Tag Archives: food and ag

Want Some Metal With That Kraft Mac & Cheese?

by ReganColls Posted on March 17, 2015

Mother Jones

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Today, Kraft Foods recalled 242,000 cases—or about 6.5 million boxes—of its signature macaroni and cheese after customers reported finding small pieces of metal in the product. Yummy!

Eight customers, like the one below, have found the metal, though no injuries have been reported.

According to a company press release, the recalled boxes are 7.25 oz, “Original Flavor” Macaroni & Cheese Dinner with expiration dates between September 18, 2015 and October 11, 2015, and they’re marked with the code “C2” below the date (referring to the box’s production line). The boxes have been distributed across the United States and Puerto Rico, as well as some Caribbean and South American countries. The company’s statement read, “We deeply regret this situation and apologize to any consumers we have disappointed,” and added, “Consumers who purchased this product should not eat it.”

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Want Some Metal With That Kraft Mac & Cheese?

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What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

by RafaelaYFPY Posted on March 4, 2015

Mother Jones

Bill Nye, the bow-tied erstwhile kids’ TV host, onetime dancer with the stars, and tireless champion of evolution and climate science, was never a virulent or wild-eyed critic of genetically modified crops. Back in 2005, he did a pretty nuanced episode of his TV show on it, the takeaway of which was hardly fire-breathing denunciation: “Let’s farm responsibly, let’s require labels on our foods, and let’s carefully test these foods case by case.”

In his book Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation, published just last November, Nye reiterated these points. His concern about GMOs centered mainly on unintended consequences of growing them over large expanses—he cited the example of crops engineered to resist herbicides, which have been linked pretty decisively to the decline of monarch butterflies, which rely on abundant milkweeds, which in turn have been largely wiped out in the Midwest by GMO-enabled herbicide use. Nye praised certain GMOs, such as corn engineered to repel certain insects, but concluded that “if you’re asking me, we should stop introducing genes from one species into another,” because “we just can’t know what will happen to other species in that modified species’ ecosystem.”

Now, Nye’s doubts have evidently fallen away like milkweeds under a fine mist of herbicide. In a February interview filmed backstage on Bill Maher’s HBO show (starting about 3:40 in the below video), Nye volunteered that he was working on a revision of the GMO section of Undeniable. He gave no details, just that he “went to Monsanto and I spent a lot of time with the scientists there.” As a result, he added with a grin, “I have revised my outlook, and am very excited about telling the world. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world!”

Monsanto’s longtime chief technology officer, Robb Fraley, responded to the interview with an approving tweet featuring a photo of Nye at company HQ:

It will be interesting to hear what wonders within Monsanto’s R&D labs turned Nye from a nuanced GMO skeptic to a proud champion.

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What Did Monsanto Show Bill Nye to Make Him Fall “in Love” With GMOs?

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Eat What You Want, But Eat Fresh

by AlvaroHutchings Posted on February 25, 2015

Mother Jones

This is interesting. Yesterday I wrote a post suggesting that we should all try to eat more fresh food and less processed food, but that otherwise it didn’t matter much what kind of diet you followed. (Within reason, of course.) This was based solely on my intermittent reading of food research over the years, not on a specific rigorous study. Today, however, fellow MoJoer Tom Philpott tells me that there is indeed a rigorous study that backs this up:

Over the past decade, there has been a bounty of research on the ill effects of highly processed food. And when Yale medical researchers David Katz and Samuel Meller surveyed the scientific dietary literature for a paper in 2013, they found that a “diet of minimally processed foods close to nature, predominantly plants, is decisively associated with health promotion and disease prevention.”

Interestingly, Katz and Meller found that as long as you stick to the “minimally processed” bit, it doesn’t much matter which diet you follow: low-fat, vegetarian, and Mediterranean have all shown good results. Even the meat-centered “paleo” approach does okay. The authors conclude the “aggregation of evidence” supports meat eating, as long as the “animal foods are themselves the products, directly or ultimately, of pure plant foods—the composition of animal flesh and milk is as much influenced by diet as we are.” That’s likely because cows fed on grass deliver meat and milk with a healthier fat profile than their industrially raised peers.

