Small Farms, The Senate, And Food Safety

Senator Jon Tester of Montana's amendment to protect family-scale producers in the Senate's food safety bill has gained traction. Both Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser, prominent writers who study the convergence of food and culture, are in his corner. Meanwhile, the Senate moved forward Wednesday on long-awaited legislation that would overhaul the nation's food safety system, grant new powers to the FDA, and make farmers and processors responsible for preventing food-borne illness.

For more, there's this story in The Washington Post.

Update on Tuesday, November 30, 2010 at 6:37PM by Kathy

Today the Senate passed the Food Safety Modernization Act, with the Tester Amendment, by a vote of 73 to 25. (Voting on the biggest overhaul of food safety laws since the 1930s, this was a rare display of true bi-partisanship in contemporary D.C.) The House passed a more stringent version of the legislation about a year ago. 

Update on Monday, December 20, 2010 at 4:42PM by Kathy

After a bump in the road, the Senate green-lights the Food Safety Bill. Here's a report from Politico.

Enzyme As Ultimate Food Critic

Researchers at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia have found that an enzyme in saliva calledSlimey or silky? Your amylase level will decide. amylase, which breaks down starch into liquid, could play a key role in determining the appeal of various textures of food. A new genetic study shows that people produce strikingly different amounts of amylase, and that the more of the enzyme a person has in his mouth, the faster he can liquefy starchy foods.

In the post-El Bulli era, chef Ferran Adria--the master of texture manipulation who has famously captured the flavor of carrot in the form of air--may want to consider opening a new restaurant: Casa del Amylase.

Scientists think the new finding could help explain why people experience foods as either creamy or slimey, sticky or soupy, and that this perception could affect food preferences. 

"We all have had the experience of liking a food that someone else complains is too tacky, or slippery, or gritty, or pulpy," Paul Breslin, a researcher at the Monell center and a professor at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. told The Wall Street Journal recently. "This is why a given line of product often comes in different textural forms," such as orange juice with and without pulp, he said.

Starch comprises or is added to about 60% of the foods people typically eat, so determining how it's digested is central to understanding food-texture preferences, Monell center scientists say. Other research has shown that people have a preference for creamy sensations as well as for foods that start off solid and melt in the mouth such as ice cream and chocolate, said Dr. Breslin, who began the current research because of his interest in creaminess. 

Gout Increasing in Women, Soda Partly to Blame

Most people assume gout is a medieval ailment of men in tights drinking grog, but it turns out the painful condition, characterized by attacks of acute inflammatory arthritis (usually in the metatarsal-phalangeal joint at the base of the big toe) is a growing problem in the 21st Century. This past week, researchers at the American College of Rheumatology annual meeting (a barnburner if there ever was one) report gout now afflicts some 31% of U.S. adults 65 and older--that's an estimated 8.4 million people limping about like Henry the VIII. Most curiously, the incidence of gout is increasing in women.Sprite is more than 60% high fructose corn syrup.

Food and alcohol have long been known as a major triggers. Gout (technical name, hyperuricemia) develops when the blood becomes saturated with uric acid, a breakdown product of purines, which are a constituent of many foods including red and organ meats. When uric acid spreads through the bloodstream into the joints, it crystallizes and intense pain develops, which tends to be worse in the extremities where body temperature is lower. The condition is more than just a painful nuisance, it's also associated with heart disease and kidney stones. 

A couple of years ago, pre-eminent gout researcher Hyon Choi of Boston University School of Medicine established high-fructose corn syrup as a new gout trigger. Fructose independently triggers the body’s production of uric acid from adenosine triphosphate, a molecule that stores and transports energy.

Now, Choi and the eminent Walter Willett of Harvard have identified (and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association) a more precise explanation as to why women are getting gout more often. Based on data collected from roughly 79,000 postmenopausal participants of the long-running Nurse’s Health Study, the team shows that downing one sugar-sweetened soft drink per day increased a woman’s risk of gout compared to women drinking less than one serving a month. Upping the consumption of sugary soft drinks to two or more servings a day appeared to have an even bigger effect.

Women are mostly protected from gout until menopause (that's another thing to add to the list) because female sex hormones help keep uric acid levels low. But after menopause, women’s risk of the disease rises to about half of the rate in older U.S. men, Choi reports.

