Search results: natural

Here’s what the FDA is doing these days.

To  my astonishment, the FDA says it will allow a health claim for cocoa flavanols and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.

OK, it’s a qualified health claim, but still.  The whole thing is absurd.

Qualified health claims are just that; they have to include the qualifier which usually says there’s no or not much research to back up the claim.

The FDA gives several examples of what it will allow.  Here are two:

• “Cocoa flavanols in high flavanol cocoa powder may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, although the FDA has concluded that there is very limited scientific evidence for this claim.”
• “Very limited scientific evidence suggests that consuming cocoa flavanols in high flavanol cocoa powder, which contains at least 4% of naturally conserved cocoa flavanols, may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.”

The FDA also says:

This qualified health claim only applies specifically to cocoa flavanols in high flavanol cocoa powder and foods that contain high flavanol cocoa powder. The claim does not apply to regular cocoa powder, foods containing regular cocoa powder, or other food products made from cacao beans, such as chocolate.

Not that anyone can tell the difference.

This silliness came about because  of a petition from the chocolate company, Barry Callebaut AG in Switzerland.

My surprise was that Callebaut was behind the petition, not Mars.

Mars, after all, has been funding this kind of research for years (see my industry-funded study of the week from March 2022).

I can’t wait to see how Callebaut or Mars will use this claim.  I haven’t seen it anywhere yet.  Let me know if you do.

Really, I can’t make this stuff up.

Thanks to Jim Krieger of HealthyFoodAmerica.org for sending me to Food Navigator-USA: Post launches the first-ever cereal designed to promote sleep.

A cereal meant to be consumed at bedtime?  I wanted it for my cereal box collection, and there hasn’t been a good one like this for a long time since the FDA started discouraging ridiculous health claims.  I went straight to the Ithaca Walmart and scored a box.

Sweet Dreams, the box tells you, is “part of a healthy sleep routine.”

The front-of-package claims:

• Made with whole grains
• Supports natural melatonin production with zinc, folic acid, and B vitamins
• Excellent source of Vitamin E for neuroprotection

The back-of-package claims:

• Sleep…We want to help you enjoy it.  With delicious wholesome ingredients, curated vitamins and minerals, and a specially formulated night-time herbal blend, our dreamy cereal is part of a healthy sleep routine.
• Made with a night-time herbal blend containing a touch of lavender and chamomile

I looked up the website:

For 130 million American adults, a good night’s sleep is elusive. You deserve good sleep, and we want to help you enjoy it! So, we made Sweet Dreams cereal, the first ready-to-eat cereal specially designed to support a good sleep routine and a fresh start to the next day…Available in Blueberry Midnight and Honey Moonglow flavors, make Sweet Dreams cereal a part of your bedtime routine and enable a better sleep cycle while satisfying those nighttime food cravings.

Comment:

I hardly know where to begin: “curated vitamins and minerals”?  “Supports natural melatonin production”?

This last is a structure/function claim like those for supplements.  It requires only the barest hint of scientific substantiation.

Reader, I ate it.

The cereal is crunchy, with occasionally visible almonds, but is cloyingly sweet (to my taste): A cup of cereal has nearly a tablespoon (13 grams) of added sugar– 24% of a day’s total sugar allowance.

No wonder it’s so sweet.  Sugars appear seven times on the ingredient list.

Whole Grain Wheat, Rice, Cane Sugar, Almonds, Whole Grain Rolled Oats, Canola and/or Soybean Oil, Flavor Clusters (Sugar, Corn Syrup, Degermed Corn, Palm Oil, Natural Flavor, Cocoa (processed with alkali)(for color), Blueberry and Carrot Concentrates (for color)), Salt, Honey, Corn Syrup, Barley Malt Extract, Molasses, Tocopherols (Vitamin E) to maintain freshness, Natural Flavor.

Post must be trying to sell more cereal.  Eat cereal at night?  Well, if you have sleep problems I suppose you can give it a try.

