Today in Oak Brook, Illinois the world’s most well-recognized purveyor of unhealthy food will hold its annual shareholders’ meeting. Usually a forum to showcase profits made at the expense of the public’s health, food advocates and health professionals will be giving the burger giant’s dog and pony show pause.

For a second straight year, shareholders will vote on a resolution requiring McDonald’s to publicly assess its impacts on the nation’s health. The resulting report would, no doubt, be damning. After all, no fast food corporation sells more high-fat, -salt, -sugar, and -calorie junk food worldwide. No fast food corporation spends more marketing its unhealthy offerings. And perhaps no food corporation has had a greater impact on how we eat or how food is grown.

As Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser puts it: even if you don’t eat McDonald’s-style fast food “you’re eating food produced by the same system.” In other words, McDonald’s, as the nation’s leading purchaser of staples like beef, pork, and potatoes, isn’t just putting unhealthy food on plastic trays, it’s shaping the unhealthy methods by which its produced. Factory farms, the overuse of pesticides–you name it–McDonald’s is in some way behind it, including the harm to animals, our drinking water, the environment, and our health an externality.

That’s why this first-of-its-kind resolution is so groundbreaking. It would give us a sense of what a Big Mac and fries truly costs. Not only that, it would give shareholders a sense of the financial risk the corporation could ultimately face for continuing to saddle the public with its externalized costs.

As recently documented in AdAge, McDonald’s brand image is out of sync with sales, with McDonald’s consistently ranking near the bottom of its industry in quality perception. Analysts warn if this trend continues the pendulum could well swing for the corporation’s profitability.

Dr. Andrew Bremer, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, will speak to these points at the meeting. He is part of a growing network of more than 2500 health professionals  that are partnering with my organization, Corporate Accountability International, to compel industry-leader McDonald’s to change course as the corporation’s leadership changes hands. CEO Jim Skinner will be stepping down this month, with COO Don Thompson stepping in.

Corporate Accountability International and partners like Dr. Bremer see no reason to wait for the results of the resolution-sanctioned report to come in for the new CEO to reduce the corporation’s “health footprint.” For one, there is a growing body of research, including a recent Institute of Medicine study, highlighting the importance of limiting junk food marketing to children and adolescents in reducing disease rates. To this end the network has called for McDonald’s to stop marketing junk food to kids, helping compel the American Academy of Pediatrics to take an even more strident stance–an outright ban on junk food marketing to kids.

And most recently, the network called on hospital administrators to give McDonald’s franchises the boot. Cleveland Clinic led the charge–affirming it would not renew McDonald’s contract. A study in the journal Pediatrics has found that citing fast food in health care settings earns brands like McDonald’s an undeserved association with healthfulness. Needless to say, McDonald’s has long built brand loyalty by nutriwashing its image–a practice that needs to stop.

Grassroots pressure is only building. Since the initial introduction of the resolution at last year’s meeting, McDonald’s has made changes to its Happy Meals and competitors have scaled back their marketing to kids.

As these things go, resolutions are not expected to pass over the opposition of the Board. But bringing it to the floor before shareholders will again put the corporation on notice, compelling CEO Thompson to lend a more sympathetic ear to the concerns of health care providers and Civil Eats readers like you.

Click here to call on hospital administrators to give McDonald’s the boot.
Click here to call on McDonald’s CEO to stop marketing junk food to kids.

Corporate Accountability International (formerly Infact) is a membership organization that has, for the last 35 years, successfully advanced campaigns protecting health, the environment and human rights. Value [the] Meal is Corporate Accountability International’s campaign dedicated to reversing the global epidemic of diet-related disease by challenging the fast food industry to curb a range of abuses.

HBO has a history of tackling serious American health-care crises. In recent years, the cable network has taken on addiction and Alzheimer’s to much critical acclaim. And now the network has turned its attention to another huge health problem: Obesity and its enormous economic, emotional, social, and health cost on individuals, families, communities, and the country at large.

As Americans have gained weight in recent years, rates of diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and other obesity-related health problems have also skyrocketed. Rates of Type 2 diabetes (once known as “adult-onset diabetes”) are soaring among kids. And this is a generation of people that may well die at a younger age than their parents, largely because of medical concerns associated with excess weight.

These facts have become commonplace to those of us who have been paying attention. Still, The Weight of the Nation: Confronting America’s Obesity Epidemic serves as a clarion call to the country to take action — and fast — to combat this pernicious, complex problem that has myriad root causes.Despite the familiar territory, this viewer gives the filmmakers points for framing the issue in a fresh, visually compelling way through astute story selection. The first episode recounts The Bogalusa Heart Study in Louisiana — a landmark investigation which found that cardiovascular disease can begin in childhood. And in the final installment we meet a Nashville mayor trying to help his city get healthy and a Latino community in Santa Ana, Calif., whose members spend years advocating for a play space for their children.

At the current rate of increase, obesity-related health-care costs are projected to exceed $300 billion by 2018.

Bigger than individuals

Some critics (including those who have yet to watch the series) worry that The Weight of the Nation only fans fear, stereotypes fat folk, and doesn’t go after the real villain in the war against weight: the food and beverage industry. But from this critic’s perspective, the program doesn’t lay shame and blame at the feet of the overweight and obese people it features. On the contrary, it presents their struggles in a sympathetic and non-judgmental light, revealing how hard the body fights weight loss despite good intentions, and how current social, economic, and government systems sabotage Americans’ attempts to stay healthy.

