ADA publishes benefits of organic talking points

In July, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) published a meta-analysis on the nutritional quality of organic versus conventional food creating a stir in the media. (See our previous post) This month, the American Dietetic Association (ADA) has published a 'Hot Topic' which takes a more holistic approach to the benefits of organic food. According to ADA, 'Hot Topics' are "short, concise practice and science-based answers to current questions Registered Dietitians (RD) may receive."

The 'Hot Topic' was co-authored by Christine McCullum-Gomez, PhD, RD and Anne-Marie Scott PhD, RD of the Hunger and Environmental Nutrition (HEN) Dietetic Practice Group (DPG) of ADA. In their review they challenge the AJCN study for "not examining differences in contaminants (such as pesticide, herbicide or fungicide residues) or the possible environmental consequences of organic versus conventional production practices." Further, the authors claim there are benefits to organic beyond human nutrition.

When considering benefits and costs of organic versus conventional agricultural production, it is important to consider benefits and costs to consumers, farmers, communities and the environment. For example, current research in numerous areas is showing both short-and long-term benefits to our population and the planet with organic and other sustainable production systems. Documented environmental benefits of organic production systems include reduced nutrient pollution, improved soil organic matter, lower energy use, reduced pesticide residues in food and water and enhanced biodiversity.

It is refreshing to see ADA taking this approach.

The challenge for our field (dietetics) is to understand exactly how foods and food products are grown and manufactured and the effects these methods may have on our personal health and the health of the global environment.

Disclosure: I am a HEN member. HEN is currently one of the fastest growing DPG of the ADA. (phew..a lot of acronyms) Congratulations to all of the HEN members who worked hard to get this document written, reviewed and published.

The Future of Food and Nutrition - Graduate Student Research Conference

Register today to receive the $25 rate for the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy's Future of Food and Nutrition Student Research Conference. The conference will be held Saturday, March 28, from 9am-5pm at the Jaharis Building in downtown Boston.

Click here to register. Registration includes admission to all conference sessions, breakfast, lunch, and coffee breaks.

The conference will feature oral and poster presentations from 35 students – including several Tufts students - doing research in the fields of food policy, public health, agriculture, nutrition, and anthropology. Click here full event schedule.

In addition, the conference will culminate with an exciting expert panel discussion entitled "New Approaches to Feeding the World," moderated by our own Parke Wilde and featuring:

Mark Winne- Mark currently writes, speaks, and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community food assessment, and food policy. He also does policy communication and food policy council work for the Community Food Security Coalition. His first book "Closing the Food Gap — Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty", published by Beacon Press, will be available for purchase at the event.

Susan Roberts- As a consultant, writer and speaker on food systems Ms. Roberts takes scientific information and translates it into policy applications linking public health, food, agriculture and food security. Recently Ms. Roberts directed the WK Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellows Program where national fellows used media to influence food systems, agriculture and health thinking and policy.

Robert Paarlberg- His latest book, titled "Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa," was published by Harvard University Press in March 2008. He is currently senior consultant to a Chicago Council on Global Affairs bipartisan study group on the future of U.S. agricultural development assistance policy. He has published books on agricultural trade and U.S. foreign policy, on international agricultural trade negotiations, on environmentally sustainable farming in developing countries, on U.S. foreign economic policy, on the reform of U.S. agricultural policy, and on policies toward genetically modified crops in developing countries.

We hope to see you there!

Sincerely,
The Future of Food and Nutrition Steering Committee
http://studentconference.nutrition.tufts.edu

Industry thwarting research

As the economy continues to slump, publicly funded research is also drying up. Are there risks associated with private industry funding research, and if so, how do we, as citizens, read research with a concerning eye? An article published in the New York Times yesterday by Andrew Pollack: Crop Scientist Say Biotechnology Seed Companies Are Thwarting Research addresses biased research in agriculture.

A statement made to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by 26 scientists was posted to a non-rule making docket titled: Evaluation of the Resistance Risks from Using a Seed Mix Refuge with Pioneer's Optimum AcreMax 1 Corn Rootworm-Protected Corn. The statement says:

"Technology/stewardship agreements required for the purchase of genetically modified seed explicitly prohibit research. These agreements inhibit public scientists from pursuing their mandated role on behalf of the public good unless the research is approved by industry. As a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology, its performance, its management implications, IRM, and its interactions with insect biology. Consequently, data flowing to an EPA Scientific Advisory Panel from the public sector is unduly limited."

