Just kidding. You don’t have to call, simply read on:

I don’t mean to proselytize, but a new study just demonstrated one of the powerful effects of changing to a vegetarian diet: significantly reduced bodily levels of harmful environmental compounds.  Published in the journal Environmental Research this year, the study analyzed participant levels of antibiotics and phthalate metabolites (compounds that are formed once they react with the body) before and after a 5-day “temple stay”.   While at the Guemsan Temple in Korea, the participants practiced a vegetarian diet and followed the daily routines of Buddhist monks.  They gave to the researchers a urine sample right before entering into the program and then once more shortly before the temple stay’s termination.  They also provided the researchers with accounts of the typical eating habits and the amount of tap water they drank (again, before and after).

All targeted compounds were found to be significantly lower after their five-day vegetarian diet.  Since no participants had a recent medication history and water inatke did not correlate with levels of contaminants, the authors conclude that the dietary change was responsible for the reduction.   The linear trends in animal product consumption and urinary levels of phthalates/antibiotics before the participants did the temple stay also suggest that diet is a substantial contributor to “inadvertent exposure”–The more animal products are eaten, the higher the exposure to these kinds of environmental contaminants.

It is important to note that while there was a significant reduction in the amount of antibiotic and phthalate compounds due to the vegetarian diets, the levels of antibiotics and phthalates never exceeded  “acceptable” or “tolerable” levels beforehand.  Of course, what you find to be acceptable for your body may be different from what the government has declared to be safe (with plenty of input from the relevant industries, I’m sure).

Anyhow, what this study shows superbly is that even short-term changes in your diet can really improve your bodys’ well-being.  It gives a whole new meaning to healthy eating, doesn’t it?

Recent research from the Consumer Reports Magazine found that those bagged salad mixes, most claiming to be pre-washed and ready to eat, aren’t as clean as you’d like them to be.  Thankfully, what they found wasn’t e coli, salmonella or anything as dreadful as that.  Instead, in their sample of 208 bags (representing 16 brands) they found bacteria like coliform or enterococcus that could only get there one way – fecal contamination.

Several industry experts [that Consumer Reports] consulted suggested that for leafy greens, an unacceptable level of total coliforms or enterococcus is 10,000 or more colony forming units per gram (CFU/g) or a comparable estimate. In our tests, 39 percent of samples exceeded that level for total coliforms and 23 percent for enterococcus.

Tasty.

Anyway…The bagged salad varied widely in amount of contamination, but the ones farthest from their sell-by date were often better.  As such, Consumer Reports suggest that you buy packages as far from their use-by date as you can find.  And, of course, wash your greens.  They say it won’t get rid of all the bacteria, but it will help to remove residual soil.

Happy salad eating, everyone!

In all, she’s pushed health and nutrition to the forefront of our nation’s conscious since she stepped into the Oval Office. Uh-hem, since her husband stepped in the Oval Office.  In any case, she’s certainly creating hope that the rise in childhood obesity will not continue and making tangible change to that effect on her own.

Let’s Move has an ambitious goal, but also an equally impressive amount of support from governmental bodies, businesses, and local  non-profits all across the nation:

The Let’s Move campaign will combat the epidemic of childhood obesity through a comprehensive approach that builds on effective strategies, and mobilizes public and private sector resources. Let’s Move will engage every sector impacting the health of children to achieve the national goal, and will provide schools, families and communities simple tools to help kids be more active, eat better, and get healthy.

To support Let’s Move and facilitate and coordinate partnerships with States, communities, and the non-profit and for-profit private sectors, the nation’s leading children’s health foundations have come together to create a new independent foundation – the Partnership for a Healthier America – which will accelerate existing efforts addressing childhood obesity and facilitate new commitments towards the national goal of solving childhood obesity within a generation.

This task force is combating childhood obesity in four key areas simultaneously: helping parents make healthy family decisions,  improving the nutritiousness of food available in schools (where children routinely consume half of their calories), promoting physical activity, and ensuring access to healthy and affordable foods.  This blog has detailed how difficult it is for some poorer families in poorer neighborhoods to access fresh fruits and vegetables.

I’d say this task force has a lot on its plate. But, Let’s Move has a powerhouse of leaders who support and believe in the importance of its mission.  In a world that seems to be at a standstill when it comes to any progressive policy, we could certainly use some superheros.  Could these be the  new Fantastic 4?

