Search results: single food agency

This report, Solving the Problem of Childhood Obesity Within A Generation, is a terrific summary of where we stand today on childhood obesity (“the challenge we face”) and what to do about it. The report wants to reduce rates of child obesity to where they were before all this started:

That means returning to a childhood obesity rate of just 5% by 2030. Achieving this goal will require “bending the curve” fairly quickly, so that by 2015, there will be a 2.5% reduction in each of the current rates of overweight and obese children, and by 2020, a 5% reduction.

This seems so modest that it might actually be achievable.

Like most such plans, this one has way too many recommendations, in this case, 70 (the summary table starts on page 89).  These are divided up in categories.  For example:

Recommendations for early childhood

• Educate and help women conceive at a healthy weight and have a healthy weight gain during pregnancy
• Encourage and support breastfeeding
• Prioritize research into chemicals in the environment that may cause or worsen obesity
• Educate and support parents in efforts to reduce kids’ TV and media time
• Improve nutrition and physical activity practices in child nutrition programs.

For empowering parents and caregivers:

• Government should work with local communities to promote the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the 2010 food pyramid.
• USDA and FDA should work with the food and beverage industry to develop standard nutrition labels for packages.
• Restaurants and vending machines should display calorie counts of all items offered.
• The food and beverage industry should extend its voluntary self-regulation to restrict all forms of marketing to children. If this does not happen, federal regulation should be considered
• Media and entertainment companies should limit licensing of popular characters to healthy food and beverage products
• Insurance plans should cover services needed to help prevent, assess, and care for child obesity.

For healthier food in schools

• Update federal standards for school meals and improve the nutritional quality of USDA foods provided to schools.
• Increase funding for school meals.
• Encourage schools to upgrade cafeteria equipment to support healthier foods. Example: Swap deep fryers for salad bars.
• Connect school meal programs to local growers and encourage farm-to-school programs.
• Improve nutritional education in schools and make it more available.
• Increase the use of school gardens to educate about healthy eating.
• Promote healthy behaviors in juvenile correction facilities.

For improving access to healthy foods

• Launch a multi-agency “Healthy Food Financing Initiative” to make healthy foods more available in underserved urban and rural communities.
• Encourage local governments to attract grocery stores to underserved neighborhoods
• Encourage facilities that serve children (e.g., hospitals, recreation centers, and parks) to promote healthy foods and beverages.
• Provide economic incentives to increase production of healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
• Evaluate the effect of targeted subsidies on purchases of healthy foods through nutrition assistance programs.
• Study the effects of state and local sales taxes on calorie-dense foods.

For increasing kids’ physical activity

• School programs should stress physical activity as much as healthy nutrition.
• State and local school programs should increase the quality and frequency of age-appropriate physical education taught by certified PE teachers.
• Promote recess for elementary school students and activity breaks for older students.
• Federal, state, and local agencies should partner with communities and businesses to extend the school day in order to offer physical activity programs.
• The EPA should assist communities building new schools to place them on sites that encourage walking or biking to school.
• Increase the number of safe playgrounds and parks, particularly in low-income communities.
• Encourage entertainment and technology companies to continue developing new ways to engage kids in physical activity.

Good ideas, but there are some things I’m not so crazy about here.  The plan seems awfully voluntary and let’s be pals and all work together. Voluntary, as evidence demonstrates, does not work for the food industry.  Much leadership will be needed to make this plan work.  But these recommendations should give advocates plenty of inspiration to continue working on these issues.

The Washington Post has a particularly good summary of the key recommendations, and singles out the ones aimed at marketing to kids.

Jane Black of the Washington Post is cautiously optimistic.  Me too.

I am, as always, indebted to Bill Marler for his ongoing commentary – often with slide shows – on recalls of foods contaminated with E. coli O157:H7 and other nasty bugs.  He offers ongoing comments about the Christmas eve recall of 248,000 pounds of needle-tenderized steaks.

