Why do they matter? Fish and McD's

Pinstrup-Anderson, co-author on my textbook, recently asked what fish have to do with food and nutrition security. He answers that it matters a great deal and recommends a new report by a high-level panel of experts on the subject.

The current debate and the many papers written recently about how agriculture can be made more nutrition sensitive also miss the point.  We should talk about how the food system, including fisheries and aquaculture and the total supply chain, can be made more nutrition sensitive.  If we limit the discussion and policy recommendations to agriculture, we are foregoing some very big opportunities for improving food security and nutrition. ... 

The report, which is available at www.fao.org/cfs/cfs-hlpe or in hardcopy from cfs-hlpe@fao.org, is a goldmine of policy-related knowledge about the fisheries and aquaculture sectors, their importance, sustainability issues, governance and recommended policies for consideration by governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations. It provides a comprehensive assessment of the interaction between the fisheries and aquaculture sector and food and nutrition security. The report is a must-read for those of us interested in food policy.

Handjiski points out that all of Sub-Saharan Africa only has two countries with McDonald's franchises. Even though countries like Seychelles, E. Guinea, Gabon, Botswana, and good old Nigeria have a higher income than Indonesia, Egypt, Pakiston, or Moldova did when they got their first. He suggests that, since having a McDonald's requires a certain level of infrastructure, entrepreneurship, and access to a large number of ingredients, it can be a development indicator:

In almost 60 percent of cases, developing countries grew [significantly] faster in the five years, compared to the previous five, following the opening of the first McDonald’s. ... What this means is that McDonald’s may be viewed as one of the tipping points for when a country has amassed sufficient urban middle-class, investment security and supply chains for economic take off.

 Speaking of which, there was also a recent article about how Americans' general stupidity with fractions stopped A&W from beating McDonald's Quarter Pounder with a "Third Pounder". People said 3 is less than 4 and therefore 1/3 is less than 1/4. Ouch. In related interesting news, New York states has decided that a burrito is a sandwich for tax purposes.

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Lit in Review: Child Undernutrition and Labor

Harttgen, Klasen, and Vollmer, "Economic Growth and Child Undernutrition in Africa," GlobalFood Discussion Paper.

They add to the short but slowly growing literature on the impact of economic growth on child undernutrition that I based my dissertation work on. They add Klasen (08), Friedman and Schady (09), and Subramanyam et al (11) to the ones I knew about.

They identify a micro-macro paradox: increasing household income reduces undernutrition significantly but increasing average incomes doesn't make nearly the same difference. It is rather disturbing to me to see for how many SSA countries there has been significant improvement in GDP/capita, but a worsening of child hunger. Among the things they find that matter more than GDP/capita, household asset rank matters, suggesting that inequality may be an important part of the story.

Bhagowalia, Menon, Quisumbing, and Soundararajan, "What Dimensions of Women's Empowerment  Matter Most for Child Nutrition?' IFPRI Discussion Paper 01192

Women's empowerment can be a fairly vague (their preferred word: complex) term, so it is nice to see the authors breaking various dimensions of it down to see which are correlated with better outcomes. From the abstract: "Results from logit models indicate that both a greater degree of women’s empowerment and greater maternal endowments [read: height and education] are associated with better long-term nutritional status of children [in Bangladesh]. Attitudes toward domestic violence have an effect on child stunting and mobility; participation in decisionmaking is an important influence on dietary diversity. Consistent with previous studies, maternal height and maternal schooling decrease the probability of stunting, and maternal schooling is positively associated with dietary diversity. While these are not immediate measures of empowerment, they are positively associated with child nutritional outcomes and reflect prior investments in women and girls." However, they have almost no control variables in the regressions, so it is uncertain how much is due to these factors directly, and how much is the fact they signal correlation with socio-economic status or other factors.

De Paoli and Mendola, "Does International Migration Increase Child Labor?" Centro Studi Luca d'Agliano Development Studies Working Paper 339.

