I keep telling you.   You can’t make this stuff up.  Try these for food politics–in this case, soda politics–in action.

Beverage Association gives $10 million to Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP)

From the Philadelphia Inquirer blog (March 16):

In keeping with a controversial pledge to made last year to City Council as part of an effort to ward off Mayor Nutter’s steep tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, the soft-drink industry will donate $10 million to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia to fund research into and prevention of childhood obesity.

The three-year grant is funded by a new organization, the Foundation for a Healthy America, created by the American Beverage Association, the national trade group representing manufacturers and bottlers. The ABA was instrumental in lobbying Philadelphia City Council to reject Nutter’s proposal to tax sugary drinks at 2-cents per ounce as a way to cut consumption and raise money for the general fund.

In a press release Wednesday, CHOP insisted that it will “retain absolute clinical and research independence,” as the source of its funding for the research is likely to come under attack from those wary of the beverage industry’s influence. That includes funding for clinical studies to be submitted to peer-reviewed publications.

Atkins Obesity Center publishes review of effects of soft drinks on obesity

In a delicious irony, the latest review of this topic comes from the Atkins Center at Berkeley.  Yes, the Atkins Diet Atkins, the one that promotes high-fat, low-carbohydrates, and has everything to gain from proving that sugars are bad for you.

With that duly noted, set the irony aside.  The review was funded by independent agencies and organizations.  Let’s take its results at face value.

The reviewers looked at five kinds of evidence: secular trends, mechanisms, observational studies, intervention trials and meta-analyses.  All supported the idea that

The currently available evidence is extensive and consistently supports the hypothesis that sweetened beverage intake is a risk factor for the development of obesity and has made a substantive contribution to the obesity epidemic experienced in the USA in recent decades.

Sweetened beverages are an especially promising focus for efforts to prevent and reduce obesity for two reasons: (i) the evidence supporting the association between sweetened beverage intake and excess weight is stronger than for any other single type of food or beverage; and (ii) sweetened beverages provide no nutritional benefit other than energy and water.

Coca-Cola funds North Carolina School of Public Health campaign against Childhood Obesity

Isn’t that nice of them?  The apparently unironical slogan of the campaign : “Everything in moderation.”

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation report, “F as in Fat”, features piece by PepsiCo’s CEO

Melanie Warner, writing on bNET, explains that the RWJ Foundation is usually scrupulously independent but that putting Pepsi’s PR piece into its document makes no sense.

A third of the way into the report, up pops a bizarre “personal perspective” from PepsiCo’s (PEP) CEO Indra Nooyi in which she details the many ways her company is working to make America healthier. “Helping consumers by building on our portfolio of wholesome and enjoyable foods is not just good business for PepsiCo -– it’s the right thing to do for people everywhere,” Nooyi chirps in a two-page soliloquy that reads like a press release and touts everything from Pepsi’s pledge to reduce the sodium in its products by 25% by 2015 to its reduced sugar drinks like Trop50 and G2. No other food company is mentioned, just Pepsi.

[This inclusion]…also ties into the ongoing debate about what role the food industry should play in helping Americans slim down. Are food companies trusted partners who are committed to fundamental changes, or is getting people to eat healthier versions of processed food really a whole lot of Titanic deck chairs?

As the research linking soft drinks to obesity gets stronger and stronger, it is no wonder that the Beverage Association is buying off city councils, and soft drink companies are eager to position themselves as helping to solve the problem of childhood obesity, not cause it.

Do these actions remind you of any other industry’s behavior?  Cigarette companies, anyone?

I was surprised to read a report in FoodNavigator.com that a private company is about to conduct an enormous—and undoubtedly very expensive—study of the nutritional status of children in Southeast Asia.

The study will collect data from more than 16,000 children aged 12 and under in four countries:

• Dietary profiles and nutrient intake assessment, including food intake, bone density and cognition.
• Iron status, vitamins, lipid profile and blood pressure.
• Body composition and physical activity, including measurements on weight, height and hand grip strength.

The company is doing this in partnership with institutions in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Why would a private company embark on a project like this?  The company is FrieslandCampina, a Dutch firm specializing in dairy products:

We provide people around the world with all the good things milk has to offer, with products that play an important role in people’s nutrition and well-being.