He points out that the recall now affects people in several states and that the meat was intended for several chain restaurants.   The contaminated meat, produced in Oklahoma, has sickened at least 19 people in 16 states.

Mechanically tenderized “non-intact” beef?  Uh oh.  The great thing about intact steak is that harmful contaminants are on the outside surface; the bacteria get killed by the high heat of searing the outside surface.  You don’t have to worry about the safety of intact steak because its insides are relatively sterile.  But if the steak is pre-treated to tenderize it, watch out!  Tenderizing can drive harmful bacteria right into the interior where they won’t get killed unless the steak is thoroughly cooked.

To explain the problem, Marler posts a slide show from Dave Boxrud.  Here is one of Boxrud’s illustrations:

Marler provides links to documents showing that the USDA has received plenty of recent warnings about the dangers of undercooked non-intact beef.  This is no surprise.  In my 2003 book, Safe Food (coming out in a new edition in 2010), I discuss the USDA’s “testing gap” with respect to nonintact beef.  In 1999, the USDA said that it wanted to extend its testing requirements for ground beef to mechanically tenderized beef that might be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.

In Safe Food, I explain how the beef industry reacted with “shock, disbelief, and anger” to the USDA’s safety proposal.  One industry representative accused the USDA of taking “another step in this administration’s obfuscation of the impeachment activities.” Those activities, of course, referred to the scandal then involving President Clinton and the White House intern, Monica Lewinsky.

Then, the meat industry’s position was that pathogens were inherent in raw meat, cooking kills them, and testing would put the industry out of business. Ten years later, the industry position hasn’t budged. The Washington Post (December 30) quotes beef industry representatives arguing that mechanical tenderizing poses no particular health problems.

According to Food Chemical News (September 28), Congressional representative Rosa DeLauro (Dem-CT), who chairs the House appropriations agriculture subcommittee, has called on USDA to take immediate action to require labeling of meat that has been mechanically tenderized.

And USA Today (December 30) has produced another long investigative report on the safety of school meals, this one citing plenty of examples of companies that successfully produce or serve safe meat and of countries that do food safety better than we do.  In the meantime, the food safety bill is still stuck in Congress.  Let’s hope that it gets moving early in 2010.

Addendum: The New York Times (online December 30) also is interested in beef produced for the school lunch program.  Its reporters investigated safety problems with beef trimmings that had been injected with ammonia to kill bacteria.    Two things about the beef trimmings are especially interesting.  One person is quoted in the article referring to them as “pink slime.”  And they used to be used for pet foods until meat packers figured out that selling them to USDA for school lunches was more profitable.

As for the ammonia treatment: surely this is not the same stuff used to clean bathrooms?  Apparently so.  But using it is tricky.  You have to inject enough ammonia to kill bacteria but if you do the meat smells like an ammonia-treated bathroom.  If you don’t want the meat to smell, you can’t use as much.  But if you don’t use as much, you get Salmonella. This, alas, is another example of regulations not working.

Congress: pass the food safety bill and then start working on a single food safety agency!

Update January 7: The CDC has posted information on its investigation of this outbreak on its website.

I received a flurry of “you should have attended the meeting before you said anything” messages in response to my post yesterday about the FTC forum.  They said the table that I posted did not have footnotes attached and I also had missed a key point about RACC (reference amounts commonly consumed): they are likely to be larger than current FDA serving sizes, meaning that the amounts of sugars and salt will have to be reduced to qualify.

Guilty as charged.  RACC, as I mentioned yesterday, is a new term to me.  This is because – how could anyone have missed this – I was unaware of the FDA’s Federal Register notice of April 4, 2005: “Serving sizes of products that can reasonably be consumed at one eating occasion; Updating of reference amounts customarily consumed; Approaches for recommending smaller portion sizes.”

