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Another reason to avoid processed and fast food

Posted on January 6, 2016 by DebbieN

In the past five or ten years, obesity and diabetes researchers have started taking a closer look at environmental factors that have unexpectedly strong disruptive effects on our appetite, food consumption levels and metabolism, even at levels currently deemed safe by the Food and Drug Administration. The potential of artificial sweeteners to lower glucose tolerance in less than a week by shifting the balance of gut bacteria is only one unnerving example.

Environmental chemicals like fungicides, pesticides and plasticizers (BPA and the like) have long been of concern for cancer, endocrine disruption and infertility. Some extensive and carefully conducted studies now reveal that some of these chemicals can also increase fat cell development and storage as well as insulin resistance. Low levels of exposure directly increase the rate of obesity in rats, and  population studies, though not as extensive, show that exposure also tracks with obesity in humans.

These common chemicals are now being considered obesogens–chemicals that cause obesity or at least make people more prone to it. And these are effects that may end up being passed down.

In the rat studies, the effects lasted for several generations, and that also seems to tally with earlier findings on environmental endocrine disruptors and male infertility. Some of the tests that were conducted on rats in the obesogen study were too invasive to perform on human subjects, and a human generation is a lot longer than a rat generation–20+ years vs. 6 weeks–so it may be hard to trace inheritance in humans just yet.

Well–so what does it mean for us while we wait for the perfect definitive human study to come along?

To my mind, it means taking a harder look at how we choose the food we eat. We can’t remove all pesticide residues from the environment but we can probably eat fewer things wrapped pristinely in plastic and cut down our reliance on plastic utensils and disposable containers.

As I look around my kitchen, I realize just how often I reach for plastic sandwich bags–daily for lunches, but also for leftovers, herbs, halves of onions or lemons, cheese, vegetables. Stacking plastic storage containers keep soup, salad, rice or beans–or this week, an overload of stuffed shells, since I finally got my cook-once-eat-six-times-or-so batch cooking mojo figured out. And almost everything else in my fridge and on my shelves is in contact with plastic at one time or another.

Plastic wrappings pervade most of the supermarket offerings–overwraps on plastic-coated juice boxes, plastic see-through windows on cardboard pasta boxes, sacks of dried beans and rice, loaves of bread, plastic inner bags for boxed cereals and snacks, and plastic linings on the insides of tin cans. Also, of course, all those bottles of soda and energy drinks and vitamin waters and juices and milk. And yogurt. To say nothing of fast food, vending machine food, and so on.

Plastic is everywhere because it’s cheap, light, flexible, avoids breakage in shipping, and it helps you keep your food dry if you want it dry or moist if you want to keep it from drying out. You can keep everything separate and clean and airtight even when stored side by side. You can store it in the freezer and take some types of plastic containers right to the microwave. If you want to give up plastic, either for health reasons or environmental ones, you have to give up some of those advantages too.

Your next best bets are glass, which is heavy and breakable and no longer reliably tempered borosilicate, at least not in the US. Or perhaps stainless steel, at least for cold containers–maybe a stainless steel kit for lunches? I don’t know–if you don’t take strict care of it, or if it’s in contact with wet or acidic foods for long periods, it may rust. Storing salads or tomato-based items might be a problem. Ceramic bowls and containers–also heavy and breakable, and some of the food-approved glazes still leach measurable amounts of copper and other metals.

I do occasionally see someone from the homesteading and health food store generation, or else in Amish or Mennonite-style dress, loading up on bulk buy drygoods at Whole Foods with their own glass jars and cotton drawstring bags. And I always admire them for it, but I also think that’s an awful lot of stuff to trundle around to the store and get the clerks to okay. It is not easy to do and it’s obvious they’ve saved up for a monthly trip to stock up because you wouldn’t want to have to do it more than that often, especially when you have young children in tow, even very well behaved young children as they often do (another thing to admire them for; my daughter used to go and play hide-and-seek in the corner grocery when she was that young. At least she knew not to take anything).

But back to plastics and food storage. The obesogen phenomenon is intriguing but probably not the main source of the current obesity epidemic. Common sense says people might have slightly more propensity for developing fat cells but they’d still be small cells if people weren’t overfeeding them by eating more calories than they used to. That’s the major trend, by far. It’s still the food itself that matters most.

Processed and fast food still dominate as popular items of diet, and they’re very high-calorie-density compared with most nonstarchy bulk vegetables, which never seem to be recommended first on any popular weight loss and fitness show anymore (cough–Dr. Continue reading →

Filed under: Food Politics, kitchen safety, nutrition, shopping | Tagged: , , , , | 2 Comments »

Lackluster “Secrets” from the Eating Lab

Posted on December 8, 2015 by DebbieN

I’ve just read Dr. Traci Mann’s popular book, Secrets from the Eating Lab, which came out in April (and is hence a “new book” at my library at the moment…). I had some real hopes for this book on dieting, obesity, and the psychology of eating. Mann has some fame in behavioral psychology, and her lab at the University of Minnesota is influential. Plus she just wrote an op-ed that Oprah Winfrey’s investment in WeightWatchers is a smart business move because diet failure, which leads to repeat customers, is a built-in and stated profit strategy for the company. Mann points out it’s the same logic that runs casinos. Big revelation? probably not, but still a good point and illustrative of the circular logic in popular American diet culture.