Yes, there is the question of personal responsibility, and the films address physical inactivity and poor diet as key contributors to this problem. But there’s also healthy discussion of factors outside an individual’s control — including genetic makeup and evolutionary biology (we’re programmed for scarcity in a time of abundance), workplace changes, fast food marketing strategies, federal farm subsidies, changes in American food culture, and the ready availability of low-cost, high-calorie food.

The series also points a finger at the global corporations that are responsible for peddling the unhealthy, highly processed foods at the crux of the problem. It’s hard to imagine commercial television, hugely dependent on advertising by the makers of such food, taking on this topic in the first place.

To produce The Weight of the Nation, HBO teamed up with some major government agencies battling this spreading epidemic — the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health — as well as the child-focused philanthropy Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and health-care giant Kaiser Permanente.

The series doesn’t sugarcoat matters, but makes it clear that obesity-related health problems will become an unprecedented crisis with dire consequences if left unchecked. They’re also incredibly expensive: At the current rate of increase, obesity-related health-care costs are projected to exceed $300 billion by 2018.

In conjunction with the series, HBO also launched a massive social media campaign to spread the word about what can be done about these health problems, and reached out to more than 40,000 community-based organizations across the country.

Take that, obesity epidemic. And yet, as John Hoffman, executive producer of the series, noted in a discussion after a recent screening in Oakland: One of the first steps that might put a serious dent in this problem would be addressing government subsidies for commodity crops, which have made ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup cheap, accessible, and ubiquitous. He suggested changing the date of the Iowa caucus — a step that would give this farm state considerably less political power. (Such creative thinking didn’t make it into the series. But it’s food for thought — as is the hormonal defect hypothesis, detailed in a Newsweek story last week, which argues that refined sugars and grains are the major players in a problem that no amount of dieting and exercise could correct.)

Chicken nuggets are served for school lunch in the Weight of the Nation.

For kids’ sake

Following on the heels of pink slime, mad cow disease (AKA bovine spongiform encephalopathy—or BSE) is back this week after a California dairy cow destined for a rendering plant that makes pet food was found to have the disease. So far, it looks like the beef industry is playing down the finding, hoping to dodge a loss in sales at home and abroad. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was quick to tell Americans that our food supply is entirely safe.

But the re-emergence of mad cow and the conversation around pink slime has re-opened questions about our food system. It has exposed how food safety falls inevitably through the cracks in a country where over 9 billion animals are being slaughtered per year and budgets for the departments that oversee these processes are being slashed. The incredible media coverage of both issues reflects a growing consumer interest in more transparency in what we’re eating and how it’s being produced.

While this is only the fourth case of mad cow in the U.S. to date, experts argue that finding it this time was a stroke of luck. Of the 34 million cows we slaughter annually in the U.S., 40,000 are being tested by USDA for the disease, down from nearly 500,000 in 2005—about one tenth of one percent.

Some would like the media focus on mad cow to be re-directed to other ongoing and serious food safety issues. Dr. Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition at New York University and author of Safe Food, is among those connecting this finding of mad cow to other unfortunately routine (and in some cases, deadly) food safety issues. “The risk of you getting this disease from eating beef is extremely small,” she said.

Sarah Klein, of the consumer advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest told the AP, “What we know is that 3,000 Americans die every year from preventable food-borne illnesses that are not linked” to mad cow disease. She continued, “Things like E. coli, salmonella–that’s where we should be focusing our attention, outrage and policy.”

Mad cow originally captured the public’s attention because of the grotesqueness and serious consequences of the story. Back then we learned that cows were being fed parts of other cows–some of which had been infected with the disease, and thus BSE was able to spread easily among herds. Worse were the photos of human suffers of the lethal prion, an infectious agent that degenerates the brain. The disease takes years to show up, and looks somewhat like an accelerated version of dementia, making it more difficult to trace–and adding to the public fear factor.

Similar to mad cow, pink slime struck a chord with consumers who were disgusted by the idea that less desirable parts of the cow were being made “safe to eat” with the addition of ammonia. Through the weeks of media coverage we learned that pink slime, or “lean finely-textured beef,” is a regular ingredient in the hamburgers used in school lunches and in 70 percent of the ground beef sold in supermarkets.

The USDA insists that the strain of mad cow found this week is a random mutation that occurs from time to time in older cows (the cow in question was 10 years old and found lame and lying down) and that no harm could have come to humans should it have gone undiscovered. Specifically, the USDA has stated that this dairy cow couldn’t have transmitted the disease through its milk. Yet Tom Philpott at Mother Jones draws attention here to a study in which a similar prion was transmitted from sheep to sheep through milk.