In the U.S. the FDA has just approved a patent for a gout treatment, colchicine, that's been around since the Germans invented it in 1826, a move that has driven the price up from pennies to over $3 a pill. (Canada anyone?)

Of course, the age-old approach of foregoing alcohol, red meat and now soda still works.

Study: Chocolate Cuts Stroke Risk

Leave it to the Aussies to find an upbeat approach to the rather gloomy problem of atherosclerotic vascular disease--the hardening and narrowing of the arteries that can lead to stroke and heart failure. A group of researchers at the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital in Perth, Western Australia ingenuously piggybacked their study of chocolate's effect on cardiovascular disease onto a study of calcium supplements in 1,216 older women followed for nine and a half years (a long time in the world of science).A couple of squares a week might help prevent a stroke.

What they found was really quite remarkable: the risk of stroke and heart failure (and accumulation of plaque in the arteries) was significantly reduced by eating a small quantity (1-5 grams or a small square) of chocolate containing between 15% and 50% cocoa just once per week. And one of the best things about this study, published in the venerable Archives of Internal Medicine, is it was not financed by a chocolate company.

Cocoa is a rich source of flavonoids, the plant antioxidants associated with a lower risk of cardiovascular disease. In previous studies, consuming an average 4.2 grams (a small square) of chocolate per day resulted in a 50% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. But all of the previous data was from short term studies that looked at overall cardiovascular risk. The Austrialian group had a hunch that chocolate was somehow improving hardening of the arteries, and so they took a look see.

Compared with women who rarely consumed chocolate, those who consumed 1 to 5 grams of chocolate daily or once per week had a significantly lower (24%) risk of hospitalization or death due to stroke and heart failure. Even more astonishing, women who frequently consumed chocolate also had a significantly lower prevalence of plaque in their arteries compared to women who consumed it rarely. 

There was almost no difference in risk reduction between women who ate chocolate daily and those who ate it weekly, so cocoa fat consumption doesn't have to skyrocket. And what a relief to see participants experienced benefits when eating lower cocoa concentrations, without having to eat extreme, dark chocolate (the 65%+ versions usually touted by nutrition experts). The authors stress that further research to confirm the findings is warranted.

But it looks like one former vice is morphing into a potentially life-saving necessity.

For One Government Program, Corporate Profit Trumps Public Health

It's not often you see the Freedom of Information Act invoked in a food story. But given the astonishing results of Michael Moss' quest to report for The New York Times about a little known government program called Cheese Management, perhaps food reporters should consider invoking it more often. Moss managed to uncover what may be one of the only bi-partisan initiatives thriving on Capital HIll--a concerted effort to sell more cheese to Americans, which involves encouraging people to consume more cheese, and as a result more unhealthy saturated fat.Domino's new Wisconsin pizza, with cheese even baked into the dough, offers 40% more cheese than its regular pizza.

In Moss's story we learn that the Department of Agriculture's cheese marketing program was started under Bill Clinton to promote the sale of dairy products to an increasingly fat-phobic public, and has ballooned over time into a cheese pushing machine. A single program initiated in 2007 (under George Bush) oversaw the creation of a double cheesy sandwich at Wendy's that resulted in an additional 30 million pounds of cheese sold--enough to create a small obesity epidemic of its own.

Cheese Management (did Monty Python name this department?) has been involved in controversy over some of its weight loss claims about cheese (which routinely packs a saturated fat content close to steak--and in the case of some varieties such as brie and "triple creme" can be up to 80% fat.) But it would seem the department under President Obama is continuing business as usual. Last month, a new initiative, which the board spent $12 million dollars to help create and promote, was announced by Domino's. The company will be selling a Legends line of cheesier pizza, which delivers more than 3/4 of the daily recommended maximum saturated fat intake in just 1/4 of a medium pizza.

"More cheese on pizza equals more cheese sales,” Mr. Gallagher, the Dairy Management chief executive, wrote in a guest column in a trade publication last year. “In fact, if every pizza included one more ounce of cheese, we would sell an additional 250 million pounds of cheese annually.” 

As far as government initiatives go this one could be considered a home run. Americans now consume triple the amount of cheese they did in 1978. But where Mr. Gallagher and his department see success, we just see cellulite and clogged arteries.