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I am indebted to Politico Morning Agriculture (behind a paywall but try Twitter) for this riveting item: Major Seafood Dealer and Eight Individuals Indicted for International Wildlife Trafficking

The Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, Environmental Crimes Section, unsealed an indictment charging a major seafood distributor and eight of its employees and associates with smuggling, Lacey Act violations and conspiracy to violate the Endangered Species Act, stemming from their trafficking in large volumes of highly imperiled eels.

The mind boggles.

Who knew that eel poaching and smuggling are major wildlife trafficking problems.

With respect to European eels, exporting them has been illegal since 2010.  But wait.  The indictment gets better:

Despite this ban…the defendants conspired to unlawfully smuggle large quantities of live baby European eels out of Europe, to their eel-rearing factory in China. After rearing the baby eels to maturity, defendants’ Chinese facility would then slaughter and process the eels for shipping to the United States, to be sold as sushi products.

It ends with this caveat:  An indictment is merely an allegation and all defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

I’m due to be called for jury duty.  Is this what I’m in for?

I like French fries as much as anyone but c’mon; they are hardly a health food.

The Alliance for Potato Research & Education sent me a press release about a new study demonstrating that “adding a daily 300-calorie serving of French fries to one’s typical diet every day for one month does not result in differential short-term weight gain or other biomarker changes associated with impaired blood sugar regulation compared to adding an isocaloric daily serving of almonds.”

The study: French-fried potatoes consumption and energy balance: a randomized controlled trial.  Daniel L Smith, Jr, Rebecca L Hanson, Stephanie L Dickinson, Xiwei Chen, Amy M Goss, John B Cleek, W Timothy Garvey, David B Allison.  The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, nqac045, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqac045

Purpose: “We completed an RCT [randomized controlled trial] testing whether increased daily potato consumption influences energy balance (specifically, fat mass (FM)) compared with calorie-matched almond consumption.”  Participants were given 300 calories a day in either fries (~3 oz) or almonds (~40).

Conclusion: There were no significant differences in FM [fat mass] or in glucoregulatory biomarkers after 30 days of potato consumption versus almonds. Results do not support a causal relationship between increased French fried potato consumption and the negative health outcomes studied.

Funding: This study was supported in part by a grant from the Alliance for Potato Research and Education (APRE) to DBA and DLS, by Core services through NIH grant awards P30DK056336 and P60DK079626 and the donation of study food items by J.R. Simplot Company.

Comment:  I’m not surprised by this result.   Biomarkers depend on everything you eat, not just one food.

The purpose of this study was to take away any guilt you might feel about eating French fries.   The potato alliance got the result it wanted.

Yesterday I reported about the COSMOS clinical trial demonstrating reductions in mortality among people taking cocoa flavanol supplements.

That trial had another arm: multivitamin supplements.

The study: Multivitamins in the Prevention of Cancer and Cardiovascular Disease: The COSMOS Randomized Clinical Trial.  Sesso HD et al.  The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, nqac056, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/nqac056

Conclusion: The supplements did not reduce cardiovascular disease, cancer, or all-cause mortality in older men and women.

Funding: The COcoa Supplement and Multivitamin Outcomes Study (COSMOS) is supported by an investigator-initiated grant from Mars Edge, a segment of Mars dedicated to nutrition research and products, which included infrastructure support and the donation of study pills and packaging. Pfizer Consumer Healthcare (now part of GSK Consumer Healthcare) provided support through the partial provision of study pills and packaging.

Conflicts of interest: Drs. Sesso and Manson reported receiving investigatorinitiated grants from Mars Edge, a segment of Mars Incorporated dedicated to nutrition research and products, for infrastructure support and donation of COSMOS study pills and packaging,
Pfizer Consumer Healthcare (now part of GSK Consumer Healthcare) for donation of COSMOS study pills and packaging during the conduct of the study. Dr. Sesso additionally reported receiving investigator-initiated grants from Pure Encapsulations and Pfizer Inc. and honoraria
and/or travel for lectures from the Council for Responsible Nutrition, BASF, NIH, and American Society of Nutrition during the conduct of the study. No other authors reported any conflicts of interest.

Comment: Pfizer, of course, makes Centrum multivitamin supplements aimed at older adults.

I was surprised by this part of the trial because previous studies have also shown no consistently beneficial effect of supplementation of individual vitamins or multivitamins on disease risk.  Pfizer must have hoped to find benefits for Centrum.  This is a rare industry-supported study that showed no benefits and is, therefore, worth attention.

Corby Kummer sent me this ireport from the Food is Medicine Initiative (he is one of the authors).

This is an initiative of the Aspen Institute Food and Society Program, which aims to find practical solutions to food system challenges and inequities.