I ate this cereal in the morning.  It did not make me feel sleepy.

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I don’t know about you but I’m riveted by what’s in the pipeline for cell cultured meat alternatives.   Here are some recent items I’ve been collecting.

Products under development

• Why the first mass-produced cultured meat product won’t be food: While in the long-term, Czech start-up Bene Meat Technologies plans to develop a cell-based steak product for human consumption, its short-term focus has pivoted to cultured pet food, CEO Roman Kříž tells FoodNavigator…. Read more
• Pork and microalgae cells combined in cultivated meat an ‘industry first’: Czech start-up Mewery claims to have developed the first prototype of cultivated meat based on microalgae. The company is already in talks with the Singapore Food Agency, founder Roman Lauš tells FoodNavigator…. Read more
• UK Scientist produce ‘world’s first’ 100% cultivated steak: UK-based scientists have produced the ‘world’s first’ steak fillet made from 100% cultivated meat. Read more

State of the industry

• Cultivated meat in focus at Tufts cellular ag innovation day: From bioreactor bottlenecks to a ‘global battle cry’ for government funding: It’s becoming increasingly clear that early projections about the speed with which cultivated meat might gain market share now seem pretty optimistic. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and significant progress is being made to build the ecosystem needed to sustain a completely new industry, said key stakeholders at an event run by Tufts University on Thursday…. Read more
• Dissecting cultivated meat regulation part 2: What’s working in the US and Singapore, and what’s not?  Both the US and Singapore have seen cultivated meat products pass through their regulatory processes, yet the two governments approach novel foods in different ways. Which challenges and opportunities exist within these regulatory frameworks, and what impact could they have on Europe?… Read more

State of the techno-food scene

• Soylent acquired by Starco Brands as nutrition company shifts into its ‘natural next stage’: Soylent Nutrition is joining public company Starco Brands as part of an acquisition that will keep the plant-based food technology company operating as a separate unit under its current CEO Demir Vangelov.  As part of the transaction, Vangelov told TechCrunch that he will join Starco’s board and is getting shares in the new company, while himself and Soylent’s shareholders will become the largest single voting block in Starco. Other financial details were not disclosed.

Comment

Cell-based meat, meat-plus-algae, and pet food are not yet on the US market so it’s too early to see what they taste like and how well they will do.  I see these products as mostly about mergers, acquisitions, and generating lots of money for investors, which is why I included the Soylent event (Soylent is a nutrient supplement drink, but I put it in the same category of “techno-food”).

Last week I did a post on the FDA’s reorganization.   I should have made one other point: the long-standing inadequacy of FDA funding.  For decades, Congress has assigned tasks to the FDA but provided inadequate funding to do those tasks adequately (hence 1% of imported foods are inspected).  Congress also assigns the funding for specific purposes.

Yes, FDA ought to be doing more, but it is not up to the agency to decide how to deploy its funds.

One more point: For long-standing historical reasons, FDA funding comes from congressional Agriculture committees, even though it is an agency of the Public Health Service.  That is one reason why USDA’s food safety programs are funded at so much higher a level than FDA’s.

With that said, the FDA has come out with some recent initiatives of interest.

I.  Front-of-Package labels.  The FDA is proposing to research a front-of-package symbol: “an easy-to-understand, standardized system that is 1) mandatory, 2) nutrient-specific, 3) includes calories, and is 4) interpretive with respect to the levels of added sugars, sodium, and saturated fat per serving.”

It is doing this in response to a petition from the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

The comments that have come in so far are here.

It is examining the use of front-of-pack symbols in other countries.

It also plans to conduct research on consumer understanding of multiple designs.  Here are the prototype packages on which the designs will be tested.

None of these is likely to be as effective as the ones used in other countries.

Here is one of the better options, in my opinion.