An interesting data combination allows them to look out how out-migration of workers from different skills impact local labor markets, and how those impacts affect some 200,000 children studied in 38 different countries. They find that allowing low-skilled workers to emigrate increases local wages for the parents, reducing child labor. It might have also been the case that it raised the wage for child labor, which would increase child labor, but this does not seem to be a significant factor. They also see that female emigration reduces child labor by more than male emigration. "According to our estimates, a 10% increase in the migration rate decreases the probability of child labor by 1.2 percentage points (p.p.) and the total time of weekly work by 7.3 hours." I count 209 reported regressions and, at first glance at least, the vast majority tell the same overall story.

Best of 2011

Time for some intense naval-gazing. I wasn't going to do one of these, but then I enjoyed others' so much for the posts I missed that it seemed much more interesting.

Top Ten Posts of 2011
1. Google's statement on AUN's amazing internet usage, got a lot of doubting comments and a few  defending and very plausible explanations.
2. Nutrition Labeling, describing the new requirement that meat include information on calories from fat.
3. Unemployment: Leads and Lags - Breaking unemployment into separate decisions to hire or fire will give us a better indicator of where the economy is going (has been) than total unemployment.
4. AEA session on agricultural export bans during the 07/08 food price crisis.
5. Microinsurance in Kenya via cellphone
6. My first visit to AUN. Classes will resume Thursday the 24th
7. Low saturated fat diet vs. low simple carbohydrate diet
8. QE2 and food prices - debunking the idea that the Fed is causing global food price inflation
9. Food safety, food movements, and paternalism
10. Lit in Review: Food Demand -- Ethiopia and Speculators
Honorable Mention (because I thought it was fun): The socially acceptable price of fried chicken, also known as the political economy of fast food markets in South Korea.

Top Ten Posts of 2010 (in 2011)

1. My pictures of the Thorvaldsen's Christus and apostles statues, mentioned in a Church lesson this year.
2. Lit in Review: Grossman and Helpman, there has been steady interest in summaries and other papers that make use of the "Pay to Play" model of lobbyists.
3. Food in Africa: Too much and too little discussing the problem of getting food from food-surplus states to food-deficit states. There was never a large spike, but a steady stream of interest throughout the year.
4. High Hopes for Rwandan Agricultural Development
5. Food Security in Nepal which has been of increasing interest lately
6. Cutting Costs Through ... Fonts?? Some fonts go easier on the printer's ink
7. Population Health vs. Individual Health - commentary on macro vs. micro in economics and health
8. Ethiopian Monetary Policy - combines monetary policy, food prices, Ethiopia's development goals (food self-sufficiency), and growth prospects
8. Five from vacation: education, hyperinflation, and Chinese food safety.
10. Fed governor: if we could guarantee 5% NGDP growth, it would be great - I'm glad this made the list because I think it was my most significant post, interviewing Governor Dudley about what they are targeting and Sumner's policy.

Where did my visitors come from in 2011?

The Lighter Side of ... Development, Drinks, and Demonized Demonstrators

Dear Mr Gandhi: We regret we cannot fund your proposal because the link between spinning cloth and the fall of the British Empire was not clear to us.

LDS Aid

Two professors, one a Cornell-trained BYU professor of nutrition, have been working to improve the Atmit porridge that is often given out in LDS care packages. The hope is that it will be even better for small children with a better mix of micronutrients (particularly more iron) but without compromising on shelf-life. Another article describes its dissemination in poor areas of Peru.

A single serving provides 34 percent of the recommended daily allowance of protein, 43 percent of calcium, 99 percent of iron, and high percentages for a dozen vitamins and minerals for children under 5 years old. ... 
In 2010, 645,000 pounds of Atmit were shipped by LDS Charities to four countries. Depending upon the age and size of the children, that's enough to feed 100,000 to 130,000 children for one month. The cost? Less than $6 (USD) per child.

LDS efforts to help those suffering from the famine in the Horn of Africa:

In Ethiopia, projects to aid more than 100,000 refugees are under way, including water tanks, trucking services, sanitation supplies and hygiene training for 15 villages; supplementary food for 8,700 malnourished children; nutrition centers and sanitation facilities for Somali refugees in Dollo Ado; and 5,000 hygiene kits.
The Church also plans to provide water catchment and storage structures, as well as soap and washbasins to serve tens of thousands of other residents in the communities surrounding the Dollo Ado camps.