Now, Tom is optimistic that processed food is losing its allure as Americans migrate more and more to fresh foods. I can’t say that I share this optimism, but I hope he’s right. There’s nothing wrong with a potato chip or a can of soup here and there (everything in moderation!), but a steady diet of processed food really is something worth avoiding.

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Eat What You Want, But Eat Fresh

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Does Anyone Really Know What a Healthy Diet Is Anymore?

by ColemanKrauss Posted on February 24, 2015

Mother Jones

For several years now I’ve been following the controversy over whether the dietary guidelines that have developed over the the past 70 years might be all wrong. And I’ve become tentatively convinced that, in fact, they are wrong. For most people—not all!—salt isn’t a big killer; cholesterol isn’t harmful; and red meat and saturated fat are perfectly OK. Healthy, even. Sugar, on the other hand, really needs to be watched.

Before I go on, a great big caveat: I’m not even an educated amateur on this subject. I’ve read a fair amount about it, but I’ve never dived into it systematically. And the plain truth is that firm proof is hard to come by when it comes to diet. It’s really, really hard to conduct the kinds of experiments that would give us concrete proof that one diet is better than another, and the studies that have been done almost all have defects of some kind.

In other words, what follows are some thoughts I’ve gathered over the years, not a crusade to convince you I’m right. And it’s strictly about what’s healthy to eat, not what’s good for the planet. Take it for what it’s worth.

Salt is perhaps the most personal subject to me. My father had a stroke when I was a teenager, and his doctor told him he needed to watch his salt intake. Ever since then, I’ve watched mine too. As it happens, this wasn’t a big sacrifice: I don’t eat a lot of prepared foods, which are usually loaded with salt, and I’ve never felt the need to heavily salt my food.

Nevertheless, last year my doctor told me she was worried about my sodium level. I misunderstood at first, and figured that I needed to make additional efforts to cut back. But no. My serum sodium level was too low. What’s more, it turns out that most Americans consume a safe amount of sodium. The usual recommendation is to keep sodium intake below 2400 mg per day, but the bulk of the evidence suggests that twice this much is perfectly safe for people who don’t suffer from hypertension. (And even the recommendations for people with hypertension might be more restrictive than they need to be.)

Then there’s cholesterol. I guess I don’t have to say much about that: the evidence is now so overwhelming that even the U.S. government’s top nutrition panel announced a couple of weeks ago that dietary cholesterol was no longer a “nutrient of concern” in its latest guidelines. Go ahead and have an egg or three.

Finally, there’s saturated fat. The same nutrition panel that decided cholesterol is OK didn’t ease up its recommendations on saturated fat. But I’m increasingly skeptical of this too. Interestingly, Aaron Carroll is skeptical too:

As the guidelines have recommended cutting down on meat, especially red meat, this meant that many people began to increase their consumption of carbohydrates.

Decades later, it’s not hard to find evidence that this might have been a bad move. Many now believe that excessive carbohydrate consumption may be contributing to the obesity and diabetes epidemics. A Cochrane Review of all randomized controlled trials of reduced or modified dietary fat interventions found that replacing fat with carbohydrates does not protect even against cardiovascular problems, let alone death.

Interestingly, the new dietary recommendations may acknowledge this as well, dropping the recommendation to limit overall fat consumption in favor of a more refined recommendation to limit only saturated fat. Even that recommendation is hotly contested by some, though.

….It is frustrating enough when we over-read the results of epidemiologic studies and make the mistake of believing that correlation is the same as causation. It’s maddening, however, when we ignore the results of randomized controlled trials, which can prove causation, to continue down the wrong path. In reviewing the literature, it’s hard to come away with a sense that anyone knows for sure what diet should be recommended to all Americans.

Randomized trials are the gold standard of dietary studies, but as I said above, they’re really, really hard to conduct properly. You have to find a stable population of people. You have to pick half of them randomly and get them to change their diets. You have to trust them to actually do it. You have to follow them for years, not months. Virtually no trial can ever truly meet this standard.

