Search results: Corn sugar

My monthly Food Matters Q and A column in the San Francisco Chronicle appears this weekend:

Are 8 glasses of water a day really necessary?

Q: It’s such a hot summer and I’m sweating all the time, but I don’t feel thirsty. Do I have to force myself to drink eight glasses of water a day?

A: San Franciscans: Please, no complaints about summer fog. Where I live, it’s hot and humid, and staying hydrated takes work.

Everybody needs water to replace the amounts lost through breath, sweating and excretions. In comfortable temperatures, the amounts lost conveniently come out to about a quart of water for every thousand calories consumed. If you eat 2,000 calories a day, you need about 2 quarts of water.

But water equivalents – juice, coffee, tea, soda and anything else with water in it, including food – work just as well. Watermelon is called watermelon for a reason. It is mostly water and perfect for hot summer days.

Mostly, you don’t have to keep track of how much liquid you drink. Thirst takes care of it. If you need water, you feel thirsty and you get something to eat or drink. Problem solved.

But thirst doesn’t work very well at times when it is most needed – in very hot weather, at high altitudes or during heavy exercise. People in hot climates, mountain climbers and athletes have to force themselves to drink.

How can you tell when you need water? This is easy. Look at your urine. If you are dehydrated, your urine is bright yellow and smelly. If you are getting enough water, your urine is pale and practically odorless.

Except for these exceptions, hardly anyone needs to worry about how much water to drink. That “hardly anyone,” however, also includes children and the elderly, who tend not to regulate water balance very well. Beyond these exceptions – as you shivering San Franciscans can attest – thirst works well as a guide to how much to drink.

Q: A young woman I know got a nasty combination of altitude sickness and electrolyte imbalance when she was hiking in the Sierra Nevada. She sipped water constantly, ended up drinking too much, and got so sick from lack of salt that she had to be airlifted out. Are those Gatorade-like drinks that replenish electrolytes any better than plain water when you are hiking or exercising hard?

A: Those drinks might help, but your friend also must not have been eating much on that hike. Foods are excellent sources of electrolytes.

Electrolytes are minerals like sodium, potassium and chloride that help balance blood acidity. They are lost in sweat, which is why sweat tastes salty. Our bodies have plenty of electrolytes. Salt, for example, is usually eaten in great excess. Normal sweat losses don’t matter much, unless we are vigorously exercising or sweating profusely.

But sweating is easy to miss at high altitudes because it evaporates so quickly. The higher the altitude, the easier it is to overlook fluid and electrolyte losses.

High altitude also disrupts normal appetite, so climbers don’t feel hungry or thirsty. Elite climbers know to pack lightweight foods and supplements made especially for that purpose, and to force themselves to eat and drink frequently.

Drinks advertised as electrolyte supplements do indeed contain electrolytes. Gatorade Orange Sports Drink, for example, contains water as the first ingredient, followed by sugars (sucrose syrup, high-fructose corn syrup), flavors and three sources of electrolytes – salt (sodium chloride), sodium citrate and monopotassium phosphate – along with color additives and thickeners.

If you are an athlete working out for an hour or more, Gatorade might replenish your sodium, potassium and chloride more quickly than food can, but not by much. An 8-ounce Gatorade serving provides just 1 percent of the daily value for potassium (30 milligrams) and 5 percent of the daily value for sodium (110 milligrams).

Gatorade is a sweetened drink supplemented with a few salts, but with less sugar and fewer calories than a regular soft drink. On the basis of electrolytes, PepsiCo, its parent company, markets Gatorade as a better choice than any other drink, including water. Nothing, says PepsiCo, rehydrates, replenishes and refuels athletes better. According to Advertising Age, the company backs up that contention with a hefty advertising budget – $118 million in 2009.

Studies do show that replenishing electrolytes is a good thing to do at high altitude or during any other extreme activity. But hikers can do this with food or supplements without having to carry additive-laden sugary drinks in a backpack.

An average carrot, for example, provides 230 milligrams of potassium and 50 milligrams of sodium. Many other vegetables have similar electrolyte profiles. Nobody wants to carry heavy foods up a mountain, which is why sports shops sell dehydrated foods and special supplements for high-altitude climbers.