Our product range: baby and infant food, milk-based drinks, cheese, milk, yoghurts, desserts, butter, cream, milk powder, dairy-based ingredients and fruit-based drinks.

As the company explains, “We aspire to help people move forward in life with our dairy nutrition, and are committed to helping our consumers maintain and improve their nutritional well-being with the goodness of milk.”

I’m willing to predict that these studies will show that kids in Southeast Asia would be a lot healthier if they drank more milk.   And will find reasons to dismiss concerns that lactose intolerance is the norm in Asian populations over the age of five or so.

I’ve been mulling over the article in the New York Times (March 13) about the effects of an itinerant lifestyle and the threat of deportation on the children of farmworkers in California.  If ever there was an example of how the political gets personal, this is it.

The article focuses on a third-grade teacher, Oscar Ramos, who is on the front lines trying to give these kids a chance in life, let alone at the American dream.  It describes what he’s up against: nearly all his students are near the poverty line, and nearly 80% have limited English.  They move frequently and live under crowded conditions.

But the often disrupted lives of the children of migrants here is likely to grow still more complicated as the national debate over immigration grows sharper.

Efforts by lawmakers to rescind automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to illegal immigrants are already stoking fears among many agricultural workers, and that has consequences for their children.

Some parents, as they move with the crops, are already keeping their children out of school when they get to Arizona because they are worried about the bureaucracy and tougher restrictions in the state.

The article is long but well worth reading.  If nothing else, take a look at the photographs.

This is how our relatively inexpensive food gets to us.   The costs, as the economists tell us, are externalized.  Here is one of those externalized costs–the potential of those kids to become functioning citizens in our democratic society.

Today’s New York Times has a story about how Mexico is trying to improve school food in an effort to help prevent childhood obesity.

By all measures, Mexico is one of the fattest countries in the world, and the obesity starts early. One in three children is overweight or obese, according to the government. So the nation’s health and education officials stepped in last year to limit what schools could sell at recess. (Schools in Mexico do not provide lunch.)

The officials quickly became snared in a web of special interests led by Mexico’s powerful snack food companies, which found support from regulators in the Ministry of the Economy. The result was a knot of rules that went into effect on Jan. 1.

“What’s left is a regulatory Frankenstein,” said Alejandro Calvillo, Mexico’s most vocal opponent of junk food, particularly soft drinks, in the schools. “They are surrendering a captive market to the companies to generate consumers at a young age.”

By all reports, schools in many Latin American countries sell candy and soft drinks in lieu of real food.  Kids pretty quickly get used to the idea that those foods mean lunch, and eating them is normal.  Never mind the effects of such diets on teeth—dental decay is increasing rapidly—and body weights.

By coincidence, I just received a paper from Brazilian investigators documenting the way soft drink companies are funding physical education activities in that country.  That’s one way to deflect attention from aggressive marketing in schools and other venues.

Last year, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, and Kraft reported rising profits from overseas sales.  With the U.S. market for their products flat or declining, companies are looking to developing markets for increased sales.  Obesity is sure to follow.

Yet another study confirms the obvious: kids prefer foods with cartoons on the package. Why should this be obvious?  Why else would the cartoons be there if not to sell products to kids?

The latest study comes from the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

It says pretty much the same thing as the study published in Pediatrics last year by investigators from the Yale Rudd Center.

The newer study did something cute. It invented a cereal box and tested kids’ responses to it and variations with and without cartoons of the penguins Mumble and Gloria from the movie Happy Feet .

The results:

• Kids preferred the taste of the cereals with cartoons
• They preferred boxes labeled “Healthy Bits” more than “Sugar Bits”
• They most preferred “Healthy Bits” with a cartoon
• They least preferred “Sugar Bits” without a cartoon

This is why is would be a good idea to just say no to cartoons on food packages aimed at kids.

Michael Osterholm writes in the current New England Journal of Medicine that despite claims that foodborne illness is declining in the United States, that is only part of the story. His editorial refers to the now-published study of Salmonella Saintpaul that I talked about in a previous post.  He says:

All these findings, however, must be interpreted with caution, since most of the decreases occurred between 1996 and 2000, and there has been little additional change since then.