Nonetheless, as Carroll says, the randomized trials we do have suggest that red meat and saturated fat have little effect on cardiovascular health—and might actually have a positive effect on cancer outcomes.

At the same time, increased consumption of sugars and carbohydrates might be actively bad for us. At the very least they contribute to obesity and diabetes, and there’s some evidence that they aren’t so great for your heart either.

So where does this leave us? As Carroll says, the literature as a whole suggests that we simply don’t know. We’ve been convinced of a lot of things for a long time, and it’s turned out that a lot of what we believed was never really backed by solid evidence in the first place. So now the dietary ship is turning. Slowly, but it’s turning.

For myself, I guess I continue to believe that the key is moderation. Try to eat more fresh food and fewer packaged meals. That said, there’s nothing wrong with salt or saturated fat or cholesterol or sugar. None of them need to be cut down to minuscule levels. You don’t need to limit yourself to two grams of salt or eliminate red meat from your diet. You can eat eggs and butter and steak if you want to. You should watch your sugar and carb intake, but only because so many of us consume truly huge quantities of both. In the end, all of these things are OK. They simply need to be consumed in moderation.1

Can I prove that? Nope. But it’s what I believe these days.

1Needless to say, none of this applies to people with specific conditions that require dietary restrictions. Listen to your doctor!

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Does Anyone Really Know What a Healthy Diet Is Anymore?

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How Screwed Are Your State’s Oysters?

by Amilianp2t Posted on February 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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When carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and cars rise into the atmosphere, they don’t always stay there. While the majority of these emissions hang around to create the greenhouse effect that causes global warming, up to 35 percent of man-made carbon falls into the ocean. When that happens, the pH level of the ocean drops, causing a phenomenon known as ocean acidification. Some scientists call this the “evil twin” of climate change.

Over the last century, the oceans have become about 30 percent more acidic, a faster rate of change than at anytime in the last 300 million years. That’s really bad news for any sea creatures that live in hard shells (shellfish) or have bony exoskeletons (i.e., crabs and lobsters), and for coral. Fish larvae and plankton can also be affected. And since many of these organisms are food for bigger fish and mammals, ocean acidification puts the whole marine ecosystem at risk.

Of course, humans depend on these critters as well, especially in coastal communities whose economies are deeply tied to the fishing industry. In the last few years, the threat to oyster harvests in the Pacific Northwest has been well documented. But every bit of the US coastline bears some level of risk, according to a new report in Nature. The study offers the first comprehensive projection of which parts of the US coast will be worst off, and when ocean acidification could reach dangerous levels there.

Julia Ekstrom, a climate adaptation researcher at the University of California-Davis, combed through existing scientific literature for three key types of data: How ocean acidification is projected to change in different regions over the next century; how dependent individual local economies are on the shellfish harvest (the study focused only on bivalves like oysters—other critters could be the subject of future research); and social factors that could help communities adapt, like pollution controls (runoff from rivers can also affect local pH) or the availability of other jobs. That data, combined, led to the map below.

Purple indicates the time at which ocean acidification is expected to become serious enough to significantly affect shellfish (darker is sooner); red indicates how vulnerable a region would be to a drop-off in shellfish productivity. So Washington, for example, could see the impacts soon but is relatively well-prepared to handle them. Impacts to the Gulf Coast are expected much further in the future but could be more economically severe.

Ekstrom et al, courtesy Nature

The good news is that many of what could be the hardest-hit communities still have time to prepare. Then again, the outlook could be worse in some places (Maine, for example) if you conducted similar research on lobsters and other vital fisheries. Ekstrom said localized predictions like this are key to enabling communities to prepare and can also help scientists decide where to focus efforts to monitor and track acidification as it progresses.

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How Screwed Are Your State’s Oysters?

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Eat Like A Mongolian, Not Like An American

by HectorSherry Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

The world, as a whole, is getting less hungry. Over the past two decades, the levels of undernutrition in developing countries from Sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia have declined. Unfortunately, so has the quality of our diets.

