I’ve only just come across this USDA chart, which first appeared in an article in Amber Waves.
USDA’s Economic Research Service (ERS) researchers looked at 1998-2006 grocery store food expenditures and compared what consumers buy to dietary guidelines for healthy eating.
Oops.
Since 1980, U.S. dietary guidelines have advised eating less sodium (salt is 40% sodium, 60% chloride). Although sodium is an essential nutrient, most Americans consume way more than they need or is good for them—around 3,400 milligrams a day.
The 2010 guidelines advised healthy people to consume no more than 2,300 mg per day (~6 grams, or 1.5 teaspoons). They advised even less, 1,500 mg, for people with or at high risk for high blood pressure. Since blood pressure increases with age in countries with high salt intake, this applies or will apply to just about everyone.
In 2011, the Institute of Medicine said it was imperative to find effective strategies to lower salt intake. This means dealing with processed and restaurant foods, because that’s where most of the salt comes from, as can be seen from this list of major food sources.
Because consumers have no choice about the amount of salt in processed and restaurant foods, education cannot be enough to achieve salt reduction. Scientists in Australia have just proved this point.
Why anyone would think that nutrition education alone would change behavior is beyond me. By this time everyone should know that to change behavior requires not only education, but a food environment—social, political, economic—that supports and promotes the behavior change.
Most dietary sodium comes from processed foods, restaurant foods, and other pre-prepared foods. All the label can do is say ‘don’t eat me’ It can’t help with what people can eat.
The easiest and most effective way to help people reduce sodium intake is to require food producers and food preparers to use less of it. Good luck with that. I’m not optimistic, particularly given the conflicting and confusing science.
Ah yes. The conflicting science. The IOM now says that there’s no evidence one way or the other that reducing sodium below 2,300 mg per day, or even to 1,500 per day, does much good, and that low sodium intakes could be harmful (but this too is controversial).
Yes, they could, but as Mark Bittman blogs,
It may be true that there are no benefits in an ultra-low-salt diet, but almost no one is eating an ultra-low-salt diet. It’s not quite like worrying about whether we get “enough” sugar, but it’s nearly as ridiculous.
And now, as Food Navigator explains, the IOM committee is complaining that its report has been badly misinterpreted. All they said was:
As to whether we should cut back to 1,500 mg or to 2,300 mg sodium a day, meanwhile, the jury is out, says the IOM, not because consuming 1500 mg/day is dangerous, but because there is just not enough data on the benefits of consuming such low levels to support a firm conclusion.
IOM committee members were so bothered by misleading press accounts that they wrote an op-ed to JAMA to clarify:
Rather than focusing on disagreements about specific targets that currently affect less than 10% of the US population (ie, sodium intake of <2300 mg/d vs <1500 mg/d), the IOM, AHA, WHO, and DGA are congruent in suggesting that excess sodium intake should be reduced, and this is likely to have significant public health effects. Accomplishing such a reduction will require efforts to decrease sodium in the food environment….
The bottom line, Bittman says (and I enthusiastically agree), is that
Salt intake — like weight, and body mass index — is a convenient baseline for public policy people to talk about. If you focus on eating less salt — and, indeed, less sugar — you will inevitably eat less processed food, fast food, junk food (it’s all the same thing.) If you eat less processed food (etc.) you eat more real food. If you eat more real food, not only are you healthier, but you probably don’t have to pay attention to how much salt you’re eating. Wowie zowie.
SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, is funded by Title IV in the farm bill, currently under consideration in Congress. It accounts for about 80% of the total farm bill funding, and costs taxpayers about $80 billion a year.
SNAP is an entitlement, which means that everyone who qualifies gets benefits—unless Congress changes that. So far, all it is doing is trying to cut budget.
Although SNAP is under the Nutrition title, little about the program is designed to improve the nutrition and health of participants. But the farm bill has plenty to say about nutrition—just not for SNAP participants.
Much of the Senate version of the Nutrition Title is about continued funding for food assistance programs other than SNAP:
And here’s another one about the Dietary Guidelines for Americans of all things [whose bright idea was this?]:
The Senate bill does have one useful, if poorly funded, piece directed at the health of SNAP participants, and another aimed at retailers:
The House bill does more or less the same with the addition of:
Small-farm activist Ferd Hoefner, policy director at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, said the quarrel over SNAP could rupture a long-standing partnership of rural and urban lawmakers who supported farm programs on the one hand, and public nutrition programs on the other.
