Marion Nestle
SOC SAFE NET STEALTH ATTACK? RFK2
AN 4 25
While Republicans throughout the United States are intensifying efforts to regulate soda, lawmakers in Texas, Arkansas, West Virginia, Idaho, Nebraska, Michigan, Arizona, and South Carolina have reportedly declined to support a ban on the drink. However, they are aligned with businessman Michael Bloomberg's other initiatives: banning the purchase of soda with food stamps, formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
An article in the Atlantic by Nicholas Florko published on Tuesday noted that these states are taking cues from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has expressed strong opposition to allowing low-income Americans on SNAP to use government funds to buy soda.
"The soda wars have long broken along partisan lines. New York City’s ban was struck down in court before it could go into effect, but even more modest attempts to regulate soda have been concentrated in deeply blue cities such as Berkeley and San Francisco. Liberals drink soda too, of course, though the drink’s biggest defenders are on the right. President Donald Trump loves Diet Coke so much that in both of his terms, he’s had a button installed in the Oval Office to summon a refill; on the campaign trail, now–Vice President J. D. Vance claimed that Democrats see Diet Mountain Dew, his drink of choice, as 'racist,'" the article reads.
ALSO READ: 'You own this': Top GOP senator who backed RFK Jr. now under attack after HHS mass firings
"The federal government’s own research has shown that Americans who receive food stamps have worse diets than nonparticipants with similar incomes, and soda is surely part of that problem. These proposed bans should be even more palatable because they wouldn’t be permanent; they are pilot programs to try out the idea."
Overall, Democrats largely continue to stand against soda bans, the article notes. In both Idaho and Arizona, no Democratic legislators in the state Senates supported the proposed measures in their states. To effectively address soda consumption in the U.S., initiatives like these will need to be included in the solution, the author said.
He further pointed out that the Republican Party’s "about-face on soda" is more stark in West Virginia.
"In July, the state removed its soda tax. And now, less than a year later, it is pushing forward with a SNAP soda ban as part of an effort to decrease consumption of 'ultra-processed crap that barely qualifies as food,' Republican Governor Patrick Morrisey said late last month," the article notes.
ALSO READ:A deadly mosquito-borne illness is rising in the US as Trump cuts health funding
Many seasoned advocates against soda express skepticism about Republicans' motives. Marion Nestle, a professor emeritus at NYU and the author of Soda Politics: Taking on Big Soda (And Winning), has supported bans on soda within the SNAP program. She told the Atlantic that she views the current Republican initiatives as a disguise for their true aim, which is to reduce SNAP funding. Nestle added that while soda is detrimental to health, restricting food stamps also poses risks and that research indicates that the program greatly alleviates food insecurity and lowers healthcare expenses.
Supporters of the soda ban emphasize that the official name of the food-stamp program is the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, highlighting that a two-liter bottle of Pepsi does not contribute to nutritional assistance. However, public health and anti-hunger advocates contend that any food is better than having no food at all.
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Consumer Confidential: A former corn-syrup lobbyist is drafting new federal dietary rules (seriously)
Valley News
Consumer Confidential: A former corn-syrup lobbyist is drafting new federal dietary rules (seriously)
A former lobbyist for the Corn Refiners Assn. is helping oversee nutrition guidelines intended to address the obesity epidemic. An advisory panel of experts, meanwhile, has close ties to food and beverage companies.(Dreamstime)
By DAVID LAZARUS
Los Angeles Times
Friday, May 10, 2019
The swamp isn’t just getting deeper. It’s being ladled out for supper.
Federal dietary rules are required by law to be updated every five years. Under previous administrations, this task was performed mainly by nutritional experts focused on improving public health.
Under President Trump, the process is being overseen to a large extent by a former lobbyist for the Corn Refiners Association — the high-fructose corn syrup industry.
Yes, that would be the same sweetener commonly found in soda, candy, breakfast cereal, canned fruit, condiments, and other processed foods and drinks frequently linked with the obesity crisis and increasing rates of diabetes and heart disease.