In other words, some scientists feel as if industry has a chokehold not only on the research that is being conducted, but on what is actually being disseminated to the public. This research problem is largely under-reported and under-addressed to a science illiterate public. An article by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry called Who's Getting It Right and Who's Getting in Wrong in the Debate About Science Literacy, dives deeper into this equally important issue. You can add science based blogs to your RSS here.

Research should be a public good and government should be conducting research to protect the well-being of its citizens from corporate strongholds. Another example of the system failing by Tom Philpott of the Grist is in the issue of Why is the FDA unwilling to study evidence of mercury in high-fructose corn syrup? I would argue much has to do with attractive jobs. The Crème de la Crop of scientists and researchers are easily enticed by high paying jobs in industry, not in regulatory positions at FDA. The FDA lacks man power and funding. On the flip side, those who are working in for the public interest (i.e. the scientists who just published their statement to the EPA) are being manipulated as well.

A professor at Tufts, Sheldon Krimsky, has done extensive work on the effects of industry on research. He argues that a series of laws, federal policies and court decisions have enabled private interest "stakeholder science" to gain influence over university research. His book "Science in the Private Interest"sparked a website that continues to address these issues.
The key to change, Krimsky says, is separating the financial interests from the science. A daunting task indeed.

Cross posted from Epicurean Ideal.

Time use, food preparation, and risk of overweight

USDA's Economic Research Service has just posted 2007 results from the special module on eating and health in the American Time Use Survey (ATUS).

I frequently hear questions about time use and food policy. For example, many people wonder if the high cost of healthy food prevents Americans from choosing good diets. On reflection, many healthy and affordable food options are mixed in with the junk on the market. Next, many people wonder if some combination of price and the time burden of buying and preparing healthy food is to blame.

So, let's turn to the facts.

Here is my graphic based on Table 6 of the 2007 results on the ERS website. I left out the activities for sleeping, working, and eating and drinking as secondary activities while doing something else as a primary activity. You can follow the link for the table to confirm that the omissions just simplify the picture without cherry-picking. The graphic shows the number of minutes spent in several activities, for adults, computed separately according to the responding adult's weight status based on self-reported weight and height.

The questions are: (a) is it true that lack of shopping time and food preparation time are preventing us from eating healthy? (b) what time use activity is most noticeably and systematically associated with weight status?

In short: (c) what is the elephant in the room when it comes to time use?

Evidence on declining fruit and vegetable nutrient composition

Research by Donald R. Davis who retired from Biochemical Institute at The University of Texas (in my hometown of Austin) and in conjunction with the Bio-Communications Research Institute in Wichita Kansas, has summarized three kinds of evidence that points towards the decline in the nutrient value of fruits and vegetables in the US and UK over the last 50 to 100 years.

The report, published in February 2009 Journal of HortScience, reviews a highly cited research study titled "The dilution effect in plant nutrition studies" published in 1981 by Jarrell and Beverly in Advances in Agronomy. Jarrell and Beverly found that fertilized plants contained larger absolute amounts of minerals than the unfertilized plants, but these amounts were sufficiently diluted by the increased dry matter that all mineral concentrations declined, except for phosphorus, which is the common fertilizer.

Next, Davis looked at historical food composition data derived from three quantitative reports. While these studies are limited by their ability to be compared due to variation in methods, they found:

apparent median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein with similar results.

Finally, Davis evaluated studies of collections of cultivars of a single food that was grown side by side for purposes of comparing their nutrient content. The foods were broccoli, wheat and maize. The side by side allows the elimination of using historical data in the form of averages (as was done in the previous section), which allows all environmental conditions (soil, fertilization, irrigation, pest control, climate, harvest, sampling, and analytical methods) to be held constant. He found:

plantings of low- and high-yield cultivars of broccoli and grains found consistently negative correlations between yield and concentrations of minerals and protein, a newly recognized genetic dilution effect.

In conclusion,

Further studies are needed to assess the generality of dilution effects among foods and to greatly expand the numbers of nutrients and phytochemicals considered. Side-by-side comparisons of multiple cultivars in multiple environments can provide rigorous answers to the many remaining uncertainties. They are also well suited for testing proposed environmental and genetic methods to overcome dilution effects. Specifically, we would like to find ways to decrease the inverse correlation coefficients between yield and nutrient concentration or to decrease the negative slopes in plots of nutrient concentration vs. yield.

Over three billion of the world’s population is malnourished in nutrient elements and vitamin,including in developed countries. Vegetables and fruits are among the richest sources of many nutrients. Thus, declining nutrient concentrations in horticultural products are most unwelcome. Past and ongoing efforts to increase yields, combined with apparent broad tradeoffs between yield and the concentrations of perhaps half of all essential nutrients, work against recent efforts to increase one or a few micronutrients in individual foods.