"First lady Michelle Obama walks through the White House east colonnade with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, left, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, second from right, and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, as they meet regarding the childhood obesity initiative." By Jack Gruber, USA TODAY

]]> http://www.foodbubbles.com/blog/2010/02/27/lets-move-michelle-obamas-campaign-against-childhood-obesity/feed/ 5 http://www.foodbubbles.com/blog/2009/11/22/martha-stewart-to-have-a-vegetarian-thanksgiving/ http://www.foodbubbles.com/blog/2009/11/22/martha-stewart-to-have-a-vegetarian-thanksgiving/#comments Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:34:51 +0000 foodbubbles http://www.foodbubbles.com/blog/?p=1917 Jonathan Safran Foer has been talked about and to in nearly every major media outlet since his book Eating Animals came out.  Where  Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma tiptoes around the treatment of factory farmed animals, Eating Animals blows the doors wide open on the modern day “farm”.

In an email to Erik Marcus of vegan.com, Jonathan Safran Foer described his more recent adventure with the professional craft-maker and (television) host, Martha Stewart:

I was on Martha Stewart today, along with the director of Food, Inc., a veg chef, and a family farmer. I couldn’t possibly have been more impressed by how Martha handled things. Firstly, to devote an entire show to the horrors of the meat industry without feeling a need to offer the industry a voice. Secondly, she came right out and said the meat industry is bad. She didn’t mince her words. She wasn’t cagey or indirect. She spoke plainly and openly about the secrecy, about how they went after Oprah, about how they torture animals (her words), about how she’s going to have a vegetarian Thanksgiving. She told her audience, “You’ll probably agree with just about all of the conclusions in Jonathan’s book.” Frankly, she came off as further down the spectrum than I did.

Jonathan Safran Foer

You know it’s a really great book when it infuriates some and inspires a whole lot more to change.

I think I know what’s on my shopping list this holiday season.

After creating quite a stir in the foodie blogosphere, the mainstream media, and even riling up the lethargic FDA, the industry led Smart Choices label is voluntarily suspending the promotion of its program.  They even had the Attorney General of Connecticut after them–Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced that he was investigating the program and some of the companies that participate in it to see if they had violated a consumer protection law that bars deceptive marketing claims.

The FDA had sent a letter to several major food companies saying that they would be looking into whether not certain food labels and logos mislead consumers about the health benefits of certain items, and cracking down on inaccurate food labeling.  The FDA did not name names or give a time line of enforcement.  However, Dr. Margaret A. Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, has expressed the administration’s interest in standardizing and streamlining front-of-package labels.

”There’s a growing proliferation of forms and symbols, check marks, numerical ratings, stars, heart icons and the like,” said Hamburg. ”There’s truly a cacophony of approaches, not unlike the tower of Babel.”

The New York Times

She says Americans need a label they can trust to inform them about building better diets.  The FDA’s letter may not have named specific the offending, trust-crushing products, but Dr. Hamburg wasn’t afraid to comment on the loose standards of a certain egregious labeling campaign, noting that ‘there are products that have gotten the Smart Choices check mark that are almost 50 percent sugar”.  In a phone interview with reporters, she repeatedly reference the UK traffic light system as a guide for present label guideline efforts.

In making their own labels, the industry was obviously trying avoid regulation that would make them use a structure so bluntly honest as the UK’s traffic light system: These things are bad for you; This is how much of the bad stuff this item has in it. Smart Choices attempted to avert this by only touting only the good in a food–mostly in the form of added vitamins, minerals, and fiber.     Thanks to its very lax standards on other nutritional information, like calorie and fat content, nobody trusted the Smart choices campaign.

Putting “Smart Choices” on things like Froot Loops and mayonnaise (yes, mayonnaise) may have immediately corrupted its image of doing good for the consumer, but it did help intensify the FDA’s efforts to rework its own guidelines.  Because “helping consumers make better, healthier choices for themselves is a critical part of the FDA’s public health mission,” the agency said in a statement Friday. “Consumers want and have a right to clear, accessible nutrition information that they can trust to help guide their food choices.”  Officials said that by early next year, the FDA will issue proposed standards that companies must follow in creating nutrition labels that go on the front of food packaging.  New, exciting “science- and nutrition-based” food labels could be seen on packages at the end of next year!

Still, Mike Hughes, the program’s chairman, said in a statement that they continue to “believe in the science behind the Smart Choices program”.  Adding that the “impetus for the Smart Choices program was that there were and are too many systems,” he said. “We applaud the concept of having one system nationwide.”

Yes, the reason the industry added another labeling system was because there were too many systems.  Of course.  It makes perfect sense.  You know what actually makes sense?  Ending the stupid, Smart “Froot Loops are better than a donut” Choices program.

In 2001 Barbara Kowalcyk’s 2-year old son, Kevin, died after contracting E. coli O157:H7 from a hamburger. Her son’s death thrust her into a life of food-safety activism.  She started the non-profit Center for Foodborne Illness and continues to lobby Congress for an improved food safety system.  She has tried in vain for many years to get “Kevin’s Law” passed, which would give the FDA the authority to shut down plants that repeatedly produce pathogen contaminated foods. She recently talked with Evan Kleiman, host of KCRW’s Good Food, about her struggles with food safety advocacy.