So about Secrets from the Eating Lab. The tone of the book is personable and it’s a quick read–a couple of hours will cover it. But…it’s not really a very good book and it makes Mann look a little like the huge parade of airheaded “pundits” who show up on Fox News and Good Morning America and Dr. Oz to talk about emotional eating right before presenting a plate of “healthy treats” that turn out to be brownies.

OK, it wasn’t quite that brainless. I even liked a lot of what Mann had to say about how to live an integrated life and not obsess over weight. But the book is a very good example of why someone who’s reasonably expert in one facet of diet research may not be the right person to interpret other areas for the public.

The behavioral studies are interesting and entertaining. Although the findings are not altogether news anymore, the lab setups she and her team used to demonstrate them are fun to read about. A sample of the psych experiment findings, which are the strongest part of Mann’s book:

  • The eating style of your companions is likely to influence you pretty strongly when you eat as a group. Her lab tested this in an entertaining series of experiments.
  • “Determination and willpower” is more wishful thinking than a successful diet strategy for a lot of people, and structuring your environment is more effective.
  • Keeping a bowl of treats even more than arm’s length away from you reduces your likelihood of grazing, and if you actually have to get up and walk to get more, you probably won’t.
  • People eat more when distracted with screentime or eating while driving or whatever than when focusing on their food.
  • Smaller plates lead to greater satisfaction with less food.
  • Offering vegetables at the school cafeteria before serving the rest of lunch, and without competition from french fries, gains a much higher rate of takers than when there are other foods available.
  • Announcing foods as “healthy” is a turn-off.
  • Most intriguingly, “comfort food” is no more effective than any other food, or even no food, for recovery after an emotional shock.

All of these findings mesh with common sense, and few of her recommendations are implemented as regularly as one would like in daily life at school or work. But the behavioral studies from her lab are only a small part of the book, one or two chapters in the middle. Where Mann runs into trouble is nearly everywhere else. Put bluntly, she’s way out of her depth in the larger world of academic obesity research, and neither she nor most of her readers or even, crucially, her book editor seem to know it.

The main themes of Secrets from the Eating Lab are 1. that diets don’t work, 2. obesity is not the deadly killer everyone assumes it is, and 3. therefore you should stop obsessing and be healthy in other ways, for example by exercising to relieve stress.

These claims are stated as blanket facts rather than opinions she wants to explore, even when she bolsters them with studies. Outside of her own lab’s experimental framework she makes fundamental and glaring misstatements and assumptions of fact that can easily be disproven. The result is not markedly better than what you might expect from a high school debate team’s background prep for the season topics, “Do Diets Work?” and “Does Obesity Kill?”

In the “diets don’t work” chapter, Mann scours the literature for a largeish number of diet studies in which subjects attempted to lose weight, then winnows the 300 or so studies down to about 26 that meet her criteria of a randomized controlled study with reasonable participant recruitment and retention. Although some studies demonstrated short-term weight loss or differential success between two test diets over the course of weeks, months or a year, longer followup revealed no net loss and a large degree of regained weight among participants, and most of the studies had a lot of dropouts before completion. Moreover, most were less than carefully conducted and relied on self-reported weight and diet recall from the subjects rather than weigh-ins and so on.

Well, fair enough. But she doesn’t look at more recent and stringent work, as a nutrition researcher would be expected to. And she doesn’t really explore what the behavioral environments of the experiments might have contributed–something she might have been able to lend better insight into. Continue reading →

Filed under: books, DASH Diet, Diabetes, Food Politics, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Lackluster “Secrets” from the Eating Lab

French reaction to food waste

Posted on August 6, 2015 by DebbieN

Some things that rarely make it into US newspapers are considered more serious in Europe. Large-scale destruction of food, crops, livestock or arable land is one topic that really sets the French off, no matter what their political leanings. It’s an offense they’ve considered beyond the pale ever since Henry V invaded Normandy and Aquitaine in the 1400s. His officers and gentlemen destroyed crops and livestock wherever they went, siege or no, to the point that even their Burgundian allies wouldn’t forgive or forget.

Hence Le Figaro’s detailed account today of Moscow’s latest reaction to European and US sanctions for its invasion of Ukraine last year:

Le Figaro 8/6/15: Moscou détruit des tonnes d’aliments

The French newspaper reports that Russia’s agricultural agency has stopped merely confiscating and returning embargoed out-of-country produce to its country of origin and as of today is now destroying it outright within Russia, either at the borders with Belarus and Ukraine, or seizing it from store shelves. Tons of tomatoes, nectarines, peaches, and other produce, meats and cheeses from Poland and western European countries that have participated in sanctions against Russia are being crushed and dug under with farm equipment or else incinerated at a plant near St. Petersburg.

Given the likely hardship and isolation the Russian populace has experienced since Putin embarked on reseizing chunks of Ukrainian territory without admitting to it, you might think the best thing to do as a deterrent would be to seize the contraband and redistribute it evenly to the poorer citizens, and deny profits to the smuggler-importers. Grinding all that European-produced food under with tractors and the like may be a satisfying symbolic response for Putin, but it’s horribly wasteful and, as with the whole Ukraine project, not  a benefit to the citizens at large.

