Search results: public health strategies

I learned about this one from FoodNavigator-Europe.

Ashwagandha has ‘tremendous potential’ for promoting healthy aging: Review:  Ashwagandha could serve as a potent anti-aging ingredient by improving immune system function and acting as an antioxidant, according to a review published in Frontiers in Nutrition…. Read more

This is the kind of headline that makes me ask: “Who paid for this?”

FoodNavigator usually provides references, so I could easily look this one up.

The study: Current insights into transcriptional role(s) for the nutraceutical Withania somnifera in inflammation and aging.  Praful Saha, Saiprasad Ajgaonkar,  Dishant Maniar, Simran Sahare, , Dilip Mehta,  Sujit Nair. Front. Nutr., 03 May 2024. Volume 11 – 2024 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fnut.2024.1370951.

Conclusions: “Management of aging is difficult due to its progressive and irreversible nature, as well as the comorbidities associated with aging. However, the quality of biological aging can be improvised by recent advancements including intervention with nutraceuticals that can modulate the transcriptional activity of different genes implicated in aging and age-related complications…Taken together, given the modulation of key RNA markers in aging and inflammation pathways, there is tremendous potential for harnessing the beneficial effects of Withania for achieving healthy aging.”

Funding: “The author(s) declare that no financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.”

Conflict of interest: “PS, SA, DMa, SS, DMe, and SN were employed by PhytoVeda Pvt. Ltd. and Viridis Biopharma Pvt. Ltd., Mumbai, India. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.”

Comment:  I looked up Viridis BioPharma.

Viridis BioPharma is a marketing, manufacturing and research company that deals with active ingredients for the pharmaceutical, nutraceuticals, food and cosmetic industries, medicated dressings and formulations to treat wounds, burns and other novel clinically proven topical formulations.  What drives us is the desire to extend lifespans and, more than that, to extend health and wellbeing at every stage of life.

Employees of this and the other company developed this quite comprehensive review.  The authors state its purpose explicitly.

WS [Withania somnifera] is known for its versatility in treating a range of conditions, such as immunomodulation, rejuvenation, enhancement of cognitive function, inflammation, enhancing concentration, etc. However, a synthetic review exploring its potential role in ameliorating aging and aging-related disorders is currently lacking…This may facilitate the development of various preventive and therapeutic strategies employing WS as a nutraceutical for healthy aging.

Their funding statement is accurate; they weren’t paid particularly to write this article; they are just on salary generally.  And they are members of the editorial board of this journal.  Oh dear.

Here’s what the NIH says about ashwagandha.  It finds some evidence for use but concludes “most studies have been conducted as part of a traditional medical system, so the potential effects of ashwagandha when used as a dietary supplement outside of that approach remain unclear.”

An investigative report from Public Eye and the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN): “How Nestlé gets children hooked on sugar in lower-income countries.”

Nestlé’s leading baby-food brands, promoted in low- and middle-income countries as healthy and key to supporting young children’s development, contain high levels of added sugar. In Switzerland, where Nestlé is headquartered, such products are sold with no added sugar. These are the main findings of a new investigation by Public Eye and the International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN), which shed light on Nestlé’s hypocrisy and the deceptive marketing strategies deployed by the Swiss food giant.

The report points out that Nestlé (no relation) “currently controls 20 percent of the baby-food market, valued at nearly $70 billion.”

Nestlé promotes Cerelac and Nido as brands whose aim is to help children “live healthier lives”. Fortified with vitamins, minerals and other micronutrients, these products are, according to the multinational, tailored to the needs of babies and young children and help to strengthen their growth, immune system and cognitive development….

Spoiler alert: Our investigation shows that, for Nestlé, not all babies are equal when it comes to added sugar. While in Switzerland, where the company is headquartered, the main infant cereals and formula brands sold by the multinational come without added sugar, most Cerelac and Nido products marketed in lower-income countries do contain added sugar, often at high levels.

For example, in Switzerland, Nestlé promotes its biscuit-flavoured cereals for babies aged from six months with the claim “no added sugar”, while in Senegal and South Africa, Cerelac cereals with the same flavour contain 6 grams of added sugar per serving….

Similarly, in Germany, France and the UK – Nestlé’s main European markets – all formulas for young children aged 12-36 months sold by the company contain no added sugar. And while some infant cereals for young children over one year old contain added sugar, cereals for babies aged six months do not.

Do small amounts of sugar like these make any difference to babies’ health?  After all, 6 gram is just a bit more than a teaspoon.

They might make a big difference:

• They get kids hooked on sugars.
• The sugars can add up quickly.

For sure, this report shows is that sugar is not really necessary.  It is there to encourage sales, not health.