That’s the main takeaway of a study published by The Lancet Global Health on Wednesday that looked at the dietary patterns across 187 countries—comprising about 89 percent of the global population—in 1990 and 2010. Check out the maps below, which break down eating habits by country on a scale of green (the healthiest) to red (the unhealthiest). The first map shows which countries are eating the most healthy foods like whole grains, fruits, vegetables, fish, nuts and seeds, beans and legumes, and milk (see, for example, Chad, the Central African Republic, Mali, and Turkey). The second map shows which countries are eating the most unhealthy foods that are high in fat and salt, as well as sugary drinks, unprocessed red meats and processed meats (see the United States, Russia, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Brazil, among others).

Fumiaki Imamura et al / The Lancet Global Health

The next three maps show changes in dietary patterns from 1990 to 2010, again on a color scale, with green countries making healthy changes and red countries making unhealthy changes. Russia, Mongolia, Laos, and Paraguay are outpacing many other countries with their increase in nutritious foods, as the top map shows, while the second map reveals that Uganda, Vietnam, and Armenia are quickly finding a taste for fatty or sugary treats. And when it comes to overall dietary changes since 2010, shown in the last map, it seems that China, Angola, and Congo aren’t doing very well.

Fumiaki Imamura et al / The Lancet Global Health

A team of researchers made these maps by evaluating hundreds of national surveys about diets. Looking at the big picture, they found that people around the world are, on average, eating more nutritious foods than they did 20 years ago, but they’re also digging into more junk—much more junk. “Consumption of healthier foods and nutrients has modestly increased during the past two decades; however, consumption of unhealthy foods and nutrients has increased to a greater extent,” the researchers explained.

On average, older adults are eating better than younger adults, while women are eating better than men. There are also major differences regionally, depending on countries’ income levels. While people in the United States, Canada and western Europe are among the worst in the world for high consumption of unhealthy food, they’re eating less junk than they used to, which helps explain reductions in blood pressure, blood cholesterol, and cardiovascular mortality in these countries. By comparison, people in many developing countries eat relatively healthy diets, but they’re eating more junk than they did in the past.

These socioeconomic variations have ramifications for public health. International food programs usually focus on fighting hunger, but in nearly every region of the world, the researchers said, diet-related health problems due to undernutrition are now less common than those due to non-communicable chronic diseases, and the food we eat plays a role in causing many of these diseases. By 2020, nearly three-quarters of all deaths globally will be attributable to non-communicable chronic diseases, they said, adding that without major changes to diet quality, these diseases and obesity will become much more common among the world’s poor.

It’s unclear exactly why low-income countries are eating more unhealthy foods, but the reasons are probably varied. In northwest sub-Saharan Africa, the researchers said, food prices have increased and diet quality has worsened, perhaps due to economic liberalization and marketing of unhealthy foods to the region’s wealthiest people. Violent conflicts might also play a role in certain countries, by hindering food production and trade. “Our work should help to link the possible economic and political factors to actual diets,” they wrote, “and to assess determinants of the potential divergence in consumption of healthy foods in the poorest nations in the world.”

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Eat Like A Mongolian, Not Like An American

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Here’s What the Government Thinks You Should Be Eating in 2015

by PhilomeLoggins Posted on February 20, 2015

Mother Jones

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Earlier this week, I wrote about some of the nutrition controversies surrounding the release of new United States Dietary Guidelines in 2015. The Guidelines, which inform public health initiatives, food labels, and what health-conscious parents decide to make for dinner, are revised every five years, with help from a scientific committee.

Today, that committee released its initial scientific report, an extensive 572-page tome on all the current thinking about healthy diets.

So what are we eating—and what should we be eating—in 2015?

