydrates this week, so how about I end the week with Bakery & Snacks’ special edition (compendium of articles) on protein.  Bakery & Snacks is a newsletter aimed at this industry which, as you might expect, is highly interested in the marketing potential of protein.

Reminder: most Americans consume twice the protein needed, which makes protein a non-issue for most of us.  Bakery & Snacks says:

There’s little sign of us losing our appetite for protein – with around a third of global consumers seeking foods high in protein [Nielsen 2015].

But that’s not to say the market isn’t changing – and that those in the industry may need to change with it.

In this special edition newsletter, we look at topics including: the questions to be asked when using protein in a baked good or snack; whether consumers need more education around protein; how poultry and seafood are transforming meat snacking; and what the protein boom means for retail product mixes.

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Jul 7 2016

More on carbs vs. fats: The NuSI study*

Yesterday I explained why “butter is back” is not useful dietary advice, even when studies show that eating butter has little or no effect on disease risk (the total diet and calories are what matter).  Now I can say the same thing about low-carbohydrate diets.

The debate about whether fat or carbohydrate is responsible for obesity has passionate advocates on both sides, although those for carbohydrates predominate in the press these days.

As explained by Julia Belluz of Vox,

The main scientific model behind the low-carb approach is the “carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis,” which journalist Gary Taubes, Harvard professor David Ludwig, and others have extensively promoted. It suggests that a diet heavy in carbohydrates (especially refined grains and sugars) leads to weight gain because of a specific mechanism: Carbs drive up insulin in the body, causing the body to hold on to fat and suppress calorie burn.

According to this hypothesis, to lose weight you reduce the amount of carb calories you eat and replace them with fat calories. This is supposed to drive down insulin levels, boost calorie burn, and help fat melt away…instead of just cutting calories, you’re supposed to change the kinds of calories in your diet to lose weight.

To his great credit, Gary Taubes was willing to put this hypothesis to the test.  He organized the Nutrition Science Initiative (NuSI) to fund studies that he must have hoped would demonstrate the benefits of low-carb diets.

To its great credit, NuSI recruited highly experienced and respected obesity investigators to design and conduct the studies.

The first of these studies has just been published.   It fully discloses the role of NuSI.

Supported by the Nutrition Sciences Initiative…Nutrition Sciences Initiative (NuSI) convened the research team, helped formulate the hypothesis, and provided partial funding. NuSI and its scientific advisors were given the opportunity to comment on the study design and the manuscript, but the investigators retained full editorial control.

In this case, because I am familiar with the work of some of the investigators, I’m inclined to take these statements at face value.

Here’s what they did.  They put 17 overweight or obese men in a metabolic ward and fed them a very low carbohydrate diet, so low that it would induce fat breakdown and ketosis.  The calories were supposed to be sufficient to maintain weight, but were not.  The men lost weight from water excretion and breakdown of body protein as well as of fat, as is typical of what happens during partial starvation.  Energy expenditure did not increase to the level anticipated from the carbohydrate-insulin model.

The Abstract concluded:

The isocaloric KD [ketogenic, very low carbohydrate diet] was not accompanied by increased body fat loss but was associated with relatively small increases in EE [energy expenditure] that were near the limits of detection [translation: barely detectable] with the use of state-of-the-art technology.

The Discussion concluded:

Therefore, our data do not support the carbohydrate–insulin model predictions of physiologically relevant increases in EE or greater body fat loss in response to an isocaloric KD. However, it is possible that dietary carbohydrate restriction might result in decreased ad libitum energy intake—a prediction of the carbohydrate-insulin model that was not tested in the current study but deserves further investigation.

In other words, restricting carbohydrate does not increase body fat loss or energy expenditure but might help you eat fewer calories.

This result confirms some of the results of a previous study from the first NuSI author. That one, funded by NIH, concluded:

Whereas carbohydrate restriction led to sustained increases in fat oxidation and loss of 53 ± 6 g/day of body fat, fat oxidation was unchanged by fat restriction, leading to 89 ± 6 g/day of fat loss, and was significantly greater than carbohydrate restriction (p = 0.002).

Taken together, these studies show that both low-carbohydrate and low-fat diets cause weight loss when calories are restricted, but low-fat diets cause greater losses in body fat content than do low-carbohydrate diets.

In my book with Malden Nesheim, Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, we review a 1964 study that put obese patients in a metabolic ward and fed them low-calorie diets of widely varied composition.  They lost weight at the same rate on diets ranging from 3% to 60% carbohydrate and from 13% to 83% fat.  They titled the study “Calories Do Count.”  The NuSI studies confirm the benefits of reducing calories from any source to lose weight.

Bottom line:

  • With regard to weight loss, calories count and the relative proportions of fat, protein, and carbohydrate do not matter much (although low-carb diets may help with eating less).
  • With regard to health, the food sources of calories matter very much indeed, and nearly everyone would be better off eating less sugar—at the very least because sugars provide calories, but no nutrients.

