The Food Environment

Wasting Antibiotics

By Michael Crupain, MD, MPH

Antibiotics are valuable medications that have made treating what were once life-threatening infections with bacteria, relatively easy.  A growing threat to public health however, is the development of bacteria that are resistant to our current antibiotics.  An infection with one of these resistant bacteria can increase costs, suffering, and even cause death.  Each year fewer and fewer new antibiotics are being developed and we may find ourselves someday soon faced with bacteria that are resistant to all of our current defenses. 

This Week's Food News

By Young-Rok Shin, MD, MPH

In case you missed it here are some news highlights from last week.

This week, we had two articles about the Federal government’s role in food policy. Jennifer Huget at the Washington Post covered the Harvard School of Public Health’s release of their own version of the USDA’s MyPlate dietary guide in “Dishing up a different healthful-eating plate.” While similar to the USDA’s guide (which is the new replacement for the old Food Pyramid), it replaces the cup of dairy with water and adds a flask of healthy oils. It also tweaks the plate components by emphasizing that the grains and protein should be from healthful sources.

In the New York Times, we had an article by Fernanda Santos titled, “Public Schools Face the Rising Costs of Serving Lunch” about the Federal government’s recent requirement that schools start raising their prices to better reflect the cost of providing school meals. This was done to eliminate the large differences in prices that exists between some school districts. New York City, for example, only charges $1.50 for lunch, compared with Fairfax County, Va, which charges $2.65. Critics of the measure claim that the price increase will drive parents away from the school lunch program altogether by making them too expensive to afford for struggling families that are just above the cutoff for subsidized lunch, and that the new prices will still not realistically cover the actual cost of lunch anyway.

An End to Unlimited Breadsticks?

By Michael Crupain, MD, MPH

Recently Michelle Obama held a press conference at an Olive Garden restaurant in Maryland.  She was there to announce that Darden Restaurant Inc, which owns the Olive Garden, Red Lobster, as well as other chains, had signed on to make their menus healthier as part of the Let’s Move Campaign.

The group will adopt a number of strategies to improve the health of the food they serve; they will reduce calories and sodium by 10% in the next 5 years and reduce it by another 10% in the preceding five years; make fruits and vegetables the default option for sides in kids meals; and make low fat milk the default option for kids beverages.   In addition, they state that soda will not be promoted, menus will promote healthy choices, and the nutritional values of children’s menus will be improved. 

This Week's Food News

By Young-Rok Shin, MD, MPH

It was quite a busy week for food news.

In “’Corn sugar’ is false advertising, FDA warns” Thomas Watkins of the Associated Press wrote about the Corn Refiners Association’s attempt to circumvent the bad publicity that high fructose corn syrup has been receiving lately by renaming it as “corn sugar.” The FDA has issued a warning about this, however, as it oversees all food labeling and has not approved this name change. While no labels on actual food products have used the “corn sugar” label, the Corn Refiners Association is using the name in TV commercials and on at least some of its websites and the FDA has raised concerns that the new label may be misleading and confusing for consumers.

The New York Times had two articles related to food this week. Jane Brody wrote about the findings of a new series of reports published in The Lancet about fighting the obesity epidemic by approaching the problem from multiple angles. She described her own experience of what had changed from her childhood to modern times with regards to the much greater availability of cheap, convenient, and tasty processed foods and the decline in physical activity resulting from the design of suburban neighborhoods and the rise of modern conveniences like television. She then went on to go over some of the recommendations from the reports from The Lancet, which advised approaching the problem similar to the way tobacco smoking was handled with advertising controls, increases in tobacco taxes, greater availability of treatments such as the nicotine patch, and banning public smoking.

Joe Nocera wrote a column titled “Killing Jobs and Making Us Sick,” in which he laments the Republican Party’s opposition to funding proposals for the Food Safety Modernization Act and the FDA. Despite significant industry and bipartisan House support for an industry fee that would have raised $300 million to help fund the new food safety act, Republican Senators killed the fee because they viewed it as a tax in disguise. House Republicans then cut the FDA’s own budget by $87 million instead of increasing it by $120 million as requested by President Obama. Although the Senate just recently approved a $40 million increase in the budget, it is still not believed to be enough to cover the new inspections that the FDA has been mandated to carry out, and it also remains to be seen what the final 2012 budget will look like.