Other projects in Kenya, Uganda, and Somalia are also underway and briefly described at the link.



At the most recent General Conference, Church President Thomas S. Monson reminded members about the General Temple Patron Fund. Donations from members around the world are used to help members who live far from a temple travel there. A recent article highlighted some of the saints in southeastern Africa who have been blessed by the Fund:

Food policy sausage

Where does Indian agricultural policy come from? IFPRI has a new report out on how the subsidy sausage gets made, and in particular what is keeping them from making better policy.

This study throws new light on the factors that have so far prevented a move toward more pro-poor and environmentally sustainable agricultural input policies in India. The authors show that electoral politics, institutional factors, and policy paradigms or belief systems all play an important role in blocking reform.

Where did the idea of people consuming 2000 calories a day come from? M. Nestle answers from her forthcoming book: a survey + marketing. Reality is complex, with surveyed responses varying over 1400 calories per day just in what Americans admitted to eating, let alone what was actually consumed. 2000 is easy to remember, easy to divide, and less than they were recommending for most real people so as not to give an appearance of over-encouraging saturated fat and salt. But as to how many calories you personally should actually consume to be healthy and satisfied, even she gives little real help: if you're gaining weight, you're eating too much.


How is it that farmers' market food safety regulation comes out so differently from that for corporations? Tucker discovers there are (at least) two kinds of farmers' markets and points out the idiosyncracies and food safety problems in our governance of them. Attending the university-sponsored one on a whim, he found the upscale farmers market with prices to match. In another town, the market was "kept alive by the workers and peasants. The price were 1/3 to 1/2 as much as the local grocery. They have locally grown produce, and a fantastic cart full of virtually free produce that is about to spoil." He notes that neither one was easily a pure exercise in local food. At the second, he bought Vietnamese fish. At the first:

For example, the man with super-cool rabbit meat, lamb and goat sausage, and the like, had come 3.5 hours, and he does this every week, even though he doesn’t have a refrigerated truck. Every corporate giant faces a labyrinth of inspections and mandates comparable to the Soviet Gosplan, just to get meat to the market. And yet here is a guy with some animals on his land who slaughters, grinds, packs, and sells, and no one seems to be bothering him. No inspectors, no special tests, no mandates. Puzzling. Thrilling but puzzling.

The New Food Plate

USDA came out with the "new" food plate. I put new in quotes because that's the advice my nutritionist gave me last year. That is to say, the advice is longer-standing than you might think, in a picture that should hopefully be much more intuitive to a lot of people than anything they have done recently. Wilde gives it an A+.

M. Nestle: "This may not look much like action, but it is a sharp departure from previous USDA icons (which USDA has delightfully put online)." She also praises the organization for saying "eat less" and taking on salt in a political climate strongly against these changes.

Why is dairy moved out to the side? Two reasons. First is that, all of milk's advertising to the contrary, you don't actually have to have milk or milk products in order to get all the nutrients you need. You can get calcium from a fairly wide selection (pasta, rice, bread, broccoli, green beans, several other legumes if you're into that kind of thing, half a dozen nuts - not peanuts or cashews, sadly - sardines or salmon, apricots, oranges) not to mention vitamin pills, and it's not exactly like we're currently hurting for places to put a little cheese. Second is that the plate gets a bit messy otherwise. They almost came out with a plate with dairy on it in 1992 but the guidance is less clear than this.


That doesn't mean it doesn't have it's lighter side... (comics below the fold)

Lit in Review: Child health

An excellent natural experiment: the electricity was cut from Zanzibar for 4 weeks in May, 2008. Families who had just gotten pregnant and wouldn’t have known about it yet wouldn’t have done anything to change their behavior, but families who did know they had a pregnancy would adapt behavior to safeguard the mother’s and child’s health. As a result, women who knew they were pregnant delivered babies within the usual distribution for Zanzibar, while women who had not known were 11% more likely to give birth to children with low birthweight, according to a new paper by Burlando. Food prices hadn’t changed. Also interesting is that there was a increase in babies born 9 months after the blackout (also about 11%). Friedman particularly highlights the long-lasting effects of temporary shocks.