“Is this the end of the farm bill coalition?” Hoefner said.
Is it? I wonder if we will ever have a Congress that puts a little vision into this bill and writes legislation to solve some of our country’s agriculture, poverty, and health problems, interconnected as they are.
AGree is a foundation-sponsored group devoted to nonpartisan ways to “transform federal food and agriculture policy to meet the challenges of the future:” future demands for food and improvements in conservation, public health, and agricultural communities.
It has just posted a series of position papers reflecting its members’ short- and long-term thinking about how to:
AGree also offers a report on Facing the Future: Critical Challenges to Food and Agriculture. It has identified a set of strategies in addition to the ones listed above to address the challenges confronting the global food and agriculture system.
These papers are useful for anyone interested in how to improve agricultural systems and it’s great that this group is laying the groundwork for serious thinking about these issues.
Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) held a press conference this morning to announce that 10 health departments, 20 health and consumer organizations, and 41 health professionals (including me) have signed a letter in support of its petition asking the FDA to:
Our letter of support begins:
The undersigned scientists and organizations are concerned about Americans’ excess consumption of added sugars…Every edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (going back to 1980) has recommended reducing consumption of added sugars, but Americans are consuming more added sugars (including sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, and other caloric sweeteners) now than they did in 1980. And that high level of consumption…is contributing to serious health problems.
If the situation with trans fats was any indication, the food industry will reduce the sugars in its products if it has to disclose them.
This is not the first time that CSPI has tried to get added sugars labeled (see petition from 1999). I’m hoping the letter of support will encourage the FDA to take action this time.
Maybe it will even put sugars on front-of-package labels, as the Institute of Medicine suggested in 2011.
USDA’s Economic Research Service has just issued a report, Assessing the Healthfulness of Consumers’ Grocery Purchases.
The bottom line? Americans buy fewer fruits and vegetables than recommended but far more refined grains, sugars, and meat.
Here’s the summary diagram:
These results should not come as a surprise. According to the 2010 Dietary Guidelines, the leading sources of calories in U.S. diets are:
One of the great ironies of food politics these days is this: while journalists and scientists are increasingly documenting the health consequences of diets way too high in added sugars, the producers of two forms of those sugars—sucrose and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—are doing everything they can to decrease their rivals’ market shares.
Once the election is over, I will write about the ugly legal battles between the producers of sugar cane and beets (sucrose) and the corn refiners who produce HFCS. But in the meantime, don’t miss the current issue of Mother Jones.
It has just published an investigative report by journalist Gary Taubes and dental health administrator Cristen Kearns Couzens: Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies: How the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill?
Their report is a detailed account of how the sugar industry manipulated scientists and government officials into overlooking the health problems caused by overconsumption of sugars and instead focusing on overconsumption of dietary fat (both removed from their caloric context, alas).
Their winning campaign, crafted with the help of the prestigious public relations firm Carl Byoir & Associates, had been prompted by a poll showing that consumers had come to see sugar as fattening, and that most doctors suspected it might exacerbate, if not cause, heart disease and diabetes.
With an initial annual budget of nearly $800,000 ($3.4 million today) collected from the makers of Dixie Crystals, Domino, C&H, Great Western, and other sugar brands, the association recruited a stable of medical and nutritional professionals to allay the public’s fears, brought snack and beverage companies into the fold, and bankrolled scientific papers that contributed to a “highly supportive” FDA ruling, which, the Silver Anvil application boasted, made it “unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in coming years.”
The report is accompanied by riveting background information, examples of sugar advertisements, and formerly confidential documents:
Much of what’s in this report came as news to me, but is consistent with what I know. Here, for example, is a comparison of the increasingly complicated and obfuscated sugar recommendations from the Dietary Guidelines for Americans from 1980 through 2010:
“Avoid too much sugar” is still good advice.
And here’s a photo of a billboard in Guatamala, taken a couple of years ago by anthropologist Emily Yates-Doerr. If the sugar industry isn’t selling enough sugar here, might as well push it onto people in emerging economies.
Curl up with Mother Jones over the weekend , hopefully one free of hurricanes (I, along with many others, am still waiting for electricity, water, and heat).