*Note: this version corrects an error in the version originally posted.  Hall et al.’s 2015 study was funded by NIH, not NuSI.  Apologies.

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Jul 6 2016

No, butter is not back (eat in moderation, please)

I like butter as much as you do—and definitely more than margarine—but Time Magazine took it to an extreme with its cover story last year on how scientists (they are so dumb) got it wrong.

Hype alert: any time you read that science got it wrong, be skeptical.  Maybe they did, but it’s more likely that the science is still incomplete.

Time Magazine is really dug in on the butter issue.  It continues to insist that scientists were wrong about saturated fats.  Indeed, Time says, its case against saturated fats has just gotten even stronger.

On what basis?  A new study with the provocative title, “Is butter back?”   The study concludes:

This systematic review and meta-analysis suggests relatively small or neutral overall associations of butter with mortality, CVD, and diabetes.

It comes as no surprise that a single food like butter is not linked to a higher risk of heart disease. The highly respected Cochrane Collaboration’s meta-analysis of 15 randomized clinical trials concluded that replacing saturated fat (from all sources) with polyunsaturated fats lowers the risk of heart attacks and other cardiovascular events. (That finding is consistent with clinical studies on blood cholesterol levels and well-designed analyses of observational studies). One would not expect any single food to matter, since people who eat butter don’t necessarily eat an overall diet that is high in saturated fat.

No, butter is not back says the Harvard School of Public Health:

What the headlines miss is that in a meta-analysis such as this, there is no specific comparison (i.e. butter vs. olive oil), so the default comparison becomes butter vs. the rest of the diet. That means butter is being compared to a largely unhealthy mix of refined grains, soda, other sources of sugar, potatoes, and red meat…Here is the most important takeaway from this study not making headlines: Butter, a concentrated source of saturated fat, is still a worse choice than sources of healthy unsaturated fats such as extra virgin olive, soybean, or canola oils.

And just published is the Harvard group’s latest report on the diet and health of tens of thousands of nurses:

Different types of dietary fats have divergent associations with total and cause-specific mortality. These findings support current dietary recommendations to replace saturated fat and trans-fat with unsaturated fats.

Even the “Is butter back?” investigators temper their conclusions:

These findings do not support a need for major emphasis in dietary guidelines on either increasing or decreasing butter consumption, in comparison to other better established dietary priorities; while also highlighting the need for additional investigation of health and metabolic effects of butter and dairy fat.

Time Magazine:  Your science writers need to do a better job of reading the literature and putting new studies in context.

Readers: consider “scientists are wrong” (and, by implication, “we are right”) to be a red flag.  Saturated fat is one nutrient in diets that contain many, and studies that examine the effects of one nutrient without considering the total diet—and calorie balance—are highly likely to require further research.   In the meantime, enjoy butter—in moderation, of course.

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Jul 5 2016

The Disney-funded paper episode comes to closure (I sincerely hope)

My invited, accepted—but omitted—commentary about a study funded by Disney has at last been published by the Journal of the Association of Consumer Research.

In February, I explained how the editors had solicited this commentary, but then given it to the article’s authors to rebut, and allowed me to comment on their rebuttal.  None of this correspondence appeared when the journal published the Disney-funded article.

Could Disney’s involvement have anything to do with this omission?  The editors said no; they had just ran out of page room.

But in April, I wrote about how Stat had obtained e-mails between Disney and one of the authors indicating that the company had attempted to withdraw its study because it feared adverse publicity.  Some of the study’s authors had been associated with the Global Energy Balance Network, the group funded by Coca-Cola to promote the idea that physical activity is more important than diet in maintaining healthy weight.

When I complained about the omission of my accepted piece, the editors arranged to have it and the correspondence published in the journal’s June issue.

While the correspondence was in proof, I added a last line bringing the situation up to date: “Disney’s now exposed attempt to withdraw their paper from publication (Kaplan 2016) provides further evidence for the hazards of industry-funded research.”

Done.  Finished.  Amen.

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Jun 30 2016

The FDA weighs in on GMO labeling

The Senate’s proposed GMO labeling bill gives food companies three options:

  • An on-package code that consumers can scan with a smartphone
  • A 1-800 number
  • A symbol to be developed by USDA

None of these does what Mars is already doing on M&Ms, for example—a straightforward, easy-to-read, quickly understandable statement that the product is “partially produced with genetic engineering.”

 

Now, the FDA has just produced a technical assessment of the Senate bill.