In addition, Dr. Michael Hansen, PhD, a senior scientist at Consumers Union, told me that some of the practices that led to the mad cow epidemics of the past are still being employed, like “feeding cows’ blood back to cows, feeding chicken litter to cows and allowing ground up cows to be fed to pigs and chickens, then allowing ground up pig and chickens to be fed back to cattle.” These practices are banned in Europe, Japan and Canada. According to Hansen, a team of scientists including the former head of surveillance at USDA, Linda Detwiler, recommended in 2005 that the FDA stop “the legal exemptions which allow ruminant protein to be fed back to ruminants (with the exception of milk).” [PDF of the letter here]

Mad cow deserves our attention and we deserve to know the truth about our food system. It is but one small piece of the puzzle of overcoming our food safety challenges and a potent reminder why our food system needs an overhaul. Now let’s just hope that enough public pressure forces our regulatory bodies to step up to the plate and act, and that the government has the impetus to fund and enforce new regulations.

Photo: Dairy cows by Shutterstock

Recently pesticide manufacturer Arysta LifeScience agreed to stop selling the cancer-causing strawberry pesticide methyl iodide in the United States. It was a tremendous victory for the 200,000+ farmworkers, farmers, rural residents and environmentalists that worked over the past several years to pull a chemical that one scientist called “one of the most toxic chemicals on earth” off the market.

One of the central figures of this battle from the get-go, both behind the scenes and in the media spotlight, has been Paul Towers, Organizing & Media Director for Pesticide Action Network (PAN).

For the past decade, Paul has worked to protect communities from hazardous pesticides in their food, air, soil and water. He’s worked side-by-side with people that bear the brunt of industrial agriculture, and helped share their stories, grounded in science, with elected officials and policymakers. It hasn’t been easy. He’s gone up against the likes of pesticide and biotech corporations, oil and gas interests, and industrial food companies.

Highlighting food and environmental injustices has been a priority for Paul from an early age. He grew up in Tucson, Arizona, a state where the five C’s were imprinted on young schoolchildren: copper, cattle, cotton, citrus and climate. It didn’t take long to see that many of these industries, coupled with explosive growth, were incompatible with the desert.

Over the years, Paul has come to see his work on pesticides, food and agriculture as a means of unraveling the larger issues of building democracy and diminishing corporate control and influence. He’s focused a lot on breaking down the pesticide treadmill–the trap that farmers get caught on as they are forced to use more (and increasingly toxic) chemicals to control insects and weeds that develop resistance to pesticides.

Paul recently moved from Sacramento to the San Francisco Bay Area, but still remains connected to neighborhoods and issues in the political hub of the state. Paul was a key leader of a multi-year effort in Sacramento aptly entitled CLUCK (Campaign to Legalize Urban Chicken Keeping) which eventually legalized keeping egg-laying hens in the city. He continues to be involved in efforts to create more local farmers markets in underserved neighborhoods, spur more urban gardening and strengthen community organizations that collect and deliver social services.

Every one of these efforts required building political pressure to put new policies in place to allow people to grow safe, healthy and local food.

What issues have you been focused on?

Bees and strawberries have been the main focus in recent months.

First, a word about bees. It’s widely understood that one in every three bites of food we eat is reliant on bees. In working with beekeepers across the country, including some of the largest commercial operations, I’ve learned about the dramatic losses they’re experiencing–over 30 percent of their hives each year. These losses are often termed colony collapse disorder. This is bad for all of us, especially if you like to eat things that require pollination like almonds, cherries, and blueberries–and dozens of other crops.

Increasingly, science points to this newer class of systemic pesticides called neonicotinoids as a critical factor in CCD. We filed a legal petition with over two-dozen beekeepers last month urging EPA to take action on these neonicotinoids. As you can imagine, pesticide corporations like Bayer are pushing back, trying to confuse the science.

Strawberries have been a big focus too. With strawberry season now upon us in California, many of us are getting excited to eat our share of the fruit. While the controversial fumigant pesticide methyl iodide is off the shelf, other strawberry pesticides are still widely used in California and across the country. Many rural residents and farmworkers are on the front lines of exposure, with these gaseous pesticides drifting into their homes and bodies. Many fumigants are known to be cancer-causing, neurotoxins and reproductive toxins. So we’re working with people across the country to bring their case to local, state and federal officials to phase out the use of these chemicals and invest in green, safe and cutting-edge agriculture.

What inspires you to do this work?

A lot of things inspire me to strive for an ecologically sound and socially just food system.

But more than anything it’s the injustices I see and the people who are taking incredibly courage steps to counter them. It’s the people I meet from all over the country–from Alaska to Florida, Illinois to California–who are working to ensure that their communities are safe and healthy. Last week, I had a chance to meet with a diverse group of Hawaiians who are actively working to take their food system back from pesticide and biotech corporations and the plantation system.

I’m also an expecting father. It is likely that our child is already being exposed to pesticides and other chemicals in utero. And that makes me angry. So I work to create protections and find solutions to ensure our child isn’t saddled with a toxic legacy of pollution.

As I look toward the upcoming adventure of fatherhood, the health and future of my child–very literally–is a big part of what inspires me to keep doing this work.

What’s your overall vision?

In the not so distant future, my vision is that we re-build our food and farming system to create a sustainable form of agriculture and lift up human rights to food, justice and self-determination.

What books and/or blogs are you reading right now?

I don’t spend nearly enough time reading books, including those on my nightstand. I do consume a lot of news, including newspapers and magazines from all over the country. I’m especially impressed by blogs by folks like Tom Philpott at Mother Jones, Twilight Greenaway and Tom Laskawy at Grist, Barry Estabrook, and so many others.

Who’s in your community?