I’ve previously written about this program’s food worker safety guidelines.

Now, the Institute and its collaborators have come up with a Food is Medicine Research Action Plan.

The Plan begins with the premise that Food is Medicine interventions improve health and quality of life as well as curb health care costs.

Food is Medicine interventions:

• Medically tailored meals
• Medically tailored groceries
• Produce prescriptions

The report provides the background—the health implications of food insecurity, key federal nutrition programs, the history (with a a handy timeline), the existing research basis, and case examples—for these interventions.

The Action Plan is an agenda for the kind and quality of research that needs to be done to link these and other interventions to reduction of food insecurity and improved health.

• Researchers: this report has anything you need to write a grant to do research in this area
• Advocates: this report has whatever you need to justify action.

Food is Medicine Resources

• Website
• Research Action Plan 
• Webinar 
• Graphics 
• Toolkit

Sarah Vogel.  The Farmer’s Lawyer: The North Dakota Nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm.  Bloomsbury, 2021.

This book comes with an impressive collection of blurbs from the likes of Willie Nelson, Dan Barber, Ricardo Salvador, and Fred Kirschenmann, and, fittingly, with one from John Grisham on the cover because much of the book reads like something out of one of his thrillers.

The book tells two stories, both amazing.

The first is how Vogel, as a young lawyer, filed a class-action suit representing small farmers who had been treated terribly by a USDA agency, the Farmers Home Administration.  This agency started during the Great Depression as a way to help small farmers survive from year to year through loans and other measures.

But early in the Reagan years, the agency switched to treating farmers harshly, quickly foreclosing on unrepaid loans, garnishing bank funds, and forcing the farmers off their land—in violation of the agency’s own rules.  Most of the book is about how Vogel took on these cases, pursued them carefully, and, incredibly, won.

The second story is about the personal cost of this case to Vogel, who worked without pay during the years this litigation was in the works.  Without a salary, she couldn’t keep up her own mortgages, lost two houses, and lived hand to mouth.

It’s hard to believe anyone would take on a case like this at such risk, but the book is also about her dedication to a cause she deemed too important to abandon.

The book is packed with legal details but so well written and is so compelling that I could hardly put it down.

And the good guys won!

For that alone, the book is inspirational.  And I love the way she ends it.

The North Dakota Nine had small to midde-sized farms.  In the 1980s, their lives were very difficult.  In today’s economy, they wouldn’t have a prayer.  But farmers like them are exactly the kind of farmers we need today: farmers who will love their land, grow crops as well as communities, plant trees, care for their animals, and leave the earth better than when they found it.  In the big picture, farmers like them can help solve global warming, revitalize the countryside, and provide abundant, healthy food…We can save farmers, protect the environment, solve the hunge crisis, and rebuild rural and urban economies from the ground up…if we act soon.

Yes!

Jerry Hagstrom did a review of this book a couple of weeks ago on his Hagstrom Report.  Here’s his list of resources:

 Sarah Vogel
 — “The Farmer’s Lawyer”
 Prairie Public Newsroom – Sarah Vogel: “The Farmer’s Lawyer”
 – Author Sarah Vogel reads from “The Farmer’s Lawyer”
 AgWeek – Thankful for new FFA chapter, affordable food, ag lawyer Sarah Vogel
 Capital Journal – Attorney worked to stop foreclosures during ’80s farm crisis
 The Christian Science Monitor – ‘The Farmer’s Lawyer’ tells a David and Goliath legal story

Nicolette Hahn Niman.  Defending Beef: The Ecological and Nutritional Case for Meat (revized and expanded second edition). Chelsea Green, 2021. 

This is an updated edition of Hahn Niman’s 2014 book, which I wrote about in October that year.  Then, it was titled Defending Beef: The Case for Sustainable Meat Production.

I did a blurb for the book when it first came out and it still holds for this new edition:

Issues related to the long-term health effects of red meat, saturated fat, sugar, and grains are complex and I see the jury as still out on many of them.  While waiting for the science to be resolved, Hahn Niman’s book is well worth reading for its forceful defense of the role of ruminant animals in sustainable food systems.

In my 2014 post, I said:

The subtitle says it all: “The Manifesto of an Environmental Lawyer and Vegetarian Turned Cattle Rancher.”

Really?

Really.  She’s not kidding.

As [my blurb] might suggest, I have a more cautious interpretation of the science she summarizes, but there are plenty of reasons why eating meat can help improve human nutrition, especially when the animals are raised as humanely and sustainably as possible, which the Nimans most definitely do on their beautiful Bolinas ranch. [Photos are here]

Vegetarians: does she convince you?

Let the debates begin.

