Civil Eats

Paula Deen’s public admission that she has Type 2 diabetes and her follow-up announcement that she is also a paid spokesperson for the pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, and its diabetes drug, Victoza, has sparked an interesting debate about the deeper issues surrounding our food system—especially the impact it has on the many people diagnosed with diabetes. And according to Deen’s comments on the Today show, she implies to her millions of fans, that the primary ways to deal with this largely diet-related disease are through personal responsibility and pharmaceuticals. Read More

In what is the most comprehensive analysis of fast food nutrition and marketing to date, the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity released a study Monday indicting fast food restaurants for aggressive marketing campaigns targeted to youth and other vulnerable groups, and a lack of readily available healthy options on their menus. Read More

A new study published last week in the journal Obesity, found that popular sodas and other beverages sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contain on average 18 percent more fructose than was previously thought. Read More

A recent report by the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) and Farmers Market Coalition (FMC) called “Real Food, Real Choice: Connecting SNAP Recipients with Farmers Markets,” gives detail to the economic, social and technological roadblocks that often prevent many Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants from buying fresh and healthy food at their  local, or not so local, farmers markets. Is the real issue access or affordability? Michel Nischan, CEO and President of Wholesome Wave, talks about how their innovative programs are helping to avert a national health care crisis. Read More

“The less we spend on food, the more we spend on health care,” said Michael Pollan last week on Oprah.

Today, Americans spend almost 20 cents of every dollar managing disease–diabetes, allergies, asthma, cancer, obesity–and only 10 cents of every dollar on food.

The jury is still out on what exactly may be causing all of these epidemics, but genetics don’t change that quickly, the environment does. And increasing evidence points to the role that diet is playing in the onset of disease. Read More

For many twenty-somethings like myself, issues like school lunch can be murky and distant. I’m not eating school lunch; nor do I have children who are eating school lunch (nor will I in the foreseeable future). When I think of school lunch, I mostly envision a Wonder Years-style cafeteria line, complete with mystery meat (or is it called Salisbury steak?) and a scoop of mashed potatoes. Not so bad, not so good, but unchanging and unchangeable. Right? Wrong. Read More

Earlier last week the Corn Refiners Association launched a multimillion-dollar media campaign to defend high fructose corn syrup as a “quality” sweetener, in the face of mounting public perception that this cheap, ubiquitous compound has played a not-so-sweet role in making Americans chunky and sick. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just announced that the number of Americans with diabetes increased to 24 million in 2007. But that’s just the tip of that deadly sundae: another 57 million Americans have pre-diabetes, a condition that vastly increases the risk of developing diabetes in the future. Read More