Perhaps the biggest change this year could breathe some life into your breakfast habits: The cholesterol in egg yolks is no longer as much of a health concern. The US Dietary Guidelines used to recommend that you eat no more than 300 milligrams of dietary cholesterol a day, or under two large eggs. But this year, the committee has scrapped that advice as new research suggests that the cholesterol you consume in our diets has little to do with your blood cholesterol. Saturated fats and trans fats, on the other hand, could boost blood your blood cholesterol levels, as could unlucky genes.
The committee found that Americans lack vitamin D, calcium, potassium, and fiber in their diets. We also eat too few whole grains. On the other hand, we eat far too much sodium and saturated fat. Two-thirds of people over age 50, those most at risk for cardiovascular disease, still eat more than the upper limit, or 10 percent of their daily calories from saturated fat.
Gardeners, rejoice: The committee applauds vegetables in its latest report, describing them as “excellent sources of many shortfall nutrients and nutrients of public health concern.” Unfortunately, our veggie intake has declined in recent years, especially for kids. Only 10 percent of toddlers eats the recommended 1 cup of vegetables a day.
Added sugars, which make up 13.4 percent of our calorie intake every day, contribute to obesity, cavities, high blood pressure, and potentially cardiovascular disease. If you are in tip top shape, the committee suggests keeping your added sugar consumption under 10 percent of your daily energy intake, or roughly 12 teaspoons (including fruit juice concentrates and syrups). But for most people, the report adds, the ideal amount of added sugars is between 4.5 to 9.4 teaspoons a day, depending on your BMI.
Most adults are fine to keep drinking alcohol in moderation—one cup a day for women, and up to two for men. “However,” writes the the committee, “it is not recommended that anyone begin drinking or drink more frequently on the basis of potential health benefits.”
Be it máte, espresso, or chai, your caffeine habit is fine in moderation, up to 400 mg a day (3-5 cups of coffee). But before you start handing out the Rockstars: The committee found evidence that high levels of caffeine, such as those found in energy drinks, are harmful to kids and pregnant women. (Plus: See above for the danger of the added sugars found in many of these energy drinks).
Seafood is a pretty healthy thing to eat from a dietary standpoint, and concerns about mercury don’t outweigh the health benefits of eating fish, according to the committee. And yet, the collapse of fisheries due to overfishing “has raised concern about the ability to produce a safe and affordable supply.” The report suggests that both farm-raised and wild caught seafood will be needed to feed us in the future.
The committee found that a diet “higher in plant-based foods…and lower in calories and animal-based foods is more health promoting and is associated with less environmental impact than is the current US diet.” A group of 49 environmental and animal-welfare groups sent a letter to the US Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services to urge them to embrace this sustainability-oriented message in their Dietary Guidelines, which are set to be released later in 2015.

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Here’s What the Government Thinks You Should Be Eating in 2015

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This Chart Shows That Americans Are Way Out of Step With Scientists on Pretty Much Everything

by MichelineWorth Posted on January 29, 2015

Mother Jones

Here’s one big reason why the US has been so slow to take aggressive action on climate change: Despite the wide consensus among scientists that it’s real and caused by humans, the general public—not to mention a disconcerting number of prominent politicians—remains divided.

It’s not just climate change. On a range of pressing social issues, scientists and the public rarely see eye-to-eye. That’s the result of a new Pew poll released today that compared views of a sample of 2,000 US adults to those of 3,700 scientists who are members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the group that publishes the journal Science.

The biggest split was over the safety of genetically modified foods: 88 percent of scientists think GMOs are safe, compared to only 37 percent in the general public. Interestingly, college graduates were split 50-50. The gap between scientists and the public is smaller on the question of whether to mandate childhood vaccines. But it’s still there. Eighty-six percent of scientists and 68 percent of all adults think vaccines should be required.

The poll didn’t attempt to explain the gaps between scientists and the general public. On some issues there are clearly factors beyond pure science, like ethics and politics, that influence opinions. For example, scientists show more support for nuclear power, but less support for fracking, than the public. As our friend Chris Mooney has reported many times, these outside factors tend to creep into peoples’ opinions even on objective questions like whether humans have evolved.

Lee Rainie, Pew’s director of science research, added that trust in scientists can be a big factor. On GMOs, for example, 67 percent of the public believe scientists don’t fully understand the health risks. And on issues like climate and evolution, the public believes there to be more disagreement within the scientific community than there actually is, he said.

