When I first lost my job, we applied for emergency food assistance. Then, when I saw how little was provided for our family of five, I went into panic mode and bought the cheapest stuff I could find: a coffin-sized crate of ramen noodle packages, a box of Cheerios as big as an ottoman. No longer did I shop for the “best”—organic, free range, all natural—I was now shopping for the cheapest.

And I was not alone in trying to negotiate this shift from affluent foodie to poverty-level mom just trying to feed her family on next to nothing. Take a look at the numbers and be startled along with me. As you can see, there was an unprecedented jump in participants in the program after the Great Recession in 2008 began. Suddenly, families who were unaccustomed to financial struggle joined the ranks of the truly needy, and we didn’t know how to shop for it! And still, after a few years of this “New Poor” culture, we are looked at with derision when we try to maintain our values as careful consumers and healthy eaters.

Thankfully, however, there are ways to make a mountain (of produce) out of a molehill (of money.)

First of all: in a genius and enlightened move, SNAP allows for the purchase of food-bearing seeds to plant in your garden, if you’re lucky enough to have room for growing (we made space for raised beds by using our defunct driveway, an irony not lost on us.) I love the optimism the government has in my ability to nurture squash seeds to fruition! If you do your homework and learn everything you can about your own climate requirements, you can successfully supplement your family’s needs. We have also had luck with an informal bartering system with our neighbors, trading our little micro-harvests to add to the variety.

Also, keep an eye out for fruit trees in your community, and work up the courage to approach neighbors. We’ve managed to incorporate loquats, Asian pears, and blackberries to supplement our own abundantly-productive fruit trees—and we get to return the generosity. Or if you want to be more official about it, register at neighborhoodfruit.com. Even if you don’t have trees of your own, you can certainly enjoy the excess of someone who may not know what to do with all those plums that ripen at once.

Until recently, we had temporarily shelved our healthy, happy habit of shopping at farmers’ markets. Though it is heartening to see the foot-hold they’re gaining in the mind of the mainstream grocery shopper (see the good news for yourself here,) farmers’ markets were something we couldn’t enjoy as a family, as they were one of the few food outlets that didn’t take SNAP EBT cards. (And still today, only one-one hundredth of a percent of food stamp dollars are spent at farmers’ markets.) In a cheering development, that seems to be changing. Locally, our biggest farmers’ market-cum-swap meet has begun taking SNAP EBT as a form of payment for fresh produce. We are able to buy organic strawberries for half of what we’ve paid in our grocery store, and I can get a chance to interact with our local agricultural producers as well.

The Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) can be another option for adding to your family’s food coffers. They offer vouchers to exchange for simple, healthy foods such as brown rice, fruit, and vegetables, though it’s important to note that the program is limited to pregnant women, nursing mothers, and preschool-age children.

Sometimes I think we are the only family at the grocery store that buys collard greens and kale. We go through the line and, inevitably, the checker has to look up the code on her laminated cheat sheet. I expect it now, and maybe I could do these long-suffering cashiers the favor of memorizing the PLUs myself. Then I top it off by paying with my EBT card. Often this makes the cashier stop making eye contact.

It’s surprising how many people will criticize your desire to buy healthy, unprocessed foods on government assistance, while they think nothing of subsidizing the nation’s dependence on medications for type-two diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other illnesses with a lifestyle component.

Further, the intentions of SNAP have changed since the inception of the program. “Healthy Food Access and Affordability: We Can Pay the Farmer or We Can Pay the Hospital” by Gus Schumacher, Michel Nischan, and Daniel Bowman Simon sheds light on the history and inter-relatedness of the WIC and food stamp (now SNAP) programs. Originally the program sought to provide the nation’s poor to access to surplus agricultural product. This benefited the farmers, and yes, through this symbiotic system, ensured that the program’s dollars would be spent on the types of food that would add to the health of our populace as a whole. Issues of autonomy and choice gained a stronghold. Government decided that the way to influence healthy eating among the nation’s food stamp recipients was best served through allowing recipients to purchase whatever they want, and relying on educational interventions to guide them to better choices, which has yielded minimal success.

Thankfully, it seems that advocates are acknowledging the failings of the past, and have begun to embrace incentives that direct federal dollars toward local agricultural products, such as providing private funds to double the worth of food stamp vouchers when spent at farmers’ markets.

In our home—in spite of our education and our commitment to organic and healthy eating—we still struggle with trying to avoid the cheap-and-easy route, especially when you can get white bread and Doritos for pennies. Sometimes, during especially stressful months—usually when it’s cold and rainy, the fruit trees are bare, and the paycheck comes in as thin and pitiful as ever—it’s tempting to just fill our family with what will satisfy their bellies. Happily, though, that happens less and less as our options for healthful fresh local foods expand. It feels good to feed your children a rainbow of colorful produce every day, and it’s satisfying that with careful purchasing, gardening, bartering, and taking advantage of enlightened new food stamp policies, we don’t have to let go of that.

There’s a new study out purporting to show that, as this AP story puts it, “healthy eating is a privilege of the rich.” In many ways, this headline is meant to be a spear slicing deeply into the Achilles heel of the food movement. In one stroke, it seems to confirm the stereotype of the elitist, Alice Waters-loving, farmers-market-shopping locavore who demands we all drop the Doritos and start learning to love kale chips instead. It is, however, a bit of an overstatement.The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, is actually doing something a bit different from what the news coverage would lead you to believe. The researchers have excellent pedigrees: epidemiologists from the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, including Adam Drewnowski, who has a large body of work looking at the various challenges of healthy eating for low-income people, and ways to overcome those challenges.

