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PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, has released its REPORT TO THE PRESIDENT A Vision for Advancing Nutrition Science in the United States.

I learned about the report from a Tweet (X): 

I wrote about an earlier draft of the report in a previous post: The federal vision for chronic disease prevention: individual behavior, not the environment.  I called for the report to take on the need for fundamental improvements in the food environment aimed at preventing obesity-influenced chronic diseases.

If you read the fine print, the report has indeed done some of that.  It now mentions ultra-processed foods, for example,

people’s food selections are complex, influenced by various factors in a multifaceted U.S. (and global) food ecosystem, with many of these factors beyond an individual’s control, e.g., increased production and availability of ultraprocessed foods which are associated with overconsumption and obesity. In addition to widespread availability of inexpensive ultra-processed foods, the U.S. food environment has undergone huge changes in recent decades, including easy access to low-cost fast food and eating away-from-home becoming much more common…in the era of widespread internet and digital technology access and use, people’s food habits increasingly are influenced by advertising and social media, which are sources of both facts and misinformation. Acknowledging and understanding these factors and their intersections is critical to addressing nutrition-related health disparities.

It also says useful things like these:

• new emphasis must be placed on nutrition research that can equitably and effectively help all Americans achieve better health.
• [needed is an] equity focus that particularly considers those who are disproportionately affected—racially, ethnically, and socially minoritized groups—due to long-standing and structural inequities which make it hard for many people to eat healthy and be physically active.
• For such a highly developed nation, the U.S. has distressingly high rates of food insecurity, imbalanced nutrition, and inequities in food access, all further exacerbated by the pandemic.  With diet-related disease rates increasing, we have responded by focusing resources on costly medical treatments, further widening disparities and directing efforts away from prevention or addressing social determinants of health and a food environment that for too many Americans does not provide or promote good nutrition. The only way to reverse these trends and achieve robust health for our nation is to focus on prevention, which will require significant modifications of our overall food environment and must be informed by improved nutrition research.
• Preventing diet-related chronic diseases is among the most urgent public health challenges facing the nation.

Despite these statements, its two recommendations say nothing beyond the need for coordination aimed at addressing that challenge.

1. The Administration should implement a coordinated and sustained federal interagency effort, co-led by HHS and USDA, to strengthen the nutrition science base for current and future public and private sector actions to reduce the burden of diet-related chronic disease and maintain momentum toward the President’s 2030 goal.

2. To ensure equitable access to the benefits of nutrition research, federal agencies should prioritize equity in nutrition research, focus research on improving program delivery, continue efforts to diversify the nutrition science and dietetics workforce and engage the academic and private sectors in multisector research and intervention initiatives.

Yes, coordination would be a big help.  Nutrition research is all over the place at the federal level.  So would increased funding for nutrition research aimed at improving the food environment to prevent chronic disease.  Only a tiny fraction of the NIH budget goes for this purpose.  NIH’s main nutrition focus is “precision nutrition” aimed at individuals, not public health.  And much of the USDA’s nutrition funding goes to the kinds of industry-funded studies I post here on Mondays.

The report mentions what’s needed in theory; it ducks dealing with the tough politics of chronic disease prevention.

And alas, it did not cite my suggestions for what is needed (which I had sent to the committee).

So where is leadership for chronic disease prevention at the federal level?  It’s in an odd place at the moment, as I will discuss tomorrow.

Lots of people are uncomfortable about the concept of ultra-processed foods, the category of processed foods made mainly of industrially extracted ingredients, containing little or no recognizable food, and able to reproduced in home kitchens only if you have the ingredeients and the equipment.

Here is an example: The Guardian headline: “Ultra-processed foods are not more appealing, study finds”

The Study: Evidence that carbohydrate-to-fat ratio and taste, but not energy density or NOVA level of processing, are determinants of food liking and food reward.  Appetite, Volume 193, 2024, 107124, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.appet.2023.107124.