More interesting findings are below:

Pew

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This Chart Shows That Americans Are Way Out of Step With Scientists on Pretty Much Everything

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McDonald’s Just Recalled 1 Million Chicken McNuggets for a Super-Gross Reason

by CathernChippind Posted on January 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Update 12/15/15: Cargill announced that “they are confident the blue, plastic foreign material recently reported in one McDonalds Chicken Nugget in Japan did not originate from Cargill’s production facilities.” The source of the plastic is unknown.

McDonald’s Japan is having a rough start to 2015. Last week, the company apologized after a customer found plastic fragments in an order of Chicken McNuggets, which were thought to have been produced at a Cargill factory in Thailand. McDonald’s pulled out nearly 1 million McNuggets from the factory in one day. The same week, a customer in Misawa found a piece of vinyl in an order of McNuggets.

In a statement about the plastic contamination, company spokesman Takashi Hasegasa said, “We deeply apologize for the trouble we have caused our customers and we are taking quick measures to analyze the cause of the contamination.”

Plastic and vinyl are, sadly, not the only gross items that customers have found in their McDonald’s meals over the past year. In August, the company received a complaint from a customer in Osaka who had found the shard of a human tooth in an order of french fries. It was unclear at press time if the customer was in fact “lovin’ it.“

In July, McDonald’s shut down its poultry supplier in China, Shanghai Husi Food Co, after allegations that the factory had deliberately mixed fresh chicken with expired produce. The meat had then allegedly been shipped to McDonald’s in Japan and Starbucks and Burger King in China.

The summer food scares led McDonald’s Japan sales to drop more than 10 percent every month compared to the previous year, according to CNN. This fiscal year, the golden arches are bracing themselves for the their first net loss in Japan in 11 years.

In an effort to bounce back, McDonald’s Japan launched a sales campaign with discounts, giveaways, and new nuggets made from tofu.

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McDonald’s Just Recalled 1 Million Chicken McNuggets for a Super-Gross Reason

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California’s Almonds Suck as Much Water Annually as Los Angeles Uses in Three Years

by minecrafty Posted on January 12, 2015

Mother Jones

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More stories about the almond boom and what it means for California.


Invasion of the Hedge Fund Almonds


Charts: Almonds Suck as Much Water Annually as LA Uses in 3 Years


Photos: The Story Behind California’s Nut Boom


It Takes How Much Water to Grow an Almond?!


Lay Off the Almond Milk, You Ignorant Hipsters

California’s worst drought on record isn’t stopping the state from growing massive amounts of nuts: The state produces over 80 percent of the world’s almonds and 43 and 28 percent of the world’s pistachios and walnuts, respectively. As Mother Jones’ Tom Philpott details in this longread, the state’s almond market in particular has taken off: What was a $1.2 billion market in 2002 became $4.8 billion market by 2012.

Why are the almond growth rates so…nuts? (Sorry.) One reason is that the average American now eats two pounds of the crunchy snack per year—more than twice as much as a decade ago. But the biggest demand is coming from abroad: The US now exports 70 percent of almonds.

The thing is, nuts use a whole lot of water: it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. Residents across the state are being told to take shorter showers and stop watering their lawns, but the acreage devoted to the state’s almond orchards have doubled in the past decade. The amount of water that California uses annually to produce almond exports would provide water for all Los Angeles homes and businesses for almost three years.

China and Hong Kong together are the top buyers of US almonds; as Philpott writes, “Between 2007 and 2013, US almond exports to China and Hong Kong more than quadrupled, feeding a growing middle class’ appetite for high-protein, healthy food.”

Yet the center of almond farming—and the farming of lots of the US’s fruits and veggies—is exactly where the worst the most extreme drought is taking place. To make up for the water shortage, farmers are pumping groundwater—the underground water that feeds aquifers, serving as a savings account of sorts for the state’s water supply.

As the value of treenuts soars, the water required to support crops is pumped from a groundwater supply that has been shrinking for decades.

So how does the amount of water used to create nuts stack up with the water we use in our daily life? Check out the graphic below:

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California’s Almonds Suck as Much Water Annually as Los Angeles Uses in Three Years

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