Our community is large–we’ve got “network” in our name. It’s international and it’s farmers, beekeepers, farmworkers, rural residents, and everyone in between. PAN has five regional centers based in the major continents, representing tens of thousands of people and organizations. I am honored to be part of this global community of concerned and committed citizen activists.

On a day-to-day basis, I work closely with lots of people involved in coalitions like Californians for Pesticide Reform, the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition and Californians for a Healthy and Green Economy.

What are your commitments?

I’m committed to science, justice, and people, across the globe.

What are your goals?

Personally, I want my artichoke plants to thrive this year. Professionally, I want to be part of fixing our food and farming system to protect farmers, workers, communities–and children, include my own. Both are challenging, but of different magnitudes.

What does change look like to you?

It’s what Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers did and do, what Lois Gibbs and the Center for Health and Environmental Justice did and do and its what Luke Cole at the Center for Race, Poverty and the Environment did and do.

Change means organized, coordinated people pressuring elected officials and decision makers–including corporate leaders–to take steps to protect health and the environment, while advancing safe solutions. The good news is that people want their communities and environment to be healthy–we just need to reach decisionmakers with our collective voice.

Regarding the practicalities of enacting change, what planning is involved? What kind of outreach?

The success of our international network over the past 30 years has taught us a few things, especially as we’ve helped broker new protections through international treaties. Change requires organizing. Organizing people and partners requires patience, time and commitment. It requires online and offline engagement, meeting people where they are and creating collaborative opportunities to advance a shared vision.

What projects are affiliated with yours?

I already described my work around safe strawberries and healthy pollinators. I also work with PAN to hold the “Big 6” pesticide and biotech corporations–Monsanto, Bayer, BASF, Dow, Dupont, and Syngenta–accountable for human rights abuses. We concluded an international trial late last year in India, documenting harms to live, health and livelihood. And the final verdict should be issued soon, so this work will continue to unfold. In addition, we’re continuing to document the harm to Midwest communities from water contaminated by the Syngenta’s gender-bending atrazine, an herbicide commonly used in corn fields.

What projects and people have you got your eye on or are you impressed by?

I’m impressed by so many people and organizations. I respect organizations that shine a spotlight on the broken industrial agricultural system, finding policy solutions, and those that are helping us get out of it. Off the top of my head, I respect organizations like the Center for Food Safety, United Farm Workers and Food & Water Watch are doing a great job of advocating for change. I also deeply respect organizations like ALBA and the California Farm Academy, who are training the next generation of farmers with cutting-edge, green agriculture.

Where do you see the state of agriculture/food policy in the next 5-10 years? Is real policy change a real possibility? 

Farmers, rural residents, and consumers are demanding something different–whether it’s labeling of genetically engineered crops and products, phasing out the use of hazardous pesticides or investing in sustainable agriculture. We are in a moment of real possibility for a real shift in direction on our agriculture and food policies.

What does the food movement need to do, be or have to be more effective?

Political and organized. The challenges before us are large and profound, including the power of pesticide and biotech corporations. These corporations exert undue influence in the elections, lobbying, and through the revolving door with government regulators. So we, as a movement must gather our voices and be determined, creative and persistent. We can’t afford to be anything but political and organized.

What would you want to be your last meal on earth?

Anything my wife cooks. She’s got a real knack for pulling things together, including fresh ingredients from our yard and weekly finds at farmers markets. And she’d probably wrap it up in a fresh tortilla, a nod to those I use to get fresh off the line at the spot across the street after school growing up.

When it comes to the chemicals used in food packaging, there is much we still don’t know. After a recent U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) decision last month to not put further restrictions on bisphenol-A (BPA), a new report today in the Washington Post takes a closer look at studies that reveal that such endocrine-distrupting chemicals are not only ubiquitous, they might also be harmful at much lower doses than previously thought. 

The FDA allows around 3,000 chemicals, including BPA and phthalates–a family of chemicals used in lubricants and solvents and to make polyvinyl chloride pliable–at low doses, long considering them additives though they migrate from the packaging instead of being purposefully added by the food manufacturer. But these chemicals are notoriously hard to trace, and have not been studied for their cumulative effects.

“Finding out which chemicals might have seeped into your groceries is nearly impossible, given the limited information collected and disclosed by regulators, the scientific challenges of this research and the secrecy of the food and packaging industries, which view their components as proprietary information,” writes Freinkel, author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, who wrote this story in collaboration with the Food & Evironment Reporting Network. “Although scientists are learning more about the pathways of these substances–and their potential effect on health–there is an enormous debate among scientists, policymakers and industry experts about what levels are safe.”

What has scientists worried is the fact that endocrine disrupters like these interfere with the body’s natural hormone system. Animals studies on BPA, for example, have found that doses of the chemical below the FDA-approved threshold administered during critical stages of development can effect behavior, breast and prostate cells, and brain structure and chemistry. According to recent studies, around 90 percent of Americans have BPA inside their bodies.

Freinkel explains how plastic food packaging is a major source of these potentially harmful chemicals. Other studies have shown phthalates passing into food from processing equipment and food-prep gloves, gaskets and seals on non-plastic containers, inks used on labels–which can permeate packaging–and even the plastic film used in agriculture.

