While we are on the subject of European decisions on health claims, Kellogg has just petitioned the European Food Safety Authority to be allowed to put claims for weight loss on its breakfast cereals: “Ready-to-eat breakfast cereal can help to reduce body weight, can help to reduce body fat, can help to reduce waist circumference.”

Do you think they mean Froot Loops?

Kellogg is always way ahead of the curve on health claims.  What is especially creative about this one is that the company is filing the claim through “article 13.5,” which means that the “science still remains proprietary and does not require disclosure through this process.  A Kellogg official explained:

As we understand article 13.5, five years after approval of the health claim, the wording can then can be used by other cereal manufacturers but our scientific data does not have to be made public.

EFSA, I hope, will turn this one down flat.  I want to see the science before believing that breakfast cereals are diet products.  Sure they are, if you eat just one serving for breakfast, use one more to substitute for a meal, and then eat a small meal.  That would work.  But so would chocolate bars.

Thanks to Anita Laser Reutersward in Sweden for forwarding the most recent decisions of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) on  petitions for health claims.

Health claims are vitally important to food marketers.  Evidence: they have filed 44,000 petitions with EFSA to date.  EFSA consolidated these into 4,185 claims.  It is dealing with them in batches.

EFSA did not approve many of the 416 petitions in this latest batch :

Experts issued unfavourable opinions on most of the claims in the second series due to the poor quality of the information provided to EFSA including:

• Lack of information to identify the substance on which the claim is based, e.g. “probiotics”
• Lack of evidence that the claimed effect is indeed beneficial to the maintenance or improvement of the functions of the body (e.g. food with “antioxidant properties”)
• Lack of human studies with reliable measures of the claimed health benefit

Its decisions about antioxidants are especially interesting in light of claims on products in American supermarkets.  Under EFSA rules, this Kellogg package would not be allowed.

In its decision, EFSA said:

“On the basis of the data presented, the Panel concludes that a cause and effect relationship has not been established between the consumption of the food(s)/food constituent(s) evaluated in this opinion and (1) a beneficial physiological effect related to antioxidant activity, antioxidant content, or antioxidant properties, and (2) the protection of body cells and molecules such as DNA, proteins and lipids from oxidative damage.”

My translation: EFSA panels took a good hard look at the science and could not find evidence for benefits at the physiological or molecular levels from taking antioxidant supplements or eating foods with antioxidants.

I can’t wait to see how food manufacturers respond.

March 1 update: here come the comments.  According to FoodNavigator.com, EFSA rejected health claims for:

vitamin D, probiotics, green tea, black tea, lutein, beta glucans, meso-zeaxanthin, alpha-lipoic acid, melatonin, peptides, xanthan gum, sugar-free gum, guar gum, gamma-linolenic acid (GLA), fermented whey and linoleic acid.

These decisions “came as a massive blow to the European and international functional foods and nutraceuticals industries, especially the herbal antioxidant and probiotic sectors, which have yet to see a positive NDA opinion.”

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who is clearly serious about sustainable food issues, just issued a new report: FoodNYC: A Blueprint for a Sustainable Food System.

Here are some of its goals:

• Promote urban agriculture
• Connect upstate and Long Island farms with downstate consumers
• Increase the sale and consumption of regionally grown foods
• Increase the number of “alternative” food markets, indoors and outdoors.
• Require a food curriculum in public schools
• Support large-scale and small-scale composting
• Increase access to drinking water fountains
• Support the rights of farm workers
• Create a Department of Food and Markets

If Manhattan can do this, other boroughs (and cities) can do this too!  Let’s do what we can to help Mr. Stringer make these work!

Who knew that the food ingredient business ran on bribes?  The New York Times (print edition) calls its report of the latest scandal, “Hidden Ingredient: The Sweetener.”  By “sweetener,” the Times is not refering to aspartame or even Splenda: it means bribes.

You are an ingredient supplier and want a big food company like Kraft, Frito-Lay, or Safeway to buy your products?  Easy.  Bribe their purchasing managers.

In my book, Food Politics, I discuss food industry sales tactics ranging from soft (advertising, lobbying) to hard (manipulating media, cozying up to federal officials, and suing critics).  These, as I point out, are legal.  Fixing prices, is not.  Neither is bribery.

This is not a pretty story.  Managers were bribed to purchase inferior ingredients such as moldy tomato sauce.  Companies relied on the suppliers for quality assurance.

The moral: companies need to do their own product testing and consumers need to demand that they do.

Thanks to William Neuman of the Times for his excellent investigative report, handicapped as it was by not being able to interview the jailed perpetrators.

I have an editorial with David Ludwig in today’s JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association. NOTE: scroll down to find it).  We titled it, “Front-of-package food labels: public health or propaganda?”

We think it’s time for the FDA to consider getting rid of all of them.  How’s that for an idea?

Here’s what Forbes thinks about it.

And FoodNavigator.com.

Update, February 25: the Los Angeles Times wrote about it.

Jamie Oliver, the British celebrity chef who has taken on school food as a personal crusade against childhood obesity – and with some success in Great Britain – wants to do the same for us.  He is starting with a school in Huntington, West Virginia, a community that gives itself credit for being the unhealthiest in America.

Thanks to NYU student Jessica Watkins for forwarding this video of his plans. The reactions of people in the community to Jamie’s ideas are especially interesting.

This is the start of a TV series.  Is his campaign about theater or is this real public health?  I guess we’ll have to watch and decide.

Update March 7: Here’s Jamie Oliver’s famous TED video.

I’m catching up on my reading and have just gotten to the special 2009 issue of the Journal of Hunger and Environmental Nutrition on food systems and public health.  If you – like most public health people – don’t usually think of agriculture as a major factor in health status, the papers in this journal will come as a revelation.  They demonstrate tight links between agriculture and public health issuees such as childhood obesity, food safety, and environmental health.    Best, they are downloadable at no cost, which means they can be easily shared with students.  I will use them in my food policy class next fall.

European candy makers have been responding to concerns about obesity by taking their ordinary chocolate bars and packaging them so the pack contains two pieces, instead of just one.  Do people eat just one?  According to Dutch researchers, they do not.

Candy eaters “still perceive the entire package as one unit instead of two, because they come in the same wrapper. This also makes them less storable.”

Suggestion: how about making smaller candy bars to begin with?