To file comments, go here.  It’s important to do this because the Consumer Brand Association (formerly the Grocery Manufacturers Association) and other industry groups are unlikely to accept any labeling scheme that might discourage you from buying a product.

II.  Qualified health claim: cocoa flavanols.  The FDA has approved a qualified health claim for cocoa flavanols and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.

This was in response to a petition from the Swiss chocolate company, Barry Callebaut.

Here’s what the FDA will allow.  Yes, this is absurd (look at what the FDA has to go through to get to this), but companies must think statements like this will sell their products.

• “Cocoa flavanols in high flavanol cocoa powder may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, although FDA has concluded that there is very limited scientific evidence for this claim.”
• “Cocoa flavanols in high flavanol cocoa powder may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. FDA has concluded that there is very limited scientific evidence for this claim.”
• “Very limited scientific evidence suggests that consuming cocoa flavanols in high flavanol cocoa powder, which contains at least 4% of naturally conserved cocoa flavanols, may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.”
• “Very limited scientific evidence suggests that consuming cocoa flavanols in high flavanol cocoa powder, which contains at least 4% of naturally conserved cocoa flavanols, may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. This product contains at least 4% of naturally conserved cocoa flavanols. See nutrition information for_____ and other nutrients.”

III.  GRAS panels.  The FDA has issued final guidance on best practices for panels deciding which ingredients can be Generally Recognized as Safe.

This lays out the guidelines for

• Identifying GRAS panel members who have appropriate and balanced expertise.
• Steps to reduce the risk of bias, or the appearance of bias, that may affect the credibility of the GRAS panel’s report, including assessing potential GRAS panel members for conflict of interest and the appearance of conflict of interest.
• Limiting the data and information provided to a GRAS panel to publicly available information.

A lot of this is headache-inducing.  FDA rulemaking takes forever.  Can’t wait to see how all this turns out.

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Jonathan Rees.  The Fulton Fish Market: A History. Columbia University Press, 2022.

I really wanted to read this book and was appy to do a blurb for it.

Rees’s history of Manhattan’s Fulton Fish Market is an elegy for a place that reached peak vibrancy in the 1920s, only to decline steadily as a result of overfishing, developers, the Mafia, unions, politics, refrigeration, real estate prices, and, eventually, more developers.  Rees’s thoughtful analysis of these themes has much to tell us about the clash between the natural and built worlds in American cities over the last couple of centuries.

Rees is a history professor at Colorado State-Pueblo, a food historian.  I’ve long wanted to understand the changes I’ve witnessed at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport and the reasons for moving the fish market to Hunt’s Point in the Bronx, a mile from the nearest subway station.

I remember my first visit—at 4:00 am on a cold winter’s day—to the fish market in the mid-1990s.  It was lit up like a stadium, crowded with people, tables covered with fish, and hand-trucks for moving them.  I thought it looked like a move set on which the director has just shouted, “Action.”  We had to move quickly to avoid being hit.

My guide was the chef-owner of a Chelsea fish restaurant who pulled thousands of dollars in cash out of his pockett o pay for the fish he was selecting carefully for the next few days.  His purchases went to a van that would take them to his restaurant within the next hour or so.

We went for coffee at a nearby café and were out of there by 6:00 a.m.

I picked four excerpts from Rees’ book that help explain the history of this place:

(1) Two developments very close to the Fulton Fish Market spurred the transformation of the entire neighborhood into something new by the end of the twentieth century and beyond: the founding of the South Street Seaport Museum in 1967 and the development of the neighborhood by the Rouse Corporation, a Baltimore firm best known for its successful revitalization of the Faneuil Hall area in Boston… More development increased rents. Businesses which made more money than dealing in wholesale fish then bought up properties that the dealers had moved into earlier in the century, thereby changing the character of the neighborhood. The city and the state never deemed the actual fish market worthy of protection. As a result, every new project that made the neighborhood more desirable made it harder for the fish market to stay a fish market.

