A recent New York Times article reported that the distribution of counterfeit food and beverage products is widespread. In “Counterfeit Food More Widespread Than Suspected,” authors Stephen Castle and Doreen Carvajal note that although the scandal in Europe surrounding the substitution of horse meat for beef products has garnered the most attention from consumers, in fact, that is just a hint of what has been happening as the economic crisis persists. Castle and Carvajal report that investigators have uncovered thousands of frauds, raising questions about regulatory oversight as criminals offer shoppers cheaper versions of everyday food products, including chocolate, olive oil, wine, juice, honey, and coffee. One recent food fraud case reportedly involved an international organized crime gang that produced and distributed a “dangerous brew” of fake vodka that appeared legitimate and bore a “near-perfect counterfeit label,” but contained bleach and high levels of methanol. See The New York Times,…
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“An enormous amount of media space has been dedicated to promoting the notion that all processed food, and only processed food, is making us sickly and overweight,” writes David Freedman in a July/August 2013 Atlantic article arguing against the widely-held belief that “the food-industrial complex—particularly the fast-food industry—has turned all the powers of food-processing science loose on engineering its offerings to addict us to fat, sugar, and salt, causing or at least heavily contributing to the obesity crisis.” According to the article, “the wholesome food movement” has consistently derided all processed foods as innately fattening, even though many offerings sold by organic and natural food purveyors contain more sugar, fat and salt than their fast-food equivalents. For Freedman, however, these efforts to demonize the food industry have overlooked not only its considerable market influence, but also the role of technology in making healthier foods as palatable as the original products.…
“In what is becoming an all too familiar sight, the major food corporations recently teamed up with the First Lady’s Partnership for a Healthier America to announce their latest PR attempt to look like they are helping Americans eat healthier,” opines food activist and attorney Michele Simon in a June 19, 2013, post on the Corporations & Health Watch blog. According to Simon, the food companies that pledged in 2010 to reduce calories “in the marketplace” by 1.5 trillion have “jumped the gun” in proclaiming their success, as the official evaluation funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has not yet been released. In particular, Simon cites Bruce Bradley, “a former food industry executive turned blogger and author,” who questions the accuracy of a preliminary report issued by the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF). “First off, measuring something like this at such a high level is recipe for bias. There…
According to Bay area journalist April Short, who apparently focuses on social justice reporting, public concerns about food health in the United States have compelled “the junk food industry” to use “disturbing deceptions . . . to keep Americans hooked on its junk.” In her June 18, 2013, AlterNet article titled “You Won’t Believe What the Food Industry Is Doing to Keep Americans Hooked on Junk,” Short claims that the deceptions include processing to make products look more “natural,” “marketing to children under the guise of charity,” and creating foods “manufactured to include just the right combination of the sugar, fat and salt our limbic brains love.” Citing Michael Moss’s book Salt Sugar Fat, Short discusses how food companies have made a science of producing foods that consumers cannot resist, including using just the right amounts of salt, sugar and fat, otherwise known as the “bliss point”; creating the “mouthfeel”…
During a recent interview with Atlantic journalist Joe Fassler, author Michael Moss discussed “the language of junk-food addiction” and the role of salt, sugar, fat, and texture in snack foods allegedly engineered to promote “mindless eating—where were [sic] not really paying attention to what we’re putting in our mouths.” According to Moss, who spoke with Fassler about why consumers find processed foods like potato chips so appealing, the food industry has invested “a trillion dollars of money” in creating and marketing products that seek “to override the natural checks that keep us from overeating.” “And I’ve found that the language they use to describe their work and their products and their [sic] striving not just to make us like their products but to make us want more and more of them is absolutely revealing,” opines Moss. “When they talk about the allure of food, they hate the word addiction: but…
Writing in the May 2013 edition of the Harvard Business Review (HBR), the editorial director of the HBR Press, Tim Sullivan, considers the questions raised by three new books that examine the evolution of the food industry and its relationship to consumer health. Turning to Michael Moss’s Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Melanie Warner’s Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal and Jon Krampner’s Creamy and Crunchy: An Informal History of Peanut Butter, the All-American Food, Sullivan notes that despite the blame leveled at food processors and marketers, “it’s much harder to tell the public that they are partly culpable for the state of their personal and national health (food, after all, is not crack) than it is to point the finger at Big Business, Wall Street, or the government.” “When monoliths take over and aim to get us ‘addicted’ to their product— whether we’re talking…
Food writer Tom Philpott has authored a March 13, 2013, Mother Jones article taking issue with a meta-analysis of bisphenol A (BPA) studies that toxicologist Justin Teeguarden recently presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the meta-analysis covered 150 exposure studies and 130 toxicity studies, and ultimately concluded that “people’s exposure may be many times too low for BPA to effectively mimic estrogen in the body,” according to a recent press release issued by the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PPNL). In particular, Teeguarden argued that human BPA exposure usually occurs at levels well below detection, pointing to the combined results of exposure studies apparently showing “that human blood levels of BPA are expected to be too far below levels required for significant binding to four of the five key estrogen receptors to cause biological effects.” His research also…
The New York Times has reported that an “anti-Bloomberg” bill intended to curtail the ability of local governments to pass food regulations has gained significant support in Mississippi, where Governor Phil Bryant (R) is expected to sign the measure into law. “It is easy to view the new Mississippi law with an ironic eye,” writes Atlantic Bureau Chief Kim Severson, pointing to obesity rates in the state. “But the legislation is the latest and most sweeping expression of a nationwide battle in which some government officials, public health leaders and food supply reformers are pitted against those who would prefer the government quit trying to control what people eat.” Since its introduction by Sen. Tony Smith (R-Harrison), who owns a barbeque restaurant, the bill has apparently garnered support from other food retailers as well as agricultural interests, such as the farm bureau and Mississippi Poultry Association. Broader in scope than…
According to Law Professor and former White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administrator Cass Sunstein, a new book addresses the intersection of recent findings on human behavior with the paternalism many Americans equate with “big government” regulations, such as New York City’s restrictions on the size of sugar-sweetened beverages. Sarah Conly’s Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism contends that John Stuart Mill was wrong about the competence of human beings to know what is good for themselves and thus government’s consequent lack of legitimacy to coerce people to prevent harm to themselves. “We are too fat, we are too much in debt, and we save too little for the future,” she states, insisting “that coercion should not be ruled out of bounds.” Sunstein sums up Conly’s approach to paternalism by noting the four criteria she would require to justify government coercion: the activity “must genuinely be opposed to people’s long-term…
Wall Street Journal columnist Carl Bialik recently authored two related articles questioning whether body mass index (BMI) is a reliable data point insofar as it “lumps together all body mass, including bone, muscle and beneficial fat, rather than singling out the more dangerous abdominal fat, which most researchers see as the real threat to health.” In particular, Bialik focuses on a recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report finding that out of 2.9 million people involved in 97 studies, those participants whose BMI classified them as overweight had a 6 percent lower risk of death than those classified as normal weight. But Bialik notes that several scientists have since criticized the results of CDC’s report, partly because threshold BMIs in the mid-to-high 20s tend to paint “a wide range of body types… with the same brush.” He adds that Pennington Biomedical Research Center Executive Director Steven Heymsfield,…