According to the article, the head of the Russian agriculture service admitted that destroying all that food doesn’t look good on TV. The country’s public media, including Tass, are portraying it pretty negatively.

He hinted that the contraband is suspect in quality as well as in political origin–some of the cargoes had been deceptively labeled as coming from Turkey or the like, but had really been produced in places like Ireland. From what I can gather, the reporter at Le Figaro wasn’t too impressed with that argument, and it’s possible that the head of the agriculture service wasn’t too happy about being ordered to destroy the food either but couldn’t say so.

And from the frequency of individual foodstuff mentions in the article, I’d say the waste of tons of peaches, nectarines, tomatoes and carrots and meat might be the greater part of the injury, but to the French, the destruction of all that fromage under tractor wheels was the final insult.

The only thing I can think is, it’s a damn good thing it’s still summer, because if the government did that in the winter, or close to winter, the public reaction might quickly become something other than merely unhappy.

Filed under: Food Politics, history | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Comments Off on French reaction to food waste

What not to put in your cake

Posted on June 24, 2015 by DebbieN

Marijuana use is being legalized–or sought out for legalization–in an increasing number of states, despite the federal government’s stance against it. The key argument in favor is a plea for the well-being of those whose terminal or debilitating illnesses–or the drug regimens for treating them–cause pain and nausea that respond better to marijuana than anything else on the market.

But who’s fooling whom? Along with the increase in legalization and dispensaries comes a host of new products to capitalize on the expanding market: candies, cakes and other sweets laced with tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). You can’t tell me that’s exclusively, or even mostly, for medical use.

And–no surprise here–most of them are being mislabeled.

Marijuana is not a well-characterized, easily dosable drug. It’s a whole-plant or at least whole-leaf drug, with hundreds of chemical compounds in both the leaves and the smoke. Even THC, its primary active ingredient, appears difficult to measure and dose correctly given that its signal effect is a general distortion of sensory perception and mental function, not stimulation or blockage of a specific molecular receptor or other well-defined cellular target.

Given the vagueness of both dosing and effect, it’s not really a surprise that standardization and labeling are still inaccurate at best. Which is now a relevant issue: if you’re going to call marijuana a pharmaceutical in order to get it legalized, you’re going to have to treat it by the same standards and be able to quantify it. That could be a challenge–especially given the professionalism and laboratory expertise with which it’s typically handled.

The current attempts are not particularly encouraging, if a recent article in the Journal of the American Medical Association is any indicator. About 75 percent of the product labels are off; 15 percent or so underestimations and the rest overestimations of THC dose per serving.

Add to that the products themselves–pink and green-colored pound cakes (at least as shown in the article in The Scientist). Who but a stoner–or worse, a little kid who happened upon them–could find those appetizing, even without the added attraction?

And you can see the key problem here–it’s bad enough that people who take marijuana in any form are likely to get the munchies and be completely indiscriminate about what they eat while high. It’s a lot worse if the food available is also laced with yet more THC. Or if an adult buys a colorful cake product and leaves it where a kid can get at it.

And yes, I am being intentionally insulting about it. I’ve worked as a lab tech in pharmacology and natural products research labs and interviewed numerous experts in pharmaceutical and diagnostics industries as well as medical and forensic toxicologists. It’s time for the marijuana legalization proponents and industry to grow up, pull up their socks, and stop potschkying around. Or sampling their own wares.

If you’re serious about treating THC as a respectable therapeutic pharmaceutical, and not just a recreational drug accompanied by a wink and a sheepish laugh, then put up or shut up. Treat it as a proper drug and keep it in a recognizably unappetizing drug form–a plain pill would do–and make sure the dosing is precise and minimal. And that access is limited to patients who actually need it and that the effect is genuinely beneficial. That requires clinical trials.

We don’t put methotrexate or doxorubicin, two of the major chemotherapy drugs, in candies for cancer patients. We don’t put morphine or antibiotics in cake or leave them around casually on a kitchen counter. There’s a serious reason for that.

[Note: I’ve turned comments off for this post, not because I don’t usually welcome comments–and even arguments–but because the ones I’ve seen so far appear to be using the opportunity to recommend their preferred homebrew remedy–not really relevant to the question: “Do drugs belong in cake?”]

 

Filed under: Food Politics, Odd food, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on What not to put in your cake

Chain-restaurant excess strikes again

Posted on June 5, 2015 by DebbieN

The Center for Science in the Public Interest has found itself swamped for choice in its 2015 Xtreme Eating “awards” list.

What’s the highest calorie chain-restaurant meal in America? (LA Times online, 6/3/15)

The entries are frightening–typically 1-2 days’ worth of calories, 3 days’ worth of saturated fat and sodium, huge oversized amounts of food. One steakhouse platter with so much hamburger meat–not even steak–seven burgers, each piece topped with cheese or at least cheez–it’s like eating several Double Whoppers at once. Ice cream float-type concoctions with no actual pie but pie crust pieces crumbled on them. They start at 32 ounces. Which is clearly the new 20 ounces if you actually read through the horrible meal descriptions, because another chain’s sweet tea is only offered in a 32 oz size as well. That’s a quart. For one person. There’s a 900-calorie margarita in there somewhere at 24 ounces.