In the Baltimore Sun this week, Candus Thomson covered Maryland’s efforts to receive a seal of approval from the Marine Stewardship Council for locally caught striped bass. With consumers increasingly choosing products that are labeled as eco-friendly and sustainable, supporters of the effort believe that it will provide a boost for local watermen by allowing them to charge a premium price for their fish while providing a safeguard against state budget cuts on research and protection programs for Maryland’s fisheries. However, not everyone is onboard, with opponents questioning the validity of the Marine Stewardship Council’s approval process and Maryland’s ability to properly maintain its striped bass fisheries in a sustainable manner against the many water quality challenges that face the Chesapeake Bay.

Finally, The Nation magazine has a whole issue on food issues this week, covering Michael Pollan’s thoughts on how to effect change to the food system, food as a human right, Walmart’s new plan to open stores in food deserts all over the country, and much more. Some of the articles are available only to subscribers, but the ones linked here and many others are available for free (although reading more than a couple of articles at a time may require a free signup).

Redefining Health Education

By Michael Crupain, MD, MPH

Last week there was an interesting Op-Ed in the NY Times calling for the resurrection of Home Economics classes in schools.  The article, by Professor Helen Zoe Veit, makes many good points about many Americans not knowing how to cook and therefore relying on processed and prepared foods for nourishment.  She suggests that Home Ec is a great venue to teach America’s youth about healthy cooking and that by doing so we could combat the epidemic of obesity and chronic disease that we face.

I really enjoy cooking, but when I think back to my Home Ec cooking class, I do not have many pleasant memories nor do I remember doing any healthy cooking.  I do remember making apple pie, coffee cake, cheese steaks.  I also remember that if the person measuring out the ingredients for the day made any mistakes then our whole group failed for that day!  This class clearly was focused on recipes, but it would have been better to focus on the techniques of cooking.  While we learned the technique of measuring ingredients (to be fair, as a result of this strict measuring policy, I learned the difference between a wet and dry measuring cup), we did not learn many other cooking techniques that we could apply to multiple foods or throughout our lives.  If we are going to combat obesity by bringing back Home Ec, there are going to have to be some major changes in the curriculum.

This Week's Food News

By Young-Rok Shin, MD, MPH

In Vegetable Gardens Are Booming in a Fallow Economy, Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times wrote about the boom in backyard and community vegetable gardening that started after the 2008 financial crisis. Taking place primarily in rural areas, this movement has been about cutting grocery bills, with people growing or purchasing in bulk and then canning, pickling, or otherwise preserving their food for long-term use in order to reduce their overall food costs. Some of the backyard growers are also selling their excess crops at local farmers’ markets to supplement their incomes.

USA Today had a piece called Restaurants want a piece of food stamp pie covering the efforts of restaurants to expand food stamp benefits (now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) to allow their use in restaurants, including fast food chains. Although federal regulations generally do not allow SNAP to be used to buy prepared foods, there is an exception for the disabled, elderly, and homeless. The lobbying efforts have the support of anti-hunger advocates but are opposed by public health advocates and current SNAP vendors.

A Northern California School District’s Cafeteria is having a tough time competing with food trucks selling unhealthy foods during lunchtime.  According to the NY Times, Novato High School is preparing healthy meals for students, but students don’t like them and buy ice cream and other junk food from trucks parked outside.  The question the article fails to answer is; is the food really any good or are students critiques justified?

This Week's Food News

By Young-Rok Shin, MD, MPH & Michael Crupain, MD, MPH

On the opinion pages of the New York Times, Mark Bittman expressed his disappointment with the Obama administration in a piece titled, “Profits Before Environment.” He criticized the administration’s actions on environmental issues such as genetically modified crops and a new proposed oil pipeline that would cut across the Midwest between Canada and the Gulf coast. He cited numerous concerns about both issues, and called on President Obama to stop protecting corporate interests at the expense of the environment.