The report highlights an upcoming study that found a particular phthalate, called DEHP, in many of the 72 different grocery items evaluated. Studies have associated low-dose exposure to this chemical with male reproductive disorders, thyroid dysfunction, and subtle behavioral changes.

Last month, the FDA denied a petition to ban BPA, saying in a statement that while “some studies have raised questions as to whether BPA may be associated with a variety of health effects, there remain serious questions about these studies, particularly as they relate to humans and the public health impact.”

You can read the full report here on the Food & Environment Reporting Network’s Web site, which also features additional reporting on the topic.

Hats off to this mother of three who got fed up and took charge. Thirteen years ago, Sofía Gatica’s newborn died of kidney failure after being exposed to pesticides in the womb. After the despair came anger, then a fierce determination to protect the children in her community and beyond.

Today, she’s one of six grassroots leaders from around the world receiving the Goldman Environmental Prize, in recognition of her courageous—and successful—efforts.

Pesticide Action Network will host Sofía as she travels to San Francisco for tonight’s ceremony and celebration.

Pesticides drift from GE soy fields

Sofía lives in Ituzaingó Annex, a working-class neighborhood of 6,000 bordering commercial soy farms in the province of Córdoba in Argentina.

Argentina is the third largest exporter of soybeans in the world. It is also the third largest producer of genetically engineered (GE) crops worldwide, following closely behind the U.S. and neighboring Brazil. The explosion of GE soy production in Argentina has brought with it dramatic increases in pesticide use, and specifically aerial spraying of Monsanto’s weedkiller, RoundUp. Spraying of the antiquated insecticide endosulfan was also common until this year. Its use is now banned in Argentina as it moves toward a global phaseout under the Stockholm treaty.

RoundUp, long touted by Monsanto as all but harmless, has recently been linked to increased risk of birth defects when mothers are exposed during pregnancy. Endosulfan has also been linked to health harms in children, including birth defects, reproductive harm and autism.

Local mothers take charge

Here’s where Sofía’s story becomes truly inspirational.

After she lost her newborn, she realized that such losses were all too common in her small community. Building on Argentina’s powerful history of movements led by mothers, Sofía worked with other concerned moms to go door to door collecting stories about health problems in each family—essentially conducting the community’s first-ever epidemiological study.

Despite few resources and very real threats, Sofía led the Mothers of Ituzaingó to concrete victory.

“The Mothers of Ituzaingó” discovered the community’s cancer rate to be 41 times the national average. Rates of neurological problems, respiratory diseases and infant mortality were also astonishingly high.

The group then launched a “Stop the Spraying!” campaign, leading demonstrations and publishing materials warning the community about the dangers of pesticides.

Their efforts bore fruit. In 2008, Argentina’s president ordered an investigation of the health impacts of pesticides in Ituzaingó Annex; the resulting official study corroborated their informal door-to-door research. Sofía and the Mothers of Ituzaingó then won a municipal “buffer zone” ordinance, prohibiting aerial spraying less than 2,500 meters from homes.

Honoring leadership & courage

Each year since 1989, the Goldman Prize has honored grassroots leaders across the globe, unsung heroes who are campaigning for environmental justice and sustainability in their local communities. This global recognition of Sofia’s work couldn’t be more deserved.

Despite few resources and very real threats—including being held at gunpoint in her own home—Sofía led the Mothers of Ituzaingó to concrete victory: on-the-ground protections for the children in their community. The group also raised the profile of the broader issue of the health harms of pesticides to the national level, making room for a push for safer and more sustainable approaches to agriculture.

Sofía is now working with mothers in other Argentine communities, looking for ways to expand protections to families across the country.

Originally published by PANNA

The epidemic of autism in children in the United States may be linked to the typical American diet according to a new study published online in Clinical Epigenetics by Renee Dufault, et. al. The study explores how mineral deficiencies—affected by dietary factors like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS)—could impact how the human body rids itself of common toxic chemicals like mercury and pesticides.

The release comes on the heels of a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that estimates the average rate of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) among eight year olds is now 1 in 88, representing a 78 percent increase between 2002 and 2008. Among boys, the rate is nearly five times the prevalence found in girls.

“To better address the explosion of autism, it’s critical we consider how unhealthy diets interfere with the body’s ability to eliminate toxic chemicals, and ultimately our risk for developing long-term health problems like autism,” said Dr. David Wallinga, a study co-author and physician at the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).

Commander (ret.) Renee Dufault (U.S. Public Health Service), the study’s lead author and a former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) toxicologist, developed an innovative scientific approach to describe the subtle side effects of HFCS consumption and other dietary factors on the human body and how they relate to chronic disorders. The model, called “macroepigenetics,” allows researchers to consider how factors of nutrition, environment and genetic makeup interact and contribute to the eventual development of a particular health outcome.

“With autism rates skyrocketing, our public educational system is under extreme stress,” said Dufault, who is also a licensed special education teacher and founder of the Food Ingredient and Health Research Institute (FIHRI). As part of the current study, the authors found a 91 percent increase in the number of children with autism receiving special educational services in the U.S. between 2005 and 2010.

