New Rules for School Meals Aim at Reducing Obesity

Ron Nixon, The New York Times, January 25, 2012

WASHINGTON — Hoping to combat the growing problem of childhood obesity, the Obama administration on Wednesday announced its long-awaited changes to government-subsidized school meals, a final round of rules that adds more fruits and green vegetables to breakfasts and lunches and reduces the amount of salt and fat.

The announcement came months after the food industry won a vote in Congress to block the administration from carrying out an earlier proposal that would have reduced starchy foods like potatoes and prohibited schools from counting a small amount of tomato paste on a slice of pizza as a vegetable. Under the latest rules, potatoes are not restricted, and tomato paste can qualify as a vegetable serving.

The rules were announced by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Michelle Obama at Parklawn Elementary School in Alexandria, Va.
“As parents, we try to prepare decent meals, limit how much junk food our kids eat and ensure that they have a reasonable balanced diet,” Mrs. Obama said in a statement. “And when we are putting in all that effort the last thing we want is for our hard work to be undone each day in the school cafeteria.”

About 32 million children participate in school meal programs each day. The new rules are a major component of Mrs. Obama’s campaign to reduce the number of overweight children through exercise and better nutrition.

The rules are the first changes in 15 years to the $11 billion school lunch program. They will double the amount of fruits and vegetables children are served in school and will require that all grains served are whole grains.

All milk served must be low fat, and for the first time the rules set limits on levels of salt and trans fats. They also set a minimum and maximum calorie intake per day based on student age.

The government estimates that the rules will add about $3.2 billion in costs to the program, about half the cost of the proposed rules that were blocked last year.

Nutrition experts praised the new standards.

“We applaud the U.S. Department of Agriculture for issuing final guidance to help schools across the country serve healthier meals to students,” said Jessica Donze Black, project director for the Kids’ Safe and Healthful Foods Project, a joint project of the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “The updated nutrition standards for school meals are now in line with the most recent Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”
Representatives of the food industry generally also approved.

“From our perspective, the new rules improve school nutrition, but at the same time give schools the flexibility to serve a variety of foods to meet the standards,” said Corey Henry, vice president for communications of the American Frozen Food Institute. “It’s a balanced approach that meets the goals of everyone involved.”

The National Potato Council, which had opposed the attempts to limit the serving of potatoes, said that it was pleased with the new rules but that it still had some concerns.

“Despite the fact that Congress said the U.S.D.A. could not limit potatoes in school lunches or breakfast, we still feel like the potato is being downplayed in favor of other vegetables in the new guidelines,” said Mark Szymanski, a spokesman for the council. “It seems the department still considers the potato a second-class vegetable.”

Earlier versions of the proposal met with political opposition because they would have cut the amount of potatoes served, a move not popular with lawmakers from potato-growing states. It would also have required schools to put more than a quarter-cup of tomato paste on a slice of pizza for it to count as a vegetable serving, an idea food service companies opposed as unappetizing. And the rules would have halved the amount of sodium in school meals gradually over 10 years.

A group of farm state senators, led by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, blocked those earlier rules. Ms. Collins, who once worked on a potato farm, said the proposal to limit potatoes was overly restrictive.

The American Frozen Food Institute was concerned about the previous guidelines’ restrictions on sodium levels and the amount of tomato paste required to qualify as a vegetable serving.

The institute backed the latest rules, which continue to allow about a quarter-cup of tomato paste on a slice of pizza to count as a vegetable serving.

Still, Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit research group in Washington, said the rules would provide healthier meals and have a major impact in reducing childhood obesity rates.

“Despite Congress getting involved,” she said, “this is a very significant and comprehensive change that should improve the quality of school lunches.”

Standards at http://www.ofr.gov/OFRUpload/OFRData/2012-01010_PI.pdf

Start-Ups Look for a Shortcut From Farm to Table

Jessica E Vascellaro, The Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2012

A host of new tech companies are creating ways to buy food directly from local food producers, cutting out grocery stores and some of the middlemen.