The authors looked at four basic nutrients that the USDA recommends Americans get more of: potassium, calcium, vitamin D, and fiber. Then they looked at the buying habits of a group of residents from King County, Wash. (an area that includes Seattle) and calculated the increase in cost for them to do just that. The eye-opening finding that got most of the press coverage was that increasing consumption of potassium to meet USDA recommendations “would add $380 per year to the average consumer’s food costs.”

But even the study authors admit that there’s a wrinkle here worth noting: They didn’t search out the cheapest source of potassium (bananas, for the record) to come up with that figure. They performed statistical analysis to model a diet higher in those nutrients based on what the study participants were already buying. That’s very different from trying to shop on a budget!

Indeed, their point was not to demonstrate that healthy eating is the province of the rich. Their conclusion was simply that “adopting a nutrient-dense diet in line with both dietary recommendations and current U.S. eating habits may raise food costs for consumers.” In other words, it’s not enough for the government to set dietary guidelines. It needs to radically change its policies, including but not limited to possibly subsidizing healthy foods, if we are to achieve the goal of healthy eating.

Last year, writers Jane Black and Brent Cunningham demonstrated the possibility of healthy, even locavore-style, eating on a tight budget during time spent researching a book in Huntington, W.Va., site of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution television show. They spend $2.38 per person per meal (cooked at home) while eating “plenty of organic produce … local eggs, buffalo meat and un-homogenized milk in glass bottles.” That’s not to say it’s easy, of course. But it’s not impossible.

The new study’s main thrust is that Americans will have to change their eating patterns if they are to eat a healthy diet affordably. But didn’t we know that already? Forget potassium — it’s well known that Americans don’t come even close to the recommended number of servings of fruits and vegetables, and if they tried, there wouldn’t be enough fruit and veggies to go around! The real question, which the study does not address, is how to get from where we are to where we want to be.

To me, the most interesting finding of the paper was not the “cost” of potassium (which may be a convenient nutrient for this kind of analysis but is certainly not the one most consumers focus on when shopping). Rather, it was the researchers’ results that showed “each time consumers obtained 1 percent more of their daily calories from saturated fat and added sugar, their food costs significantly declined.” Over the course of a year, a consumer could reduce food costs by $125 for each 1 percent increase in calories from sugar and fat. In other words, all the financial incentives point strongly to upping calories from fat and sugar and slashing the nutritional quality of the American diet.

The sad fact is that we are not born knowing how to shop for healthy food. While the concept of “healthy eating” has a long pedigree, for most of history the vast majority of people ate what was available or, if possible, the foods their parents ate. To vastly oversimplify, this fact held true for most people in the developed world until the middle of the last century when the great “labor saving” wave swept over American households (much to the relief of millions of women). It was at that moment that traditional “foodways” finally gave way to a corporate version that emphasizes convenience, ease, and palatability (achieved through manipulating sweet, fat, and salt). Government should be the obvious counterweight to the corporate marketing machine, but for reasons of internal conflicts and regulatory capture, it’s not.

Navigating the grocery aisles has never been more complicated — and not just for low-income folks. I can attest to the fact that many of my well-educated, affluent peers don’t manage things so well either, if the number of parents who serve their children sports drinks but limit soda is any indication. With time and money at an absolute premium and when most food education takes place in front of the television, do we really need a study like this to tell us which way the food winds are blowing?

Originally published on Grist

Food corporations enjoy carte blanche on what they can say about their foods, how and to whom they advertise, and even (to a large degree) the ingredients they choose to put in their foods. But when the Obama administration recently proposed voluntary guidelines [PDF] for the types of food advertised to children, industry giants decided to preempt these guidelines and create their own.

Since the government released its new guidelines, two powerful industry groups have reared up. One is the Sensible Food Policy Coalition, headed by former Obama press secretary Anita Dunn, and led by PepsiCo, Viacom, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Time Warner, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Association of National Advertisers. This group was quickly created in response to the government’s new guidelines and its sole purpose is to prevent them from going into effect.

The second industry group making noise is the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), led by ConAgra, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, and Kellogg’s. The members of CFBAI sell thousands of food and beverage products around the world and thus share joint interests when it comes to advertising policies.

The government’s guidelines evolved as part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign and are intended to protect children from the onslaught of advertising for highly processed, nutritionally void foods. The guidelines propose that by 2016, all food products most heavily marketed to children and adolescents ages two to 17 must meet the following two nutrition principles, “provide a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet,” and “should minimize the content of nutrients that could have a negative impact on health or weight.”

This translates as quite modest caps on added fat, sugar, and sodium: One gram or less of saturated fat, zero grams trans-fat, no more than 13 grams of added sugars, and no more than 210 grams of sodium per serving. The trouble is, many processed foods already meet this criteria: Trix cereal, which is heavily marketed to children across various social media platforms as well on TV and in print, contains 10 grams of sugar per serving, zero grams saturated fat and trans fat, and 180 mg of sodium, which puts it right up there with some of the worst foods our nation’s children are eating. Trix is chock full of sugar, additives, food dyes, and preservatives that have been to shown to have a myriad of ill effects.

The food industry members of the CFBAI called the voluntary guidelines, “unworkable and unrealistic” and then proposed their own guidelines—guidelines that would require no modifications to two-thirds of their food products. Meanwhile, the CFBAI is trying to paint this as groundbreaking progress and even the chairman of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) agrees. “The industry’s uniform standards are a significant advance and exactly the type of initiative the commission had in mind when we started pushing for self-regulation more than five years ago,” Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC said in a statement about the advertising initiative.

It’s unclear how creating regulations that allow for two-thirds of the processed food products to remain unchanged is “significant progress.” What is clear is that the industrial food giants want no part in creating healthier foods for children. They claim the modest guidelines will cause job loss in an already troubled economy, appealing to the conservative base that scoffs at any government regulation, and crying “nanny-state,” when the government attempts to intervene in our health crisis.