Key Findings:

• Autism and related disorders affect brain development. The current study sought to determine how environmental and dietary factors, like HFCS consumption, might combine to contribute to the disorder.
• Consumption of HFCS, for example, is linked to the dietary loss of zinc, which interferes with the elimination of heavy metals from the body. Many heavy metals like mercury, arsenic and cadmium are potent toxins with adverse effects on brain development in the young.
• HFCS consumption can also impact levels of other beneficial minerals, including calcium. Loss of calcium further exacerbates the detrimental effects of exposure to lead on brain development in fetuses and children.
• Inadequate levels of calcium in the body can also impair its ability to expel organophosphates, a class of pesticides long recognized by the EPA and independent scientists as especially toxic to the young developing brain.

“Rather than being independent sources of risk, factors like nutrition and exposure to toxic chemicals are cumulative and synergistic in their potential to disrupt normal development,” said Dr. Richard Deth, a professor of Pharmacology at Northeastern University and a co-author of the study. “These epigenetic effects can also be transmitted across generations. As autism rates continue to climb it is imperative to incorporate this new epigenetic perspective into prevention, diagnosis and treatment strategies.”

The picture of how and why a child develops autism is a complicated one influenced by many different factors. The authors of this study have given insight into the complex interplay between several of the factors that may lead to the development of this debilitating neurodevelopmental disorder. In order to curb the epidemic of autism in the U. S., continued analysis of the impact of the industrialized food system and exposure to environmental toxins on ASD must be key areas of research moving forward.

The Food Ingredient and Health Research Institute (FIHRI) is a non-profit organization devoted entirely to food ingredient safety, education, and research. foodingredient.info

Originally published by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. IATP works locally and globally at the intersection of policy and practice to ensure fair and sustainable food, farm and trade systems.

Photo: bbaltimore

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Dow’s 2,4-D corn, soon to be followed by 2,4-D soybeans and cotton, are the first of many new GE crops designed to launch American agriculture into a new era of increased dependence on more toxic pesticides, reversing decades of progress. Two-thirds of GE crops awaiting approval by USDA are resistant to one to three herbicides each, with many more in the longer-term pipeline. For instance, Monsanto has developed crops resistant to dicamba, a close chemical cousin to 2,4-D.

According to agricultural expert Dr. Charles Benbrook, 2,4-D corn will trigger an astounding 30-fold increase in 2,4-D use on corn by the end of the decade, assuming widespread planting. 2,4-D soybeans and cotton will boost usage still more. Yet USDA has provided no analysis of the serious harm to human health, the environment or neighboring farms that will result.

Farmers, women and children at greatest risk

Farmers are on the front line. While generally healthier than other Americans, farmers suffer higher rates of certain cancers, such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), a cancer of the lymph nodes that kills 30 percent of those afflicted. Numerous studies in Sweden, Canada and by scientists at the U.S. National Cancer Institute have found that farmers who use 2,4-D and related herbicides are more likely to contract deadly NHL. While Sweden, Norway and Denmark have banned 2,4-D based on such studies, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) refuses to act. Other studies link farmer 2,4-D exposure to greater risk of Parkinson’s Disease.

The rest of us may also be at risk. 2,4-D is known to be a hormone-disrupting chemical, which can affect critical developmental processes in very small amounts. Lactating rats fed low doses of 2,4-D exhibit impaired maternal behavior while their pups weigh less. Children of pesticide applicators in areas of Minnesota with heavy use of chlorophenoxy herbicides like 2,4-D had a disproportionately higher incidence of birth anomalies than in non-crop regions or where these herbicides were less used. 2,4-D is frequently detected in surface water, albeit at low levels.

Based on these and numerous other studies, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) petitioned EPA in 2008 to ban 2,4-D, and recently sued the Agency for its failure to respond. Meanwhile, the latest available data show that 2,4-D is still contaminated with low levels of extremely toxic dioxins, which may or may not be the cause of 2,4-D’s toxicity.

Chemical arms race with weeds

Farmers would have no interest in 2,4-D crops if there weren’t a raging epidemic of weeds resistant to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. Glyphosate-resistant weeds evolved to infest millions of acres of cropland through massive, unregulated use of glyphosate on Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant soybeans, corn and cotton. This epidemic of “superweeds” has alarmed agricultural scientists, triggering a substantial increase in herbicide use, greater use of soil-eroding tillage operations, and a return to weeding crews hoeing hundreds of thousands of acres, dramatically increasing production costs. A National Academy of Sciences committee singled out glyphosate-resistant weeds as an issue demanding national attention, and a leading weed scientist warns they represent a threat to global food production.

As farmers struggle to contend with a problem that Monsanto assured them would never arise, Dow sees a golden opportunity, marketing its 2,4-D crops as a false solution to glyphosate-resistant weeds. Dow scientist John Jachetta excitedly announced in the Wall Street Journal ”a new era” and “a very significant opportunity” for chemical companies in 2,4-D and similar herbicide-resistant crops.

Far from solving the resistant weed problem, however, a recent peer-reviewed study by Penn State weed ecologists suggests that 2,4-D crops (along with Monsanto’s dicamba-resistant crops) will trigger an outbreak of still more intractable weeds resistant to both glyphosate and 2,4-D or dicamba, another salvo in the all-out “chemical arms race” between herbicide-resistant crops and weeds. Weeds resistant to multiple herbicides are already on the rise, prompting an Illinois weed scientist to warn that ”we are running out of options” to confront what is rapidly becoming an “unmanageable problem.” The Center for Food Safety made similar findings in a 2008 report and in Congressional testimony on resistant weeds in 2010. The Penn State study also outlines sustainable weed control techniques that could avert further weed resistance.