This notice was the result of concerns about the serving sizes that had been established when the FDA issued final food labeling regulations in 1993.  Then, the FDA established serving sizes for 129 product categories for adult foods and 11 categories for infant and toddler foods.  These were derived from information about amounts commonly consumed reported in food consumption surveys from the late 1970s and late 1980s.

Either people ate a lot less back then or they were lying, or both.  As my former doctoral student, now Dr. Lisa Young, discovered during her doctoral research, standard portion sizes – half a cup of ice cream or one 2 or 3-ounce slice of pizza, for example – are smaller (sometimes much smaller) than what people seem to be actually eating.

The FDA knew this.  In 2003, it appointed an Obesity Working Group to advise the agency about several issues, among them whether to update the RACCs.  The Group filed its report in 2004.  With respect to serving size, it recommended:

* In the short-term, that FDA encourage manufacturers immediately to take advantage of the flexibility in current regulations on serving sizes that allows food packages to be labeled as a single-serving if the entire content of the package can reasonably be consumed at a single-eating occasion.

* In the long-term, that FDA develop two separate ANPRMs [Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking].  The first would solicit comment on whether to require additional columns within the nutrition label to list the quantitative amounts and %DV of the entire package on those products and package sizes that can reasonably be consumed at one eating occasion or, alternatively, declare the whole package as a single serving. This ANPRM would also solicit information on products and package sizes that can reasonably be consumed at one eating occasion.  The second ANPRM would solicit comments on which, if any, RACCs of food categories appear to have changed the most over the past decade and therefore need to be updated.

On that basis, the FDA’s 2005 Federal Register notice asked for comments about whether:

• Consumers might “think that an increase in serving size on food labels means more of the food should be eaten.”
• Manufacturers might repackage products in larger sizes to avoid labeling a package as a single serving.
• Manufacturers might reduce the size of single-serving packages to reduce the apparent content of undesirable nutrients.

That was nearly five years ago.  If anything further happened, I cannot find it in the Federal Register. Getting to these questions at last was apparently the point of the FTC forum.

I am told that panelists suggested raising the RACC serving size of kids’ cereals to 50 grams rather than the current 30 grams.  If so, this would require cereal companies to reduce the amount of sugars in their products.   Aha!  That could explain why, as I discussed in a previous post, General Mills chose to put its full-page ads in newspapers promising to drop the sugars to single digits.  General Mills must think changes in the RACC for cereals will require it to lower the sugars in order to be able to advertise to kids under the voluntary guidelines. Given how long the FDA’s processes take, it is understandable why General Mills failed to say when it would implement its promist.  I am also told that the salt cut-point is open for comment.

For those of us who were not at the Forum and prefer to see such things in writing, how about releasing the footnotes to that chart and giving us some examples of the proposed changes to the RACC?  Also, how about setting up a mechanism so interested people can file official comments on the proposals?  Both would help people offer more informed comments on how the FDA should handle the serving size issues.

Update, December 20: Thanks to Ellen Fried for providing a link to some food industry opinion on what all this is about and another an in-the-know source that says the proposed standards are to be published in the Federal Register and opened for further public comment in January.  The project is to be finished by July.  Ellen points out that this procedure seems administratively complicated for standards that are not regulations; they are voluntary. Do the FTC and FDA really have to go through all this to issue what is simply guidance?  Or is something else going on here that I’m not getting?

Bill Marler has posted a handy link to his Monday night appearance on Larry King Live on which he, and many others, were on to discuss meat safety.  As Marler puts it, the discussion got sidetracked – I would say derailed – from food safety to whether eating meat is good for you or not. Among others, Colin Campbell, the committed vegan scientist who wrote The China Study, was given plenty of air space to argue no it is not.

Despite Marler’s best efforts, and those of mothers and grandmothers of children sickened by eating meat contaminated with E. coli O157:H7, King refused to let anyone get a word in edgewise about the need to fix our food safety system.