• Purpose: “This virtual (online) study [highlighted so you won’t miss this point] tested the common but largely untested assumptions that food energy density, level of processing (NOVA categories), and carbohydrate-to-fat (CF) ratio are key determinants of food reward.”
• Method: “Individual participants (224 women and men, mean age 35 y, 53% with healthy weight, 43% with overweight or obesity) were randomised to one of three, within-subjects, study arms: energy density (32 foods), or level of processing (24 foods), or CF ratio (24 foods). They rated the foods for taste pleasantness (liking), desire to eat (food reward), and sweetness, saltiness, and flavour intensity (for analysis averaged as taste intensity).”
• Results: Against our hypotheses, there was not a positive relationship between liking or food reward and either energy density or level of processing. As hypothesised, foods combining more equal energy amounts of carbohydrate and fat (combo foods), and foods tasting more intense, scored higher on both liking and food reward. Further results were that CF ratio, taste intensity, and food fibre content (negatively), independent of energy density, accounted for 56% and 43% of the variance in liking and food reward, respectively. We interpret the results for CF ratio and fibre in terms of food energy-to-satiety ratio (ESR), where ESR for combo foods is high, and ESR for high-fibre foods is low.”
• Conclusion: “We suggest that the metric of ESR should be considered when designing future studies of effects of food composition on food reward, preference, and intake.”I ca

Comment

I can’t say this any better than Stuart Gillespie, who posted:

https://twitter.com/stuartgillesp16/status/1729061409202618512?s=51&t=BTlnSTTeO7_vUXAOw5KNXg

Or Tamar Haspel (@Tamar Haspel) who points out:

Want to find out what properties of food drive consumption?

Is it fat/carb ratio, degree of processing, sweetness?

I’m gonna say asking a self-selected group of internet randos to rate a bunch of really unappetizing photographs isn’t the way.

If nutrition and food scientists want to shoot down the concept of ultra-processed foods, they are going to have to refute hundreds of studies linking such foods to poor health outcome, as well as the carefully controlled clinical trial demonstrating that ultra-processed foods encourage overeating.

If

A group with which I was unfamiliar, PropellerFish, sent me a report of a survey it conducted: Partisan Wellbeing in America.

Earlier this year, we sponsored a study to take a more robust look at how partisanship may be shaping people’s decisions around health, nutrition and wellbeing.
We conducted a quantitative survey with 1,400 Americans across the country and further engaged 450 of those respondents in qualitative writing assignments.
We then ran in-home ethnographies with eight participants who epitomized the perspectives we encountered to put that learning into context.

They were particularly interested in the views of people in conservative small towns.  For example:

Overall, foods were perceived as liberal when they:

• Symbolized privilege
• Signaled entitlement
• Were associated with liberal causes (e.g., climate change)
• Were associated with a liberal place (e.g., California)
• Is viewed as technologically advanceed

America;s divisions, they conclude, are rooted in distinct world views.

Small town conservatives are concerned that eating healthfully will alienate their peers.

How to fix this?

• Make healthier choices more accessible.
• Associate healthier choices with hard work.
• Connect healthier choices to rural social issues.

I like qualitative research.  It gets at voices and let’s them be heard.

What PropellerFish found here is not particularly surprising, but it’s the first time I’ve seen such views presented so clearly.

Worth a look?  I think yes.

I was induced to watch all of this video because Chris MacAskill, whom I do not know personally but who quoted me a couple of times briefly in a previous show, starts out his investigations by displaying my book Food Politics.  

This is titled, “How Food Myths SPREAD: Fact Checking Dr David Diamond”

I don’t know Dr. Diamond either, but he has some unusual and quite strong opinions about nutrition, which MacAskill, a historian, demolishes one after another.

MacAskill checks references, demonstrates the flaws in statements taken out of context, and does so carefully, compellingly, and entertainingly.

This is really worth watching (and I do appreciate the shout outs).

While I’m catching up on items I’ve been wanting to post about I ran across this report from NIH about its nutrition research initiatives. 

Some highlights:

• NIH’s total investment in nutrition-related research was approximately $2.0 billion in FY20 and $2.1 billion in FY21.
• Nutrition research funding increased by approximately $510 million—a 25 percent overall increase—from FY14 to FY21
• Approximately half of the nutritionrelated projects in FY20 and FY21 were related to prevention or obesity.
• NIH sponsored workshops on Precision Nutrition, Food Insecurity, and Conflicting and Controversial Health Information in the Media
• Nutrition research comprises just under 5% of total NIH research obligations.
• NIH sponsored a study in 2021 of  low-fat compared to low-carb diet.
• A future direction will be to address how “food as medicine” can be improved in clinical settings.

I did not know much of this and am happy to have the report.