High fructose corn syrup contaminated with mercury and other food safety news

I can't wait to see the new ad-campaign to try to wiggle out of this one. The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has issued a report, Not So Sweet: Missing Mercury and High Fructose Corn Syrup, revealing that mercury was found in nearly 50 percent of tested samples of commercial high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The research article was published January 26th in the scientific journal, Environmental Health by Renee Dufault et al. From the IATP report:

What she found was that possible mercury contamination of these food chemicals was not common knowledge within the food industry despite the availability of product specification sheets for mercury-grade caustic soda that clearly indicate the presence of mercury (as well as lead, arsenic and other metals). Upon further investigation, she found mercury contamination in some commercial HFCS, which can be made from mercury-grade caustic soda.

Through this public scientist’s initiative, the FDA learned that commercial HFCS was contaminated with mercury. The agency has apparently done nothing to inform consumers of this fact, however, or to help change industry practice.Consumers likely aren’t the only ones in the dark. While HFCS manufacturers certainly should have been wary of buying “mercury- grade” caustic soda in the first place, the food companies that buy finished HFCS and incorporate it into their processed food products may be equally unaware of how their HFCS is made, i.e., whether or not it is made from chemicals produced by a chlorine plant still using mercury cells.

The HFCS isn’t labeled “Made with mercury,” just like contaminated pet foods, chocolates and other products have not been labeled “Made with melamine.” Under current regulations, that information is not made available to either consumers or to companies further down the food supply chain.

When we learned of this gap in information, we set out to do the FDA’s work for it. We went to supermarkets and identified brand-name products—mainly soft drinks, snack foods and other items mostly marketed to children—where HFCS was the first or second ingredient on the label.

We sent several dozen products to a commercial laboratory, using the latest in mercury detection technology. And guess what? We found mercury. In fact, we detected mercury in nearly one in three of the 55 HFCS-containing food products we tested. They include some of the most recognizable brands on supermarket shelves: Quaker, Hunt’s, Manwich, Hershey’s, Smucker’s, Kraft, Nutri-Grain and Yoplait.

No mercury was detected in the majority of beverages tested. That may be important since sweetened beverages are one of the biggest sources of HFCS in our diets. On the other hand, mercury was found at levels several times higher than the lowest detectable limits in some snack bars, barbecue sauce, sloppy joe mix, yogurt and chocolate syrup. Although closer to the detection limit, elevated mercury levels were also found in some soda pop, strawberry jelly, catsup and chocolate milk. The top mercury detections are summarized in Table 3, on page 14 of the report.

Environmental mercury from chlorine plants, coal-fired power plants, dental offices and other sources have helped contaminate albacore tuna, swordfish and many of our favorite fish with mercury. Eating these fish has long been thought to be the most important mercury exposure for most people.

However, HFCS now appears to be a significant additional source of mercury, one never before considered. When regulators set safe fish consumption recommendations based on an understanding of existing mercury exposure, for example, they never built mercury contaminated HFCS into their calculations. HFCS as a mercury source is a completely avoidable problem. HFCS manufacturers don’t need to buy mercury-grade caustic soda. And the chlorine industry doesn’t need to use mercury cell technology. In fact, most chlorine plants in the U.S. don’t use it anymore, as it is antiquated and inefficient.

While we wait for the FDA to do its job and eliminate this unnecessary and completely preventable mercury contamination, we have a few suggestions for what you as consumers and voters can do.

Currently, food manufacturers don’t list on their products the source of HFCS and whether or not it is made from mercury-grade caustic soda. So call them. Make use of the toll-free numbers or Web sites on many packages, and let companies know you’re not comfortable eating their product until you know exactly what is in it. As voters, call your elected officials and ask them for hearings to find out why the FDA is not protecting us from mercury in HFCS.

Also, ask these officials to reintroduce legislation originally proposed by then-Senator Barack Obama a few years ago that will force the remaining chlorine plants to transition to cleaner technologies. Because even if they stop providing the caustic soda used for HFCS, their mercury pollution is still contaminating our food system as it falls on farm fields and waterways.

Tom Philpot at the Grist also covers this topic in Some heavy metal with that sweet roll? Seems to me the house of cards is falling with food safety. In the FDA's spotlight is salmonella in peanut butter from mildew in peanut butter plants, melamine in dry milk from China, and the myriad of meat contamination, with its sights probably on the newest report of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) being found in swine and swine farmers in the Netherlands and Canada. The more of these reports that continue to surface, the more people will be looking towards alternative food systems.