Meanwhile, a blue-ribbon committee of “nationally recognized health and nutrition experts” advising on the new guidelines contains a number of academics with significant ties to food and beverage companies.
This latest iteration of nutritional guidance “can be expected to be as industry-friendly as possible,” saidMarion Nestle, a professor emeritus of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University who helped set dietary guidelines under President Clinton.
“We were instructed to review the research and give the American public the best possible interpretation of the meaning of that research in dietary guidelines that we ourselves wrote,” she told me. “That process has now changed.”
This is important stuff.
Dietary guidelines for the American people serve as “the cornerstone of federal nutrition programs and policies, providing food-based recommendations to help prevent diet-related chronic diseases and promote overall health,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services.
The next guidelines, to be issued in 2020, are especially noteworthy because for the first time they’ll address not just things like school lunches but also dietary needs of pregnant women, infants and small children.
They also will be our latest response to an obesity epidemic that’s costing the country about $175 billion in annual health care and as much as $7.6 billion in lost productivity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
With all that in mind, it’s not unreasonable to think the government needs to take a strong stand on upping America’s nutritional game.
There’s certainly enough scientific evidence to make good decisions — and most experts agree on what has to be done.
Less sugar. Less salt. Fewer calories. Smaller portions. Easy on the red and processed meats.
What’s unclear, however, is whether this administration has any interest in pursuing such goals, which would run contrary to the interests of some of the country’s largest and most powerful industries.
“The potential for conflicts of interest are a concern,” said Angela Amico, a senior policy associate with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “Look at the waiver.”
The waiver she’s referring to is an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card handed out by former White House counsel Donald McGahn to Kailee Tkacz (pronounced “T’Kash”), whose past as an industry lobbyist raises questions about whether she’s focused first and foremost on the public’s well-being.
Before Tkacz was paid by the Corn Refiners Association to influence federal policy in favor of soda pop, she lobbied on behalf of SNAC International, a trade group representing manufacturers of potato chips and other junk foods.
Normally a person with her background wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the drafting of dietary guidelines. However, McGahn waived ethical requirements, ruling that “it is in the public interest” for Tkacz to help draft the 2020 document.
He said Tkacz’s past lobbying efforts on behalf of food and beverage companies “make her uniquely qualified” to help guide official policy.
I’m honestly not making that up.
When Tkacz was hired by the Trump administration in July 2017, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue praised her for having “extensive knowledge of the food industry supply chain, from farm to folk.”
He also welcomed the hiring of Maggie Lyons, who before joining the Agriculture Department was a lobbyist for the National Grocers Association, which has fought providing consumers with calorie counts on product labels. Tkacz worked for the association as well earlier in her career.
I reached out to the department for comment. No one got back to me.
When the 20 members of the dietary-guidelines advisory committee were announced in February, the administration depicted them as the best and the brightest in the fields of nutrition and public health. Each committee member was identified solely by his or her academic affiliation.
For example, the committee’s chairwoman, Barbara Schneeman, was identified as being from UC Davis, where she’s listed on the university’s website as a professor emeritus in the department of nutrition.
Left unsaid in the announcement was that, according to her LinkedIn page, Schneeman is a former president of the Dannon Institute, a nonprofit foundation backed by the dairy-focused food and beverage company of the same name.
She also has served as a trustee of the International Life Sciences Institute, which, according to SourceWatch, “was first established in 1978 by Coca-Cola, Heinz, Kraft, General Foods and Procter & Gamble.”
Schneeman couldn’t be reached for comment.
Sarah Reinhardt, a food systems and health analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, said most of the researchers on this year’s advisory committee “have been funded by industry at one time or another.”
However, she cautioned against reading too much into food experts’ industry ties.
“You’d be hard-pressed to find any food scientists who didn’t have ties to industry funding,” Reinhardt said, noting that food and beverage companies pay for a significant amount of research in the field.
Nevertheless, she acknowledged that it’s fair to wonder if such experts bring entirely unbiased views to the table (so to speak). They may not want to jeopardize funding for future projects.
“These are valid concerns and we share them,” Reinhardt said.