When the 2009 incidence of infections with the eight primary bacterial and parasitic pathogens is compared with their incidence in the period from 2006 through 2008, no significant change can be seen for six pathogens; only the infection rates with shigella and STEC O157 show significant decreases (see graph).

In addition, recent studies have demonstrated a significant increase in the incidence of foodborne disease caused by emerging non-O157 STEC, suggesting that surveillance for O157 is no longer sufficient to determine the effect of foodborne STEC infections.

On the basis of FoodNet data for the past 14 years,we must conclude that the improvements made in the late 1990s in the safety of our food supply are still having a positive effect. But we’ve made little additional progress in the past decade.

The graph he refers to comes from Pathogen. It represents the percent change in laboratory-confirmed foodborne infections from 2006–2007 to 2009.  The horizontal line represents no change.

Food allergies pose labeling and other problems for food manufacturers.  FoodQualityNews.com summarizes recent stories on what’s happening with food allergies, from the perspective of its European food industry clients.

Enzyme treatment may remove peanut allergens, suggests study: An enzymatic treatment process may effectively reduce allergens in roasted peanuts by up to 100 per cent, according to new research.

FoodNavigator conference to address food allergy challenges: Incidence of food allergies and intolerances is on the rise in Europe, and there are big gains to be made by companies who provide products that are safe and enjoyable for sufferers. Some challenges remain, however, such as appropriate labelling, and future threshold levels. 

The balancing act of allergen labelling: The food industry has a responsibility to label allergenic ingredients as big and bold as they can – but also not to over-egg the slimmest of slim possibilities that a trace amount of an allergen may have slipped into a product.
Germany develops rapid detection systems for food allergens

German researchers are aiming to develop rapid detection systems to identify allergenic substances in foodstuffs, according to a workshop on analytical methods for allergen detection staged in Berlin this week. 

UK leads free-from launches in major European markets: Mintel data: People with food allergies and intolerances in the UK have the more new products to meet their dietary needs than consumers in other major European markets, indicates data from Mintel, but there has been a general increase in launches across the EU in the last six years.

Allergy prediction tool could revolutionise allergen labelling: As allergy diagnoses among children continue to rise, a new online calculator is said to provide fast, cheap and highly accurate predictions, with potential implications for better-targeted on-pack allergen labelling.

Allergies, as I have discussed in previous posts, are difficult to diagnose and it’s hard to avoid something you are allergic to if you can’t figure out what it is.  Rates of food allergies seem to be increasing, for reasons not well understood.  The leading hypothesis is cleaner environments, but research can’t confirm that cause.  This is one area where the trite phrase, more research needed, really means something.

I was pleased to see the article in last Sunday’s New York Times about New York City’s efforts to improve school food.   The story focused on PS 56, a school that serves low-income kids in Brooklyn.

The article  describes the food revolution that is taking place in New York City schools, one described in an excellent report by Hunter College faculty.

In singling out PS 56, the writer chose a good example.

I visited there a year or so ago, and wrote about it at the time under the title “School food: it can be done!”  Its cafeteria is an astonishing place.  The food smelled good.  It tasted good.  The staff cared whether the kids ate what they cooked.

When I asked whether this school was typical, the answer was “not exactly.”  How come it worked?  Everyone pointed to the principal, Deborah Clark-Johnson, who believes it’s important to feed kids well and who totally supported the cafeteria staff.

So one way to improve school food is to recruit caring staff.

Another, for older kids, is to encourage them to make better choices.  An article in the Boston Globe discusses Cornell professor Brian Wansink’s work in this area:

But it turns out that students are susceptible to the same marketing strategies that grocery stores have been using for years. Several experiments have shown that children will be more likely to eat items if they see them early in the lunch line and find them attractive and convenient to pick up. Putting fruit in a good-looking bowl works. So does putting a salad bar in a prominent place. Calling your carrots “X-ray vision carrots” can double sales.

I’ve discussed Professor Wansink’s work on lunch line redesign in an earlier post.  It raises an interesting question: is this the right strategy, or should schools just serve healthy food in the first place?

This is worth discussion.  Want to weigh in?