Well, 7 years later the new edition focuses much more on arguments about the effects of beef production on climate change and whether plant-based meat alternatives are worth the trouble.

The big news:  Hahn Niman is no longer a vegetarian.

I may once have believed that if I followed a vegetarian diet, nothing would have to die for my meals.  I now see how wrong I was…My primary mission these past two decades has been helping, in whatever ways I can, build a more environmentally sound, nourishing and humane food system.  We have a long way to go.  I don’t urge people to eat meat.  But I certainly don’t urge refraining from it, either.  I encourage omnivorous eaters to seek well-raised meat.  Abandoning meat will not positively affect the food system and may diminish one’s health.  The greatest consumer impact will come from people who eat meat actually buying it from good sources. (p.244)

I am with her on all of that.

That meat has nutritional and ecological benefits is beyond dispute.  This books lays out her point of view about the reasons for these benefits in an especially thoughtful way that carefully considers the counter-arguments.

Whether you agree with her views or not, this is the book to read about these issues.

I learned about this study from an article in FoodNavigator.com, “Baobab industry welcomes study linking the fruit to good gut health.”

The title raised the question, “Who funded this?”  Bingo, as it turns out.

Baobabs are enormous African trees that produce a highly fibrous fruit.

I can’t say it looks particularly yummy.  In fact, it is described as “floury, dry, and powdery” and works best as a powdered ingredient.

But the baobab industry?  Who knew such an entity existed?

It does.  Hence this study:

The study: A Pectin-Rich, Baobab Fruit Pulp Powder Exerts Prebiotic Potential on the Human Gut Microbiome In Vitro.  Martin Foltz, Alicia Christin Zahradnik, Pieter Van den Abbeele, Jonas Ghyselinck, Massimo Marzorati.  Microorganisms. 2021 Sep 17;9(9):1981.

Methods: Test tube mixing of baobab powder with colonic bacteria.

Results: Baobab fruit pulp powder boosted colonic acidification across three simulated human adult donors due to the significant stimulation of health-related metabolites.

Conclusions: Overall, Baobab fruit pulp powder fermentation displayed features of selective utilization by host microorganisms and, thus, has promising prebiotic potential.

Funding: The studies described in this manuscript were performed at the request of and were funded by Döhler, 94295 Darmstadt, Germany  Surprise!  This company makes baobab powder.

Conflict of interest:  M.F. and A.C.Z. are employees of Döhler. While M.F. participated in the design of the study, the interpretation of the data, and the revision of the manuscript, M.F. did not participate in the collection and analyses of data.

Comment: No food, product, or ingredient is too obscure to avoid industry attempts to demonstrate that it can be marketed as a “superfood” (see, for example, this product).

Reference: For a summary of research on the “funding effect”—the observation that research sponsored by food companies almost invariably produces results favorable to the sponsor’s interests but that recipients of industry funding typically do not recognize its influence—see my book, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.

Digital marketing, especially when targeted to children, is a rising source of concern and for well-documented reasons.

Two reports provide the data.  The big issue?  Digital marketing promotes unhealthful eating.

I.  From the World Health Organization’s Regional Office in Europe: Digital Food Environments Factsheet

Digital technologies are becoming integrated to varying degrees into everyday life across the 53 countries of the WHO European Region. The increase in digital technologies can increase the convenience of food and prepared meals. A recent unrepresentative survey of 10 European countries found that every fifth meal was consumed outside of the home, with 80% from commercial outlets. The influence of digitalization on dietary behaviour, however, is not well understood, raising questions about its influence on the health and nutrition of adults and children.

II.  From the U.S. Center for Digital Democracy comes Big Food, Big Tech, and the Global Childhood Obesity Pandemic

The full report

Some of the largest food and beverage corporations—including Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Pepsi—have, in effect, transformed themselves into Big Data businesses, acquiring specialist firms, establishing large in-house operations, and hiring teams of data scientists and technology experts to direct these systems. With these enhanced capabilities, they can more effectively engage in ad targeting—whether on the leading platforms or through their own mobile apps.

The Executive Summary

A growing body of academic research has documented the increasing presence of unhealthy food promotion in digital media, as well as clear patterns of youth engagement with major brands, and influences on health behaviors.

The Press Release

Tech platforms especially popular with young people—including Facebook’s Instagram, Amazon’s Twitch, ByteDance’s TikTok, and Google’s YouTube – are working with giant food and beverage companies, such as Coca Cola, KFC, Pepsi and McDonald’s, to promote sugar-sweetened soda, energy drinks, candy, fast food, and other unhealthy products across social media, gaming, and streaming video. The report offers fresh new analysis and insight into the most recent industry practices.

Comment: All this calls for regulation, of course.  Any chance of that coming our way?