I’m sure Michael Jacobson, CSPI’s president, never dreamed there’d be something fully twice as bad on any restaurant menu as fettucine Alfredo, which he termed “a heart attack on a plate” only what, 20 or so years ago?

What the hell is going on here?  The chains may be cutting down slightly on artificial colors and trans-fats and GMO ingredients, but they’re serving meals with an entire day’s worth of calories embedded in the endless parade of glop that is routinely slathered on otherwise reasonable-sounding main ingredients like chicken breast (note: a top offender for hidden sodium in the “healthy” chain offerings, especially on salads). “Special” sauces, breadings, cheese, frying oil, stuffings, dips, and less-announced coatings (the problem with the chicken) that add surprising amounts of sweet, salt and/or fat. Chipotle isn’t on CSPI’s wall of shame over this, but it’s just as true of them as of any of the others–their meals typically run 500-800 calories for a burrito without chips, guacamole or salsa (not to mention sour cream and added cheese), and the same number of milligrams of sodium.

The meal insults listed on CSPI’s site consist of huge portions that could more normally serve four people, not one. Dishes are never less than 3″ high and cover every square millimeter of the plate. Burgers are multiplied–if one or two are okay, six or seven must be even better. Vegetables have disappeared, of course.

Accessories double or triple the calorie, fat and sodium counts of the full “meal”: caesar salad, fries, biscuits, half-gallon drinks, whole quarts of ice-cream-related desserts. Why is this gargantuan approach even appealing?

They didn’t list Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors, but maybe they should have–a couple of years ago I took my daughter there for a post-diabetes-diagnosis ice cream cone so we could do something normal for summer, albeit with a shot of insulin (it was a new experience) and we got the entire brochure of offerings when we asked for the nutrition info. The single cone, no lightweight for any of the flavors at about 250-300 calories (double or triple what it would be for Dreyer’s/Edy’s half-the-fat, our standby) and 25-30 grams of carb (also double the D/E per serving), turned out to be a best bet. Some of the sundaes were getting to the 20 oz. range, with over 1500 calories and two days’ worth of carb and fat. The soft serves were actually the worst nutritionally, much higher in calories, carb and fat than they look for the volume you get–and especially given how plain the flavors always are.

Overall, the picture of chain food is not lookin’ good. It’s a nightmare of shameful, pointless stuntlike excess, the stuff parodied in Wall-E and Idiocracy among other movies from the past decade. Only as one of the CSPI judges remarked, it’s become the new normal, and much faster than the screenwriters imagined. Maybe we should all look at the before pictures of the participants on The Biggest Loser, as shown in all the accompanying guidebooks (see your local Friends of the Library bookstore) and ask ourselves if we really want to do that. Because that’s a lot of work.

Filed under: Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chain-restaurant excess strikes again

Media misread on the new USDA dietary guidelines

Posted on February 28, 2015 by DebbieN

The new USDA public nutrition guidelines are being updated again, as scheduled, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee’s version now says some egg yolks are okay and to limit carbs and sugar instead. A variety of media commentators have jumped all over that, even though it’s not very different from what the guidelines have been emphasizing for years. Now, if anything, I would have hoped that most of the commentaries in the newspapers of record would be critical of the industry influence on the USDA’s nutrition guidelines for the general public each time, but no.

The most prominent commentators, notably Nina Teicholz, whose op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times really bothered me, are well-educated and should know how to “read a french fry” as it were. But instead of looking at the likely effect of loosened USDA dietary limitations on a public that has gone so seriously overboard on calorie-dense food, they’ve taken the opposite tack. Mostly to declare self-righteously that the new relaxation of standards really means all the previous recommendations to limit saturated fat and cholesterol were bunk and a waste of time based on “uncertain” and “weak” or even “junk” science.

Which is untrue. Epidemiologic research–large observation studies and surveys, like the NHANES diet and cardiovascular health survey series from the 1970s onward, and the big Framingham Heart Study of the 1950s onward, are not junk science. They do what clinical feeding trials can’t: they look for the contribution of individual dietary risk factors to chronic and complex-origin health conditions like heart disease and stroke across very large population groups. Both the processed food industry and people like Teicholz claim that clinical feeding trials are the only legitimate way to provide “proof” of cause and effect, but the cost of conducting them carefully long enough and with a big enough participant pool for meaningful results would bankrupt the nation halfway through.

Epidemiologic findings matter on the large public scale. Not every specific applies absolutely and equally to every single person, but that’s not what population-wide studies are for. The big studies, loose as they might seem compared with DNA fingerprinting and perfectly demonstrated cause-and-effect kinds of lab workups for individual cases, give best-bet recommendations for most people to reduce their risk.

Your genetics determine how well that works for you specifically, but most of us don’t have access to DNA testing on that level, and the “big six” lifestyle risk factors (high sat fat, high blood cholesterol and blood pressure, overweight, lack of exercise and smoking) are a lot easier to change and get some control over. After all, you can’t change your genetics much (and yes, my daughter is quite disgruntled that she can’t pick cooler parents. But tough. We couldn’t pick ours either).