Forgive me, but we know what needs to be done about food safety.  As I am ever intoning, we need a single agency devoted to food safety that combines the safety functions of FDA and USDA.  That agency needs to require and enforce a science-based safety system (of the HACCP type) for all foods, from farm-to-table.

Will we ever get it?  Only if people like Larry King catch on to the problem and help generate enough public outrage to get Congress to move on food safety.  King had the chance.  He blew it.

OK, so Bill Marler is a class action lawyer* who makes his living from suing companies that produce unsafe food. I’ll grant that he has a vested interest but I admire the way he never loses sight of the harm done to innocent adults and children.  Cookie dough has a warning label on the package and everyone knows you are not supposed to eat raw cookie dough.  If you eat it, it’s your fault if you get sick, right?  See what he has to say about that one.

In Marler’s view, the warning label on commercial raw cookie dough should read something like this:

THE FDA INSPECTION MEANS NOTHING. THIS PRODUCT MAY CONTAIN A PATHOGENIC BACTERIA THAT CAN SEVERELY SICKEN OR KILL YOU AND/OR YOUR CHILD. HANDLE THIS PRODUCT WITH EXTREME CARE.

And, he asks, “Where is the multi-million dollar ad campaign to convince us of the dangers of uncooked cookie dough, like we do for tobacco?”

I would add a few further questions: What are we going to have to do to get a real food safety system in this country?  By real food safety system, I mean one that requires production of all foods – from farm to table – under science-based food safety plans (HACCP with pathogen reduction), overseen by a single federal agency that unites and rationalizes the current functions of USDA and FDA.

Everyone knows how to produce food safely or a lot more safely than is being done now.  If companies don’t bother, it’s because they don’t have to. You don’t like this?  Complain to Congress!

*Correction: See Mr. Marler’s comment below.  He says he mostly represents individuals.   I do apologize for the error.

Here are a few of the questions I get asked most often. I will be adding to this section as more come up. Enjoy!

Questions

1. I’m really interested in nutrition. How do I study it?
2. I want to study about food. Can I get a degree in Food Studies?
3. I want to do something to improve the food system, nutritional status, and health. How do I get started?
4. I want to work in food policy. How do I get started?
5. I’m a lawyer. I want to work on food issues. How do I get started?
6. I want to find out what Americans eat. What are the best sources?
7. Do trans fats have anything to do with obesity?
8. Are organics worth it?
9. Which is better: organic or locally grown?
10. What’s the deal on soy? Is it good or bad for me?
11. Is high fructose corn syrup good, bad, or indifferent to health?
12. Whose nutrition advice can I trust?

Answers

1. I’m really interested in nutrition. How do I study it?

My first question for anyone who asks me this is what, exactly, do you want to end up doing? There are many approaches to nutrition and you have choices among rather separate fields of study, each with different requirements and training, and each with its own professional journal. An easy way to start figuring this out is to look at the journals and see which one covers work or advertises jobs that might interest you. Here are the most obvious options that lead to professional credentials or degrees:

Clinical Nutritionist: If you would like to work in a hospital or counsel patients about diet and disease, you will need to be credentialed as a Registered Dietitian (RD) and must meet course, degree, and practice requirements of the American Dietetic Association (Journal of the American Dietetic Association).

Nutritionist: If you would like to counsel clients about diet and health, and are quite sure you do not want to work in a hospital or qualify for a state license, you can get a master’s or doctoral degree in nutrition education, nutrition science, clinical nutrition, or any other field (Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior)

Nutrition scientist: If you want to do research, you will need a science degree of some type. Look for a university with a department of nutrition science or epidemiology and apply for masters or doctoral degree programs (American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Journal of Nutrition).

Public health nutritionist: If you want to work with community groups, government agencies, or international agencies, look for degree programs accredited by or affiliated with the American Public Health Association (Journal of the American Public Health Association, Public Health Nutrition). A privately run website makes this easy for you; it describes accredited programs on one site.