Vasilakis also has a new working paper on poverty and child malnutrition, using an overlapping generations framework to generate malnutrition-induced multiple equilibria and poverty traps. He models several different World Food Program policies. In his model, a school feeding program “locks” poor countries into a poverty trap by increasing fertility and lowering human capital, but the country could escape. A school feeding program increases efficiency and human capital accumulation in middle-income countries. WFP food price subsidies or investments in local agriculture and food industry allow poor families to increase human capital in their children and increase incomes, helping the country out of poverty. Clearly the body is buried in the adopted and adapted Becker model of fertility decisions (parents face a quantity/quality tradeoff). Since my read of the literature has made me skeptical of the fertility model, I end up skeptical of these results, but the rest of the set up (2 period OLG with poverty traps) is quite interesting.

Glewwe, Park and Zhao (HT:MR) have a work in so much progress there are still notes from the authors to each other in the pdf: 

after one year, making eyeglasses available increased average test scores by 0.09 to 0.14 standard deviations (of the distribution of the test scores). For those students who accepted the glasses, average test scores increased by 0.12 to 0.22 standard deviations….

Cowen asked who refused the glasses and why. About 30% of the children who were eligible were not outfitted. “The stated reasons for not accepting them are not very informative, the two most common reasons being 'child refused' and 'parents refused.'” Running some simple regressions, acceptance is correlated with eyesight (worse eyesight means more likely to accept), already having eyeglasses (more likely to accept a new pair), “children of schoolteachers 22.4 percentage points less likely to accept eyeglasses, and children of party cadres 35.2 percentage points less likely to accept them”, and higher income towns were more likely to accept.

Well, that didn't take long: McD's

San Fransisco passed a ban on selling children toys with happy meals unless they met certain dietary guidelines. It did not take McDonald's long to demonstrate how easy it is to get around such legislation:

 

McDonald's started a program of giving music away with their Big Mac Extra Value meals back in 2004. It is apparently coming to the rescue of the Happy Meal too. After all, the ban is about toys and advertising to children, which I don't think many people would argue is the target demographic for Cascada music. Raffi she is not.

Food Stamps and Soda in 3 Acts

The political economy of soda, part 1, NYT via M. Nestle

Eighteen members of the Congressional Black Caucus recently urged the Obama administration to reject New York’s proposal. The plan is unfair to food stamp recipients because it treats them differently from other customers, they said in a letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
While Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are among the largest contributors to the nonpartisan Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, a research and education institute, caucus members say their positions are not influenced by such contributions.

Policy advice, Part 2 from Wilde:

1. You never should have called the proposed policy a ban. Has there ever been a controversy over the "ban" on SNAP spending for hula-hoops and yo-yos? The "ban" on SNAP spending for gasoline? No

Part 3 … is just funny.

Run-Of-The-Mill Requests

Gas station | Madison, WI, USA
(A customer sets all their items up on the counter. This includes a six-pack of beer.)
Me: “Okay, your total will be $12.12.”
(The customer hands me their food stamp card.)
Me: “I can run this through, and it’ll take most of the total off. But beer isn’t covered under this program. I apologize.”
Customer: “Excuse me, what?”
Me: “Yeah, alcohol isn’t covered under the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance program.”
Customer: “But beer is nutritional. It has wheat in it.”

Missing the Target

1 - (ad absurdum) Where in the Constitution does it say the federal government should have a working bathroom in the Capitol Building? It doesn't. Where in the Constitution does it say the federal government should make use of electricity? It doesn't. Where in the Constitution does it say the federal government should do ANYTHING with the internet? It doesn't. There many things not mentioned by name in the Constitution that are perfectly legitimate because they fall under the principles enumerated in it.