They are also providing new services to educate consumers about what they are eating, down to the growing conditions of a carrot.

Founded by alumni from tech giants like Google Inc., the companies are using the same sorts of online tools that changed how people rent an apartment or find a date to make it easier to buy locally grown food. They are part of a growing class of start-ups targeting food and eating, from sites that deliver celebrity-chef meals to your door to a business that aims to turn roofs into vegetable patches. Many are steering clear of delivering fresh foods to your door, trying to avoid the pitfalls that felled some food-delivery companies in the past.

Among the new entrants is Farmigo Inc., a San Francisco company that has 50,000 subscribers after launching late last year. Founded by Microsoft Corp. and SAP AG veteran Benzi Ronen, Farmigo allows consumers to search for and buy produce and meat from local farms that deliver to pick-up locations in their neighborhood, including offices like Yelp Inc., Twitter Inc. and Google.

Many of those inclined to shop from the source rather than the store currently have to hunt for a seller via word of mouth. Farmigo tries to automate that process and hopes its technology increases the number of farmers that sell directly to consumers in the first place.

"At the end of the day farmers want to be in the field," not cobbling together technology, says Mr. Ronen. The company has raised $2 million from Silicon Valley angel investors.

Farmers like Annie Salafsky, just south of Olympia, Wash., say they appreciate how Farmigo lets customers register themselves online rather than having to enter in all their data manually. Farmigo takes a 2% cut of a farm's sales through the system and allows farmers to build their own Web store to sell additional products like lamb and honey. Those add-ons have brought Ms. Salafsky's farm, Helsing Junction Farm, about $35,000 in sales over the past year or so, out of annual sales of $500,000, she says.

Meanwhile, former Silicon Valley engineer Karl Rosaen co-founded Real Time Farms LLC and is building a database of farms and their growing practices, making it possible, for instance, to find a place to buy a tomato grown without synthetic pesticides with a few clicks. So far, the site has growing-practice information for a few hundred farms.

And Rob Spiro, co-founder of Good Eggs Inc. in San Francisco, left Google in June to start developing software for local food producers, testing ideas like allowing them to sell their products via mobile apps and helping them market with email newsletters.

Good Eggs is testing a consumer site offering information about where local foods are available, along with recipes. The goal is to "make local food even more convenient than typical grocery shopping" for national food brands, Mr. Spiro says. His company—which raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Silicon Valley venture-capital firms Baseline Ventures and Harrison Metal Capital in August—plans to launch its service this year.
Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com

Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

First Lady to Announce New Nutrition Standards for Meals Served in America's Schools

Public-Private Partnership Aims to Connect More Kids to Nutrition Programs

WASHINGTON, January 24, 2012 – TOMORROW, First Lady Michelle Obama will be joined by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack at Parklawn Elementary School to speak with parents about the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) new and improved nutrition standards for school lunches. An important accomplishment of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act that President Obama signed into law last year, USDA is making the first major changes in school meals in over 15 years, and doing so in a way that’s achievable for schools across the nation.

The new standards make the same kinds of changes that many parents are already encouraging at home, including ensuring kids are offered fruits and vegetables every day of the week, substantially increasing offerings of whole grain-rich foods, offering only fat-free or low-fat milk varieties and making sure kids are getting proper portion sizes.

Mrs. Obama and Secretary Vilsack will join children in the lunch line in Parklawn’s cafeteria where the school’s food service employees and celebrity cook Rachael Ray will be serving a healthy, delicious meal that meets new and improved nutrition standards for school lunches. Mrs. Obama and the Secretary will then join elementary kids for lunch.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012
11:15am
WHAT:          First Lady Michelle Obama, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and Kevin Concannon, Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services will announce the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) new and improved nutrition standards for school lunches.