It’s a good idea to drink water at high altitude, but also to eat plenty of good food at regular intervals.

Marion Nestle is the author of “Food Politics,” “Safe Food,” “What to Eat” and “Pet Food Politics,” and is a professor in the nutrition, food studies and public health department at New York University. E-mail her at food@sfchronicle.com, and read her previous columns at sfgate.com/food.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/07/30/FDD51EK7K0.DTL

This article appeared on page K – 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

I’ve been collecting items on food safety for the last week or two. Here’s a roundup for a quiet Friday in July:

Antibiotics in animal agriculture

     USA Today does great editorial point/counterpoints and here is one from July 12 on use of antibiotics as growth promoters or as  prophylactics in farm animals and poultry.  This selects for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.   If we get infected with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, too bad for us. 

     The paper’s editors think that use of antibiotics for these purposes is irresponsible:  Our view on food safety: To protect humans, curb antibiotic use in animals.

     Dr. Howard Hill, a veterinarian who directs the National Pork Producers Council, defends these uses of antibiotics: Don’t bar animal antibiotics.

The source of the 2006 E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak in California spinach

     USDA and UC Davis investigators are still trying to figure out how the toxic E. coli O157:H7 got onto the spinach. Investigators did not find the bacteria on the spinach field itself, but they did find it in water, cattle, and cattle feces at a cattle crossing over a stream one mile away. Leading hypotheses: runoff from that stream or wild boar.

     Subsequent studies showed low levels of E. coli 0157:H7 in wild animals and birds.  A new study confirms that just under 4% of wild boar harbor the bacteria. 

     The investigators say the spinach outbreak of 2006 was the result of a combination of circumstances: “Everybody is starting to realize that maybe unusually heavy rainfall prior to planting could be an issue in terms of where water is routed.”

     Dairy farming is moving into California’s Central Valley in a big way.  Runoff from those farms will not be sterile and growing vegetables along water routes may be risky.  Compost, anyone?

The chemical behind Kellogg’s cereal recall

     Kellogg recalled 28 million packets of breakfast cereals last month because people reported funny smells and getting sick from something in the packaging.  At first, Kellogg would not say what the chemical contaminant might be.  

     Then it said the chemical is methylnaphthalene. Mothballs! (Are they still making mothballs?  Their smell is unforgettable)

     Tom Philpott’s comments on Grist.com point out what’s really at stake: “And of course, the real scandal is what Kellogg’s is marketing to kids: a tarted-up slurry consisting mainly of sugar, corn products, partially hydrogenated oil, and food colorings. But that’s a whole different story.”

Salsa and guacamole are sources of foodborne illness

     The CDC reports that salsa and guacamole are becoming more frequent sources of contaminants leading to illness.  CDC started collecting information on sources of outbreaks in 1973.  Its first outbreak due to salsa or guacamole occurred in 1984.  Since then, there have been 136 such outbreaks.  Restaurants and delis were responsible for 84%.  Between 1984 and 1997, salsa and guacamole outbreaks accounted for 1.5% of total foodborne outbreaks.  But the percentage rose to 3.9% from 1998 to 2008.

     Moral: make your own!

China deals with melamine in milk powder

     China is taking creative steps to prevent melamine from getting into milk powder and infant formula.  To discourage fraudulent producers from boosting up the apparent level of protein in milk with melamine, it simply reduced the amount of protein required.

The latest on food irradiation

     FoodSafetyNews.com presented a two-part series on food irradiation (part 1 and part 2), both of them quite favorable to the technology. As I discuss in my book, Safe Food, I don’t have any safety ojections to food irradiation, but I consider it a late-stage techno-fix for a problem that should never have occurred in the first place.

     I conclude with my favorite quote from former USDA official Carol Tucker Foreman: “sterilized poop is still poop.”

Enjoy a safe weekend!

USDA has just released  the most recent statistics on use of genetically modified crops in the U.S.

This, of course, does not include sugar beets, which are also in the over 90% range.

How to interpret this?  If you eat any processed foods containing corn, soybeans, or beet sugar, you should assume that they have a high probability of containing genetically modified ingredients.

You don’t like this?  Choose organics!