Within the last month, The New York Times and The Washington Post showcased two more cases of hemolytic uremic syndrome caused by E. coli contaminated foodstuff – Stephanie Smith suffered after eating hamburger, and the other has been hospitalized since May after eating contaminated  Nestle cookie dough.

Meat companies and grocers have been barred from selling ground beef tainted by the virulent strain of E. coli known as O157:H7 since 1994, after an outbreak at Jack in the Box restaurants left four children dead. Yet tens of thousands of people are still sickened annually by this pathogen, federal health officials estimate, with hamburger being the biggest culprit. Ground beef has been blamed for 16 outbreaks in the last three years alone, including the one that left Ms. Smith paralyzed from the waist down. This summer, contamination led to the recall of beef from nearly 3,000 grocers in 41 states.

Stephanie Smith, 22, had been a children’s dance instructor, but will never walk again, let alone dance.   US Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, has heard the emotional pleas for better food safety regulation and efficient enforcement and has pledged to enhance food safety.  But, food safety experts think he’s not doing enough, fast enough.  Even some from Congress are frustrated with the lack of accountability;  After reading the NY Times article, Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn), a longtime champion of food safety, wrote an open letter to Vilsack demanding an investigation into tainted beef and asking larger slaughterhouses to demonstrate responsibility and accountability.  During the House campaign to pass HR 2749, the Food Safety Enhancement Act of 2009, she noted in her debates that when over 3,000 Americans were killed on 9/11, America went to war immediately.  Yet, 5,000 Americans die annually from food poisoning and still we do nothing to enhance the safety of our food system.

Apparently,we can only leap to action when culpability lies elsewhere…

Or do they all have to die at the same time to get Congress to notice?

This, of course, is asinine and unacceptable.  Concerned Americans want action, and they want it before Thanksgiving:

A bipartisan collection of Senators got visits from food poisoning victims–or their surviving family members–[October 7th] , as part of preeminent food poisoning attorney Bill Marler’s campaign to get meaningful food safety legislation passed in the Senate before Thanksgiving. During their visits, the food safety advocates passed out the packages in the photo, above, which contained a T-shirt with Marler’s Put a Trial Lawyer Out of Business logo, as well as an info sheet about what meaningful legislation actually means. Currently, there are four different food safety Bills under consideration by the Senate, in various stages of hearing and mark up. Any meaningful legislation that gets enacted should include mandatory recall powers for FDA, mandated inspections and testing on a regular basis for food producers, and major changes in what USDA considers acceptable pathogens in meat that’s allowed in the food chain.

Obama Foodorama

Think we should wait until Thanksgiving to have safe food?  After the article in the New York Times, a ton of people wrote in expressing their concerns for food safety.  Now, it’s your turn to write.  Find your representatives online on the House site and the Senate website.  Tell them you want to give thanks for not having to worry about whether you’ll end up spending the holiday season in the hospital.

He recently wrote a sort of ‘top ten’ list of food policy blogs for blogs.com:

In this list, he looked beyond the excellent sites that already appeared in a recent list at Culinate, which included Ethicurean, Green Fork, ChewsWise, Food Politics, Politics of the Plate, Grist, Civil Eats, and Obama Foodorama. Parke’s list adds some more blogs from within what might loosely be called the “good food movement,” but it emphasizes other selections that he reads to maintain diversity in his information stream.

Food Law Prof Blog
For legal news and insight, a member of the Law Professor Blog Network. More legal blogging comes from the Agricultural Law blog.

Amber Waves
The dry but substantial electronic magazine from USDA’s Economic Research Service, with accompanying RSS feed, is enough like a blog to make this list. In the same vein, one could mention Choices electronic magazine from the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA).

La Vida Locavore
A thick stream of news and policy commentary from a local food perspective.

Blogriculture
By the staff of Capital News agriculture newspaper.

Farm Policy
A thorough summary of daily agricultural news coverage, with excerpts and little editorial commentary.

Fooducate
Practical food shopping advice. No pills. No industry affiliation.

Center for a Livable Future Blog
Focusing on industrialized food production systems.

Marler Blog
Commentary on food poisoning outbreaks and litigation.

TEFAP Alliance Blog
News about food assistance programs and the anti-hunger movement.

Daily Bread
The food business blog at Slate’s site, The Big Money.

Damn straight...

If you are further interested in what a crackpot Richard Berman is, you can find out about him and his expertise at bermanexposed.com.  Essentially, there are a lot of high paid lobbyists fronting as non-profits.