WHERE:       Parklawn Elementary School
4116 Braddock Road
Alexandria, Va. 22312

Mrs. Obama’s and Secretary Vilsack’s remarks to parents will be open press – however space is limited and her visit to the lunch room will be pooled press. Please RSVP to FirstLadyPress@who.eop.gov by Monday, January 23^rd at 5:00 PM.

Media Advisory No. 5017.12   Contact: Office of Communications  (202) 720-4623

Last Saturday: TEDX Manhattan - Changing the Way we Eat

Event Program
10:30am Session 1- Issues
ETHEL
TED Video
Dr. David Wallinga, Antibiotic Resistance
Wenonah Hauter, Food/Farming Consolidation in Poultry Industry
Dr. Robert S. Lawrence, Health/Meat Reduction/Consumption
Performance
Patty Cantrell, New Roads to Markets
Urvashi Rangan, Labeling and the Controversy Around it

12:05pm-1:20pm-Lunch
1:20pm Session 2- Impact
TED video
Fred Kirschenmann, Soil
Michelle Hughes, GrowNYC – Immigrant Farming
Performance
Mitchell Davis, How Taste Affects Food Behavior
Wayne Pacelle, Impact of Factory Farming
Howard Hinterthuer, Veteran’s Food Production Project
Stephen Ritz, Edible Food Walls and How They’re Changing Students’ Lives.

3:15pm-3:45pm Break

3:45pm-5:35pm Session 3- Innovation
TED Video
Cara Rosaen, Online System for Restaurant Goers to Find Out Where Their Food Came From
Marianne Cufone, Recirculating Farms, What They Are and How They’re Helping People
Stefani Bardin video
Kerry McLean, Green Cart Program in NYC
Paul Lightfoot, Commercial Hydroponics on Top of Stores
Performance
Frieda Lim video
Kavita Shukla, Organic Paper That Keeps Produce Fresh
Gary Oppenheimer, Food Pantries and Food Distribution

New Video: Just Label It (GMO)

93% of Americans want the FDA to label genetically engineered foods.


Watch the new video from Food, Inc. Filmmaker Robert Kenner to hear why we have the right to know what’s in our food.

Will you join these individuals — and over half a million Americans — in contacting the FDA to require the labeling of genetically engineered (GE) foods?

Learning to Be Lean

Reed Abelson, The New York Times, January 17, 2012

As one of the many outgrowths of the sweeping federal health care law, health insurers and employers must now pay the cost of screening children for obesity and providing them with appropriate counseling.

With about one in three children in the United States obese or overweight, according to government statistics, the need for such programs is clear. But, experts say, creating them will be challenging. Other than intensive hospital-based programs, few proven models exist for helping children and adolescents achieve and maintain a healthier weight, and researchers do not even fully understand the factors that contributed to the rapid rise in childhood obesity in recent years. “If this were easy, if there were clear outcomes for success, we would be investing in these,” said Dr. Samuel R. Nussbaum, the chief medical officer for WellPoint, one of the nation’s largest health insurers.

While there are many community efforts aimed at getting every child to eat better and exercise more, including Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative, there is also growing demand for programs that help children who are already seriously overweight. WellPoint and the UnitedHealth Group, another large insurer, are experimenting with new approaches, and even Weight Watchers says it is working to develop a program for children and teenagers. Drug companies and medical device makers are also testing some products on children.

Adults have a difficult enough time losing weight, and the issues are even more complicated with children and teenagers, experts say. Children are still growing, and the goal of any program may be to help them grow into a healthier weight rather than to actually lose pounds. Experts also say that to be successful, programs need to focus on the family as a whole, changing what everybody eats and how much time they are all active, not sitting in front of a computer screen or television.

UnitedHealth’s pilot program, aimed at these family dynamics, was conducted in partnership with the YMCA of the USA and the YMCA of Greater Providence, R.I. The sessions at the Y, with young children or teenagers talking about their struggles with food and exercise, are intended to be a friendlier, more cost-effective alternative to hospital programs.