You think GM foods should be labeled?  Write your congressional representatives!

I’ve heard rumors that some members of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) believe that commentators did not give a fair shake to their recently released report (see previous post).

I complained that the DGAC report is difficult to read because its pieces are presented online in a great many individual pdf files that must be downloaded separately.  Fortunately, Cornell student Daniel Green created a single Web-based file.

I have now read the report, or at least browsed through its 699 pages, and I agree that it is better than it first appeared and deserves a revisit (which I am doing in two parts, the second tomorrow).

As with previous Dietary Guidelines, both politics and science underlie this report.  The science components of this report are stunning—as good as such things get—and make this document an invaluable resource.

Why did everyone, including me, miss this?  Politics, of course.  The politics appear unchanged from previous versions (for that, see Food Politics).

The science in this report gives clear guidance for action.  But the report obfuscates its most important messages.

The Executive Summary makes the advice seem dull. The Summary is the part everyone reads first and often the only part anyone reads.  Try this:

The 2010 DGAC report concludes that good health and optimal functionality across the life span are achievable goals but require a lifestyle approach including a total diet that is energy balanced and nutrient dense…SoFAS (added sugars and solid fats) contribute approximately 35 percent of calories to the American diet….Reducing the intake of SoFAS can lead to a badly needed reduction in energy intake and inclusion of more healthful foods into the total diet.

Obesity, it says, is a big problem.  The food environment is a big problem.  What to do about them?  SoFAS.

The report introduces a new euphemism, SoFAS (Solid Fats and Added Sugars).  The meaning of added sugars is obvious.  But what are solid fats?  For that, you must wait until page 183 (on the Daniel Green file):

Solid fats are fats that are solid at room temperature. Solid fats come from many animal foods and can be made from vegetable oils through hydrogenation. Some common solid fats are butter, beef tallow (tallow, suet), chicken fat, pork fat (lard), stick margarine, and shortening. Foods high in solid fats include many cheeses, creams, ice cream, well-marbled cuts of meats, regular ground beef, bacon, sausages, poultry skin, and many baked goods (such as cookies, crackers, donuts, pastries, and croissants).

Earlier (p. 24), the report listed the principal food sources of SoFAS:

Solid fats (percent of solid fat intake)

• Grain-based desserts, including cakes, cookies, pies, doughnuts, and granola bars (10.9%)
• Regular cheese (7.7%)
• Sausage, franks, bacon, and ribs (7.1%)
• Pizza (5.9%)
• Fried white potatoes, including French fries and hash browns (5.5%)
• Dairy-based desserts, such as ice cream (5.1%)

Added sugars (percent of added sugars intake)

• Soda (36.6%)
• Grain-based desserts (11.7%)
• Fruit drinks (11.5%)
• Dairy-based desserts (6.4%)
• Candy (6.2%)

The report does not say to eat less of these foods; it talks about nutrients.  In various places in the report, the report says [with my comments in brackets]:

• Significantly reduce intake of foods containing added sugars and solid fats because these dietary components contribute excess calories and few, if any, nutrients. In addition, reduce sodium intake and lower intake of refined grains, especially refined grains that are coupled with added sugar, solid fat, and sodium. [Nutrients, not foods].
• Eat less of these: calories from SoFAS, added sugars, solid fats, refined grains, sodium, saturated fat. [Ditto]
• Significantly lower excessive calorie intake from added sugars, solid fats, and some refined grain products. [Ditto]
• Strategies to prevent childhood obesity should include efforts to reduce surplus energy intake, especially energy from foods and beverages that provide empty calories from added sugars and solid fats. [Ditto]
• Intake of caloric beverages, including SSB [sugar-sweetened beverages], sweetened coffee and tea, energy drinks, and other drinks high in calories and low in nutrients should be reduced in consumers needing to lower body weight.  [Only overweight people need to worry about these foods?]

Only once does the report say the clear and simple: “Avoid sugar-sweetened beverages” (p. 65).  Nowhere does it explicitly say to eat less steak, hamburger, French fries, pizza, cookies, or ice cream.

Like previous editions of the Dietary Guidelines, this one talks about foods in the context of eat more (fruits and vegetables).  For eat less advice, it switches to nutrients.  I’d call this obfuscation (and politics).