Cary Kreutzer, a professor and dietitian at USC who focuses on nutrition, said the long arm of industry makes it even more important for the government to find experts who can approach the task of drawing up nutritional guidelines in an objective manner.
“There are still researchers that do not have conflicts,” she said.
And could we please stop willfully overlooking the ethical conflicts that former industry insiders bring to public policy?
Under Trump, former industry lobbyists are now in charge of the Interior Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Health and Human Services. A former Boeing executive is running the Defense Department.
It’s possible the next set of dietary guidelines will have the best interests of the American people at heart. Just in case, though, do yourself a favor.
Less sugar. Less salt. Fewer calories. Smaller portions. Easy on the red and processed meats.
And my only conflict, which I freely admit, is an occasional hankering for In-N-Out Burger.
David Lazarus, a Los Angeles Times columnist, writes on consumer issues. He can be reached at david.lazarus@latimes.com.
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http://www.alternet.org/food/neil-degrasse-tyson-owes-fans-more-honest-conversation-about-gmos-food-evolution
deGrasse Tyson has inspired millions of people to care about science and imagine themselves as participants in the scientific process. What a hopeful sign it is to see young girls wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the words, “Forget princess, I want to be an astrophysicist.”
His devoted fan base, as I’ve discovered in the past few days, includes my mom, my best friend and my closest colleagues. All of them, and especially the young people who trust Tyson to lead with integrity in matters of science, deserve better than the twisted tale dished out by "Food Evolution," the new documentary film about genetically modified foods that is driving its promotion on the coattails of Tyson’s narration and kicking up controversy for its biased approach.
Already, two of the best-known experts interviewed for the film, Marion Nestle and Michael Pollan, have complained that their views were misrepresented and their comments taken out of context.
My review of "Food Evolution" describes the film as a textbook case of corporate propaganda, and offers clearcut examples of how the film selectively and unfairly presents science. The review explains how a trade group, whose leadership hails from the agrichemical industry, funded "Food Evolution" as part of a multi-year messaging project and handpicked its director, Scott Hamilton Kennedy.
This is an unusual scenario for a science documentary, but it wouldn’t matter if the film reported fairly and honestly about the topic it purports to objectively explore. The film does not deliver on that promise, and making matters worse, the filmmakers are facing a series of embarrassing revelations about their unfair treatment of interview subjects.
Two days before the film’s official release, Nestle, a professor at New York University, wrote a harsh review about the film’s many biases, and said she has repeatedly asked the filmmakers to remove her short interview clip. “The director refuses. He believes his film is fair and balanced. I do not,” Nestle wrote. “I am often interviewed and hardly ever quoted incorrectly or out of context. This film is one of those rare exceptions.”
She concluded of the film, “I view it as a slick piece of GMO industry propaganda. If you want a thoughtful discussion of the real issues raised by food biotechnology, you will need to look elsewhere.”
Pollan, a professor at UC Berkeley who also appears in "Food Evolution" and whose name the filmmakers have been dropping in their promotional efforts, said his experience and take on the film were “much the same” as Nestle’s, and that the filmmakers have misrepresented his views.
Interviews with several other GMO critics who appear in the film, or were asked to be in it, corroborate the picture of a strange process involving sneaky filming, selective editing, misrepresentation and lack of disclosure about the film’s funding.
Eric Holt-Giménez, the executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), an agroecologist with 30 years of experience in the developing world, said he spent four hours with the filmmakers discussing research from the institute’s books and trying to raise issues related to the structural aspects of hunger and how GMOs have exacerbated rural poverty and decreased environmental resilience. His interview was left out of the film entirely.
Holt-Giménez said that no matter what information he provided, director Kennedy focused on the health and safety discussion and replied that he just didn't see what was wrong with GMOs. Holt-Giménez also said the filmmakers refused to answer his questions about who was funding them.
Tufts researcher Timothy Wise, an agricultural development expert, withdrew his consent to be included in the film after asking repeatedly for more information about the funding.