So anyway, I know I’m unusually irritated with any news about USDA dietary guidelines–I used to work at NIH, and some of my colleagues had attempted to serve on the dietary guidelines committee and ended up completely frustrated at how “bought” the process became. The USDA has always had a conflict of interest when it comes to public health recommendations because its main mission is support of US agriculture, and public health always comes a distant second to big business. The committees have repeatedly subverted and weakened the scientific nutrition panelists’ best-finding recommendations by including food industry participants and weighting toward industry priorities in the consensus mix. There’s no great reason to expect the food industry isn’t still playing and winning the same game on the same committee this time around. [Update: the meat industry has just asked for an additional 75 day comment period].

But the main problem I see at this point is how poorly mainstream journalists and editors have handled the announced overhaul. None really seem to have dug into the comparison between current and previous issues of the guidelines, much less compared the USDA’s final takes with dietary guidelines from the DGAC, a combined group of more purely biomed/scientific research experts representing HHS (including NIH) and the FDA, or those of the major health advocacy organizations such as the American Heart Association.

And declaring that it’s now fine for anyone to eat all fats without limitation is nonsense and a misread. The USDA guidelines don’t say that–the DGAC draft guidelines certainly don’t say that. And if the USDA does attempt to drift in that direction for the final release, as some of the director’s announcements suggest, given the participation of Big Food and Big Agriculture hoping to sell the public more meat, eggs, and cheese, along with more profitable processed goods, would you necessarily believe them?

Is it really the fault of the scientists on the panels over the years, as Teicholz claims (“How did they get it so wrong?”), that the epidemiology findings they relied on for previous rounds of recommendations weren’t borne out by much smaller and less conclusive clinical studies?

Maybe the role of saturated fat is less apparent in a clinical study. I don’t doubt that. But as noted above, the statistical power of the comparatively short-term clinical trials for cardiovascular disease effects is bound to be a lot lower than in a long-term population-wide study, even if the controls are tighter. There are so many interfering factors–other dietary and lifestyle factors, and so many varieties of genetic risk factors within and among different population groups, genders, and age groups, that you need the big numbers and the large timescale to see effects above the noise. Meta-analysis of a lot of limited clinical studies with iffy results doesn’t make up for that. If anything, it compounds their individual uncertainties.

[And in fact it turns out that much of Teicholz’s assumption on that point is based on a very poorly conducted, much criticized meta-analysis of studies on saturated fat and cardiovascular disease published last spring. Most inclusive meta-analyses performed using standard stats analysis best practices actually show reductions of between 14 and 26% in CV events and deaths when subjects cut their saturated fat intake below 10% of calories and ate more vegetables instead of carbs, or else substituted polyunsaturated fats for them.]

Teicholz’s op-ed had carefully modulated but still overt indignation at the imperfect scientific basis behind previous recommendations to cut saturated fat and limit egg yolks and other high-cholesterol foods. What should be there and isn’t is the acknowledgement that when those recommendations were first announced to the public–by the AHA, the CDC and the USDA in the late 1960s, population trend studies over the next 10 years showed a stark drop in the rate of heart attacks–about a 30 percent drop. In other words, it worked. Big time.

And the broad peak of the population curve for a first heart attack shifted to the right by 10 years–that is, the average age for men went from about 50 to about 60, and for women from about 60 to 70. These were huge improvements in public health overall, and they were achieved partly because the public believed and paid attention, and partly because the nutrition and health experts hadn’t given up and abdicated responsibility in the face of industry pushback.

Clearly these results didn’t last; but is that the fault of the studies that identified saturated fat and cholesterol as things to reduce (note: not eliminate completely, just reduce)? The 1980s ushered in a long Republican-led era of unfettered, uncritical support of corporate priorities over public health, Reagan’s “ketchup is a vegetable” quip and the conversion of school lunches to chain restaurant concession contracts, a popular nose-thumbing at so-called “food police” health recommendations, the rise of high-fat-and-sugar-and-oversized-portion “comfort” and “indulgent” foods in restaurants and food magazines, and an entrenched anti-science bias in Congress that still haunts us today.

Not that much has changed from Reagan’s time in office–including the sad observable fact that most Americans for the past decade or so clearly aren’t paying serious attention to or even attempting to follow those modest earlier USDA recommendations, particularly the recommendations to eat more vegetables rather than more boxed, labeled namebrand processed foods, whether Big Macs or Ding Dongs or Froot Loops…

So few Americans today eat any vegetables at all compared with people of the same ages in the 1970s. As I’ve mentioned before, a shocking number of my friends, in their 40s and 50s already, do not cook at all. They have advanced degrees, if mostly in the humanities. They nervously repeat but don’t understand how to  read between the lines of whatever diet and health claims are in the news, and they’ve come to think cooking is too hard. They have a lot of takeout menus on their iPhones.

There is just one more factor to mention here: the profit motive. Teicholz, a former contributor to NPR, Gourmet and Men’s Health, wrote that op-ed in part to promote her new book, The Big Fat Surprise, which claims that diets high in meat, butter, Continue reading →

Filed under: books, Diabetes, Food Politics, history, meat and poultry, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , | Comments Off on Media misread on the new USDA dietary guidelines

2000-calorie meals in pictures

Posted on December 23, 2014 by DebbieN

The New York Times has just posted a very clear picture-it chart of how people get to 2000 calories in a single meal, sometimes even a single dish, without realizing it when they eat out. Not just at Burger King, Denny’s or IHOP, either–some of the upscale chains’ ordinary dishes are just as devastating. If you’re having trouble figuring out your own diet, you might take a look and see What 2,000 Calories Looks Like.

