Following up its testing of soft drinks for the caramel-coloring ingredient 4-methylimidazole (4-MEI) by testing for its presence in pancake syrups, Consumer Reports tested several products, including pure maple syrup which had just 0.7 micrograms in a one-quarter cup serving, and found relatively low levels in light of the amount of syrup generally consumed in the United States. Still, because 4 percent of children between the ages of 1 and 5 consume pancake syrup daily, Consumer Reports claims “the [cancer] risk would be 10 times higher than negligible, or one excess case of cancer in 100,000 people who ate that amount daily over a lifetime, that’s the point where risk becomes significant.” Because some syrups tested had little 4-MEI, Consumer Reports concludes that manufacturers that use caramel color can minimize the 4-MEI levels in their products and will urge the U.S. Food and Drug Administration “to set standards for 4-MEI in…
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The National Education Policy Center (NEPC) has published a March 2014 report titled Schoolhouse Commercialism Leaves Policymakers Behind, which claims that the education system and its policymakers continue “to grant corporate marketers ‘widespread access to students’… through mechanisms that range from delivering marketing messages through appropriated school space and property to a variety of other strategies.” Authored by University of Colorado researchers, the 16th annual report seeks to map “the legislative landscape relative to school commercialism,” relying on legislative and non-legislative databases, interviews, media reports, and other sources to gather information on new forms of school marketing, the reactions of policymakers to school marketing arrangements, and the position of education policy organizations toward these arrangements. In particular, the report finds that little state or federal legislation related to school marketing was passed in 2012 or 2013. In previous years, notes the report, legislators have responded to school marketing by passing bills…
The nation’s two largest grocery stores, Kroger and Safeway, have pledged not to sell genetically engineered (GE) salmon, joining a growing group of stores, including Target, Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, Aldi, H-E-B, Meijer, Hy-Vee, Marsh, and Giant Eagle, that have already rejected the GE salmon currently under final review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Nearly 2 million people, including scientists, fishermen, business owners, and consumers, have written to FDA opposing its approval of GE salmon, reportedly the first of some 30 other species of GE fish under development. If approved, the salmon would be the first GE animal in the U.S. food supply, and FDA has indicated that it will likely not be labeled as a product of genetic engineering. See Friends of the Earth News Release, March 3, 2014.
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) has followed up FoodBabe.com’s Vani Hari’s petition to Subway about using azodicarbonamide (ADA)—a “chemical used to make yoga mats, shoe soles and other rubbery objects”—in its U.S. food products, by launching its own petition directed to major brands purportedly using the chemical in some 500 food products. Details about Hari’s petition appear in Issue 512 of this Update. The EWG list of food products containing ADA, ranging from bread, croutons and pre-made sandwiches and snacks to pastries, rolls, pierogies, and bagels, was derived from the organization’s database of 80,000 food products. The synthetic ingredient is apparently listed on product labels, but, according to EWG “has been largely overlooked because it is not known to be toxic to people in the concentration approved by the federal Food and Drug Administration—45 parts per million.” EWG claims that commercial bakers switched to ADA in the early 1990s to…
Johns Hopkins Public Health, a magazine of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health, has devoted a special issue to food topics and includes an article about Health Policy and Management Professor Stephen Teret, who founded the Johns Hopkins Clinic for Public Health Law and Policy and recently engaged law students in a project addressing caffeinated foods. His students reportedly explained to U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Deputy Commissioner for Food Policy Michael Taylor that the agency should be focusing on this issue. While Teret was apparently not concerned initially about any purported health effects of caffeine, he suspected that consumers might eat more waffles than normal if they started “feeling really good from the waffles because of the caffeine.” In this regard, he said, “It’s the sugar for some of these products or the salt or the fat that will ultimately give you health problems, not the caffeine, but,…
George Washington University Law Professor John Banzhaf, who is known for his anti-tobacco advocacy, contends that recent court rulings involving food company defendants facing consumer-fraud and product-mislabeling allegations have opened “the door even further to a growing wave of such suits.” He argues that class action lawsuits over labeling terms such as “natural” and “all natural” will lead to increased transparency in food advertising and a reduction in obesity. He also claims that The American Lawyer attributed this exploding wave of litigation to “the movement started by Prof. John Banzhaf several years ago to use legal action as a weapon against the problem of obesity, just as he had earlier done in leading the use of legal action as a weapon against smoking.” See John Banzhaf News Release, February 27, 2014. Issue 515
New York Times op-ed writer Mark Bittman, who frequently writes about food-related issues and calls for changes in government policy to address over- or unhealthy-consumption problems, has found an ally in City University of New York School of Public Health Professor Nicholas Freudenberg who has authored a new book titled Lethal but Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health. Freudenberg, who serves as faculty director for the New York City Food Policy Center, apparently explains how the food and beverage, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, pharmaceutical, and automotive industries have used the playbook created by “the corporate consumption complex” of corporations, banks, marketers, and others that purportedly promote and benefit from unhealthy lifestyles. Freudenberg takes issue with what he perceives as their message that anything restricting rights “to smoke, feed our children junk, carry handguns and so on” is un-American. According to Bittman, Freudenberg’s grouping of these industries “gives us a better…
Public health watchdog the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has announced a February 26, 2014, meeting at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to discuss ways of improving the next generation of nutrition facts labels. NPR News correspondent Allison Aubrey is slated to moderate the panel with participants CSPI Executive Director Michael Jacobson; Wegmans Food Market Corporate Nutrition Manager Jane Andrews; The NPD Group’s Food & Beverage Industry Analyst Darren Seifer; Greenfield-Belser Principal Burkey Belser; and Share our Strength Director of National Partnerships Chef Gregory Silverman. See CSPI News Release, February 18, 2014. Issue 514
Drawing on lessons from tobacco regulation, Temple University Associate Professor Jennifer Pomeranz has authored an article recommending that state and local governments which opt to impose taxes on sugary beverages consider also adopting measures such as minimum price laws and prohibitions on price discounting and coupons to effectively deter consumption. Titled “Sugary Tax Policy: Lessons Learned from Tobacco,” the article claims that sugary beverage manufacturers can distribute the cost of a tax throughout their product lines, including diet beverages, bottled water and juice, thus making the imposition of minimum prices along with sufficiently high taxes a way to deter manufacturers from circumventing the price increase associated with a sugary beverage tax. Formerly with the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, Pomeranz also calls for additional research on whether it would be feasible to condition retail licensing on compliance with measures adopted to reduce sugary beverage consumption. See American Journal…
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has announced that Petaluma, California-based meat processor Rancho Feeding Corp. has recalled nearly 9 million pounds of beef products—all of the beef processed by the company from January 2013 through January 2014 and shipped to California, Florida, Illinois, and Texas. According to FSIS, “the products are adulterated, because they are unsound, unwholesome or otherwise unfit for human food and must be removed from commerce”; the company purportedly processed “diseased and unsound animals and carried out these activities without the benefit or full benefit of federal inspections.” Although no reports of illness from consumption of these products have been submitted to FSIS, the recall was categorized as Class I, which means it presents “a health hazard situation where there is a reasonable probability that the use of the product will cause serious, adverse health consequences or death.” The company has…