Accompanied by a parent, the children meet for 16 hourlong sessions, initially once a week. Led by a coordinator who has been trained at a Y or other community setting, the children and parents learn about what foods they should favor, why children may be overeating and how to balance what they eat with how active they are.

In Rhode Island, parents like Dana Morel said the program was appealing because there were few other options. “There really wasn’t anything like this,” said Ms. Morel, who enrolled her son, Ryan, after hearing about it from her local Y. “That’s why we jumped on this.”

Ryan, now 11, said he was initially reluctant to go to the meetings but was won over by the woman leading the group and the promise of $150 in gift cards if he filled out the paperwork (The use of gift cards was limited to the study.)

Ryan, who weighed 122 pounds, lost 30 of them as he learned to make better choices about what he ate and to recognize that he sometimes ate because he was bored. He learned to limit his portions and substitute turkey burgers for cheeseburgers.

Already active in sports like soccer, the leaner Ryan said he has become a better player. “I’m faster,” he said. “I don’t lose my breath as quickly. I can run.”

The early results of UnitedHealth’s efforts are promising, according to the insurer, which said that 84 percent of the 155 children and teenagers who completed the program had an average 3.5 percent reduction in weight after six months. Parents also lost weight, according to UnitedHealth. The insurer says it is expanding the program, even as it continues to study its longer-term impact.

Raytheon, a military contractor, started offering the sessions to its employees in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as part of a pilot program. “We are always seeking out innovative ways to help our employees and their families live healthy lifestyles,” Keith J. Peden, a Raytheon executive, said in a statement.

UnitedHealth is now working with Texas and Louisiana to offer a similar program this year for children enrolled in Medicaid under the insurer’s Medicaid plans.

“There’s not a lot of programs, especially programs that children are interested in participating in,” said Dr. Rodney Wise, the medical director for Louisiana’s Medicaid program. The state, which suffers from one of the country’s highest rates of obesity, is asking all the health plans serving Medicaid to address the problem.

In another experiment aimed at teenagers obsessed with videogames, UnitedHealth said it was studying whether Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 could help children become more fit by playing fitness games at home.

Now that insurers and employers must pay for child obesity services, “the market will respond” with more treatment options, said Dr. Deneen Vojta, a pediatrician and UnitedHealth executive. But some of those treatments may not prove effective, she said.
Early results may be misleading, agreed Karen Miller-Kovach, the chief scientific officer of Weight Watchers International.

Weight Watchers, which runs a weight-loss program for adults that involves group meetings as well as a Web-based program, had to abandon one approach after discovering children were regaining their weight after a year, with some even gaining more than they might have had they not participated.

Weight Watchers has not given up, however. Departing from the early program, it is now trying to develop ways of engaging the whole family to eat better. The new efforts focus less on counting “points” for foods.

Children, especially teenagers, can rebel under an overly strict regime, said Ms. Miller-Kovach, and programs need to focus on making smaller, sustainable changes in their lifestyle.

Many of the most established treatment programs for childhood obesity are based at hospitals or academic medical centers, and experts say they may not be well suited to a child who is overweight but has not yet developed a serious medical condition like diabetes and is not an appropriate candidate for bariatric surgery. Parents are also often reluctant to take their child to a hospital for treatment.

“There’s a big gap” between what is available for children and what is needed, said Gary D. Foster, the director of the Center for Obesity Research and Education at Temple University in Philadelphia, who serves as a consultant to UnitedHealth on its program.

WellPoint is trying a different approach, working through pediatricians. Because many pediatricians lack the background to help children who are overweight and have nowhere to refer them, WellPoint provided training to 100 doctors and linked them with dietitians in Virginia. The health plan pays for four visits to the doctor and four visits to the dietitian, whose sessions are aimed at improving the diet of the entire family.