And while the right wing makes claims of socialism and ridicules Michelle Obama for trying to regulate food corporations on grounds that the few should not control the many—the truth is, the few are indeed controlling the many. Large food conglomerates like General Mills, Kellogg’s, Con-Agra, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola are the epitome of this scenario. These corporations effectively control what most middle-income and low-income people eat in this country. If you are born into a poor family, with relative food insecurity, then it makes economic sense to eat the most calorically rich (usually nutrient-void) foods for the least amount of money. Not coincidentally, this is what the large food corporations excel at producing.

It comes as no surprise then, that the most recent research examining obesity found that poor, African American women make up the largest population of obese Americans, with Latino women following close behind. In fact, poor women of all races were the most likely to be obese and the research shows troubling links between poverty, government assistance and health problems in the United States.

Findings from a Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity study released last November indicate a similar trend. The study found that the industry specifically targets teens and minority youth more often and with less healthy items. African American youth saw at least 50 percent more fast food ads on TV in 2009 than their white peers.

Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center said this is particularly alarming since these are the populations most at-risk for obesity and diabetes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of obesity for African Americans is 51 percent higher than for white Americans, and the prevalence of obesity amongst the nation’s Hispanic American population is 21 percent higher than their white peers.

The Obama administration is on the right track by creating guidelines to regulate a food system that functions completely unchecked but it shouldn’t cower to industry pressure by allowing food corporations to regulate themselves—isn’t that exactly what they’ve been doing for the past 60 years?

Photo: via rocker_time3 on Flickr

In my recent critique of the new USDA dietary guidelines, I wrote that we’ll never see a real food version of MyPlate as long as the food industry holds sway over the guidelines and USDA continues to promote industrial foods.

While this is true, there’s no reason we can’t create our own “Real Food” version of MyPlate to promote what we think is healthy and what’s not. Admittedly, it’s difficult to convey a lot of information in a single graphic, but, in my opinion as a certified nutrition educator, MyPlate promotes foods that are unhealthy. There are structural problems with MyPlate as well—dairy should be included in the protein category and the glass next to the plate should be water.

Allowing industrial food corporations to influence the dietary guidelines—from dairy and meat to apple juice and corn flakes—makes it clear that the health of the American people is not the USDA’s top priority.

My “Real Food” approach to MyPlate clearly conveys what I think should be included and what should not be, and has no agenda other than presenting the healthiest real food diet for all Americans. The underpinnings of a real food diet is focused on plant-based, whole foods that are organic and sourced local, when possible.

Bottom Line: Simply giving these guidelines isn’t going to change the fact that too many Americans lack access to real foods. Change doesn’t appear to be happening from the top down anytime soon. In the meantime, by providing clear and accurate guidelines based on “Real Food,” I hope Americans can see what a “healthy” diet really looks like and start demanding access to these foods.

The following is an infographic of my “Real Food” Guide to MyPlate by Voltier Creative:

The European Union (EU) made a substantial step toward establishing a binding food labeling policy for its member states. According to an agreement reached by negotiators yesterday, all food products in the EU will be required within five years to display their energy, salt, sugar, protein, carbohydrate, fat, and saturated fat content. Once finalized, the food label policy would conclude a debate over the redesign of the European food label that started in 2008.

In the U.S., a comparable debate is about to take place. The Department of Agriculture recently released the “MyPlate” image as a replacement of the decades old food pyramid and the Food and Drug Administration is currently considering a redesign of the Nutritional Facts label, which lists values for calories, fats, sugars and other nutrients. While Americans negotiate which label might most effectively communicate nutritional values to consumers, it is worth looking to the experience of the EU.

Initially, lawmakers in Europe wanted to require a mandatory front-of-package labels and discussed requiring food companies to list Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) of calories, sugars, fat, saturates, and salt in a serving of food. The deal reached Wednesday does not require that labels be on the front of packages or that they include the GDA figures.

One nutrition label design that proved particularly popular among European consumers (and controversial among industry groups and law makers) was the “traffic light label” that uses the colors red, yellow, and green to indicate whether a food product contains high, medium or a low amounts of fats, saturated fats, sugar, and salt.

“It is absolutely essential that it is simple, that you don’t need to sit down and start trying to work out what that percentage means,“ Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association, told the BBC in 2010. “And the traffic lights system is something you can even see from a distance, so you can start to hone in on the foods that are predominantly green or green and amber and just cut down on the foods that are marked red.“

The traffic light label is already used on a voluntarily basis by a number of British food chains and manufacturers. It is supposed to help consumers compare products and make choices quickly when buying food.

In the European relabeling debate last year, the traffic light label received widespread support from the public and consumer protection groups. In one poll, 69 percent of the Germans favored the traffic light label. Also, separate studies of an Australian group of researchers and the UK consumer’s association found that the traffic light system was the most effective in assisting consumers to identify healthier foods.

Despite its popular support, EU lawmakers chose not to go with the traffic light label, deciding instead on the optional inclusion of a label that looks similar to the one recently proposed by the U.S. by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute.

In Europe, the food industry groups criticized the traffic light label, saying it patronized consumers and that consumers who strictly adhered to the green lights would not be able to eat a healthy diet.  The non-profit research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory estimated that the Confederation of the Food and Drink Industries and its companies spent $1.45 trillion in order to assure the traffic light label was not chosen by lawmakers.

In June 2010, the politicians of the European parliament decided against mandating the traffic light label. The European Parliament’s chief negotiator on food labeling, Renate Sommer , said that the traffic light labeling was rejected because it over simplifies food choices.