But the report—for the first time—emphasizes environmental influences on obesity:

The 2010 DGAC recognizes that the current food environment does not adequately facilitate the ability of Americans to follow the evidence-based recommendations outlined in the 2010 DGAC Report. Population growth, availability of fresh water, arable land constraints, climate change, current policies, and business practices are among some of the major challenges that need to be addressed in order to ensure that these recommendations can be implemented nationally.

What business practices?  It doesn’t say.  It does, however, recommend:

• Improve foods sold and served in schools, including school breakfast, lunch, and afterschool meals and competitive foods so that they meet the recommendations of the IOM report on school meals….
• Increase comprehensive health, nutrition, and physical education programs and curricula in US schools and preschools, including food preparation, food safety, cooking, and physical education classes and improved quality of recess….
• Remove sugar-sweetened beverages and high-calorie snacks from schools, recreation facilities, and other places where children gather.
• Develop and enforce responsible zoning policies for the location of fast food restaurants near schools and places where children play….

This is excellent advice.  But how about some suggestions about what individuals might do about it?

The report says little about food marketing.  Beyond “Develop and enforce effective policies regarding marketing of food and beverage products to children…,” the report says virtually nothing about the well documented impact of food marketing on children’s food choices, dietary intake, and health.  Unless I missed it someplace, the research review does not cite the Institute of Medicine’s 2006 landmark report, Food Marketing to Children and Youth: Threat or Opportunity.

It buries the need for policy changes in long wordy lists.  It states the needs for low-income Americans to have access to and afford healthier foods; to produce fruits, vegetables, and grains sustainably; to ensure household food security; to promote sustainable aquaculture; and to encourage the food service industry to serve healthier foods and smaller portions.  It does not—and perhaps cannot—recommend policy changes to achieve these important goals.

Overall, the report contains plenty of material for food, nutrition, and health advocates to work with, but you have to read between the lines to find it.

Recall the process.  This committee’s report is advisory. From 1980 through 2000,  dietary guidelines advisory committees actually wrote the final Dietary Guidelines.   No more.  Since 2005, the sponsoring agencies decide what the Dietary Guidelines will say.

The report is open for public comment until July 8.  If you think the Dietary Guidelines should provide clear, unambiguous advice about how people should eat to avoid obesity and how we can create a healthier food environment, now would be a good time to express your opinion.  Here’s how.

Tomorrow: The reason why this report is an invaluable resource—its science review.

Yesterday, I got a last-minute invitation to listen in on a USDA conference call announcing the release of the report of the joint USDA-DHHS Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (see www.dietaryguidelines.gov).

The call was remarkable for how little information it produced.  It was scheduled for half an hour, but started 12 minutes late.  Officials used most of the time to talk about how the committee was appointed, how the committee process worked, how transparent everything was, and how staff of USDA’s new Evidence-Based Nutrition Library (NEL) provided much of the research basis for the guidelines.  This left hardly any time for asking questions, and only five got asked.

From what I heard, the committee report says pretty much what previous accounts said it would (see my post on this).  If my notes on the call are correct, the committee report will recommend:

• Maintain appropriate body weight through diet and physical activity
• Shift to a more plant-based diet
• Eat more seafood; eat more low-fat dairy products; limit meat intake
• Eat less solid fats; eat less of added sugars
• Reduce sodium; eat fewer refined grains
• Follow physical activity guidelines

Is this news?  Isn’t this always what the dietary guidelines say?  Here, just for fun, are the first set of guidelines that came out in 1980.

The main difference seems to be the way the evidence was judged and in some of the details: the target for saturated fat is 7% and for sodium a gradual reduction to 1500 mg/day.

If so, that’s a lot of trouble to go through to get to basically the same place.  I summarized that place in What to Eat as “Eat less, move more, eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, and don’t eat too much junk food.”  Michael Pollen did it even more succinctly: “Eat food.  Mostly plants.  Not too much.”

So why would two federal agencies and 13 committee members go to all this trouble?

The quick answer is that the agencies have to.  Congress says they have to review the guidelines every five years.

The longer answer, which I discuss in Food Politics and What to Eat, is that every word of the dietary guidelines is fraught with politics.

