I love cartoons (witness Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics) and was appalled when I read this tweet: Here’s the offending cartoon: In a Facebook post the cartoonist, Rick Friday, explained: I am no longer the Editorial Cartoonist for Farm News due to the attached cartoon which was published yesterday. Apparently a large company affiliated with one of the corporations mentioned in the cartoon was insulted and cancelled their advertisement with the paper, thus, resulting in the reprimand of my editor and cancellation of It’s Friday cartoons after 21 years of service and over 1090 published cartoons to over 24,000 households per week in 33 counties of Iowa. I did my research and only submitted the facts in my cartoon. That’s okay, hopefully my children …
Weekend reading: Jennifer Pomeranz’s Food Law
Jennifer L. Pomeranz. Food Law for Public Health. Oxford University Press, 2016. I’m told that food law is the hottest area in legal education right now. At a time when law schools and lawyers are struggling, food law offers opportunities. Food issues are so controversial that they constitute a full employment act. Jennifer Pomeranz is my colleague at NYU. Her book could not be more timely, and I was delighted to give it a blurb: If you want to know how laws and regulations affect what you eat, how those laws are made, and why they cause so much controversy, Food Law for Public Health is a terrific place to start.
Coca-Cola items: Warren Buffett’s gaffe. Share a Coke and a Song.
Warren Buffett, the billionnaire who owns 9.3{7920e18cf5186565893a18d1f69fa52bf2806dc683a7bfcea51d671d2f7d8125} of Coca-Cola stock, understandably defends its products. When challenged by shareholders in his company, Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett said: He also said he drank 700 calories worth of Coca-Cola each day (translation: 44 teaspoons of sugars). As Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest put it, this much sugar is not in the interest of anyone’s health. Maybe the Wizard of Omaha can maintain good health while consuming more than three times the added sugars recommended by the nation’s leading health officials, but it’s a sure-fire prescription for increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, obesity and tooth decay for the rest of his fellow citizens…the American Heart Association whose scientific panels have reviewed the …
Congress, FOIA, and Checkoff programs
Congress in its infinite wisdom is now doing Big Ag a big favor. It wants to exempt checkoff programs from having to deal with pesky Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The House Appropriations Committee just approved its version of the 2017 Agriculture Appropriations bill along with committee report language getting checkoffs off the hook. Checkoff programs, you will recall are commodity research and promotion programs run by boards and overseen by USDA. The Milk Board, for example, does the milk mustache campaign. Checkoffs mainly do generic marketing. They are not supposed to lobby. The USDA is supposed to manage the boards—but not with federal money. So are checkoffs government programs or not? The checkoffs like to say they are government when convenient, but not government when …
Healthy? Natural? It’s up to the FDA.
The terms “healthy” and “natural” help to sell food products. They are about marketing, not health. This makes life difficult for the FDA, which has the unenviable job of defining what the terms mean on food labels. In a victory for the maker of KIND bars, the FDA has just said that the bars can be advertised as healthy—and that the agency will be revisiting its long-standing definition of the term. This is what that definition says now: You may use the term “healthy” or related terms as an implied nutrient content claim on the label or in labeling of a food that is useful in creating a diet that is consistent with dietary recommendations if the food meets the conditions for total …
Could Accurate Front-of-Package Food Photos Help People Eat Less?
Yesterday there was an interesting study published in Public Health Nutrition. The study, “Frosting on the cake: pictures on food packaging bias serving size” explored four questions. 1. Do the calories of the foods pictured on fronts of packages exceed the calories stated on the package’s per serving nutrition label? Using cake mixes as an example the authors demonstrated that as pictured, with frosting, the slices of cake on the fronts of packages contained 134{7920e18cf5186565893a18d1f69fa52bf2806dc683a7bfcea51d671d2f7d8125} more calories than the serving size calories published on the packages’ nutritional facts panels. 2. Do people take extra ingredient calories into account when determining serving size? Cornell undergrads were provided with two types of cake mix boxes and asked to estimate the “appropriate” number of calories per serving of cake. One group of …
How Is This Not An Actual Show?
I would definitely watch full length editions of today’s Funny Friday video featuring Snoop Dog.Have a great weekend! ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Saturday Stories: A Lebanese Woman, Two Boxers, and a Nazi
Carol Jahshan in The Times of Israel with her reflections of a Lebanese woman in Israel. Dan Barry in The New York Times with an amazingly told tale of two first time boxers, one fight, and tragedy. Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman In Forward with the incredible story of the decorated Nazi SS special forces lieutenant colonel who became an Israeli Mossad assassin. ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Amazing Circle With Disney Gives Parents Internet Peace Of Mind
Do you worry about your kids’ online safety and/or fight with them about the time they’re connected? I know my wife and I did. At least a bit, and it was getting worse. Our 11 year old had saved up her own money to buy herself a laptop and suddenly she was online all the time. She loves exploring YouTube videos, playing online games, and just plain surfing, and to us it seemed to be getting a bit out of hand. Concerned, I started looking around for solutions. I bought a new router that supposedly had parental controls, but they were rudimentary, difficult to set up, and glitchy. I explored OpenDNS, which admittedly looks fantastic and powerful but also complicated and confusing. Then I came across Circle …
Avocado Pit Eating Is Nutritional, Feel-Good, Magic Foodism.
Photo Credit Flickr’s arsheffieldLet me be extremely clear. There are no studies demonstrating actual health benefits to the consumption of avocado pits. None. Yet that hasn’t stopped breathless articles like this one that I saw on Monday from exclaiming, “Current research suggests that avocado pits “may improve hypercholesterolemia, and be useful in the treatment of hypertension, inflammatory conditions and diabetes. Seeds have also been found to possess insecticidal, fungicidal, and anti-microbial activities.”Or this piece that reported, “Dieticians [sic] say that consuming small quantities of that teeny-tiny seed can also help protect against sun damage, boost the health of your hair and nails and fight “bad” bacteria and inflammation in your gut”So where are we on avocado pit research? Well according to the same paper …
A Visit To Dr. WebMD (It’s Fantastic!)
Thanks to Danielle Robertson for sending this fabulous video my way – I don’t know how I’ve missed it!Today’s Funny Friday is what would happen if WebMD was an actual MD.Have a great weekend! ; ; ; ; ; ; ;
Saturday Stories: Curing Cancer with Vodka, Rationalizing Terror, and Fentanyl Addiction
Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn recounts tale of Dr. Vincent T. DeVita who explores the story of whether vodka and a particular Russian root cure cancer Nick Cohen on his own blog on how terrorism is not something that can be rationalized. Karen Howlett, Justin Giovannetti, Nathan Vanderklippe, and Les Perraux with one heckuva piece of journalism in the Globe and Mail that explores how Canadians became addicted to fentanyl. ; ; ; ; ; ; ;