Why the evasions and deceptions? One possible explanation is that the film is not an objective investigation into the science of GMOs but rather a messaging project to advance the agenda of the agrichemical industry. The positive publicity from a pro-GMO movie—such as the shallow review written by Daniel M. Gold in the New York Times—could prove useful at a crucial political moment as the seed/chemical corporations face lawsuits and regulatory threats and pursue mega mergers to consolidate control over our food supply.
As Neil deGrasse Tyson has famously said, “The good thing about science is that it’s true, whether or not you believe in it.” But Tyson seems to forget that history is also true, whether or not you believe in it.
It is true, whether or not we like it, that corporations such as Monsanto have a history of manipulating science, academia and the media to manufacture doubt and confusion about science in order to keep regulations and public scrutiny to a minimum as they do whatever they need to do to maximize profits.
Now that he is in the middle of the contentious GMO debate, Tyson owes it to his fans to broker a more honest conversation—one that involves not just the views of genetic engineers who have a financial stake in public acceptance of the technology that provides their livelihood, but also considers the broader cultural, political and scientific realities relevant to the future of our food system.
A more honest conversation about GMOs would include information about the complex and contradictory nature of the science; the proprietary controls over research; the legitimate concerns about the health risks of glyphosate and the worsening pesticide treadmill problem.
It would consider the environmental, social justice and economic issues at stake, and the political context in which decisions about science—and big-budget movies that purport to document science—are made.
As Tyson has so eloquently explained, “the cross pollination of disciplines is fundamental to truly revolutionary advances in our culture.”
Stacy Malkan is co-director of U.S. Right to Know, a food industry research group that voluntarily discloses its funding.
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Marion Nestle [44], a longtime healthy food expert and author who also has been attacked [45] by Berman, says she tries to ignore him. Nestle said she met Berman once, when they were on a panel at a NRA conference. That appearance gave her the chance to meet with a handful of national restaurant chain CEOs, Nestle said, where she went in armed with three demands—including one about ceasing to bankroll Berman.
“I wanted these restaurant chains to give a price break for smaller portions, to have the default meals for kids be healthy, and I wanted them to stop funding the Center for Consumer Freedom,” she said of meeting with the CEOs of Applebees [46] and Darden [47], the nation’s largest restaurant group.“They just went ballistic. Absolutely ballistic. It was truly amazing. I thought they were three completely reasonable asks. And they said that Berman was the only person who understood their problems.”
Nestle’s sit-down with Berman’s sponsors reveals why he has had a four-decade run as a corporate hit man. With the backing of tobacco, booze and then Big Food, he has created industry front groups, kept his sponsors’ identities largely hidden, developed a political playbook based on smears, distortions and hate-mongering, and seen the campaign and lobbying profession embrace his poisonous and destructive methodology.
America’s political culture has become uglier and more hate-filled in recent decades, and Richard Berman has played a singular roll in that descent into the gutter.