(2) From a longterm perspective, the geographical advantage of the Fulton Fish Market disappeared when fish stopped arriving there by water….When they arrived in New York by train or truck it no longer mattered where in New York City the fish market happened to be. In fact, with the arrival of modern refrigeration and freezing, you could have moved the largest fish market in America to Connecticut, or South Carolina for that matter….

(3) The original Fulton Fish Market was obviously a market in the sense that it was a place to buy and sell fish, but the longterm historical significance of the place derives more from the other sense of the word “market,” namely the abstract idea that there is a set of dedicated buyers for the good that gets sold there. The wholesalers who ran the Fulton Fish Market expanded the scope of the abstract market in order to keep their physical market going…Nobody really cared about the public good as long as they were all still making money…the actions of the wholesalers who operated there spurred the general indifference of the wholesale fish industry to the problem of overfishing, despite the obvious cost of this behavior to the overall amount of fish in the sea.

(4) In ancient Greece, the marketplace was the center of daily life. The body politic congregated there to interact, make collective decisions and conduct commerce. Fulton Market bore some resemblance to this situation during its early history, but its operations became less public as it evolved into a wholesale market….Today, without a subway stop anywhere near it, average New Yorkers would have difficulty getting to any of the city’s wholesale markets in the South Bronx. Moreover, because of improvements in refrigeration and transportation, wholesale markets aren’t even necessary for restaurants or groceries to operate in the city anymore… These days, it is very easy to forget that Manhattan is an island.

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Jim Krieger of Healthy Food America sent me this Food Navigator article titled “Can ultra-processed packaged food play a role in healthy, sustainable diets of the future.”

Uh oh.  Another attack on the concept of ultra-processed foods.  These, you will recall, are strongly associated in observational studies with poor health outcome, and one clinical trial demonstrates them to cause people to eat more calories.

The makers of highly processed foods are understandably worried that the word will get out and people will stop eating them.

Clif Bar to the rescue.

It sponsored a small session to establish guidelines for making highly processed foods healthier: “Making Healthy, Sustainable Diets Accessible and Achievable: A New Framework for Assessing the Nutrition, Environmental, and Equity Impacts of Packaged Foods”

The publication emphasizes flaws in the concept of “ultra-processed,” an approach it says

lacks the nuance needed to holistically evaluate packaged foods within recommended dietary patterns. Additionally, there is considerable diversity of opinion within the literature on these topics, especially on how best to improve nutrition security in populations most at risk of diet-related chronic disease. In support of addressing these challenges, 8 sustainability and nutrition experts were convened by Clif Bar & Company for a facilitated discussion on the urgent need to drive adoption of healthy, sustainable diets; the crucial role that certain packaged foods can play in helping make such diets achievable and accessible; and the need for actionable guidance around how to recommend and choose packaged foods that consider human, societal, and planetary health.

Acknowledgments: “Staff at Clif Bar & Company developed the meeting agenda, synthesized all prework inputs, participated as observers in the workshop, and assisted in the gathering of the materials used to prepare this manuscript.”

Here is an ingredient list for an oatmeal raisin walnut Clif Bar:

ORGANIC ROLLED OATS, ORGANIC BROWN RICE SYRUP, SOY RICE CRISPS (SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, RICE FLOUR, BARLEY MALT EXTRACT), ORGANIC ROASTED SOYBEANS, ORGANIC TAPIOCA SYRUP, ORGANIC CANE SYRUP, ORGANIC RAISINS, CHICORY FIBER, ORGANIC SOY FLOUR, WALNUTS, SUNFLOWER AND/OR SOYBEAN OIL, NATURAL FLAVORS, SALT, ORGANIC CINNAMON, MIXED TOCOPHEROLS (ANTIOXIDANT).

My definition of ultra-processed is that you can’t make it in your home kitchen because the ingredients are industrially produced and not available in supermarkets.  By this definition, the soy rice crisps are ultra-processed and maybe chicory fiber, but that’s about it.