2 - (missing the point) From a debating standpoint, the fact that she argues against regulating potatoes without questioning the existing of a system of federal schooling, she yields the point. From a Tea Party/Libertarian standpoint, it's missing the point completely. When, for the sake of a silly but illustrative example, Mr. Banks tells Mary Poppins that the outings she has taken the children on "have little use, fulfill no basic need," he surrenders the point of their reality, tacitly admitting that it is possible that the children have been "popping in and out of chalk pavement pictures, consorting with race horse persons," and "having tea parties on the ceiling."

3 - (she's also wrong) In our current system, whose validity she has surrendered, the school system is run by the federal government and our food system is heavily reliant on interstate commerce. As such, I actually have very little problem believing that school lunches fall under a reasonable interpretation of the interstate commerce. They could even mandate that all school lunches be sourced locally, which would have so blatantly much to do with interstate commerce (specifically, forbidding it) that I doubt any conservative who thought about it could argue against it on Constitutional grounds anyway.

Yglesias, who points me to this, attacks it on very different grounds, mostly attacking self-serving right-wing politicians who suffer from two problems:

Obviously the federal government has the authority to specify for what purposes federal grant money can be used. Obviously. How else could it work? The other is the tendency to regard any existing profit stream as a form of property. Banks are entitled to their federal subsidies to offer student loans. For-profit colleges are entitled to their own student loan subsidy stream. Health care providers are entitled to unlimited wasteful spending at federal expense. Potato growers are entitled to their school lunch money.

The thing is (counter Yglesias), this isn't just regulating the use of federal grant money for the federal school lunch program. It also regulates what private citizens (students) are allowed to purchase at a federal building (school) by limiting students to 0 potatoes at breakfast and 1 cup per lunch per week. More specifically, "Under the USDA proposal, school cafeterias would have to limit starchy vegetables such as potatoes, corn, peas and lima beans to a total of one cup per week for lunch."

Notice that we are not mobilizing to protect corn, peas, or lima beans. I am quite surprised at the lack of outrage about removing corn because of the political strength of King Corn. I am mildly surprised that the people arguing that potatoes are healthy are ignoring the benefits of corn and peas. I am not at all surprised that they are arguing this will shut down potato bars and not that it threatens our national supply tater tots, french fries, and other good sources of partially-hydrogenated vegetable oil (also known as trans fats). The fact is, if students are limited to one cup a week, it will be dipped in fat unless the regulation makes a specific loophole preferring potato bars and whole corn to anything fried or processed. I think that would be a very reasonable compromise that would do more to support the notion of potatoes as "gateway vegetables."

Other interesting commentary from the article below the fold.

Why Americans Got Fatter

The interactive chart is at Civileats (HT: Yglesias), but the snapshot is pretty informative:


On the left is what we ate in 1970.


On the right is what we ate in 2007.




The differences are: 200 calories of added fats, 200 calories of grains, 50 of added sugars, and 20 more calories each in meat and fruit. Getting rid of rounding, that’s more than 500 calories every day, or a pound a week. Now, granted, that’s available calories (production – trade – non-restaurant waste) rather than actual consumption. Still quite the picture
Almost half of that change happened between 1980-1990 and more than half since 1990. The real change I want to figure out is what happened in the data between 1999 and 2000. Between those two years we added 100 calories of added fat alone.

Big Bag of Food: food safety, food movements, and paternalism

Levistky, a Cornell nutrition professor, discusses the drawbacks of high-protein, low-fat,low-carb diets (basically: they don’t work). On the other hand, the Cornell dieticians  I have worked with highly recommend a high-protein, low-fat, low-carb diet. The main problem they find is that most people really eat a high-fat diet when they shoot for high-protein. M. Nestle, on the other hand, thinks we all eat too much protein already and that somehow the advice nutritionists have given us for the last 50 years can remain unchanged. Yeah, it’s still a mess.


Of course, then you have the problem that a study found “nearly half of supermarket meat and poultry samples to be contaminated with Staphylococcus aureus,” and that half of that was resistant to antibiotics. Though M. Nestle appropriately ridicules the meat industry for passing the buck to consumers, the industry is factually correct that proper cooking procedures remove the threat.  So cook your meat thoroughly because the industry isn’t making major moves to improve food safety or revise its antibiotic policies.