Nutrition is a controversial field and credibility is essential. Anyone can claim to be a nutritionist, but to be credible, the more you know about nutrition, the better. Degrees help. I think it’s good to understand as much as you can of the science and its implications for dietary choices. Get a degree of some kind but also read as much and as deeply as you can and form your own conclusions about what you are reading and being told.

2. I want to study about food. Can I get a degree in Food Studies?

As recently as ten years ago, I would have had to answer no, but today students who want to learn more about food have several options. New York University, for example, hosts undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs in Food Studies with a choice of two areas of focus: Food Culture, which examines the social, economic, cultural, and psychological factors that influence food consumption now and in the past, and a brand new program in Food Systems, which traces commodities and agricultural production from farm to table. Boston University has a master’s program in Gastronomy. So does the University of Adelaide in Australia. And if you want to go to Italy, you can study at the University of Gastronomic Sciences, which grew out of the Slow Food movement. I was responsible for starting the NYU program in 1996 so I am prejudiced in its favor but I have talked to graduates of all of the others and they all have great things to say about whichever one they went to. My conclusion: studying about food is so much fun and so useful that anyplace you can do it will be great.

3. I want to do something to improve the food system, nutritional status, and health. How do I get started?

Start by reading a post I did on this topic in 2011. The easiest starting point is to join an organization working on an issue that interests you. In 2011, I posted a list of groups and websites. In August 2012, I posted about such groups and provided a spreadsheet of organizations by category.

In June 2012, the Harvard Food Law Society produced a career guide to relevant organizations, also by category.

I always recommend joining the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) because this group has been at it so long, is so extraordinarily good at taking on the major issues, and is independent of food industry funding. At the very least, subscribe to Nutrition Action Healthletter.

4. I want to work in food policy. How do I get started?

The easiest way to get involved in food policy is to start doing it. If you want to work locally, find a group in your area that is working on the food policy issue that most interests you. There are groups working constantly on food assistance programs, farmers’ markets, food deserts, school food, community gardens, school gardens, urban agriculture, community food security, locally grown food, agricultural sustainability, organic production, the Farm Bill (see list in 2011 blog post). You can usually identify such groups by an Internet search for “food advocacy” in your area. Or read the Edible magazine published closest to where you live. If you want to work on national food policy issues, you might try an internship at a Washington DC-based advocacy group working in your area of interest. For preparation, it helps to know as much as you can—depth and breadth–about the history of food and nutrition policy in the United States, have a firm grounding in how food policy works at the federal agency level (which agency does what), and how Congress and agencies work to implement policies. Much of this can be learned on the ground if you are working with a group engaged in challenging activities. You can also start by writing well researched letters, op-eds, and position papers since these will force you to know what you are talking about and to think clearly about them. What’s stopping you? Just do it!
Michele Simon has similar advice, with some more specifics.

Food Safety News provides a list of private organizations working on food safety issues, as well as public.

5. I’m a lawyer. I want to work on food issues. How do I get started?

Lawyers have important roles in promoting healthy food policies, and the more they know about food culture, history, politics, and even taste, the better. Michele Simon discusses career issues on her website in two posts, one for food policy careers in general and one for lawyers in particular. Go for it!

6. I want to find out what Americans eat. What are the best sources?

My favorite sources of information about the American food supply come from the USDA. The USDA provides data on the availability (“consumption”) of specific foods and food groups in the food supply from 1909 to the present. These figures are reported as pounds of whatever food it is per capita per day. They represent the amount of that food produced in the U.S for an entire year, less exports, plus imports, divided by the number of people in the population on a given day such as July 1. These are the data that used to say that the per capita availability of calories is about 4,000 per day.  USDA now adjusts that figure for waste, which is closer to actual consumption levels.

Actual data on dietary intake are reported at the site of What We Eat in America. These figures are self reports by individuals interviewed in dietary intake surveys. Because people tend to lie about (OK, can’t accurately remember) what they eat, these data underestimate actual intake. Self reports say that people eat about 1,800 to 2,200 calories per day, figures much lower than 3,900. The truth undoubtedly lies somewhere in between.