The Clif people must be worried that they will be viewed in the same category as seriously ultra-processed snack foods.

Let’s give them and their parent company, Mondelez, credit for full disclosure.

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Happy new year to all.!

And now, back to my Monday postings of industry-funded studies.  Today’s is about the popular herbal supplement, ashwagandha.   This is typically taken to reduce stress and improve a wide variety of health problems, but little science backs up those contentions.  Hence, this study, which I learned about from reading an account of it: Single ashwagandha dose may exert cognitive performance: Study.  That headline was all it took to get me to ask my usual question: Who paid for this?

The study: Effects of Acute Ashwagandha Ingestion on Cognitive Function. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19(19), 11852; https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph191911852

Methods: The study assessed performance on the Berg–Wisconsin Card Sorting (BCST), Go/No-Go (GNG), Sternberg Task (STT), and Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVTT) tests.   Participants took a placebo or ashwagandha (ASH) extract (NooGandha^®, Specnova Inc., Boca Raton, FL, USA).

Conclusions: Acute supplementation with 400 mg of ashwagandha improved selected measures of executive function, helped sustain attention, and increased short-term/working memory.

Funding: “This study was funded as a fee-for-service project awarded to the Human Clinical Research Facility at Texas A&M University from Specnova, Inc. (Boca Raton, FL, USA)…Specnova was not involved in any way in data collection, analysis of the data, or the writing of the manuscript.”

Comment: Specnova, you will not be surprised to learn, is a supplier of supplement ingredients.  The company ordered the study to its specifications.  It got the result it wanted, as funders almost invariably do.  Despite booming sales of ashwagandha, so little is known about its properties that the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Medicine does not even have a fact sheet for it among its reviews of herbal supplements.  Industry-sponsored research to the rescue!  And of course it “was not involved in any way…”  It didn’t have to be.  Funding is usually enough to induce unconscious bias on its own.

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Thanks to Larissa Zimberoff (“Technically Food”) for forwarding this gem of a press release.

Grape Consumption Helps Counter UV Damage to Skin

Recent study reinforces promising role of grapes in photoprotection

A recent human study published in the scientific journal Antioxidants found that consuming grapes protected against ultraviolet (UV) damage to the skin.^[1]  Study subjects showed increased resistance to sunburn after consuming 2 ¼ cups of grapes [sic] every day for two weeks. Additionally, subjects displaying UV resistance also demonstrated unique microbiomic and metabolomic profiles suggesting a correlation between the gut and skin. Natural components found in grapes known as polyphenols are thought to be responsible for these beneficial effects.

The title alone makes me ask: Who paid for this?

Here’s the study: ^[1] Pezzuto, J.M.; Dave, A.; Park, E.-J.; Beyoğlu, D.; Idle, J.R. Short-Term Grape Consumption Diminishes UV-Induced Skin Erythema. Antioxidants 2022, 11, 2372. https://doi.org/10.3390/antiox11122372

Funding: “This work was supported in part by the California Table Grape Commission (J.M.P and J.R.I./D.B.).”  The funding statement continues:

The sponsor was not involved in the preparation of the article; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision to submit this article for publication.

Comment: That’s what they all say, despite much overall evidence to the contrary.

Why the sic?  The study was not, in fact, done wtih grapes.,  It was done with “whole grape powder – equivalent to 2.25 cups of grapes per day – for 14 days.”

Are powdered grapes the same as whole grapes?  Would anyone be willing to eat 2.25 cups of whole grapes every day for 14 days?

I like grapes, and grow two kinds on a fence in Ithaca, some for eating, the Concord ones for jam.  Grapes are fruit.  Fruit is good for health.  Eat them if you like them.  They are useful parts of healthy diets.

Are grapes the only fruit that helps counter UV damage to skin?  I doubt it.  But I’m guessing sunscreens work better.

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