“Coke Light is made with sweeteners instead of sugar, it would get a green light for sugar because it contains none, while natural fruit juice with no added sugar would get a red light because of its natural sugar content,” said Sommer. Also, one would create an incentive for the producers to substitute sugar with starch or sweeteners and salt with sodium glutamines in order to get more green lights.

In the U.S., there is a nation-wide design initiative to redesign the nutrition label that’s independent of the government and the food industry. Rethink the Food Label, a design challenge hosted by UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s News21 and Good magazine online is asking the public, graphic designers, and nutritionists to picture a revamped nutrition facts label.

Contributors are asked to incorporate the nutrition label’s existing break down of fats, sugar, vitamins, calorie count, and percent daily values; or completely re-imagine the label to include geography, food quality, food justice, added sugars or carbon footprint. The top designs will be judged by a panel of food thinkers and graphic designers that includes Michael Pollan, Robert Lustig, Andrew Vande Moere, and Laura Brunow Miner.

Top image via FSA; bottom image via GMA.

The USDA finally did away with the much-maligned Food Pyramid and replaced it with MyPlate. Many in the food world are calling it progress. It’s certainly a clearer and more concise image and deserves some credit for the fact that half of the plate is comprised of fruit and vegetables.

“This is a step in the right direction,” Marion Nestle wrote in an email. “It’s the best they could come up with and some education needs to go with it, as always.”

In my view though, when you look a little deeper, you see that beyond the clearer image not much has really changed.

The five food categories indicated in the image are: Fruits, Vegetables, Protein, Grains, and Dairy. At first glance the MyPlate image appears to eliminate many problematic sugary, processed foods, but when you actually click on the categories a host of unhealthy foods are revealed.

For example, the fruit category includes fruit juice which should be considered a “sugary drink” something the recommendations say to drink less of. There are 15 grams of sugar in one small four-ounce juice box of Mott’s 100 percent apple juice and an eight-ounce glass of Tropicana Orange juice has 22 grams of sugar—depending on how many ounces consumed, these fruit juices approach or even exceed the amount of sugar found in sodas.

There’s no doubt that fruit juice is a step up from soda but in a country where 26 million people have diabetes and many other people exhibit signs of insulin resistance (the precursor to diabetes) liquid sugar in any form is detrimental. This is why the fruit category should be strictly whole fruit—whole fruit contains fiber to help balance out the sugar content and thus has a lower glycemic load. Whole, fresh fruits also contain many vital vitamins, nutrients, and minerals not found in the processed juice version.

But many Americans don’t have enough access to fresh fruit—and the emphasis on drinking fruit juice appeals to food corporations who profit on fruit juices and other processed fruit products. Indeed, on the Web sites for Mott’s and Tropicana, you find out that your apple and orange juice provide the required fruit recommendations by the USDA.

When you click on the dairy category you find that chocolate and strawberry flavored milks are included—more examples of “sugary drinks” inexplicably deemed acceptable by the USDA.  Flavored milks, regularly served in school lunch cafeterias across the country and subject to much debate, contain loads of sugar. A serving of strawberry milk contains 27 grams of sugar, equal to the amount of sugar in eight ounces of Coca-Cola.

Meanwhile, the grains group remains amorphous. The guidelines do say to keep half of the grains you consume whole, but that’s not indicated in the graphic. Again, this group is far too inclusive and leads the consumer to believe that many highly refined ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, white buns, breads, and rolls are part of a healthy diet. Given these vague guidelines one could eat Lucky Charms for breakfast, a Subway sandwich on a white bread roll for lunch, and a few slices of Domino’s pizza for dinner and consider these processed grain-filled options as part of the healthy MyPlate meal.

Much on the MyPlate Web site is based on outdated science. The low-fat and fat-free dairy recommendations are based on the premise that saturated fats are harmful (see my article on fats for more on this) and that Americans should cut down on these calories—but the truth is Americans are not getting heavier due to the fat in dairy products but rather due to the overconsumption of sugars and refined carbohydrates.

As is illustrated in this infographic, while obesity rates have soared since the 1970s the amount of calories consumed in the form of dairy, meat, and nuts has remained mostly stable. On the other hand, the amount of calories consumed in added sugars, added fats (the type of fats are not indicated in this graphic but I would bet they are in the form of highly processed vegetable oils and trans-fats) and grains has also soared. This suggests that the fats found in real foods like dairy are not the cause of our nation’s massive weight gain.

The underlying issue is quality of food not just quantity. But this won’t be addressed as long as industrial food corporations hold sway over the dietary guidelines. Discussing quality gets to the root problem of access to healthy, whole foods in this country. Quite simply, the USDA cannot insist that people eat only high quality foods while many don’t have access to them. Herein lies a conflict of interest for the USDA since it has the dual role of promoting the business of industrial food production and simultaneously advising Americans on healthy eating.

Indeed, the MyPlate recommendation to, “Enjoy your food but eat less” is hardly helpful when the goal of the industrial food industry is to encourage Americans to eat more. Industrial food corporations are great at filling bellies with highly caloric yet nutritionally void food—and sugar and refined carbohydrates are the main culprits. If the USDA truly wanted to endorse healthier eating, it would focus on promoting nutrient-dense foods. Switching to a nutrient-dense diet goes a long way in addressing portion control—it’s difficult to overeat a real food diet.

The ideal image would be more exclusive–that is to say, many foods now endorsed by the USDA as part of MyPlate would be eliminated. The fruit group would be strictly fruit, the vegetable group strictly vegetables. The protein group would include dairy (the fact that dairy is a separate category highlights the influence of the powerful dairy lobby) and would eliminate the many processed foods now listed as part of these groups: Flavored milks, processed cheeses, processed deli meats, and processed soy products. The grains group would eliminate refined and processed grains and reserve these to be used minimally in the form of treats. The same applies to all sugary foods and sugary drinks.