M. Nestle comes out in favor of the plan to ban SNAP recipients from using the money to purchase sugared soda. Originally she was against the idea just because it seems rather patronizing and patriarchal and other words that evoke controlling male figures. The two turning points for her were the growing body of evidence (quite literally) that liquid sugars account for the bulk of increasing obesity rates among the poorest and realizing that if there is no objection to the WIC program – that provides benefits only for very specific, politically favored commodities – this is less a radical change in personal freedom and more a shift from traditional food aid to a more WIC-like program. If we don’t complain about WIC being an infringement on people’s freedom, why complain about this one?

Another Cornell prof, Wansink, had people try Cheetos without the yellow food coloring (which almost look like the red-white-and-blue mock-Cheetos below). It affected the objective taste in no way,  but had a profound impact on people’s enjoyment and sense of taste: It no longer tasted like cheese!

Indeed, color often defines flavor in taste tests. When tasteless yellow coloring is added to vanilla pudding, consumers say it tastes like banana or lemon pudding. And when mango or lemon flavoring is added to white pudding, most consumers say that it tastes like vanilla pudding. Color creates a psychological expectation for a certain flavor that is often impossible to dislodge, Dr. Shelke said. ...

As yet, natural colorings have not proven to be a good alternative. They are generally not as bright, cheap or stable as artificial colorings, which can remain vibrant for years. Natural colorings often fade within days.

M. Nestle also celebrates the “food movement” – which to me are multiple, quite different movements that just haven’t fractured yet – going mainstream. The most surprising thing to her was that the head of USDA actually seems to have an intelligent, informed opinion. Who'd've guessed? My snark aside, she said:

USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack came, gave thoughtful remarks, and responded with equally thoughtful answers to not-always-friendly comments from the audience.  This was the first time I’d seem him in person and I was impressed by how carefully he has thought through the issues he has to deal with.   Even when I viewed the issues differently,  it seemed clear that his were the result of much intelligent thought and weighing of alternatives.

Population vs. Individual Health Round 2: Water

I mentioned that I'm not supposed to whole wheat anymore. Whole wheat is bad for my health (part 2). Here's someone who's supposed to cut down on WATER because it's bad for her health:

Liz had a medical emergency which necessitated hospitalization over the last couple of weeks. ...

Lesser Known Fun Fact: Drinking more water and less soda like “the doctors say” isn‘t always the healthiest thing for everybody. That eight glasses of water thingy? Not true. At least, not always. Assuming that what’s healthy for the masses, or a generalization about drinking more water as a healthy personal choice for one specific person (as we now know) can and may lead to major medical trouble. I’ll explain what happened here. It began about a month ago.

In a perky resolution to be more healthful, Liz began drinking less sugary beverages, less caffeine, and more water. The brilliant thought behind this was “the apartment gets really hot when heat rises in the summer. I’m supposed to stay hydrated because of these medications I take, (take with plenty of water, they both warn) and I always have a can of pop next to me or an iced coffee drink. I’ll try reducing that stuff out of my diet, and this summer be one of those healthy people who carry water around, not to mention reduce my subscription to Starbucks.’

Which sounds simple enough. A nice healthy change of pace. Our dentist (The future author of ‘Liz’s Teeth Are Made of Fruit Corn Syrup’) would approve of this idea. Possibly even give a standing ovation.

Unfortunately, there’s a catch 22 to the above logic. That ’take with plenty of water’ thing for the medications? It’s true, but not when the two medications are together. Evidently one of them is a salt, and too much hydration will dilute it, removing the needed effect. ... But Liz’s chemicals really need the unaltered effect, otherwise she’s down for the count.

So for the last week, week and a half, I’ve been visiting Liz daily while she bounced from hospital to hospital (it took three networking forces) to reset her chemicals, bring the salt back into play, and find the right balance of medication. Minus the water....  So the end result? ... Mcdonald’s Frappe’s are delicious on road trips. Bottles of water in limitation.

In contrast, I'm on 12 cups of water (not liquids, but water) plus other liquids daily, and my doctors are still trying to get me to drink more. Someone is nuts.