According to Food Chemical News (June 14),

The document is frequently the source of much controversy in the food industry because of the way it is used to promote certain ingredients and eating habits…Observers expect some controversy this year over recommendations made with regard to salt, a subject discussed frequently in committee meetings, as well a possible suggestion to replace two servings of grain with two servings of vegetables.

Another controversy is brewing in regards to the information on which the report was based. On Friday, the American Meat Institute, the National Cattleman’s Beef Association, the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association and the Grain Foods Foundation were among 23 groups that asked USDA and HHS to provide access to the Nutrition Evidence Library, which contains all the research used by the Dietary Guidelines committee when making their recommendations. “Without access to the data from which the DGAC drew its conclusions and recommendations, the public may not be able to provide meaningful comments,” the letter states.

Right. And now let’s see what the agencies do with this report (here’s the USDA press release on what happens next and how to comment).  This report is, after all, merely advisory. Now, the real politics begins!

Additions:

Here is all the information about the Advisory Committee’s report, and the report itself (but why didn’t they put it in one easy pdf file?).

And here is USA Today’s take on it: “Panel: obesity is century’s greatest public health threat.”

Further addition, June 16: Thanks to Daniel Green (Cornell) for putting the report together in one enormous (19MB) file.

I can hardly believe that Princeton sent out a press release yesterday announcing the results of this rat study.  The press release says: “Rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to table sugar, even when their overall caloric intake was the same.”

How they came to these conclusions is beyond me. Here’s the original paper.

It has long been known that feeding sugars to rats makes them eat more and gain weight.  But, as summarized in Table 1 in the paper, the researchers did only two experiments that actually compared the effects of HFCS to sucrose on weight gain, and these gave inconsistent results.  Their other experiments compared HFCS to chow alone.

The study is extremely complicated and confusingly described.  As best as I can tell, here’s what they found:

1.  The first study used 10 male rats in each group and observed them for 8 weeks.  At the end of the study, the rats fed chow alone weighed 462 grams.  The rats fed sucrose plus chow weighed 477±9 grams.   The rats fed HFCS plus chow weighed 502±11 grams.   The authors say the difference between 477 and 502 grams is statistically significant.  But these rats were offered the sugars for 12 hours per day.  The rats fed HFCS for 24 hours per day, which should be expected to be fatter, were not.  They weighed less (470 grams) than the rats fed sucrose for 12 hours per day.  So these results are inconsistent.

2.  The second study did not compare rats eating HFCS to rats eating sucrose.  It just looked at the effects of HFCS in groups of 8 male rats.

3.  The third study used female rats (number not given) and observed them for 7 months.  At the end of the study period, female rats fed HFCS plus chow for 12 hours a day weighed 323±9 grams.  Female rats fed sucrose plus chow under the same conditions weighed 333±10 grams.   This result is not statistically significant.

Although the authors say calorie intake was the same, they do not report calories consumed nor do they discuss how they determined  that calorie intake was the same.  This is an important oversight because measuring the caloric intake of lab rats is notoriously difficult to do (they are messy).

So, I’m skeptical.  I don’t think the study produces convincing evidence of a difference between the effects of HFCS and sucrose on the body weight of rats.  I’m afraid I have to agree with the Corn Refiners on this one.

So does HFCS make rats fat?  Sure if you feed them too many calories altogether.  Sucrose will do that too.

NOTE 3/26: see point-by-point response to this post by Bart Hoebel, one of the authors of the study, in the Comments below.

Addition, November 23: Thanks to Jeff Walker, professor of Biology at the University of Southern Maine, Portland, for doing a detailed critique of the study, most thoughtful and well worth a look.

If you want to know what’s really happening in the world of food and nutrition, the business pages are a good starting place.  Today’s New York Times business section documents the “stunning” rise in the price of soybean seeds (up 108% since 2001) and corn seeds (up 135%).

Why care?  Genetically modified (GM) varieties are now the majority – and increasingly the vast majority – of crops planted in the United States.   The seeds are patented.  Farmers cannot harvest and save them.  Farmers must buy new patented seeds every year.  And since one company – Monsanto – owns most of the patents, it gets to set the price.