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ccf:
Marginalizing advocates
Part of CCF's method is to direct attention away from the substantive issues and to keep the focus on the messenger rather than the message. For example, CCF has created a website known as CSPIscam, whose sole purpose is to discredit and defame the Center for Science in the Public Interest. CCF dismisses CSPI's work as media driven and reliant on junk science to scare people into believing that the group is trying to take away their right to eat whatever they want.[12]
CCF explains its mission as fighting back against "self-anointed "food police," health campaigners, trial lawyers, personal-finance do-gooders, animal rights misanthropes, and meddling bureaucrats."[13] An important aspect of such rhetoric is to set advocates apart from the mainstream. These labels are meant to conjure up caricatured images of 1960s-style activism, complete with flag burning, sex, drugs, and rock and roll.[14] CCf has also developed a website called ActivistCash that claims to "expose" the funding sources of various environmental and public health organizations. The site includes a list of "key players" in nutrition advocacy, including New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle, who is described as "one of the country's most hystieral anti-food-industry fanatics," a food cop with "radical goals."[15]
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everyone does it? hmmn
http://www.foodpolitics.com/2015/09/another-expose-of-industry-funded-scientists-this-time-gmos-and-organics/
disclose conf on int not enoghm she cites http://www.tufts.edu/~skrimsky/PDF/Funding%20Effect%20and%20Bias.PDF
Do Financial Conflicts of Interest Bias Research? An Inquiry into the ''Funding Effect'' Hypothesis Sheldon Krimsky Science Technology Human Values published online 20 September 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0162243912456271 The online version of this article can be found at: http://sth.sagepub.com/content/early/2012/09/17/0162243912456271
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still down on seralini
http://www.foodpolitics.com/2015/03/whos-cancer-working-group-roundup-is-probably-a-human-carcinogen/
WHO’s cancer working group: Roundup is “probably a human carcinogen”
The WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) has justpublished a report from 17 experts from 11 countries who concluded that glyphosate (“Roundup”) is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
The IARC Working Group found evidence that
Case-control studies of occupational exposure in the USA, Canada, and Sweden reported increased risks for non-Hodgkin lymphoma that persisted after adjustment for other pesticides…In male CD-1 mice, glyphosate induced a positive trend in the incidence of a rare tumour, renal tubule carcinoma. A second study reported a positive trend for haemangiosarcoma in male mice. Glyphosate increased pancreatic islet-cell adenoma in male rats in two studies. A glyphosate formulation promoted skin tumours in an initiation-promotion study in mice.
Glyphosate has been detected in the blood and urine of agricultural workers, indicating absorption. Soil microbes degrade glyphosate to aminomethylphosphoric acid (AMPA). Blood AMPA detection after poisonings suggests intestinal microbial metabolism in humans. Glyphosate and glyphosate formulations induced DNA and chromosomal damage in mammals, and in human and animal cells in vitro. One study reported increases in blood markers of chromosomal damage (micronuclei) in residents of several communities after spraying of glyphosate formulations. Bacterial mutagenesis tests were negative. Glyphosate, glyphosate formulations, and AMPA induced oxidative stress in rodents and in vitro.
Organophosphate pesticides and herbicides have long beenknown to be toxicto mammals, but experts have been undecided about whether they cause cancer.
Glyphosate is the herbicide used in conjunction with glyphosate-resistant genetically modified crops. These are widely planted in the United States (HT means herbicide tolerant).
[graph on gmo adoption)]
In addition to causing widespread selection of resistant weeds, glyphosate may also cause cancer.
Add this to the list of scientific reasons for concern about widespread production of GMO crops. Roundup is used on plants other than GMOs, but GMO corn, cotton, and soybeans use the most.
Note:The FDA has just approved new varieties of GMO apples and potatoes. These do not use Roundup.
Next: watch Monsanto, the maker of Roundup,attempt to cast doubt on IARC’s scientific judgment.
Addition, March 22:As an example of the level of the general discussion of GMOs and glyphosate, see this short video clip from French TV (in English) with Patrick Moore. Mr. Moore, a former director of Greenpeace, has controversial views on climate change and GMOs.
Additions, March 23:
DTN/The Progressive Farmer quotes a Biotechnology Industry Organization representative as pointing out that IARC took the Séralini study seriously, immediately casting doubt on the quality of its literature review (but I can’t find any mention of this study in the IARC report).
Center for Science in the Public Interest urges the EPA to take this seriously.
Consumer Reports is concerned about the vast amounts of glyphosate used and thinks the government should monitor it.
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fair and balanced:
http://www.foodpolitics.com/2013/12/whats-up-with-the-retraction-of-the-seralini-feeding-gmo-corn-to-rats-study/
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Monsanto may have been rather restrained in its response, but other critics were not.
“[I] can’t figure it out yet,” said Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard professor in the Department of Nutrition,
Food Studies and Public Health at New York University. “It’s weirdly complicated and unclear on key issues: what
the controls were fed, relative rates of tumors, why no dose relationship, what the mechanism might be. I can’t think
of a biological reason why GMO corn should do this.”
“So even though I strongly support labeling,” Nestle told All We Can Eat, “I’m skeptical of this study.”
wapo food writer (as in rest rev) 2012
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