The USDA has released its annual report on Household Food Security in the United States in 2023.

The news is not good.

What’s especially tragic is the reversal of the pandemic decline in food insecurity.

Pandemic income support and higher SNAP benefits did exactly what they were supposed to.  They reduced poverty.

Congress, in its infinite wisdom, stopped those benefits.

The results are entirely predictable.

These, alas, are political choices.

There’s an election coming up soon…

Resources

• Food Security in the U.S.  Food security means access by all people at all times to enough food for an active, healthy life.
• Food Security in the United States
• Household Food Security in the United States in 2023: An estimated 13.5 percent of households (18.0 million) were food insecure in 2023, meaning they had difficulty at some time during the year providing enough food for all their members because of a lack of resources.
• Statistical Supplement to Household Food Security in the United States in 2023: Statistics presented in the supplement are based on data collected in the Current Population Survey (CPS) Food Security Supplement conducted in December 2023.

Thanks to Hugh Joseph for this one: Running for the Ribeye.

Team Beef was created in 2009 by the national beef checkoff program, the marketing and research group that requires beef producers and importers to pay a $1-per-head on animals they market. The stated goal is to “promote beef’s health benefits and showcase people leading active and healthy lifestyles fueled by lean beef,” according to the Cattlemen’s Beef Board website. There are more than 20 teams across the country, each independently run by the respective state’s beef board.

…“Team Beef is a collection of runners and athletes … that believe in beef as a powerful protein to fuel their training and their everyday lives,” said Kentucky rancher Joe Lowe, in a promotional video that includes him cheersing his wife Cassie with beef jerky.

…Some states require that team members go through an online, self-guided course called Masters of Beef Advocacy that trains them on how to speak knowledgeably about environmental sustainability, beef nutrition, animal welfare, and beef safety.

Comment

This is a great way to advertise beef, to associate beef with sports, and to deflect attention from the role of beef production in climate change, antibiotic overuse, and pollution of soil, air, and water.  The checkoff program is a partnership with the USDA.  Extremist Republicans want to get rid of checkoff programs (see Project 2025 agenda).  So do I (politics does indeed make strange bedfellows).

Nutrition Advocacy in Public Interest is “A national think tank on nutrition” in India, “consisting of independent experts in epidemiology, human nutrition, community nutrition and paediatrics, medical education, administration, social work and management.”  This group is calling for regulation of unhealthy  ultra-processed foods. 

This new report gives examples of food product ads, (50 of them) by method of appeal along with what information is concealed.  One example:

Take a look.  These are fun.  It’s terrific to see this kind of analysis coming from India.

We do love sweet foods.  Alas, sugars have calories but nothing else of nutritional value and they are associated with poor health.

What are the poor makers of sugary foods and beverages to do?  Here are some recent approaches.

• Are sweeteners leaving a sour taste with consumers?  An ingredient developed from coca, considered amongst the most illicit and stigmatised plants on the planet, can cut sugar in beverages by up to 40%…. Read more  
• ​Roquette and Bonumose team up to enhance scalability of tagatose, a rare sugar with 92% of the sweetness of sugar, and 38% of the calories:​Bonumose has patented a low-cost production method it claims could catapult rare sugar tagatose from a niche to a mainstream sweetener…Tagatose does not raise blood glucose levels when consumed on its own and is Ketogenic Certified.Discover more
• Are sweeteners good or bad for the planet?  Research suggests some could be more harmful to the environment than others…. Read more

And then there are the safety questions.

But questions about sugar substitutes have been swirling for decades, with scientists and public health officials suggesting they might come with certain health risks of their own. The research on how sugar substitutes affect our bodies is preliminary, complex and sometimes contradictory.

…But longer-term studies on sugar substitutes have found no weight loss benefits, and even some harms. For this reason, the World Health Organization recommended in 2023 that people avoid using sugar substitutes for weight control or better health, citing research that linked them to greater risks of health concerns like Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and earlier death. The sugar alcohols erythritol and xylitol have also been associated with a greater risk of heart attack and stroke.

What to do?  For me this is easy.

• I don’t like the way they taste.
• They are a marker of ultra-processed foods.
• I don’t eat anything artificial if I can avoid it.

How harmful are they?

I don’t know for sure but would prefer not to be a guinea pig.

The World Health Organization has issued guidelines for taxing unhealthy foods: Fiscal Policies to Promote Healthy Diets.

On the basis of current evidence, the WHO recommends:

• Taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs)
• Consideration of policies to tax unhealthy foods
• Consideration of policies to subsidize healthy foods

A recent article explains why the recommendation for SSB taxes is so strong: Sweetened Beverage Tax Implementation and Change in Body Mass Index Among Children in Seattle.

• Findings  In this cohort study of 6313 children living in Seattle or a nearby comparison area, a statistically significant reduction in BMI was observed for children in Seattle after the implementation of a sweetened beverage tax compared with well-matched children living in nontaxed comparison areas.
• Meaning  These results suggest that the sweetened beverage tax in Seattle may be associated with a small but reasonable reduction in BMI among children living within the Seattle city limits.

The World Bank is tracking global SSB taxes in a database.

The Global Food Research Program at University of North Carolina also has a database.  It displays the data in maps.

The news here is the recommendation to start working on tax strategies to reduce consumption of unhealthy foods and promote consumption of healthier foods.

Stay tuned!

I am indebted to Bakery&Snacks, a newsletter I subscribe to, for this unusully enlightening report.