As Michele Simon rightly points out in her recent post, what’s really needed to affect change are policy changes. She writes, “It’s going to take way more than a measly $2 million educational campaign to get Americans to fill up half their plate with fruits and vegetables. It’s going to take a massive overhaul of our agricultural policies.”

And this is why we’ll never see a real food MyPlate. As long as our current agricultural policies and farm subsidies remain the same, the government can’t offer much else in the way of recommendations. What they’ve recommended is what’s available to most of the American population—processed and packaged foods subsidized by government policies.

MyPlate is simply a cleaner graphic image with mostly the same old information. I can think of a much better way to spend that $2 million dollar budget: Fund urban farming projects so more Americans can actually fill those plates with fruits and vegetables. Now that would be real progress.

Flavored milk has come under scrutiny as more people, including school food activist and chef Jamie Oliver and his Food Revolution, have implicated it in the childhood obesity debate. (UPDATE: In fact, thanks to Oliver’s work, flavored milk is no longer a choice as of July 1 in LA schools.) Yet many in the mainstream health and nutrition media maintain that it is a weight loss and muscle building “super food.”

Take for example, this article by Men’s Health editor-in-chief titled, “The Chocolate Milk Diet,” which recently made the rounds on my Facebook feed. He writes, “If your teacher gave you chocolate milk as a lunchtime treat, she was (unknowingly) giving you one of the most powerful weight-loss tools in the nutritional universe.”

While foods that offer a combination of fiber, fat, and protein can help satiate with fewer calories, no food inherently produces weight loss. And yet despite the dairy industry’s fervent claim that three servings of dairy a day can aid in weight loss, the scientific evidence is scarce at best [PDF], as evidenced by this meta-analysis published in Nutrition Reviews in 2008.

Most perplexing however, is how a beverage made with added sugar (which are empty calories, providing absolutely no nutrition) can somehow be touted as a powerful weight-loss tool. Three eight-ounce servings of chocolate milk–an amount that meets the suggested amount of daily dairy servings–contribute 36 grams of added sugar. That’s four grams shy of a 12-ounce can of Coca-Cola,and as much added sugar as 12 Dunkin’ Donuts cinnamon cake Munchkins (donut holes). Plain and simple, you’re looking at 144 empty calories.  The fact that schools serve non-fat chocolate milk is irrelevant; we are increasingly seeing a higher amount of scientific research linking high added sugar intake with increased heart disease risk.

It isn’t simply pop-health magazines promoting chocolate milk, many accredited health professionals have gone on record declaring their love for it as well.  In an article titled “Nutrition Experts Applaud Chocolate Milk As A Good-For-You Treat,” Registered Dietitian Liz Weiss describes chocolate milk as “a nutrient-packed form of chocolate that always seems to satisfy. Plus, chocolate milk is such a better alternative than sugar-filled sodas and fruit drinks that contain little or no nutrients.”

The cocoa used in commercial chocolate milk is alkalized, meaning that the high amounts of the healthful antioxidants and polyphenols naturally found in cocoa are stripped away. In order to reap the many health benefits of chocolate, it must be consumed in a minimally processed form.  As if that wasn’t bad enough, a tablespoon of sugar then goes into each eight-ounce serving of chocolate milk.  The now-familiar argument that chocolate milk is a better alternative to sugar-filled sodas is quite weak, considering that sugar-filled sodas are nutritionally void.  You’d be hard-pressed to find a beverage that is a worse alternative to soda.

Weiss goes on to say, “Flavored milks provide the same nine essential nutrients and benefits as unflavored milks; the main difference is the added sugar, but the amount is significantly less than what you’d find in soft drinks–and if it helps kids get their milk, that’s a good thing.”
The nine essential nutrients she refers to are: Calcium, vitamin D, protein, potassium, vitamin A, vitamin B-12, riboflavin, niacin and phosphorus.  All of these nutrients are found in other foods, yet, much of the fervent chocolate milk propaganda makes it seem as if chocolate milk is the only way children can incorporate them into their diet.

Dairy enthusiasts, including [PDF] the United States Department of Agriculture often make the claim that dairy foods offer the most reliably absorbable calcium.  Alas, that mantra is absolutely false. A 1990 study from the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that the calcium in kale is more absorbable than from milk. And, this 1994 study also published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition shows that broccoli, brussels sprouts, and mustard greens offer a higher percentage of absorbable calcium than milk. Besides, the focus on calcium is myopic, as there are many other nutrients–many of which are not found in milk–that are crucial for bone health and development.

The best thing chocolate milk has going for it is a multi-million dollar marketing campaign and relentless lobbying power. The Milk Processors Education Board–behind the 18-year-old “Got Milk?” advertisements as well as “Body By Milk” and “Refuel with Chocolate Milk”–has spent roughly $70 million each year just for advertisements.

Nutritionally misleading and inaccurate statements aside (“without milk in your diet, it’s difficult to get the recommended amounts of nutrients you need”), all the campaigns hinge on body image, with mentions of “looking your best” and “maintaining a healthy weight” peddled by airbrushed celebrities who often times display taut arms and chiseled abs. These advertisements–and hyped-up journalism like the one mentioned at the beginning of this article–simply propagate the longstanding “milk is nature’s perfect beverage” myth, which has a lot more to do with sleek public relations and very little to do with nutrition science.