And in case you would like to know the nutrient composition of foods, the USDA provides that information at yet another site.

7. Do trans fats have anything to do with obesity?

Trans fats raise the risk of heart disease, and that’s why it’s good to have them out of the food supply. Their association with obesity is indirect. They are used in a lot of junk foods because hydrogenation prevents fats from turning rancid. But whatever fats get used to replace trans fats will have the same number of calories. That’s why I wish the FDA would not allow food companies to put “no trans fats” on their package labels. “No trans fats” is a calorie distractor. It makes you think the food is a diet food when, in fact, it has the same amount of calories.

One more point on trans fats: if the Nutrition Facts label says zero for trans fats, but the ingredient list mentions partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, it means that the amount of trans fat present is less than one-half gram per serving. Unless you are a big eater of junk food, that shouldn’t matter much.

8. Are organics worth it?

I think so. In doing the research for What to Eat, I spent a lot of time asking questions about whether the USDA Certified Organic seal meant anything. I concluded that is most definitely does. It means the producer of the food followed rules established by the USDA Organic Standards Board, and was inspected to make sure the rules were followed. The rules say that fruits and vegetables must not be treated with synthetic pesticides or fertilizers and cannot be genetically modified, irradiated, or fertilized with sewage sludge. Food animals must be fed organic feed, may not be treated with antibiotics or hormones, and must be permitted access to the outdoors. When you choose organics, you are voting with your fork for a planet with fewer pesticides, richer soil, and cleaner water supplies—all better in the long run. With that said, the quality of the rules themselves is highly debatable and there is much political jockeying about whether they are too lax or too stringent. I think they can’t be too stringent if anyone is going to trust them and that much vigilance is required to maintain the highest possible standards for organic production. To stay on top of the issues, consult the Organic Consumers Association (and see the chapters on organics in What to Eat).

9. Which is better: organic or locally grown?

My preference is both. When you choose locally grown, you are voting for conservation of fuel resources and the economic viability of local communities, along with freshness and better taste. Whenever I have the choice, my personal priority order is (1) organic and locally grown, (2) either organic or conventional and locally grown, depending on the season, and (3) Conventional (and see the chapters on produce issues in What to Eat).

10. What’s the deal on soy? Is it good or bad for me?

I would put it this way: if you are not confused about soy foods, you must not be reading product advertisements or newspaper accounts of research. For every study in my files demonstrating health benefits of soy foods, I have another disputing those benefits. Soybeans are high in good quality protein (meaning that their proteins are similar in amino acid content to those of meat and dairy foods), contain a good balance of carbohydrate and fat, and are loaded with minerals. Enthusiasts say that soy foods protect against practically any disease you can think of. No one food can possibly be that good. Overall, I find the science to be painfully inconsistent. Some studies find benefits, some find none, and others actually suggest that soy foods might cause the very health problems they are believed to prevent. Soybeans contain proteins found to reduce blood cholesterol levels and the risk of heart disease. They also contain isoflavones that behave in the body like weak estrogen (“phytoestrogens”). Although isoflavones work with soy proteins to reduce blood cholesterol levels, they also act like estrogens–and estrogens are known to increase the risk of breast and other cancers in women. As I explain in the soy chapter of What to Eat, the research is so inconsistent that it is difficult to draw conclusions. I can’t make sense of the health debates about soy foods, not least because so much of the research is sponsored by industries with a vested interest in its outcome. My feeling at this point is that soy is a food, not an essential nutrient. Like any food, you can eat it if you like it, but you don’t have to if you don’t.