The report is getting international publicity:

• The Guardian: Nestlé adds sugar to infant milk sold in poorer countries, report finds
• DE: https://stories.publiceye.ch/nestle-babyfood
• FR: https://stories.publiceye.ch/nestle-bebes
• SP: https://stories.publiceye.ch/nestle-ninos
• PO: https://stories.publiceye.ch/nestle-criancas

I was guest editor for a supplement to the American Journal of Public Health: Policies and Strategies to Increase Equitable Access to Family Nutrition.

It is open access so you can access it here.

I wrote the lead editorial: Equitable Access to the USDA’s Food Assistance Programs: Policies Needed to Reduce Barriers and Increase Accessibility.  113(S3), pp. S167–S170.  

This special supplement to AJPH deals with a critically important topic: enabling and increasing access to federal nutrition assistance programs among low-income Americans who are eligible for these programs but unaware, unable, or unwilling to participate in them. To help identify the barriers to nonparticipation and to recommend policies to reduce them, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded research projects aimed at these goals, especially as they pertain to families with young children.  PDF/EPUB

Editor’s choice

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), as part of its IFAD Research Series, released a report, Overweight and obesity in LMICs in rural development and food systems, along with a literature review.

The report finds obesity rates across developing countries to be approaching levels found in high-income countries.

The study attributes the rise to:

• Food Prices: The price gap between healthy foods (expensive) and unhealthy foods (inexpensive) is greater in developing countries than in rich developed countries.
• Diet: Sugar-sweetened beverage consumption is on the rise in developing countries and the global sales of highly processed foods rose from 67.7kg per capita in 2005 to 76.9kg in 2017.
• Culture: In some developing countries, childhood fatness is associated with health and wealth and consumption of unhealthy foods carries prestige.
• Gender: Women are more likely to be overweight or obese than men in nearly all developing countries.

One strength of this study is its consideration of the need for interventions across the entire food system:

The study results show that food system-related interventions are not overweight or obesity specific. Instead, they tap into the wider field of making diets more healthy and nutritious, and emerge as necessary strategies to set the scene for creating non-obesogenic food supply chains. The identified intervention strategies cut across different food system domains: there were production strategies for improved dietary diversity, strategies for processing (which involved food package labelling or price mechanisms), strategies for changing the food environment and strategies to address consumer behaviour.

Increasingly and more urgently concerned about the effects on children of unrestricted marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages, UNICEF and WHO have produced an invaluable manual on why and how governments must act to curb such marketing.

This is a follow up to the UNICEF report I talked about last week on engagement with food and beverage companies and to the WHO recommendations I posted about yesterday.

WHO and UNICEF are on a roll!

The rationale for this publication:

Food and beverage companies play a significant role in shaping children’s food environments, but their objectives are profit driven rather than child centred. They have a vested commercial interest in increasing sales of their unhealthy products and use highly immersive, engaging – and often unethical – marketing techniques to target children and their caregivers.
We know that food marketing harms children. It negatively affects children’s food preferences, purchase decisions and consumption behaviours, ultimately contributing to childhood obesity and diet-related disease. Food marketing also affects household purchasing decisions and the types of foods that are eaten in the home.

Among this report’s key messages:

• The evidence is clear that food marketing harms children – especially the poorest and most vulnerable.
• Tackling food marketing is challenging: past experience shows that food companies use loopholes and develop new strategies to bypass restrictions.
• Voluntary schemes are ineffective in reducing children’s exposure to foodmarketing.
• Mandatory regulation has the potential to be the most effective path to protecting children from the harmful impact of food
  marketing

Governments must act.  Now.

This exceptionaly timely and important report explains how.

Last week, I attended and spoke at the UNICEF-WHO Global Congress on Implementation of the International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes at WHO headquarters in Geneva.

The meeting was attended by more than 400 government, health, and advocacy representatives from more than 100 countries.  Representatives of infant formula companies were not invited to participate.

Its purpose was to encourage governments to promote and enforce the International Code, which nearly all U.N. member states ratified and committed to in 1981 (the U.S. was a long-standing holdout).

This meant they would control inappropriate marketing of infant formulas by banning advertising to people who are pregnant or nursing, gifts of formula samples, and doing anything to make formula appear superior to breastfeeding.

The logic of the Congress:

• Breastfeeding is the superior method for feeding human babies.
• Successful breastfeeding requires support from families, society, and government.
• It is quite easy to undermine confidence in the ability to breastfeed.
• Formula companies do all they can to undermine confidence in breastfeeding.
• Formula companies’ main goal is to sell more formula.
• Formula companies promote their products as normal and superior.
• Breastfeeding is easier when formula marketing is controlled.y

I talked about the food industry “playbook”—strategies and tactics used by industries (tobacco, chemical, drug, alcohol, and food as well as infant formula) to cast doubt on unfavorable research, fund their own research, and lobby against public health recommendations (photo: Arum Gupta).

Many country representatives discussed the effects of the playbook in their areas, and what they are trying to do to stop formula companies from using  the playbook to get around the Code.