WellPoint is already planning to expand its efforts to customers in California and Wisconsin this year as soon as it is able to identify dietitians who can work with the pediatricians.
Experts say it is critical to take the long-term view. “What we’re learning about treating childhood obesity is that there is no magic bullet in dropping weight in kids,” said Dr. Colleen Kraft, a pediatrician in Roanoke, Va., who worked with WellPoint there.

Success may be achieved when an overweight child does not become an obese adult. “It’s going to be a generation return on investment,” she said.

Study: If You Like a Food's Politics, You'll Find It More Nutritious

Anything "organic" or "low-fat" must be good for you, right? Ask people how fattening those organic chocolate-covered peanuts are, and they'll guess a lower number than they did for the non-organic version. They'll also eat more than they would have otherwise. The same goes for "low-fat" products. The effect has been called the "health halo" and it's pretty well-documented. But now it seems health halo may be too narrow a term: This study hints that any association with virtue makes a food feel healthier. In two clever experiments, people who thought that a company engaged in "fair trade" saw its chocolate as less fattening than did people who didn't know that about the company.

In one experiment, Jonathon P. Schuldt of California State University at Northridge and his co-authors signed up 56 people through Amazon's Mechanical Turk site and paid them each a nickel to estimate how the number of calories in a Petersen's chocolate bar compared to other brands. Twenty-nine people simply read that Petersen's, a small (and fictional) company, made really good chocolate. The other 27 learned, in addition, that Petersen's was a "fair trade" company—and those people guessed a significantly lower number of calories for the Petersen's product.

That result doesn't close the case, as the authors note in their paper, published online this month in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. Maybe "fair trade" can be taken to imply fair dealing for customers as well as suppliers. And anyway, what entitles the psychologists to assume that people are all alike? If you approve of the fair trade movement, maybe there is a halo effect around fair trade products. But what if you think squeezing cocoa farmers is an admirable exercise in maximizing shareholder value for Petersen's stockholders? (Such people exist, of course, and a number of them are running for President.) If you don't see the halo in one domain, you're unlikely to see it in the other.

To address these and other issues, Schuldt et al. employed a second, more rigorous experiment. They asked 192 University of Michigan students to read the description of that yummy Petersen's chocolate, which, for everyone, included that same blather about hand-crafting and rigorous testing. The sample was divided into three groups: One received no further information about Petersen's. Another set read the bit about how Petersen's "pays its cocoa farmers 50% more than the standard market price for cocoa, to ensure that the farmers receive a fair wage for their efforts." Others, in contrast, read that Petersen was an almost comically nasty company that paid lousy wages, resisted building schools and even fought to preserve child labor on West African cocoa farms.

All the readers also completed a questionnaire to assess how much they cared about ethical food production (one question, for instance, asked if, and how much, they agreed with the statement "It is important that the food I eat on a typical day comes from a country in which human rights are not violated").

Result: As the researchers expected, information about Petersen's "fair trade" practices made people more likely to see their candy as low-calorie if those people cared about fair trade. The higher people scored on a measure of their concern for the issue, the less fattening they perceived the fair-trade chocolate to be, and the more calories they perceived in the non-fair-trade version.

That result jibes with work by Dan Kahan at Yale Law School, which showed that people will accept the scientific authority of a credentialed expert who confirms their values, but will say there's something fishy and untrustworthy about the exact same expert if his science contradicts their beliefs. (I've written about the study here and a pdf of the paper is here.) In both studies, ideological commitment changes perception of the facts, without conscious awareness.

Ideology is supposed to be the result of conscious, rational reflection about facts and principles. So you would think that people who have decided they are committed will engage their conscious, rational minds when a relevant issue comes up. But as I read Schuldt et al., they found instead that ideological commitment shuts down the conscious mind. Kahan et al. did too. In the Kahan study, people discounted the credentials and arguments of an expert, rather than weighing them. In the Schuldt experiments, they saw food as nutritionally better if it was ideologically closer to them (without pausing to reason out the fact that a gram of milk chocolate has the same effect on you regardless of how much fattier other chocolates are, or how well the cows were treated). In the rationalist picture of the mind, our values guide our thinking, which then guide our actions. But it may be more accurate to say that our values block our thinking, letting unconscious processes run the show.