One thing I like about the restaurant-by-restaurant feature is the breakdown of calories for each item in the meal, so you can see how you might do better while eating out.

One obvious takeaway–so to speak–is that fries, shakes, full dinner plates of pasta with cream sauce (or any sauce, really), and slices of cake as big as your head–topped with caramel goo!–are a bad deal for excess calories, lack of nutritional value, and are basically not really necessary.

The other obvious takeaway is that for things like sandwiches, burritos, burgers and similar protein-containing main dishes, you probably don’t want to be eating more than about 500 calories at lunch or maybe 600ish at dinner. Preferably 350-450, to give yourself some room for a salad or fruit. So the hoagies and double cheeseburgers at 900-1100 calories should really be split in two–maybe three. Share one with a friend unless you’re actually a linebacker in training. Or else get rid of the cheese, the excess meat, the bacon, the mayo-based sauces. Go back to a single burger with ketchup and mustard and a couple of pickle slices. And maybe you shouldn’t eat anything else with one of those but a plain apple or orange or some tomatoes or carrot sticks.

The other thing I like is the set of pictures at the bottom–whole days’ worth of decent food from home that are worth 2000 calories per day, and they look a whole lot better than what you get at the restaurants. For the same money or less, and with a microwave, maybe even in less time. A lot more vegetables and fruits, a decent amount of meat and fish and dairy, a lot less in the way of french fries, milkshakes, salad dressing, breadings, special sauces, burger buns and unlimited pasta.

Filed under: Eating out, Food Magazines, Food Politics, frugality, nutrition, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on 2000-calorie meals in pictures

FDA warning on powdered caffeine

Posted on July 19, 2014 by DebbieN

The Washington Post carried a story yesterday on a new FDA warning about powdered caffeine’s potential for a lethal overdose. Caffeine is relatively unregulated as a dietary supplement and companies have been selling it mixed into “energy” drinks and “shots”, inhalers and other forms, including pure powder, through Amazon.com and other internet venues.

Most of the stupids (I mean, more politely, naive consumers) who buy caffeine-laced “energy” products are teenage boys and young men–no great surprise. Guys in that age range tend to have trouble getting up in the morning and being alert for class. The proliferation of the iPad, the smart phone, and game apps isn’t helping. A cheap, legal and potent stimulant seems like just the thing to counteract the effect of late nights and early exams. Combine that with a pitch about “energy” and fitness–mostly in the form of weightlifting and bodybuilding, a sector rife with dietary supplement abuse marketing, and wishful thinking about instant “buffness”, as my now-teenage daughter scoffs–and you’ve got a really bad deal.

But it doesn’t take much of the purified caffeine powder to overdose and the difference between stimulated and dead can be as little as a few milligrams–much too hard to measure accurately with a teaspoon or even most kitchen scales.

Caffeine is far from harmless even in limited doses (otherwise, why would we bother to drink coffee?) And it’s definitely a drug–I had to work with it in the lab way back in my radioactive youth. And it’s really inexpensive.

Why the “dietary supplement” label is still allowed to cloak quasi-drug and drug products from FDA control is a mystery to me. It’s a bad deal for everyone eventually, because as more of the supplement compounds are discovered to have harmful effects–think anabolic steroids or some of the “smart” drinks and relaxants added to “energy” drinks over the past decade–Congress ends up having to legislate against them one by one, and the FDA has to go through a torturous combination of warning letters and negotiations with the companies involved and attempt to draw up new regulations–a very expensive and drawn-out process. And it’s usually piecemeal and illogical–caffeine levels in soda are regulated, pure powdered caffeine is not.

In the meantime, hospitalizations from caffeinated energy drinks and other easily abused products have doubled since 2007, and there have been a number of deaths from caffeine overdose, including the Indiana teenager whose parents had no idea he was buying and consuming powdered caffeine when he died at the end of May, and whose case spurred the FDA’s attention this time. The state of Oregon is also currently going after 5-Hour Energy in a lawsuit over false advertising claims about ingredients that actually do nothing much, when the real stimulant effect is due to a dose of caffeine.

But even if you’re not a naive teenage boy, the whole caffeine-laden environment has expanded beyond anything that makes sense. More and more people are finding themselves overdosed (not lethally, usually) but with the shakes or dizziness. Between the Starbucks venti and proliferation of 20-ounce sodas as the new normal serving size, there’s a new source of trouble, because caffeine is showing up in foods we don’t expect to contain it.

Food companies are adding caffeine to candy and snacks these days as never before–even in oatmeal and pancake syrup. The FDA is taking the “negotiate with the companies and hope they back down” approach, as they did with Wrigley for its Alert caffeinated chewing gum a year ago. They don’t currently have the impetus to forbid adding caffeine to foods as they did with alcoholic caffeinated beverages a couple of years ago–the “blackout in a can” as Charles Schumer put it–but they’re at least making noises about getting it back out of foods that children and teenagers are likely to eat. I like the coffee cup graphic up on their Q&A page about it, but will it really change anyone’s mind or make them look harder at the ingredient lists if they’re already buying these products?