The general consensus:  Formula companies should NOT be allowed to:

• Advertise or market products in violation of the Code.
• Participate in public health policymaking.
• Partner with relevant government agencies or non-governmental groups.

Obviously, formula companies are not happy with such recommendations.  If you would like to see an example of the playbook in action, take a look at the response  from the International Special Dietary Foods Industries.

It was exciting to be with so many people who cared so deeply about this issue.

Resources

• WHO Breastfeeding page
• WHO International Code FAQ
• The Global Breastfeeding Collective

The International Food Information Coouncil (IFIC) headlines its website:  “We promote science-based information on nutrition, food safety and agriculture.”

IFIC is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) education and consumer research organization that communicates evidence-based information on health, dietary patterns, ingredient safety and agricultural production. Our vision is a global environment where credible science drives food decisions.

I have long argued that any time you hear a food company or organization say it is “science-based,” you need to imagine a red warning flag flying into the air.  The term unfailingly means do not criticize food products unless you can prove conclusively that they do harm.  This, of course, is virtually impossible in populations that consume many different foods in meals from day to day.

IFIC lists health organization partners on its website.   Finding out who funds it is not so easy.

IFIC is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization governed by a Board of Trustees, the majority of whom are independent, academic researchers. Our work is primarily supported by grants and contributions from the private sector. IFIC is non-partisan. IFIC does not represent any company, industry or product. IFIC does not lobby or serve as an advocacy organization.

Who in the private sector?  The FAQ takes you to the same health organization partners and to an uninformative 990 tax form.  Who funds IFIC?  According to SourceWatch, food companies used to provide the bulk of funding but I’ve been unable to find a list of current funders.

I’m curious about this because investigators associated with the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins and US Right to Know have just published: “How independent is the international food information council from the food and beverage industry? A content analysis of internal industry documents.”

The study team reviewed emails and documents obtained via public records requests related to IFIC and the IFIC Foundation, with the purpose of describing how IFIC generates and disseminates nutrition information to policy stakeholders and the general public. Results from this content analysis suggest IFIC communicates nutrition information to broad audiences using a variety of tactics designed to shape preferences about the link between unhealthy foods and chronic disease outcomes, manufacture doubt about existing evidence linking certain foods to negative health outcomes, and influence key opinion leaders in academia and government positions to support limited public health interventions designed to reduce consumption of unhealthy foods.

IFIC, they charge, is a food industry front group (this has been known for a long time) Their observations of industry funding sources date to 2018.

I’ve always thought IFIC was the most reasonable of industry front groups, perhaps because of its now former long time president, Sylvia Rowe, who understood consumer concerns exceptionally well.

This paper documents IFIC’s strategies in promoting food industry interests.

Documents

• The news release for this paper
• US Right to Know’s Fact Sheet on IFIC
• Gary Ruskin’s tweet thread on the paper

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The Access to Nutrition Initiative (ATNI) has released its latest Index report on the progress of the 11 largest U.S. food and beverage companies on their commitments to make, market and sell healthy food and drinks.

The report’s dismal conclusion:

While all companies have placed a greater focus on nutrition in their corporate strategies since the first index was released in 2018, their actual products have not become healthier, and they are not making sufficient efforts to safeguard children from the marketing of unhealthy products.

Collectively, these copanies have sales of about $170 billion annually and account for nearly 30% of all U.S. food and beverage sales.

The report’s overall findings (the Index is a composite on a scale of 10):

Specific findings:

• Only 30% of their products meet criteria for “healthy,” 70% do not. This is only marginally better than in 2018 (see link to my post on this below).
• Companies say they have a greater focus on nutrition and health, but are not doing much about it.
• Only four companies are trying to improve the affordability of their healthier products.
• Companies say they are trying to protect children from the harmful effects of marketing unhealthy products, but they are not doing much about it.

ATNI recommends that companies fix these problems and that the government “support such changes by introducing more effective and enforceable standards and legislation that prevent the marketing of unhealthy products and push companies to apply reformulation strategies on their products.

I like this recommendation, despite its being couched as “encourage,” rather than as a demand:

Companies are encouraged to actively support (and commit to not lobby against) public policy measures in the US to benefit public health and address obesity as enshrined in the National Strategy on food, hunger, nutrition, and health

Comment: Results liket these come as no surprise.  To repeat: food companies are not social service or public health agencies; they are businesses with stockholders who demand returns on investment as the first priority.

Expecting companies to change products to make them less attractive or to stop marketing to children means asking them to go against their business interests.

Until companies are rewarded for focusing on social values, public health, and environmental sustainability, ATNI’s evaluations are unlikely to have much of an impact on corporate behavior.

Documents

• The press release
• ATNI US Index Executive Summary
• My post on the 2018 ATNI release
• Note: ATNI is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

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For 30% off, go to www.ucpress.edu/9780520384156.  Use code 21W2240 at checkout.