The science of sound: What is it about the crunch that keeps snackers dipping in for more?  The sound of snacking is surprisingly important and impacts the multisensory experience that is so linked to the overall pleasure and satisfaction. From the Crunch Effect to the influence of onomatopoeias, it’s an enlightening subject that no product developer or marketer should ignore…. Read more

I always knew that tons of research went into developing snack foods, but was not aware that the “sound of snacking” mattered so much to sales.

The research demonstrates:

• People eat more pretzels if background noise cancels out the sounds of eating them (this is why restaurants are so noisy?).
• Crisp products produce higher pitched sounds; people wearing headphones eat less.
• Crunching sounds stimulate eating.

Here we have science devoted to pushing snack foods.

The study of chewing sounds involves a lot more than just the crispiness, crunchy or freshness of a product and the consumer’s perception.  It’s a science that involves knowing how the characteristics of the jaw, teeth and soft tissues in the mouth influence the perceived sounds, specifically the bone-conducted sound travelling through the teeth and jaws to the ear*. Then there’s the contribution of air and bone conduction, the number of sound bursts in a bite or chew, the frequency and pressure level and…it gets very complex and scientific.

Snacks, alas, are largely ultra-processed and sources of calories, lots of them (the more snacks, the more calories).

But look at the research, courtesy of this article.  Impressive, no?

• The crunch effect: Food sound salience as a consumption monitoring cue.  Ryan S Elder, Gina S Mohr. Food Quality and Preference 2016, 16(39-46); doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2016.02.015
• Spectral composition of eating sounds generated by crispy, crunchy and crackly foods.  C Dacremont. Journal of Texture Studies (1995) 26(1); doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-4603.1995.tb00782.x
• Analysis of food crushing sounds during mastication: total sound level studies. WE Lee III, MA Schwitzer, GM Morgan, DC Shepherd.  Journal of Texture Studies (1999) 21(2); doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-4603.1990.tb00473.x
• Sound: The Forgotten Flavor Sense.  Editors: Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, Charles Spence.  Multisensory Flavor Perception (2016) 81-105; doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-100350-3.00005-5
• The role of auditory cues in modulating the perceived crispness and staleness of potato chips.   Massimiliano Zampini, Charles SpendFebruary 2005.  Journal of Sensory Studies (2005) 19(5) 347-363, doi:10.1111/j.1745-459x.2004.080403.x
• Figurative Language in Snack Advertising Slogan.  Hosana S. Juanda, A. SupriadiInternational Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation (2022), 5(12); doi.org/10.32996/ijllt.2022.5.12.15
• Crispness, the Key for the Palatability of “Kakinotane”: A Sensory Study with Onomatopoeic Words. Atsuhiro Saita, Kosuke Yamamoto, Alexander Raevskiy, et al.  Foods 2021, 10(8), 1724; doi.org/10.3390/foods10081724\n”,

The walnut industry must be desperate for greater market share.  Walnuts are great and make a terrific snack if you don’t eat too many of them (calories!).  But this is one-food research.  Can one food really make an important difference to health (yes, if you are seriously deficient in essential nutrients but most Americans are not).

One-food research has to be about marketing more than science.

To wit:

A Cross-Sectional Study on the Association of Walnut Consumption with Obesity and Relative Fat Mass among United States Adolescents and Young Adults in NHANES (2003–2020).  2024 Current Developments in Nutrition.  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cdnut.2024.104407

Conclusions: For adolescents girls and young women, dietary intake of walnuts combined with other nuts has the strongest inverse association with measures of obesity.

Funding: This study was funded by the California Walnut Commission.

Comment

The study does not find an association between eating walnuts and obesity in adolescents.  I would not expect it to.  People do not eat that many walnuts.  They get most of their calories from fast and ultraprocessed foods.

The California Walnut Commission would like you to think the calories in walnuts do not count.  In a press release, it points out

Nuts, including walnuts, are nutrient dense and considered a key component of many recommended dietary patterns, including the Mediterranean and vegetarian diets. They are also recommended for daily consumption in the latest U.S. Dietary Guidelines.³ Despite the recommendations, nuts remain under-consumed by the U.S. population,³ perhaps due to nuts being calorie dense, leading to potential concerns that including nuts in the diet could promote weight gain. But new research suggests people, especially Gen Z and millennials, should reconsider nuts, like walnuts.

All true, but nuts in general, not specifically walnuts.  This is about increasing the market share for walnuts as opposed to other nuts.

A reader suggested this report for weekend reading:  Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals : Threats to Human Health: Pesticides, Plastics, Forever Chemicals, and Beyond.

Among the report’s key takeaways:

• EDCs in the environment may contribute to disorders with hormonal underpinnings such as diabetes, neurological disorders, reproductive disorders, inflammation, and compromised immune functioning.
• EDCs do not behave like other chemicals, and current regulatory practices do not account for the ways that EDCs can pose health threats. EDC exposures at even extremely low dosages can alter biological outcomes and the effects of low doses cannot be predicted by the effects observed at high doses. This means there may be no safe dose for exposure to EDCs.
• Products that may contain EDCs include furniture, toys and children’s products, food packaging, electronics, building materials, cosmetics, and many others. People can also be exposed to EDCs from pesticides, air pollutants, industrial waste, and other pathways.

The report reviews the research on pesticides (e.g., glyphosate), plastics and plasticizers (bisphenols, phthalates), household chemicals (arsenic), industrial chemicals (PFAS).  These show up in food and water, which is why they are matters of food politics.

This whole topic can be confusing: so many chemicals, so many effects, so much misinformation (especially from industry)—and you can’t see, taste, smell, or avoid them.

This report explains what everyone needs to know : the science, exposures, health effects, (especially in children), and regulatory needs.

This is a great place to start, troubling as it is to know about EDCs and how little is being done about them.