Food Industry – The Health Care Blog

Are Organics More Nutritious? Again? Sigh.

Sep 5, 2012• 4

By Marion Nestle

The latest study arguing that organics are not more nutritious than conventionally grown crops once again makes big-time news.

The last time I wrote about a study like this, I posted the British newspaper headlines.

Never mind the media hype. Here’s what the authors conclude:

The published literature lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods. Consumption of organic foods may reduce exposure to pesticide residues and antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Isn’t reducing exposure to pesticides and antibiotic use precisely what organic production is supposed to do?
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Should We Propose A Global Nutrition Treaty?

Jul 3, 2012

By Sanjay Basu

In 2003, 168 countries signed the world’s first public health treaty: the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC). The FCTC legally bound countries to enforce major tobacco control measures, ranging from tobacco taxes to regulations on public smoking. Through a massive international effort, the FCTC has assisted countries to improve their tobacco prevention programs, and the treaty continues to be a basis for many new programs that are implementing evidence-based tobacco control strategies.

In an article in PLoS Medicine, we publish new data showing that the food and beverage industry’s activities in low- and middle-income countries parallel that of the tobacco industry in years past; moreover, as cardiovascular disease and diabetes rates rise in poor nations, junk food, soda, and alcohol are statistically the major factors giving rise to deaths among working-age populations, and the newest evidence suggests that educational programs alone aren’t effective when markets are drowned by imports of cheap, unhealthy food and readily-accessible booze. So should the public health community push for a nutritional treaty or governance structure that parallels the successful introduction of the FCTC, but addresses “unhealthy commodities” like junk food? If so, what would such a structure look like?

Zooming out from the debates about soda taxes and similar public health controversies that pit individual freedom against public health desires to reduce disease rates, there are really a few core public health problems now facing global food systems: (1) that undernutrition and famine persist as over-nutrition (malnutrition in the direction of obesity) has appeared in the same poor households in many countries; and (2) that climate change has forced us to think about how to produce food for the world’s 9+ billion people in a manner that is environmentally sound (as highlighted in our recent discussion of Oxfam’s GROW campaign).

Interview with Alan Greene MD, author of “Raising Baby Green”

Dec 21, 2009• 1

One of the most remarkable talks I heard this year wasn’t about health care. It was about food. Of course, food is very, very closely related to health and health is at least tangentially related to health care.

So I invited Alan Greene of drgreene.com (who is a friend and has spoken at a couple of Health 2.0 Conferences) to tell me about the new book, Raising Baby Green. It really is a potential way to change how Americans (and everyone else) eat, and to use the most important years (the ones we can’t remember!) to do it.

Most importantly Alan is starting a viral campaign to get this information into the hands of expectant mothers. For anyone who knows an expectant mum or someone who might be one someday, this book is very important. And the message needs to get out and get mainstream quickly.

Here’s the interview in which Alan explains how to feed kids right, and we do a little plotting in how to get this into mainstream child-raising.