Why put caffeine powder in non-coffee foods in the first place? It doesn’t taste like much or stimulate the tastebuds, exactly. But the combination of mental stimulation via caffeine with eating a particular snack food is probably intended to make lackluster processed foods more attractive and even addictive in either the literal or marketing sense. Given the price of caffeine powder compared with almost anything else the companies could add, I’d be willing to lay odds on who’s going to be even more addicted to caffeine than the consumers. Cue the Pavlov effect.

Filed under: breakfast, Food Politics, kid food, Odd food, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on FDA warning on powdered caffeine

Tipping the scales at Whole Foods

Posted on June 25, 2014 by DebbieN

From The Los Angeles Times today:

Whole Foods paying $800,000 for overcharging in California

Pricing violations included not zeroing out the container weight when weighing prepared items from the food bar, shorting weights on packaged goods, and other problems.

This of course is bad practice toward consumers, but it doesn’t really address the critical issues with Whole Foods.

Yes, Whole Foods has been fined for pricing violations in California. The court injunction will mean five years of oversight and audits. But the real problem is beyond court remedies: everything’s overpriced and the customers seem to like it that way.

Produce prices that can rise to $10/lb for things like cherries when other nearby supermarkets are charging maybe $4-5. Fish prices in the $30/lb range. Whole Foods trades on a reputation for sourcing more variety than the average chain supermarket, and it does achieve that, but not everything it carries is really so exclusive that it justifies a higher price tag.

And in any case, the real money (other than the food bar, which is up to about $8/lb. across the board, whether for roasted eggplant and peppers or for things like canned kidney beans and flaked tuna and cucumber slices) is in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals parading as dietary supplements (and vice versa). Whenever I go into Whole Foods for a small coffee and a roll, the person ahead of me in line is inevitably ringing up more than 100 bucks worth of things like holistic soap bars at $5-10 apiece (compare “Ivory” bath bar 10-pack at about $6 at the local Ralph’s/Kroger’s) and cases of “vitamin waters” at about $4 per bottle, and dietary supplements with a $40-50 fantasy surcharge per bottle. And maybe a scrawny bunch of kale that they’re not sure how to deal with.

Filed under: Eating out, Food Politics, frugality, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: , , , | Comments Off on Tipping the scales at Whole Foods

The CDC tries defining “powerhouse” veggies

Posted on June 10, 2014 by DebbieN
carrotsareveryhealthytom-ABS“Carrots are very healthy!” “Mmmhm, very healthy, Tom. Good for your eyes. Vitamin A I think.” A six-year-old’s view of carrots and nutrition, courtesy of my daughter from several years ago, and (obviously) influenced by the best of the cartoon world…

The Centers for Disease Control seems to have taken up the nutrition density scoring gauntlet to rate high-value fruits and vegetables for their “powerhouse” value. A research paper in this month’s Preventing Chronic Disease journal derives a nutrient density formula that’s not a million miles away from the ANDI scoring scheme Whole Foods was touting a couple of summers ago. The author presents a table of 41 plain, raw and unadorned fruits and vegetables that made the cut by delivering more than 10 percent of your recommended daily value of a combo of 17 major nutrients for 100 grams of raw weight and/or (this part wasn’t quite as clear) 100 kcal worth of food.

The fact that the CDC is now publishing this kind of study lends nutrient density scoring more legitimacy than perhaps it really deserves.

On the plus side:

  • The author, Jennifer Noia of William Paterson University in New Jersey, is an actual trained nutrition researcher with a Ph.D. in the field.
  • She’s not making a pitch or selling special dietary supplements. Her stated goal is to help the CDC develop practical guidelines for public health reduction of cancers and cardiovascular disease by rating vegetables and fruits for their general nutrition-worthiness.
  • She doesn’t bias her formula in favor or disfavor of her favorite name-dropping superfoods or taboos, as Joel Fuhrman and the admirers who started the ANDI scoring empire did.
  • Avocado doesn’t score big; it’s not even included (too caloric for what it delivers).
  • Noia does not include trendy components with questionable or untested nutritional value, things like  selenium, antioxidants (unspecified groups of) and phytochemicals (unspecified groups of) among the 17 well-tested nutrients she counts in for the composite formula.

So far, so good.

But the specific method she derives is still kind of muddled, and the logic behind the nutrient density comparisons is too.

First, are we going for 100 grams or 100 kcal (also known outside the lab as “100 calories”) as the standard amount of each food for comparison? The article switches back and forth without clarifying and the formula does not normalize to one or the other as a uniform standard.

Second, how does that amount, whichever one is in use, compare with a likely normal serving of the specific fruit or vegetable? Arugula’s way up near the top for nutrient density–but if you ate 100 grams of it, or worse yet 100 calories’ worth, at a sitting, you’d be trying to eat an entire plateful or maybe several platefuls of it. Very bitter. Most people include a small handful, maybe a quarter cup per serving, in a mixed salad for interest, or (as I do) on a sandwich. With mustard or vinaigrette and some other veggies.