Schuldt, J., Muller, D., & Schwarz, N. (2012). The "Fair Trade" Effect: Health Halos From Social Ethics Claims Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611431643

We're Eating Less Meat. Why?

Mark Bittman     The New York Times      Janury 10,  2012

Americans eat more meat than any other population in the world; about one-sixth of the total, though we’re less than one-twentieth of the population.
But that’s changing.

Until recently, almost everyone considered their dinner plate naked without a big old hunk of meat on it. (You remember “Beef: It’s What’s for Dinner,” of course. How could you forget?) And we could afford it: our production methods and the denial of their true costs have kept meat cheap beyond all credibility. (American hamburger is arguably the cheapest convenience food there is.) This, in part, is why we spend a smaller percentage of our money on food than any other country, and much of that goes toward the roughly half-pound of meat each of us eats, on average, every day.

But that’s changing, and considering the fairly steady climb in meat consumption over the last half-century, you might say the numbers are plummeting. The department of agriculture projects that our meat and poultry consumption will fall again this year, to about 12.2 percent less in 2012 than it was in 2007. Beef consumption has been in decline for about 20 years; the drop in chicken is even more dramatic, over the last five years or so; pork also has been steadily slipping for about five years.

The report treats consumers as victims of government bias against the meat industry. We’re eating less meat because we want to eat less meat.
Holy cow. What’s up?

It’s easy enough to round up the usual suspects, which is what a story in the Daily Livestock Report did last month. It blames the decline on growing exports, which make less meat available for Americans to buy. It blames it on ethanol, which has caused feed costs to rise, production to drop and prices to go up so producers can cover their increasing costs. It blames drought. It doesn’t blame recession, which is surprising, because that’s a factor also.

All of which makes some sense. The report then goes on to blame the federal government for “wag[ing] war on meat protein consumption” over the last 30-40 years.
Is this like the war on drugs? The war in Afghanistan? The war against cancer? Because what I see here is:

·       a history of subsidies for the corn and soy that’s fed to livestock
·       a nearly free pass on environmental degradation and animal abuse
·       an unwillingness to meaningfully limit the use of antibiotics in animal feed
·       a failure to curb the stifling power that corporate meatpackers wield over  smaller ranchers
·       and what amounts to a refusal — despite the advice of real, disinterested experts, true scientists in fact —  to unequivocally tell American consumers that they should be eating less meat

Or is the occasional environmental protection regulation and whisper that unlimited meat at every meal might not be ideal the equivalent of war? Is the U.S.D.A. buying $40 million worth of chicken products to reduce the surplus and raise retail prices the equivalent of war?

No. It’s not the non-existent federal War on Meat that’s making a difference. And even if availability is down, it’s not as if we’re going to the supermarket and finding empty meat cases and deli counters filled with coleslaw. The flaw in the report is that it treats American consumers as passive actors who are victims of diminishing supplies, rising costs and government bias against the meat industry. Nowhere does it mention that we’re eating less meat because we want to eat less meat.

Yet conscious decisions are being made by consumers. Even buying less meat because prices are high and times are tough is a choice; other “sacrifices” could be made. We could cut back on junk food, or shirts or iPhones, which have a very high meat-equivalent, to coin a term. Yet even though excess supply kept chicken prices lower than the year before, demand dropped.

Some are choosing to eat less meat for all the right reasons. The Values Institute at DGWB Advertising and Communications just named the rise of “flexitarianism” — an eating style that reduces the amount of meat without “going vegetarian” — as one of its top five consumer health trends for 2012. In an Allrecipes.com survey of 1,400 members, more than one-third of home cooks said they ate less meat in 2011 than in 2010. Back in June, a survey found that 50 percent of American adults said they were aware of the Meatless Monday campaign, with 27 percent of those aware reporting that they were actively reducing their meat consumption.