Often times, these debates turn into a “vegan” vs. “omnivore” battle, which distracts from the core issue.  This goes beyond the question of whether it is ethically “right” or “wrong” to drink a beverage that is an animal byproduct.  Rather, it has to do with the fact that misleading and incorrect nutritional information is presented as objective fact.  As a soon-to-be Registered Dietitian, I am fed up with self-proclaimed experts who ultimately confuse the general public with erroneous nutrition claims that read like industry propaganda. Perhaps even more troubling, I am flabbergasted at the many individuals with the “right credentials” who continue to parrot the Dairy Council’s so-called facts, despite the scientific evidence that disproves them.

While dairy milk is not an essential beverage, it can have a place in a healthy diet.  That said, flavored milk is–as school lunch activist Ann Cooper puts it–”soda in drag” and should not be served daily to children at school or touted as a superfood to everyone else.

Would you change the way you eat if it kept you from getting cancer or stopped the disease in its tracks? Could you see yourself adding more sustainable, fresh local foods to your diet every day if it might prolong your life?  Cancer researcher Dr. William Li, of the Angiogenesis Foundation, thinks you can.

Li’s work revolves around looking at the way that our blood vessels–every person has around 60,000–deliver oxygen and nutrients to the all our body’s organs, but can also feed cancers and grow tumors in the body. To prove his theory about the preventative powers of healthy food, his Angiogenesis Foundation has kicked off an Eat to Defeat campaign, that has a goal of signing up one million volunteers who are willing to increase their intake of healthy foods, and to become a part of his research.

How It Works

Dr. Li says that each person’s body has the power to regulate how many blood vessels there are operating in it at any one time, and that balance of this number is critical to health.

When we suffer an injury, the body creates a set amount of new blood vessels, and when we don’t need that much blood supply, the body knows how to “prune the vessels back to baseline,” said Dr. Li. This process is called angiogenesis. When the body doesn’t have enough blood vessels, it can lead to poor circulation, strokes, heart attacks and even hair loss. On the flip side, a body that has too much angiogenesis can create cancers, blindness, Alzheimer’s disease and other ailments. “Obesity can also be linked to the imbalance of angiogenesis,” said Dr. Li.

Cancerous tumors cause the body to have a difficult time regulating the number of blood vessels present. Dr. Li said that most of us live with small microscopic tumors in our bodies that don’t cause us any risk at all. The trouble comes when there is an increase in blood vessels that feed those small tumors and make them grow.” And as the cancer grows, it allows the malignant cells to metastasize to other organs.

His main theory is that certain foods can literally bring naturally occurring inhibitors of angiogenesis into the body and stop or slow down cancer.

“Prevention is a better way of doing this than through treatment after the cancer has occurred,” Dr. Li says. “We know that diet accounts for 30 to 35 percent of environmental cancers.”

On his list of superfoods that help keep cancer and disease at bay are red grapes and red wine that have concentrated levels of resveratrol, which Li says  “can cut off the growth of blood vessels.” In the case of prostate cancer in men, Li says that consuming cooked tomatoes at least two to three times per week can reduce a man’s risk of prostate cancer. Why? “Those who ate more cooked tomatoes had fewer blood vessels growing and feeding their cancerous tumors.” Other foods with the power to block the growth of blood vessels are oranges, lemons, cherries, spinach, kale and bok choy, tumeric, nutmeg and garlic, to name a few. He even suggests that drinking a combination of teas can aid in anti-angiogenesis.

While studies show that eating a healthy diet full of fresh fruits and vegetables can make significant improvements in health, more work needs to be done to prove that the cure for cancer lies in what we eat. Dr. Li has teamed up with Dean Ornish, the diet guru at University of California to learn more about the impact of diet on controlling angiogenisis.  The two doctors will also be looking at the impact of angiogenesis on obesity. Dr. Li has suggested that cutting off blood supply through diet may be a way to shrink fat and reduce obesity. Chefs Mario Batali, Ming Tsai, and Michael Schlow have signed on to the Eat to Defeat campaign by offering up healthy recipes using the dietary sources that Dr. Li outlines.

At this point, does anybody know that this approach to eating is a sure fire guarantee that you’ll spend your whole life cancer-free? No, but it is a part of a common sense approach to being fitter and living healthy.

Watch Dr. Li talk about angiogenesis at TED here:

Chemicals and additives found in the food supply and other consumer products are making headlines regularly as more and more groups  raise concern over the safety of these substances. In a statement released yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asked for reform to the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. The group is particularly concerned about the effects these substances have on children and babies.

Last month, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) held hearings on the safety of food dyes but failed to make a definitive ruling—the most recent study on Bisphenol-A (BPA) added to growing doubts about its safety but the FDA’s stance remains ambiguous. Meanwhile, in 2010, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the FDA is not ensuring the safety of many chemicals.

Yet while the FDA drags its heels and hedges on the safety of these substances, Americans are exposed to untested combinations of food additives, dyes, preservatives, and chemicals on a daily basis. Indeed, for the vast majority of Americans consuming industrial foods, a veritable chemical cocktail enters their bodies every day and according to the GAO report, “FDA is not systematically ensuring the continued safety of current GRAS substances.”

The term GRAS refers to “generally regarded as safe,” the moniker the FDA uses to regulate food additives, dyes, and preservatives. The trouble is this system is not effective. Dr. Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union, said in an interview that many additives in our food supply are never even tested. That’s because the GRAS designation is a voluntary process—instead of being required to register food additives, companies can notify the FDA about their product, but only if they so choose. Hansen added that even for those additives considered GRAS, he didn’t have much faith in the designation.

So just how many of these largely untested and unregulated chemicals is the average American consuming every day? As of yet, no study has determined this number nor has looked at what the effects of the various combinations might be. But according to the Body Burden Web site, there are 80,000 chemicals in commerce and the site says that, “No one is ever exposed to a single chemical, but to a chemical soup, the ingredients of which may interact to cause unpredictable health effects.”