Here’s my monthly (first Sunday) Food Matters column for the San Francisco Chronicle. For links to appropriate resources and what to do to defend the new standards, scroll down to Friday’s post.
Nutrition and public policy expert Marion Nestle answers readers’ questions in this column written exclusively for The Chronicle. E-mail your questions to food@sfchronicle.com, with “Marion Nestle” in the subject line.
Q: Can you please explain to me why the USDA is restricting the number of calories in school lunches. It’s bad enough that school food is so awful that the kids won’t eat it. Now are they supposed to go hungry as well?
A: I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at a question like this or at the uproar over the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s new nutrition standards. As Comedy Central‘s Jon Stewart pointed out in his not-to-be-missed commentary on Sept. 27, if kids aren’t eating the food because they hate it, the calorie limits hardly matter. And if kids are hungry, the remedy is simple: Eat the food.
The new lunch standards hardly call for starvation rations. Kindergarteners through fifth-graders get up to 650 calories. The maximum is 700 for kids in grades six through eight, and 850 for high schoolers. All kids can have extra servings of vegetables. This ought to be plenty to get most of today’s kids – sedentary, underactive and prone to obesity as they are – through any school day.
Let’s face it. This uproar has nothing to do with school food. It has everything to do with election-year politics.
Some Republicans view school meals as convenient generator of emotional opposition to the incumbent president.
You don’t believe me? Take a look at the “No Hungry Kids Act” introduced by Reps. Steve King, R-Iowa, and Tim Huelskamp, R-Kan., both members of the House Agriculture Committee.
Their act would repeal the USDA’s hard-won nutrition standards and prohibit upper limits on calories. As King explains, this is to undo “the misguided nanny state, as advanced by Michelle Obama’s Healthy and Hunger-Free Kids Act.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
Let me briefly review where these standards came from. In 2004, Congress required school districts to develop wellness policies, but left the details up to the districts. In part to resolve the resulting inconsistencies, Congress asked the USDA to develop new nutrition standards. In turn, the USDA asked the Institute of Medicine to study the situation and make recommendations.
The institute’s 2009 report called for aligning school meals with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans by increasing fruits, vegetables and whole grains, but reducing saturated fat, sodium and calories. It suggested encouraging students to try new vegetables by establishing weekly requirements for various kinds, but to limit starchy vegetables like potatoes to one cup a week.
In 2010, Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act which required the USDA to set nutrition standards for all food sold and served in schools, not only at breakfast and lunch, but also at any time during the school day. The USDA used the institute’s report as a basis for its proposals.
These, you may recall, got the USDA in trouble with lobbyists for businesses that supply French fries and pizza to schools. The Senate intervened and amended the agriculture spending bill to say that none of its funds could be used to “set any maximum limits on the serving of vegetables in school meal programs” or “require crediting of tomato paste and puree based on volume.” The results include no weekly limits on French fries; a dab of tomato paste on pizza now counts as a vegetable serving.
With these allowances in place, the USDA released the new standards in January. Most observers viewed them as an important accomplishment of the first lady’s Let’s Move campaign to end childhood obesity within a generation.
What about student outrage that the new meals leave them hungry? As a strong supporter of student activism, I applaud students getting involved in protests. Their actions have already persuaded Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to tell kids to eat healthy snacks if they are hungry.
Perhaps student activism around calories will be a first step toward advocacy for more substantive goals for their education and wellness: more and better paid teachers, better educational materials, more sensible testing, better quality food in schools, and instruction in how to grow, harvest and cook food.
But where, I wonder, are the adults in all of this? Childhood obesity is not trivial in its consequences for many kids, and school food ought to be a model for how healthy, delicious food is normal fare.
Schools in which adults – principals, teachers, school food personnel and parents – care about what kids eat and act accordingly are setting examples that what kids eat matters just as much as what kids learn.
It’s shameful that elected officials would attempt to undermine the health of America’s children for partisan political purposes.
Marion Nestle is the author of “Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics,” as well as “Food Politics” and “What to Eat,” among other books. She is a professor in the nutrition, food studies and public health department at New York University, and blogs at foodpolitics.com. E-mail: food@sfchronicle.com
This session is on Practicing Food Studies. It will be at 5;00 p.m. Details to come.