USDA keeps track of the rise in use of GM crops.  Impressive, no?

The USDA does not track GM sugar beets on this chart, but should.  Monsanto also patents GM sugar beets.  The USDA approved Monsanto’s sugar beets in 2005.  By 2009, 95% of U.S. sugar beets were grown from Monsanto’s patented varieties.

Oops.  When it approved the beets, the USDA let them be planted without the required environmental impact statement (EIS).   Advocacy groups argued that the beets should not be planted without that assessment.  A judge agreed and blocked further plantings.  The judge is still sitting on the case.  Until he rules, no GM sugar beets can be planted.

We have a similar situation with GM alfalfa.  This crop was also approved in 2005 without an EIS and also was taken to court and banned.  But now the EIS is done and the USDA has found “no safety concerns.”  Perhaps GM alfalfa will be added to the chart next year?

What are we to make of this?  Is it a good idea for one company to own most of the seeds planted in the United States?  Especially when that company is permitted to enforce its own patent protection and to set its own prices?

The great promise of food biotechnology is that it will feed a hungry planet.  Is this the best way to met world food needs?  Whatever you think of GM foods, these questions are worth pondering.

Thanks to my NYU Medical Center colleague, Dr. Melissa Bender for the alert about the blogosphere fuss over Cascadian Farm Purely O’s cereals.  Apparently, Cascadian Farm, now owned by Big Food General Mills:

quietly changed the recipe for its “Purely O’s” cereal — previously an unsweetened favorite among children/toddlers – to include three times the sugar, as well as new fillers/sweeteners such as corn meal and tapioca syrup. They did this with no announcement on the label, taking advantage of those who trusted the brand for its previous simplicity. Loyal customers, particularly parents who had chosen this product because it was one of the few unsweetened options available, are outraged by this secretive yet major reformulation. Many discovered the change when their children spat out the cereal (myself included).

Her note sent me right to the largest of the three Whole Foods stores within walking distance of my Manhattan apartment.  Purely O’s: 3 grams of sugars, 3 grams of fiber, and 160 mg sodium per serving.

Oops: low-sugar, yes, but only medium-fiber and high in sodium.  Even with 0 grams of sugar, it’s not all that great.  Neither, for that matter, is its non-organic analog Cheerios (1 gram sugar, 3 grams fiber, 190 mg sodium).

At 3 grams of sugar per serving, Purely O’s is still lower in sugar than practically every other cereal in Whole Foods.  Whole Foods does not sell Big Food non-organics, so it does not carry Cheerios.  I had to look hard to find the only cereal lower in sugar than the reformulated Purely O’s: Arrowhead Mills Shredded Wheat, Bite Size (2 grams of sugar, 6 grams of fiber, and only 5 mg sodium).  That one, it seems to me, is a much better choice to begin with, pretty much in the same category as oatmeal (1 gram of sugar, 4 of fiber, and 0 mg sodium).  When it comes to cereal, more fiber the better.  Fiber is the point of breakfast cereal.

So I can’t get too upset about the reformulation of Purely O’s.  It’s simply a business decision, entirely to be expected from Big Food.  Cascadian Farms started out with “humble beginnings” as a maker of organic products, none of them cereals.  It was successful enough to be bought first by Small Planet Foods, and later by General Mills, which wanted to get in on the organic market.  Hence: organic Purely O’s.

General Mills is in business to sell cereal, and Purely O’s just didn’t make it past focus groups, as reported in the Boston Globe earlier this year.  General Mills must think there are too few of its deeply loyal customers to matter.  According to a business school case study, it has a history along these lines.  So chalk this one up to corporate imperatives.

Dr. Bender wrote to General Mills and received a reply that said as much:

Our goal is to give consumers quality products at a good value. Prior to introducing any product, extensive consumer testing is done. We conduct market research and product testing continuously to obtain consumer reaction to existing products and to changes being considered. Only when we feel confident that a product change will broaden its appeal will we alter a product’s formulation. We are sorry that you do not agree that the recent change in Cascadian Farm organic Purely O’s cereal was for the better.

If the bloggers are looking for a replacement, try oatmeal or those cute little bite-sized shredded wheat things.