There are only a few studies that evaluate the combined effects of food additives. One 2006 study published in Toxicology Science concludes that the combination of several common additives appears to have a neurotoxic effect: “Although the use of single food additives at their regulated concentrations is believed to be relatively safe in terms of neuronal development, their combined effects remain unclear.” Of the four additives looked at, only one is now banned in the U.S., while the rest remain in the foods on our grocery store shelves. In a 2000 study, researchers looked at the combination of four major food additives or a mixture of six typical artificial food colors and found indications of toxicity in both.

And perhaps the most alarming study dates back to 1976 from the Journal of Food Science. In this study, young rats were fed a low-fiber diet along with sodium cyclamate, FD&C Red No. 2 and polyoxyethylene (20) sorbitan monostearate individually and in combination. While the study found that any one of the three food additives given individually had little negative effect, the combination of all three additives resulted in weight loss and the death of all test animals within fourteen days. Sodium cyclamate is an artificial sweetener now banned in the U.S., but FD&C Red No. 2, a food dye, and polyoxyethylene (20) sorbitan monostearate, an emulsifier, are still in regular use in the food supply, according to the FDA’s Web site.

BPA, another regularly used chemical, has raised a number of concerns. The most recent study found that when participants switched to a diet with minimal amounts of canned foods or plastic food packaging, urinary levels of BPA decreased by more than 60 percent after just three days. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly all Americans have detectable levels of BPA in their bodies, which has been linked to breast and prostrate cancer, infertility, early puberty in girls, obesity, and ADHD. This study indicates how quickly the body will excrete BPA if given the opportunity, but here’s the key: The body must be given the opportunity to do so. Many Americans don’t take three-day fresh food breaks from a diet based largely on packaged and processed foods. What’s more, BPA is just one of the chemical compounds with potentially harmful effects entering into our systems.

Based on the anecdotal information I see in my client’s food journals, people eating processed and packaged foods are taking in exorbitant amounts of artificial ingredients and additives. Typically, a client will say something like, “I eat a bowl of cereal with low-fat milk, have yogurt for a snack, and a Subway sandwich for lunch.” While this sounds relatively harmless, here’s what it might actually look like based on some popular “health food” items:

• One serving of Kellogg’s Fiber Plus Antioxidants Berry Yogurt Crunch contains more than 13 different additives, preservatives, and food dyes, including Red 40 and Blue 1, which are known to cause allergic reactions in some people and mutations leading to cancer in lab animals. It also contains BHT, monoglycerides, and cellulose gum. In addition, conventional milk often contains residues of artificial bovine growth hormones, known endocrine disruptors as well as antibiotics used in industrial milk production.

• Dannon Light & Fit Peach yogurt contains more than 11 different additives including Red 40, aspartame, potassium sorbate, sucralose, and acesulfame potassium.

• A Subway sandwich of turkey and cheese on nine-grain bread with fat-free honey mustard, peppers, and pickles contains more than 40 different additives, preservatives, and dyes. The pickles and peppers have yellow 5 and polysorbate 80, the bread has ten different additives including dough conditioners, DATEM, and sodium stearoyl lactylate, and the turkey contains ten additives as well.

The person in this example has consumed more 60 food additives eating breakfast, a small snack, and lunch alone, to say nothing of dinner, dessert, further snacking and drinks. Consumers Union’s Dr. Hansen told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were up to 100 additives or more that people are taking in on a daily basis.”

And it’s not just food. A number of additional toxins also enter our systems from other industrial sources and often come in the form of phthalate plasticizers and parabens—both of which are used in personal care products, some medications, and even foods and food preservation. Most Americans use some form of shampoo, soap, lotion, and antiperspirant every day, and these toxins, applied to the skin, are absorbed dermally.

According to a 2010 study, like BPA, parabens and phthalates can clear our bodies relatively quickly but only if we aren’t exposed to them on a regular basis. The study states, “For serious health problems to arise, exposure to these rapidly-clearing compounds must occur on a daily basis.” Phthalates are associated with infertility, obesity, asthma, and allergies, as well as breast cancer; parabens are a cause for concern regarding breast cancer.

So what if it’s not the dyes alone, the preservatives alone, or the BPA alone, but some haphazard combination thereof that has yet to be studied or evaluated properly? Jason August, with the FDA’s Office of Food Additive Safety, admitted as much in his defense of food dyes in relation to ADHD recently when he said, “There were other factors in most of these studies that could have been the reason or could have gone hand in hand with the dyes to create these problems in these particular children, including preservatives.”

This is precisely why the FDA needs to be more rigorous with its testing of individual additives and start evaluating the combined effects or “other factors” that August so blithely refers to here.

Chemicals used in all of these industrial products are big business—food corporations own some of the largest personal care companies and they’re profiting on multiple fronts with cheap, industrial ingredients. For example, Nestlé owns 30 percent of the world’s largest cosmetic and beauty company L’Oreal—tightly regulating these substances and evaluating potential harm would be a financial hardship for these corporations.

But the real hardship is placed on the American people who trust that the foods they eat are properly regulated by the government and safe for themselves and their families. How long will the FDA continue to put the health of the American people at risk with its antiquated policy? Let’s hope with pressure from groups like the AAP, changing consumer demand, and continued headlines, the FDA will finally do its job.

Photo: 1970s Monsanto advertisement, via Christian Montone on Flickr

Wartman describes the Cornucopia Institute’s recent report in which they describe finding residues of hexane in some soy food ingredients. The Cornucopia Institute gave few details about how much hexane they actually found and there is no evidence that the amounts typically found in soy foods are harmful to consumers. However, in the interest of worker and environmental safety, as well as trying to limit any potential harm from hexane residues, I cannot fault anyone for avoiding soy products produced with hexane. As Wartman points out, there are companies that make soy meats without using hexane, such as Tofurky and Field Roast.