This makes it clear that the Senate has no idea what labeling rules entail.  Some examples:

  • We note that provisions to allow information regarding the GE content of food to be presented only in an electronically accessible form and not on the package label would be in tension with FDA’s statute and regulations, which require disclosures on food labels.
  • We are concerned that USDA’s regulations implementing the mandatory standard under this bill could conflict with FDA’s labeling requirements.
  • We note several points in the drafting of the bill that raise confusion.
  • It appears that the intent is to have the bill apply to all foods except those that are essentially meat, poultry, or eggs, and that the drafters may have assumed, incorrectly, that products covered by the Federal Meat Inspection Act, the Poultry Products Inspection Act, or the Egg Products Inspection Act are not covered by the FD&C Act.
  • [One section requires] the USDA regulations to “prohibit a food derived from an animal to be considered a bioengineered food solely because [of a certain fact]”. This is unclear — the language of “prohibit[ion]” and of ‘be[ing] considered”, if taken literally, would mean that an advocacy group that thought of these foods as being bioengineered would thereby have violated the USDA regulation and could be subject to sanctions.

The Senate bill is decidedly corporate-friendly.  It is decidedly not consumer-friendly.

Clearly, I’m not the only one who thinks so.

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Jun 28 2016

My Time Magazine op-ed: We are still confused about calories

While I was in Israel last week, Time Magazine published an op-ed it had invited me to write.  Here it is.

Even in ‘healthy’ foods, calories can tick up fast

Nutrition professor that I am, if I could teach just one thing to the American public, it is this: Larger portions have more calories.

Please don’t laugh.

If we all understood this, the United States would not have an obesity problem. And the recent revelation that places like Chipotle and Panera serve meals with more calories than McDonald’s would surprise nobody. We would realize the former’s “health” aura blinds people. But this basic rule applies to those places, too.

We would also, strangely, thank McDonald’s for at least one thing: It limits portion sizes. It’s easy to pile on calories by asking for a little more of this, then a refill of that—without realizing that the calories surpass those in McDonald’s meals.

It’s not easy to understand calories. They are not intuitive because they’re abstract. They cannot be seen, tasted or smelled, and are extraordinarily difficult to count accurately, even for scientists. My colleague Lisa Young, author of The Portion Teller, once asked an entry-level nutrition class to guess the calories in 8-ounce and 64-ounce soft drinks. We didn’t expect students to know that an 8-ounce Coke has 100 calories—but we certainly expected them to multiply whatever they guessed by eight for the 64-ounce drink. But the average multiplier was three.

The unintuitive relationship between amounts eaten and calorie intake is one of the reasons behind public health campaigns like the new soda tax in Philadelphia, which in part aims to get people to think twice before drinking sugary beverages. No nutritionist worries about an occasional 90-calorie mini-can of soda. But many people drink sugary beverages in 12-ounce, 20-ounce or liter sizes. Bigger sizes mean more calories, and more calories means more weight unless you compensate with physical activity.

But exercising off calories takes a lot of work. That was the message of aNew York City health department campaign demonstrating the need to walk the three miles from Union Square to Brooklyn to compensate for the nearly 300 calories in a 20-ounce soft drink.

And let’s not forget that all of the calories in soft drinks come from sugars, which provide nothing but calories—no vitamins, no minerals, no fiber. They may be delicious, but they have no redeeming nutritional value. That’s why their calories get called “empty.”

Does where calories come from make any difference? Yes, but in complicated ways. Weight balance depends on calories. But managing weight—and overall health—very much depends on where those calories come from. It’s not so easy to overeat vegetables, fruits and whole grains, or relatively unprocessed foods of any kind, because these tend to be bulky and fill you up before you eat too much. You can still gain weight on these healthy foods, but it’s harder. Chipotle may have healthier calories than McDonald’s, but its calories still count.

Sugars post particular problems because they induce insulin production, but also because they make foods taste good. We eat something sweet and want more of it. We start loving sweet tastes in infancy. Breast milk is sweet; it contains a tablespoon of lactose per cup and that’s there for a reason—to make babies do the work of nursing.

But sodas are very sweet. A 12-ounce soda contains more than threetablespoons of sugars—and the calories that go with them.

It’s also very hard to separate the effects of sugars from their calories. If scientists want to know whether the calories from sugars are worse than those from any other foods, they need to feed people precisely the same number of calories from diets widely varying in their content of sugar, other carbohydrates, protein, and fat for a long enough period of time to get meaningful results. The only way to do something like this would be to keep the study subjects under lock and key for as long as it takes—inconvenient, to say the least, and very expensive.

Until the science is resolved, we can all agree that eating less sugar is a good idea for just about everyone. Sugars are nutritionally empty, are hidden in foods, and encourage overeating.

Notice that I said less, not none. Personally, I love desserts and would never want to give up sugars entirely or ask anyone else to do so. I just follow my own dietary advice: eat lots of vegetables and other relatively unprocessed “real” foods, and for everything else, pay attention to portion size. This way, an occasional sugary treat is a pleasure and nothing to worry about.

Marion Nestle is professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University and co-author of Why Calories Count. Her most recent book is Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (and Winning).

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