Crop damage from herbicide drift

The Penn State scientists also warn that the massive increases in use of drift-prone 2,4-D and dicamba accompanying resistant crops will threaten neighbors’ crops through drift. Soybeans, cotton, most vegetables, grapes and many other crops are damaged by very low levels of 2,4-D. Even now, 2,4-D drift is responsible for more episodes of crop injury than any other pesticide. Farmers agree. Iowa corn and soybean grower George Naylor was recently quoted in a Greenwire story, and speaks for many farmers who are concerned about 2,4-D corn:

“It’s a big turning point for agriculture,” Naylor said. “If they are going to keep going down this road by coming up with a quick fix to the problems they created in the first place, then the problems are just going to compound… My neighborhood and a lot of farm neighborhoods are just going to be sacrificed zones,” added Naylor… “There is going to be stuff in the air all the time.”

In fact, a new coalition of farmers and food processors–the Save Our Crops Coalition–is organizing to stop 2,4-D crops from concern over huge crop losses due to 2,4-D drift.

Impacts on endangered species

2,4-D drift and runoff will also impact wild plants and animals. Because it is such a potent plant-killer, 2,4-D can harm animals by killing the plants they depend on for habitat and food. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Marine Fisheries Service have found that even now, 2,4-D is likely having adverse impacts on several threatened and endangered species, including salmon and related fishes, the California red-legged frog, and the Alameda whipsnake. USDA’s approval of 2,4-D resistant corn can only make matters much worse, likely placing many other species at risk.

Comment period ends April 27, 2012

If approved, millions of acres of 2,4-D corn could be planted as early as next year. USDA’s public comment period is open until Friday, April 27, 2012. Tell USDA to deny Dow’s petition to approve 2,4-D corn. Comments may be submitted to the agency through the Center for Food Safety’s action link or through Regulations.gov. For more information on 2,4-D corn, see our fact sheet and more extensive Food Safety Review.

Originally published on Huffington Post

To call McDonald’s latest advertising campaign aimed at children cynical doesn’t give enough credit to the fast food giant and its ad agency, Leo Burnett. The company says the new series of ads starting this month is part of McDonald’s “nutrition commitment to promote nutrition and/or active lifestyle messages in 100 percent of its national communications to kids.”

How will the purveyor of Big Macs, fries and Coke accomplish this lofty goal? Perhaps by explaining that McDonald’s is an occasional treat? Or that sharing home-cooked meals is one of the best ways for families to ensure good eating habits? Perhaps McDonald’s could educate kids about the federal MyPlate recommendations to make half your meal fruits and vegetables?

Not even close. McDonald’s idea of nutrition education is simple: just eat at McDonald’s.

In the first animated ad, a child’s pet goat is derided for eating everything in sight, from the kid’s baseball to his father’s hair. The solution? The goat needs a “better diet,” defined by fruit and dairy the ad says—but where to find such strange items? Jump in the car and head to McDonald’s, where the goat becomes “strong as an ox” from downing the apple slices and chocolate milk contained in Happy Meals. The ad ends with the goat chomping on the Happy Meals box. (Apparently, the goat does not eat the child’s toy.)

Problem solved.

The message sent to children? Everything at home is bad to eat. The place to find healthy food is at McDonald’s. In a matter of seconds, McDonald’s manages to circumscribe the entire universe of healthy foods to the two items found in a Happy Meal, all under the guise of “nutrition education.” You can’t get much more twisted than that.

For McDonald’s “balanced eating” is accomplished within the confines of the Happy Meal. But apple slices and chocolate milk don’t balance out chicken nuggets and French fries, the other two components of the Happy Meal depicted in the ad. (Moreover, by most nutrition standards apples and chocolate milk are actually treats, not staples of a healthy diet in a way that broccoli is, for example.)

Even if the ad campaign was less self-serving and actually attempted to educate children about healthful eating in a meaningful way, this is not McDonald’s job.

I don’t know any critic of McDonald’s that has been begging the company to “to promote nutrition and/or active lifestyle messages” to children. Quite the opposite: We want McDonald’s to stop targeting children, period. Stop using toys to lure children, stop promoting Ronald McDonald in schools and communities, and stop marketing to children as young as age two online at websites like Ronald.com, McWorld.com, andHappyMeal.com. We want McDonald’s to just get out of the way to let parents do their job to teach children how to eat right.

Notably, in its press release announcing the new campaign, McDonald’s felt compelled to reassure the public: “Ronald McDonald will continue to be an ambassador of happiness and joy for children of all ages in ongoing McDonald’s advertising and local community programs.”

That’s a relief, because I was really worried that goat was taking over.

With this new campaign, McDonald’s is making a desperate attempt to silence its critics by appearing to care about children’s health. But what the fast food giant has actually accomplished is yet one more way to exploit children’s emotional vulnerabilities through the use of animals and cartoons.

And parents, your job to help your kids eat right just got even harder.

Please sign this letter urging McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner to stop marketing children.