But this is where Wartman and I part ways. While there are legitimate concerns regarding soy, Wartman cherry-picked the studies and ignored the vast majority of research. For the topics in this article, I will cover the full range of research findings, both pro and con.

A little background: Soy contains isoflavones which have the ability to bind to estrogen receptors and can affect thyroid hormone (especially if someone has iodine deficiency). There are about 25 mg of isoflavones in one serving of soy.

Breast Cancer

Wartman implicates soy as a cause for breast cancer, mentioning only one study. Unfortunately, she didn’t cite the study correctly, so it is not clear to which she was actually referring. In any case, here is a run down of the research.

Case-control studies on soy and breast cancer have been generally encouraging to those with soy in their diets, with about half associating soy with a lower risk for breast cancer and the other half showing no effects.

Prospective studies, which are generally a higher level of evidence than case-control, have also been very positive. Of the six studies done on populations with higher soy intakes (about one to two servings per day is the typical upper intake amount), the Singapore Chinese Health Study (21), the Shanghai Women’s Study (22, 23), and the Japan Public Health Center study (26) all found that higher intakes of soy were associated with a reduced risk. The Japan Collaborative Cohort Study (17) and the Japan Life Span Study (30) found no association. The European Prospective Investigation into Cancer-Oxford (24), which contained a large number of vegetarians, also found no association. Regarding the lack of association in the European study, some have speculated that in order to receive benefits from soy, exposure must occur during adolescence when breasts are developing, while Western vegetarians often adopt the diet as adults.

As for women with breast cancer, including those with tumors that grow in response to contact with estrogen (known as estrogen receptor positive), the authors of the recently published Women’s Healthy Eating and Living Study write:

Our study is the third epidemiological study to report no adverse effects of soy foods on breast cancer prognosis. These studies, taken together, which vary in ethnic composition (two from the US and one from China) and by level and type of soy consumption, provide the necessary epidemiological evidence that clinicians no longer need to advise against soy consumption for women diagnosed with breast cancer.

Dementia

Wartman cites the 2000 Honolulu-Asia Aging Study, saying that it linked soy with an increased risk of Alzheimer’s disease and brain shrinkage. Actually, this study does not mention Alzheimer’s Disease, although it did measure cognitive function. Let me sum up the evidence on soy and mental cognition.

There have been twelve short-term (lasting one week to a year) clinical trials looking at the impact of soy on cognition, and all have shown soy to be helpful (44, 45, 48, 49, 47 50, 54, 55, 56) or neutral (51, 52, 57).

Epidemiological studies (unlike clinical trials), examine patterns of soy consumption and cognition in specific populations. One such study found tempeh (a fermented soy food) to be associated with improved cognition (9). Three reports from epidemiological studies have associated tofu with reduced cognition in some groups (2, 9, 53), but increased cognition in another group (42), and neutral in others (42, 53). The harmful findings for tofu in the epidemiological studies are likely due to confounding caused by the fact that people of lower economic status have traditionally eaten more tofu in Asian cultures as well as the fact that some tofu has been prepared using formaldehyde (at least in Indonesia from where some of these reports have come). The research as a whole provides little cause for concern.

Infant Formulas

Wartman suggests that soy-based infant formulas are “Perhaps the most alarming…” While I can understand the concern given that some infants are eating nothing but soy, the most important study to date, tracking adults who were fed soy formula as infants, provides assurance that there is no reason to be concerned about thyroid or reproductive function (95). Furthermore, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Toxicology Program considers soy formula safe.

The Beginnings Study is an ongoing study examining the effects of formula on child development (86). It is in its early stages with findings from children only a year old, but to date no negative effects of soy have been found on growth, sex organs, or neurological development compared to children on cow’s milk formula.

Some research shows that is best to choose a soy formula with DHA, and it is important to note that soy-formula is not intended for pre-term infants.

Feminizing Characteristics

Regarding the concern that soy could cause feminizing characteristics in men, there have been two case studies. In one, a man eating twelve servings per day of soymilk developed enlarged, sensitive breast tissue (123). In another, a man with type 1 diabetes was eating 14 servings per day of mostly processed soy foods for one year and developed erectile dysfunction (10), which normalized after ceasing the soy. While I would not recommend eating this much soy, one study used even much higher amounts of isoflavones and found no problems for most men (124).

As for sperm quantity and quality, while one epidemiological study raised concerns, albeit minor, about soy and sperm quantity (14), two clinical studies have shown no effects of soy (15, 126).

Thyroid

I do want to address one more issue that has recently arisen with the publishing of a clinical trial this year in which 16 mg/day of isoflavones in people with mild hypothyroidism appeared to cause an increased rate of advancing to overt hypothyroidism (78). Nine other clinical trials showed no effect of soy on the thyroid compared to placebo in people with presumably healthy thyroids (13, 60, 63, 64, 66, 68, 69, 71, 75) while the remaining five studies found small changes, all without physiological significance (61, 65, 70, 73, 74). People without hypothyroidism should have no problems with soy as long as they get enough iodine, but until we know more, people with mild hypothyroidism might want to avoid soy just to be safe.

Miscellaneous

In Soy: What’s the Harm?, I address other issues Wartman raised, such as mineral absorption (a non-issue) and traditional Asian intakes.

Conclusion

In addition to reducing the risk for breast cancer as mentioned above, soy also provides benefits for preventing prostate cancer, lowering LDL cholesterol, and improving menopausal symptoms. When you add up all the research on soy, there is no reason to think that two servings per day are harmful to most people, and good reason to think soy will provide some health benefits.

Originally published on JackNorrisRD.com