Orwell on Nutrition

The Economist has decided that George Orwell is a nutrition expert:

AT THE depths of the Great Depression, George Orwell wrote of the English working classes: “The basis of their diet is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea and potato—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread?…Yes it would, but the point is, no human being would ever do such a thing.…A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man does not…When you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want to eat something a little bit tasty.”
… When the Copenhagen Business School asked some Nobel-winning economists the best way to spend money to help the world, nutritional projects topped the poll. Vitamin A supplements cost just a dollar or two. Their benefits—preservation from fatal diseases, higher lifetime earnings—so massively outweigh the tiny costs that poor people ought to snap them up. Yet they don’t. Orwell put his finger on why. The poor want something tasty. They may not believe nutritional experts who promote special diets (rich Westerners have been known not to stick to diets, too). Or food itself may not be their priority. As Orwell said, “There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you.”

The Economist’s set of solutions is both simple and a little simplistic: food fortification (they don’t address whether adding micronutrients to junk food is really a good thing), biofortification (they don’t address cases where people refuse to eat the biofortified foods or the cost and time to get them to market), and public feeding for infants (they ignore household decision making and food reallocation). Closing with the tag “this depends on education and policy “nudges”, not cheap rice”, their article from just a few weeks ago on micronutrient deficiencies was much better thought out. Cheap rice itself is a mixed bag, with winners and losers among the poor – just see Haiti.

The Lighter Side: Local Food, Food Safety, and Artificial Ingredients

Low saturated fat "vs." low simple carbodydrates

When I first read her article, I summarized it as “cheerleading the anti-sugar, maybe-fat-isn’t-so-bad lifestyle.” Wartman says, however, that “I am not a low-carb advocate. Rather, I am concerned that the long-time recommendations to reduce saturated fat (and all fats for that matter) from the American diet has resulted in an increase in carbohydrate consumption which has in fact caused more harm than good.”


That claim as restated in the original article:

For many people, low-fat diets are even worse than moderate or high-fat diets because they’re often high in carbohydrates from rapidly digested foods such as white flour, white rice, potatoes, refined snacks and sugary drinks.

The article also focuses on saturated fats having more complex effects on the body than most people imagine. Trans-fats, however, are still given a thorough and resounding negative review.

The USDA’s kind words about vegetarianism in its latest guidelines (eg: “On average, vegetarians consume a lower proportion of calories from fat (particularly saturated fatty acids); fewer overall calories; and more fiber, potassium, and vitamin C than do non-vegetarians.”) and the link above prompted Wilde to give some analysis:

First, there is the scientific evidence that lowering saturated fat reduces risk of heart disease [contrary to Wartman’s claim].  … For example, Harvard scientist Walter Willett has long argued that replacing saturated fats with unsaturated fats saves lives, and that refined grains and simple carbohydrates are no healthier than unsaturated fats.  The new Dietary Guidelines seem to me in complete agreement. …

While some people have complained that the USDA focuses too much on "saturated fat" and not enough on "which foods to avoid," the guidelines do contain this handy chart of where most of us get our saturated fats:

Note that this isn't "which foods have the most saturated fats" but "where do we get our saturated fat"? More of us drink reduced-fat milk than whole milk, so we as a nation get more saturated fat from the reduced fat milk, even though it contains less saturated fat than whole milk.

Wilde's article got a fairly intense comment section, with Wartman defending herself as I quoted at the beginning. He responds to her rebuttal: “The point of difference is whether low-saturated-fat diets are unhealthy. You say yes. I say, "I doubt it." Strong claims require strong evidence.”

She disagrees with his characterization again. Her one point is not whether LSF diets are unhealthy or not, but that high refined carb diets are. “There’s a big difference here -- one could easily eat a diet low in saturated fats that's also low in refined sugars and grains and potentially be very healthy. … No one diet will work for everyone. To simplify my argument into one inaccurate sentence that says I think "low-saturated-fat diets are unhealthy" is not only untrue, but does a disservice to people trying to make sense of the issues.”

I think one could be forgiven for thinking she meant that based on the article she wrote.