The documents

• Nutrition Research Report 2020-2021: Executive Summary 
• Nutrition Research Report 2020-2021
• NIH Nutrition Research Reports:  2017-2019

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A report, Science Education in an Age of Misinformation, from Stanford University and written by a distinguished group of scientists addresses a question I get asked all the time: how do you know whom to trust when reading articles about food and nutrition.

It presents a decision tree for evaluating information sources.

Although most of the report is focused on other science topics, it includes one nutrition example (Example 3, pages 34 and 35).

Example 3 presents two websites, one from the Partnership for a Healthier America, the other from ILSI, the International Life Sciences Institute.

The suggested lesson asks students to use the decision tree to evaluate the credibility of the information on the websites.

For this example,

if students search for ‘Partnership for a Healthier America,’ they will find that one of the first links to appear in the search results is from Wikipedia…they may decide to start with the Wikipedia page to get a broad sense of what other information is available about the organization. There students will read that PHA is a nonprofit organization focused on health and nutrition. Its president and CEO is Nancy Roman, who has years of experience working for world food programs, food banks, and nutrition non-profit organizations.

On the other hand, when students apply the same strategy to the ISLI web page, they are also likely to begin with the Wikipedia entry. This tells a very different story. While ISLI is also a nonprofit organization, the Wikipedia entry shows it was funded by a Coca-Cola executive and has numerous ties to food and chemical companies, such as McDonald’s and Pepsi. Such ties represent a clear conflict of interest and would strongly suggest that ISLI is not a credible source of information.

A good start?  I think yes.  Take a look and decide for yourself.

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I always appreciate the Headline vs. Study sections of the Obesity and Energetics newsletter that arrives in my email once a week.

This one concerns coffee.  It amuses me that researchers are always trying to prove either that coffee is a superfood or that it is poison.

It’s neither, but never mind.  The research is fun to track.

Headline: Coffee Lowers Risk of Heart Problems and Early Death, Study Says, Especially Ground and Caffeinated.

Researchers found “significant reductions” in the risk for coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure and stroke for all three types of coffee. However, only ground and instant coffee with caffeine reduced the risk for an irregular heartbeat called arrhythmia. Decaffeinated coffee did not lower that risk, according to the study published Wednesday in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology.

Press-Release: Coffee Drinking Is Associated with Increased Longevity.

Study: Self-Reported Coffee Consumption in the UK Biobank… Again. Causation Not Established.

Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day is linked with a longer lifespan and lower risk of cardiovascular disease compared with avoiding coffee, according to research published today in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the ESC.¹ The findings applied to ground, instant and decaffeinated varieties.

Headline vs Study Déjà Vu: For More Coffee in the UK Biobank Headlines, See Headline vs Study from July 30, 2021.

• Headline: A Daily Dose of Coffee May Protect You from COVID-19.
• Study: Self-Reported Dietary Behaviors and Incident COVID-19 in the UK Biobank.
• Headline: Too Much Coffee Can Cause Your Brain to Shrink, Raise Risk of Dementia by 53 Percent, Study Finds.
• Study: Associations Among High Coffee Consumption, Brain Volume and Risk of Dementia and Stroke in UK Biobank.
• Headline: Your Morning Cup of Coffee May Lower Your Risk of Liver Disease.
• Study: All Coffee Types are Associated with Lower Risk of Adverse Clinical Outcomes in Chronic Liver Disease: A UK Biobank Study.
• Headline: Coffee Drinking Won’t Harm Your Health, New Study Reveals Caffeine Lowers Arrhythmia Risk.
• Study: Coffee Consumption and Incident Tachyarrhythmias with Mendelian Randomization for Caffeine Metabolism in the UK Biobank.

And just for fun, here’s the Washington Post’s adorable interactive comparison of the relative benefits of coffee vs. tea.

My view?  Drink whichever you like, don’t worry, be happy, enjoy!

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The USDA has just released this summary of food research funding.

This graph clearly indicates what I view as a big problem: government funding for agricultural and food research has been declining since the early 2000s, whereas private funding—meaning corporations and industries—has sharply increased since 2008 or so.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Government funding can support basic research with no obvious commercial implications—science.

Funding by food corporations and industries has one primary purpose: to develop and promote products—marketing.

I’m not opposed to marketing research, as long as it is labeled as such.

The decline in federal funding for food and nutrition research has long-term implications for scientific progress.

We need basic research on agriculture, food, nutrition, and health.

These curves need to be reversed.