I can add, anecdotally, that when I ask audiences I speak to, “How many of you are eating less meat than you were 10 years ago?” at least two-thirds raise their hands. A self-selecting group to be sure, but nevertheless one that exists.

In fact, let’s ask this: is anyone in this country eating more meat than they used to?
We still eat way more meat than is good for us or the environment, not to mention the animals. But a 12 percent reduction in just five years is significant, and if that decline were to continue for the next five years — well, that’s something few would have imagined five years ago. It’s something only the industry could get upset about. The rest of us should celebrate. Rice and beans, anyone?

-P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods

Ari LeVaux, The Atlantic, January 9, 2012

New research shows that when we eat we're consuming more than just vitamins and protein. Our bodies are absorbing information, or microRNA.

Chinese researchers have found small pieces of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in the blood and organs of humans who eat rice. The Nanjing University-based team showed that this genetic material will bind to proteins in human liver cells and influence the uptake of cholesterol from the blood.

The type of RNA in question is called microRNA, due to its small size. MicroRNAs have been studied extensively since their discovery ten years ago, and have been linked to human diseases including cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes. The Chinese research provides the first example of ingested plant microRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function.
Should the research survive scientific scrutiny, it could prove a game changer in many fields.

It would mean that we're eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but information as well.
The Chinese RNA study threatens to blast a major hole in Monsanto's claim. It means that DNA can code for microRNA, which can, in fact, be hazardous.

That knowledge could deepen our understanding of cross-species communication, co-evolution, and predator-prey relationships. It could illuminate new mechanisms for some metabolic disorders and perhaps explain how some herbal medicines function. And it reveals a pathway by which genetically modified (GM) foods might influence human health.

Monsanto's website states, "There is no need for, or value in testing the safety of GM foods in humans." This viewpoint, while good for business, is built on an understanding of genetics circa 1950. It follows what's called the "Central Dogma" (PDF) of genetics, which postulates a one-way chain of command between DNA and the cells DNA governs.

The Central Dogma resembles the process of ordering a pizza. The DNA knows what kind of pizza it wants, and orders it. The RNA is the order slip, which communicates the specifics of the pizza to the cook. The finished and delivered pizza is analogous to the protein that DNA codes for.

We've known for years that the Central Dogma, though basically correct, is overly simplistic. For example: Pieces of microRNA that don't code for anything, pizza or otherwise, can travel among cells and influence their activities in many other ways. So while the DNA is ordering pizza, it's also bombarding the pizzeria with unrelated RNA messages that can cancel a cheese delivery, pay the dishwasher nine million dollars, or email the secret sauce recipe to WikiLeaks.

Monsanto's claim that human toxicology tests are unwarranted is based on the doctrine of "substantial equivalence." This term is used around the world as the basis of regulations designed to facilitate the rapid commercialization of genetically engineered foods, by sparing them from extensive safety testing.

According to substantial equivalence, comparisons between GM and non-GM crops need only investigate the end products of DNA translation: the pizza, as it were. "There is no need to test the safety of DNA introduced into GM crops. DNA (and resulting RNA) is present in almost all foods," Monsanto's website reads. "DNA is non-toxic and the presence of DNA, in and of itself, presents no hazard."

The Chinese RNA study threatens to blast a major hole in that claim. It means that DNA can code for microRNA, which can, in fact, be hazardous.

"So long as the introduced protein is determined to be safe, food from GM crops determined to be substantially equivalent is not expected to pose any health risks," Monsanto's website goes on. In other words, as long as the pizza is OK, the introduced DNA doesn't pose a problem.

Chen-Yu Zhang, the lead researcher on the Chinese RNA study, has made no comment regarding the implications of his work for the debate over the safety of GM food. Nonetheless, his discoveries give shape to concerns about substantial equivalence that have been raised for years.