11. Is high fructose corn syrup good, bad, or indifferent to health?

You are probably thinking that high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is the new trans fat— something to be avoided at all costs. But HFCS is not poison. It is just sugar in liquid form, differing from common table sugar (sucrose) mainly in how it affects the texture of foods. HFCS, however, is a marker for junk foods. Cheaper than sucrose, it turns up in all kinds of processed foods, particularly soft drinks. And there is nearly as much of it in the food supply as sucrose — 68 pounds per year per person versus 62 pounds for table sugar. Sucrose is a double sugar made of two single sugars — glucose (50 percent) and fructose (50 percent) — stuck together. HFCS also contains glucose and fructose, but the sugars are already separated and their percentages differ slightly. Because sucrose is quickly split by digestive enzymes, the body can hardly tell the two kinds apart. Glucose, by the way, is blood sugar, fructose is fruit sugar, and honey contains both. Fructose — unlike glucose — does not stimulate the release of insulin, and in small amounts can be a useful sweetener for people with diabetes. But fructose is preferentially metabolized to fat, raising the possibility that HFCS — or any other source of fructose (but we won’t worry about fruit) — could have something to do with current obesity trends. Both HFCS and sucrose give us more fructose than we need and for both the advice is the same: eat less.

11.Whose nutrition advice can I trust?

I’m always tempted to answer this question with “mine, of course.” I answered it more seriously in a column I wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle (October 11, 2009). I wrote What to Eat to inspire readers to think about nutrition and to figure out for themselves whose advice makes sense and not. I think some healthy skepticism is useful in interpreting anyone’s advice, even mine. Does the expert have a vested interest that might influence opinion? Does the conclusion of a research study completely contradict everything you’ve heard before? Does it announce a breakthrough? If so, you should be seeing caution signs everywhere. A lot of nutrition is plain common sense. Use it!

Lucien Joppen, who writes for Voedingsmiddelen Industrie, a Dutch food business magazine, asked this question: What does the U.S. election of either Obama or McCain mean for food and health policy? Here’s what I told him in English:

If it is McCain, it is business as usual or – impossible as it may be to imagine – worse. If Obama is elected, things could get better. The decision to vote for Obama may be a matter of the triumph of hope over experience, but everyone I know who cares deeply about social issues wants him to win, and by a huge margin. I do too.

The history of American politics teaches that once elected, candidates do not necessarily keep campaign promises so let’s not deal with the details. Both candidates have issued vague health care proposals and neither seems willing to take on insurance companies and demand what experts believe is absolutely necessary to fix the system: develop a single-payer health care program with universal coverage. If McCain is elected, we have no reason to expect improvement. If Obama wins, we can hope that he will use his mandate to push through a single-payer system.

As for food policy, the big question is who is appointed to lead the USDA. Historically, the USDA has promoted the interests of agribusiness. It still does, but the agency is now also responsible for everything connected to food policy: farm subsidies, land use, organic standards, international food trade, food assistance to low-income families, and dietary advice to the public. If McCain is elected, expect to see another USDA Secretary who represents agribusiness. I do not know who is advising Obama about agricultural issues (he has not asked me, alas), but let’s hope his advisers have a broad view of food and nutrition policy that includes social concerns about food security and food equity. Maybe we will get lucky. Let’s hope for fair weather and a huge voter turnout. Every vote counts, and—according to this video—mine is especially valued (and yours too!).

Here’s what the New York Times has to say about the new report from the FDA’s Science Board. The Science Board is a high-level committee that directly advises the FDA Commissioner (full disclosure: I used to be a consumer representative on that Board). At the Commissioner’s request, it has just issued a no-holds-barred report on the current state of the FDA. Congress, it says, has deliberately taken resources away from the FDA to the point where it cannot possibly do what it is supposed to. The report singles out the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition–the part that deals with food regulation and safety–as a particular target for budget cuts. Since 1992, for example, CFSAN has lost 15% of its workforce, but has far more to do. You think a weak food regulatory agency is maybe not such a good idea? Let your congressional representatives know what you think about this issue. You don’t know who they are? Just go to this site, type in your zip code, and take it from there.