Originally published on Appetite for Profit

Dr. Marion Nestle and Dr. Malden Nesheim’s Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, is not a diet book selling you on the newest trend nor does it encourage you to count calories. Instead it does the seemingly impossible: It takes calories from the abstract to the concrete. Nestle and Nesheim explain the significance of the calorie not only in understandable scientific terms, but also in social terms with the explicit aim of helping their reader navigate the convoluted world of food labels and diet fads.

Nestle and Nesheim address frequently asked calorie-related questions like: Is there such a thing as negative calories and are some calories good and others bad? Chapters titles like “What is a Calorie?” belie the complex nature of the subject, but despite their respective PhD’s in molecular biology (Nestle) and nutrition (Nesheim) they manage to make the science of the calorie a personal and ultimately relatable subject.

And, not unlike Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” mantra, Nestle and Nesheim leave us with four simple charges when it comes to calories: “Get organized. Eat less. Move more. Get political.”

I spoke with Nestle about her motives behind writing the book, the impossibility of estimating calories by sight, and the reason she got into this field in the first place.

Why did you decide to write a book about calories?

Well actually this came through an invite from the University of California Press. I wish I could say it was my idea, but it wasn’t. My editor at UC Press took me to lunch at one point and said he wanted me to do two things—one was to update Safe Food (2003) and the other was to write a book about calories. I thought it was a brilliant idea. It was so current since nobody seems to know what to do about obesity and there are huge debates about what you’re supposed to eat to maintain a healthy weight. There’s so much misunderstanding with calories especially since, as we say in the book, you can’t see them, smell them, or taste them.

What was the aim of Why Calories Count?

As we say in the introduction to the first chapter, if you just stay with the science, it will pay off later on. Because if you understand the stuff in the beginning [the history and the science] all the rest of it, all of the arguments about diet make sense and you can evaluate it on your own. We were trying to empower people to interpret the food environment around them. We don’t think you need any complicated explanations for weight gain beyond extra calories

You and Malden Nesheim collaborated on an earlier book called Feed Your Pet Right (2010). Since you’ve decided to tackle another project I assume you must work well together…

Yes. I knew that this book was not something I was going to be able to do by myself because the scientific background that’s needed to understand this goes really deep and the thought of reviewing all of that stuff on my own gave me a headache. So I asked Mal to help me and he agreed. Our strengths complement each other really well.

You write that the book explores calories through science and politics. Why both?

We thought that if people were going to understand what’s out there in society then they need to understand the science. If people want to manage their weight they need to learn how to manage the environment and that’s not so easy. I used to see this in our department at NYU when we were still in the space with the kitchen. There was food around all the time. Every new member gained weight and they had to learn how to manage it. Because it is a Nutrition Department everyone did learn how to deal with it, but it required a lot of thought to figure it out.

What calorie-related questions do you get most often?

People always ask us if we count calories. Absolutely not. I think you have to work with portion sizes. The other big question that everyone has is does it matter what you eat?  The answer is yes and no. Strictly for weight gain it’s no. Strictly for health yes. But if you are eating a healthy diet it is so much easier to control your weight.

One of my favorite examples of underestimating calories in restaurant food in the book was from an anecdote you tell about a New York Times reporter taking you and several other nutritionists out to lunch and asking you to estimate the number of calories in your dishes. Despite the fact that you were all nutritionists, you still found it hard to estimate the calories in the food and ended up underestimating by about 30 percent.

It’s impossible to estimate. It was inconceivable to me that a little dish of risotto had 1,200 calories—how is that possible? I was on an airplane with a bunch of chefs the day the article came out, which was quite humiliating. The chefs said I obviously didn’t know anything about being in a restaurant kitchen and they were right.

Let’s talk about the increase in portion sizes.

Once you get used to large portions you cant go back. People feel like they’re cheated. Mini bagels are the size of bagels I grew up with and mini muffins are the size of what a normal muffin used to be. Larger muffins have more calories, sometimes many more. I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than that.

I once went to a meeting of restaurant chain owners and said that I would really like them to give a price break for smaller portions. They said, “what are you trying to do put us out of business?” For them it’s a matter of life and death. Large portions sell.

You briefly mention the controversial front-of-package nutritional labels in the book. Do you support any version of these?

Oh no. I’m on record that there shouldn’t be any labels or health claims on the front of packages at all. If there has to be one then I would advocate for calories of the whole package. Calories-per-serving is a huge source of confusion.

In the introduction you call yourselves “consummate foodies,” which is not a label people necessarily associate with nutritionists…

My love of food is the reason I go interested in all of this. In High School a friend of my mother’s was a cookbook collector and oh how I wish I had her collection. She told me if I liked food then I should study it. But the options then were either agriculture or dietetics and since I’m a city girl [Nestle grew up in New York City] I never considered agriculture. It took me decades to find out how much agriculture had to do with what we eat on a daily basis.

So I went to Berkeley as a dietetics major and lasted exactly one day. It was not a happy experience for me.  I ended up being a science major and didn’t get back to food until many years later when I was given a nutrition course to teach. It was like falling in love. I was in a biology department and I could see that it was the perfect way to teach undergrad bio. Cell biology made everyone’s eyes glaze over, but nutrition made everyone perk up and start talking. I loved that you could go from science to politics in just one lecture. Everything you were doing in the science department was reflected in the culture and society. I figured that out on the first day I was doing research for the course and I never looked back.