Cornell Seminar: Wansink on food interventions

Wansink gave a seminar to the nutrition department this week which I tweeted about while it was ongoing. He discussed two somewhat related strands of research, one with the military trying to get people to eat more and one with schools trying to get students to eat less and better. The military's main solution has been to try to get the food to taste better; schools (naturally) rely on education. Neither has been overly effective and he went in to find out a)why and b) what to do about it. Here are my notes from his talk:

It’s not nutrition until somebody eats it. Reasons for poor nutrition are simple, but only after we figure it out. 

In the army, the primary thing massive undernutrition affected was shooting accuracy. Army food scored 7.5/9 for taste, better than TGI Fridays. Observations: if it’s opened, it’s eaten; weird smells reduce appetite; no comfort areas; and they don’t drink enough.

#1 – Solution #1: TV dinner packaging. If their vegetables fall out when they open other foods, they eat them.

#2 – Packing material infused with smells of good food.

#3 – Familiar branding was comforting. They suggested: try M&Ms. The army tried peanut butter M&Ms which wouldn't melt, but that attracts sniper fire because of its bright orange packaging. Now army won’t try it again.

#4 – couldn’t solve.

Daily school salad bar sales increased 200-300% in days by moving the salad bar to the center of the room. People buy first thing 11% more often, so they moved broccoli to first ... and sales dropped 40%. Entrees worked as expected.

People want what they can see, so instead of removing ice cream, just cover the glass door with paper. Sales down 28%. Saying “Do you want salad with that?” doubled salad sales. She held on to the plate with their pizza until they answered, increasing likelihood even more.

Most changes are among people who only occasionally consume fruits and vegetables. Kids who never eat them aren’t affected and kids who eat them regularly aren’t much changed. So it’s marginal users.

Five Second: Economist on the new food regime; Part 1

The Feb 24 edition of The Economist contained a special insert on the global food situation since the global food price crisis of 07/08. Here are some of the highlights:

On the potential for improving agricultural productivity in Africa: “Given the same technology, European and American farmers get the same results.”

On obesity they aren't quite right: “Food is probably the biggest single influence on people’s health, though in radically different ways in poor countries and in rich ones, where the big problem now is obesity. … In the favelas (slums) of São Paulo, the largest city in South America, takeaway pizza parlours are proliferating because many families, who often do not have proper kitchens, now order a pizza at home to celebrate special occasions.” Obesity has been and is growing rapidly in developing countries where sometimes within the same family you can find both hunger and obesity.

On nutrition vs. calories: “Feeding the world is not just about calories but nutrients, too; and it is not about scattering them far and wide but pinpointing the groups who can and will eat them.”

“In Tanzania, children whose mothers were given iodine capsules when pregnant stayed at school for four months longer than their siblings born when the mother did not get those capsules.” “Half of those over 75 in hospital are reckoned to be nutrient-deficient, as are many obese people.”

Fortification: “Better nutrition, in short, is not a matter of handing out diet sheets and expecting everyone to eat happily ever after. Rather, you have to try a range of things: education; supplements; fortifying processed foods with extra vitamins; breeding crops with extra nutrients in them. But the nutrients have to be in things people want to eat. Kraft, an American food manufacturer, made Biskuat, an “energy biscuit” with lots of extra vitamins and minerals, into a bestseller in Indonesia by charging the equivalent of just 5 cents a packet. It also did well in Latin America with Tang, a sweet powdered drink with added nutrients, marketing it to children for the taste and mothers for its nutritional value.”

Biofortification: “It is also possible to breed plants that contain more nutrients. An organisation called HarvestPlus recently introduced an orange sweet potato, containing more vitamin A than the native sort, in Uganda and Mozambique. It caught on and now commands a 10% price premium over the ordinary white variety. The local population’s vitamin intake has soared.”

If we produce enough calories to feed the world now, “why worry about producing more food? Part of the answer is prices. If output falls below demand, prices will tend to rise, even if “excess” calories are being produced. … Pushing up supplies may be easier than solving the distribution problems.”

The downside of Zero Tillage: “weeds. They like to grow in the mat as much as crops do.”