In 1999, a group of scientists wrote a now-landmark letter titled "Beyond Substantial Equivalence" to the prestigious journal Nature. In the letter, Erik Millstone et. al. called substantial equivalence "a pseudo-scientific concept" that is "inherently anti-scientific because it was created primarily to provide an excuse for not requiring biochemical or toxicological tests."

To these charges, Monsanto responded: "The concept of substantial equivalence was elaborated by international scientific and regulatory experts convened by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1991, well before any biotechnology products were ready for market.

This response is less a rebuttal than a testimonial to Monsanto's marketing prowess. Establishing the concept of substantial equivalence worldwide was a prerequisite to the global commercialization of GM crops. It created a legal framework for selling GM foods anywhere in the world that substantial equivalence was accepted. By the time substantial equivalence was adopted, Monsanto had already developed numerous GM crops and was actively grooming them for market.

The OECD's 34 member nations could be described as largely rich, white, developed, and sympathetic to big business. The group's current mission is to spread economic development to the rest of the world. And while that mission has yet to be accomplished, OECD has helped Monsanto spread substantial equivalence to the rest of the world, selling a lot of GM seed along the way.

The news that we're ingesting information as well as physical material should force the biotech industry to confront the possibility that new DNA can have dangerous implications far beyond the products it codes for. Can we count on the biotech industry to accept the notion that more testing is necessary? Not if such action is perceived as a threat to the bottom line.

Image: Dirk Ercken/Shutterstock.

New York CIty Health Department launches portion-size campaign

The amazing New York City Health Department, almost unique in its interest in public health and willingness to do what it can to improve the health of New Yorkers, adds another campaign to its collection of hard hitters.  This one is on the need to reduce portion sizes.

The subway campaign posters in Spanish and English.  Here’s an example in Spanish.

I especially like this campaign because much of the work on increasing portion sizes in the food supply was launched by my former doctoral student, now Dr. Lisa Young.  See:

·       Young LR, Nestle M, The contribution of expanding portion sizes to the US obesity epidemic. American Journal of Public Health, 2002. 92(2): p. 246-9.

·       Young LR, Nestle M, Expanding portion sizes in the US marketplace: implications for nutrition counseling. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, 2003. 103(2): p. 231-4.

Larger portions do three things:
·       They have more calories, obviously.
·       They induce people to eat more calories 
·       They induce people to underestimate the number of calories they are eating

All of these induce people to eat more than they need or should.
The expansion of portion sizes alone is sufficient to explain rising rates of obesity.
The Health Department’s campaign makes sense.  Let’s hope it helps.

--------------------------------------------------Stefaan G. Verhulst
Chief of Research
Markle Foundation
10 Rockefeller Plaza, Floor 16
New York, NY 10020-1903
 Tel. 212 713 7630http://www.markle.org
P Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.

Looking ahead to food politics in 2012

Marion Nestle      SF Gate      January 1, 2012
Nutrition and public policy expert Marion Nestle answers readers' questions in this monthly column written exclusively for The Chronicle. E-mail your questions to  food@sfchronicle.com">mailto:food@sfchronicle.comHYPERLINKsfg.ly/s3aZKW) and more farmers' markets, farm-to-school programs, school meal initiatives, and grassroots community efforts to implement food programs and legislate local reforms. There is plenty of hope for the future in local efforts to improve school meals, reduce childhood obesity, and make healthier food more available and affordable for all.

And on a personal note: In April, University of California Press will publish my co-authored book, "Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics." I'm hoping it will inspire more thinking and action on how we can change our food system to one that is better for people and the planet.

Marion Nestle is the author of "Food Politics" and "What to Eat," among other books, and is a professor in the nutrition, food studies and public health department at New York University. She blogs at www.foodpolitics.com. E-mail comments to food@sfchronicle.com.