Fox Business News interviewed Slow Food USA President Josh Viertel about the Farm Bill and subsidies for unhealthy foods.  Josh and Fox’s Neil Cavuto talk about how the government has created a toxic food environment with its financial support for unhealthy foods.  The clip is below.

 

The website Gilt Taste posted on a well-done video about food environments in the South Bronx, one of NYC’s most unhealthy.  The video put together by students from the New Settlements Bronx Helpers with the Center for Urban Pedagogy.  In the 28 minute piece the students talk with bodega owners, wholesalers, distributors, community leaders, and public health experts about why the food environment in the South Bronx is the way it is.  While the video may be a little long, it is definitely informative and worth a watch.  If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, it starts to get really good at around the 10 minute mark.

Bodega Down Bronx from the Center for Urban Pedagogy on Vimeo.

New Ads Target Dads

By Michael Crupain, MD, MPH

Public Health professionals can often be heard saying that education is not effective at getting people to change their behaviors.  This sounds pretty reasonable, especially when you consider that the majority of American’s are overweight, yet for over 100 years people have been taught that eating healthy and staying active is the best way to maintain a healthy weight.  There is a form of education however that is very effective--advertising. 

Food advertising is ubiquitous and has become part of our environment.  We are constantly bombarded with images to “educate” and lure us into eating unhealthy foods.  Ads are designed not just to inform us about how good a product is, but also to get us to associate that product with certain traits or lifestyles that we desire.  This messaging helps to build brand loyalty, so that we prefer one brand to another even though in reality there may be little difference between them.

This Week's Food News

By Young-Rok Shin, MD, MPH

Tired of reading about Hurricane Irene, check out these stories from the week of 8/22/2011.

In As Farmers’ Markets Go Mainstream, Some Fear a Glut Kate Zezima of the New York Times reported,  that although the recent surge in popularity of farmers’ markets has led to greater and easier accessibility to fresh farm produce for many consumers, the number of new markets being created may actually be greater than the demand for their products. Many farmers are reporting substantial decreases in their profit margins and are facing greater transportation and labor costs as they try to supply more markets in order to keep their revenues up.

USDA Actions Speak Louder Than Words

By Michael Crupain, MD, MPH

The soda industry scored a major victory last week when the USDA rejected New York City’s proposal for a pilot program to stop the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Funds (SNAP aka Food Stamps) from being used to purchase empty calorie soda.  While soda companies protested the program under the guise of protecting the rights of the poor, they were really concerned about protecting corporate profits.  The NYC plan would not have stopped anyone from purchasing soda if they chose to, but it would have reduced the income of companies selling soda.  NYC estimates that in its jurisdiction between $85 and $135 million of tax payer dollars are used, through the SNAP program, to pay for non-nutritious sodas each year.  If program such as NYC proposed were adopted nationwide, that would essentially mean over $1.7 billion less a year in federal subsidies to soda companies!

Obesity is well known to be the result of calorie intake exceeding calorie expenditure.  Soda has been implicated by numerous studies to be a major source of excess unhealthy calories in the American diet.  In fact conservative estimates show that American adult consume over 150 and children over 190 calories a day from sugar-sweetened beverages. 

While the Federal Government has spent the last 100 years asking citizens to eat a healthy diet, it has at the same time spent citizens’ money supporting a toxic food environment.  The typical example of this is taxpayer money used to subsidize the growing of corn and soy, which is turned into the fat and sugar that make up processed foods.  The purchasing of unhealthy foods with SNAP dollars represents another example of federal subsidies to food companies.  NYC proposal offered the Federal Government a chance to show its support for a healthy food environment.  Unfortunately actions do speak louder than words and the failure of the USDA to approve the pilot program demonstrates once again that the priorities of the Federal Government are the pocketbooks of the food industry not the public’s health.  Its time the Federal Government stops simply paying lipservice to eating healthy and adopts policies consistent with dietary reccomendations.