With consumer skepticism over the Smart Choices program, mandatory calorie labels on menus, the FDA developing nutrition label revisions (pdf), and the words ‘soda taxes‘ on the tip of every tongue, it is no wonder that industries are bringing out all their guns, pulling no stops when it comes to, well, their freedom to confuse consumers and obfuscate facts.  The moral here?  Always read the small print.  Sometimes, though, they make so easy for us:

He has earned the Nobel Peace Prize, Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Congressional Gold Medal for his successes. The Nobel Peace Prize was given to him in 1970 in recognition of his contributions to world peace through increasing food supply. The urge to debilitate the scourge of hunger began when he took his first job in 1935 with the Civilian Conservation Corps. He worked with the unemployed on federal projects and saw first hand how hunger affected the people working for him. A lot of them were essentially starving. He later recalled, “I saw how food changed them … All of this left scars on me.”

Indeed, Borlaug had started out studying forestry, but switched to plant pathology when he considered the effect of crop disease on hunger. After graduating he began his career as a microbiologist at DuPont studying industrial and agricultural bacteriocides, fungicides, and preservatives then came the war and with it his lab was transformed to perform governmental research for the United States armed forces. They made some pretty cool stuff.

After the war, Borlaug declined DuPont’s offer to double his salary and left for Mexico to join the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program–a joint project between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. His project in Mexico was the archetype of his future work in other countries. He and his team studied genetics, plant breeding, plant pathology, entomology, agronomy, soil science, and cereal technology to make Mexico more self-sufficient in feeding its population.

His success in manipulating genetics and plant breeding made him a target for anti-genetically modified food campaigns. It has also led some to complain about the disruption to traditional farming and claimed his processes would lead to pervasive monocultures across the world:

Mr Borlaug called them naysayers and elitists, who had never known hunger but thought, for the health of the planet, that the poor should go without good food. Higher yields, he pointed out, saved marginal land and forest from farming. Inorganic fertiliser just replaced natural nutrients, and more efficiently than manure. As for cross-breeding, Mother Nature had done it first, cross-pollinating different wild grasses until they produced a grain that could eventually expand into modern bread…

Genetic engineering of plants greatly excited him. The risks, he said, were rubbish, unproven by science, while the potential benefits were endless. The transfer of useful characteristics might now take weeks, rather than decades. More lives would be saved.

The Economist

Borlaug taught and researched at Texas A&M University from 1984 until his death. He was the Distinguished Professor of International Agriculture at the university and held the Eugene Butler Endowed Chair in Agricultural Biotechnology.  Clearly, though, his most important lessons were found in his own life’s work and in his own motto, “Get the plow, start growing now.”

Not a chance, says the group Americans Against Food Taxes.  Americans Against Food Taxes is a “coalition of concerned citizens” that is strictly opposed to the sweetened beverage taxes.  However, on more than cursory view, you find that it is actually a front for the American Beverage Association.  (The media contact page leads you directly to their representatives.)  They took out a whole page ad in The Washington Post which urged congress not to “tax our groceries”.

Of course, soda taxes would seriously damage the industry’s profits, so it’s not surprising that the American Beverage Association is defending itself more actively.  Researchers like Dr. Brownell at Yale report that just like with cigarette purchases, consumer spending on sugary beverages would decline as prices rise.  Plus, the sweetened beverage industry has seemingly been under constant attack in myriad other ways as of late:

Across the country, many schools have removed soda vending machines saying they should not be plying children with sugary drinks.

Last month, the American Heart Association urged people to reduce their intake of sugary foods and beverages to lower the risk of conditions like obesity and high blood pressure — singling out soft drinks as a prime culprit.

Even President Obama has voiced a cautious openness to the tax.

”I actually think it’s an idea that we should be exploring,” he said, in a recent interview in Men’s Health magazine. ”There’s no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda. And every study that’s been done about obesity shows that there is as high a correlation between increased soda consumption and obesity as just about anything else.”

But Mr. Obama acknowledged that there would be significant resistance to such a tax.

Kelly D. Brownell, the lead author of the study and director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, said in an interview that a penny-an-ounce tax would have an immediate and powerful impact on the nation’s elevated obesity rate.

The New York Times

Furthermore, the money from a soda tax could very well pay for at least some of the health care reform measures in the works.  The Baucus health care bill, which is estimated to cost $774 billion over ten years, called for “an array of taxes and fees on high-end group insurance plans, drug and medical device makers, and other sources” to pay for itself.  No soda taxes or the like were mentioned, but according to research of the sort that lead to the soda tax revenue calculator they could make a rather big dent in health care payments.

The American Beverage Association is huge in terms of dollars available, but does it have the same power and influence as the insurance companies or the farm lobby?  Do the benefits so outweigh the negative impact on the soda industry that their dollars won’t matter? (Ha!) Will actual citizens join the group Americans Against Food Taxes?  As usual when it comes to food and politics, we shall see…