Same for watercress. And both are expensive per serving compared with romaine, bok choy, Chinese cabbage, turnip greens…parsley??? Who’s going to eat 100 grams OR 100 calories’ worth of parsley? Scallions? Maybe if you grill them, but then again, 100 grams? 100 calories?

The list is also a little arbitrary and incomplete in terms of what’s included. Green beans make no appearance on the list, for good or ill. Maybe it’s because they don’t deliver a ton of vitamins per se, even though they have some fiber and potassium and are low in calories. Mostly, though, they don’t happen to fit into one of the four broad categories (cruciferous, leafy greens, citrus, and yellow/orange) included in the selected list. That’s not a nutrition criterion, it’s a plant classification criterion, even though it is based on some generalizations that those four categories are the most nutrient-dense of the common vegetables and fruits. But at least the author acknowledges that limitation in her study and isn’t saying green beans have no worth in one’s diet.

Of what is included in the list, the rankings by nutrient density score are a bit counterintuitive. Broccoli and cauliflower are, perhaps disappointingly, rated a lot lower on the scale than watercress–in the 20-25  range, not the 100 (maximum score). So are carrots and tomatoes.

One of the reasons for this is, as Dr. Noia writes, “As some foods are excellent sources of a particular nutrient but contain few other nutrients, percent DVs were capped at 100 so that any one nutrient would not contribute unduly to the total score.”

So the scoring formula is purposely handicapped toward well-rounded performers. Is that realistic or meaningful? Some of the foods that scored lower within each of the four broad categories  may provide large amounts of one critical nutrient–vitamin C or A, or fiber, or potassium, or iron–but perhaps not loads of B vitamins or calcium.

Well–that’s the way it is. Very few single vegetables–and almost no fruits–deliver so many different nutrients at high density in an edible portion. It’s why we eat a variety of vegetables and fruits and don’t just gravitate toward one impossible or hard-to-eat-exclusively jack-of-all-trades food.

And that’s the major flaw in this approach to defining nutrient-worthiness through a catch-all formula. The author of this study, the ANDI Score folks, Dr. Fuhrman and countless others really are looking for a magic bean. They want “AND”, not “OR”, a vegetable or fruit that delivers everything by itself. Even if they think they’re making it simpler for the average consumer to get better nutrition advice, they’re working from a false premise.

Still, at least Dr. Noia isn’t overreaching as much as the commercial popularizers of “superfoods” schemes. She admits the list is limited, and that the formula she’s derived from previously validated major studies is still preliminary. The correlation between her nutrient density score and established nutrients with some cardiovascular disease and/or cancer-prevention effect is predictably high–well, there’s a lot of overlap to begin with, so what it really tells you isn’t a great deal.

But there is some value in looking at the list of what scored at least a 10 out of 100. What can you really learn from this list?

First, “Bitter is Better.” Sort of, anyway. You wouldn’t want to make a whole dish of arugula or watercress, but you might want to throw a good handful or so into your salad or sandwich or pasta.

Notably, though, “More Expensive and Trendy isn’t Necessarily More Nutritious.” Kale isn’t as high up on the list as ordinary unglamorous spinach or turnip greens, or even darker leafy lettuces–isn’t that interesting?

Third, “Green is Good.” Darker greens are closer to the top of the list, and even between broccoli and cauliflower there’s a slight pan-nutrient decrease, though it’s not meaningful enough to start shunning cauliflower. Which I happen to like nearly as much as broccoli, and sometimes in combination with it. And although brussels sprouts are marginally more nutritious than cauliflower, they’re also more of a pain to peel and trim, and there’s a lot more waste.

The real Green Effect here has to do with calories. You notice that none of the citrus or berry fruits are up in the top 10 in the list. Apples and bananas don’t make the list at all, and melon is right out. So are summer stone fruits. Even apricots, which have a fair amount of vitamin A. That’s because the greens on the list are very low-calorie, with almost no carbohydrate or sugar. And because the nutrient density scoring formula accounts for nutrients per 100 calories (at least sometimes, when there are countable calories involved), fruits are naturally going to score lower.

From the perspective of diabetes prevention and weight control, this is a reasonable way of looking at how we get critical vitamins and minerals. The common phrase “fruits and vegetables” leads people to assume that fruits should be thought of first when you shop, and vegetables are kind of an afterthought. But it’s obvious from this kind of scoring that fruits should be considered dessert rather than the major source of vitamins and minerals.

However–given that citrus fruits, berries and stone fruits deliver large doses of vitamins C and A respectively, plus potassium and vitamin E and fiber on occasion, they shouldn’t be shunned for not “doing it all” and doing it carb-free. We need some carbohydrates, and if you eat an orange, a half a grapefruit, or even a nectarine at breakfast instead of a piece of coffeecake, so much the better. Just notice that you’re also eating some carbohydrate in the form of fruit and don’t eat three at a time. Or dump sugar and butter on it and still think it’s righteous because it’s nominally fruit.

I think we can all handle that. Even without calling anything a superfood.

Filed under: DASH Diet, Food Politics, fruits, nutrition, Vegetabalia | Tagged: , , , , , | Comments Off on The CDC tries defining “powerhouse” veggies

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