First Lady Michelle Obama spoke to the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) yesterday about her campaign to prevent childhood obesity. According to one witness, Marian Burros, she scolded them – politely and with humor – but told them in no uncertain terms "to stop fattening our children."

The GMA is a tough audience for messages about childhood obesity. It represents the makers of processed foods and beverages who have much to lose from efforts to get kids to eat less of their products.

The speech itself is a masterpiece of tact, but Mrs. Obama clearly gets the issues loud and clear. Here are some excerpts:...

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If you want to know what's really happening in the world of food and nutrition, the business pages are a good starting place. Today's New York Times business section documents the "stunning" rise in the price of soybean seeds (up 108% since 2001) and corn seeds (up 135%).

Why care? Genetically modified (GM) varieties are now the majority – and increasingly the vast majority – of crops planted in the United States. The seeds are patented. Farmers cannot harvest and save them. Farmers must buy new patented seeds every year. And since one company – Monsanto – owns most of the patents, it gets to set the price.

">USDA keeps track of the rise in use of GM crops. Impressive, no?

The USDA does not track GM sugar beets on this chart, but should. Monsanto also patents GM sugar beets. The USDA approved Monsanto's sugar beets in 2005. By 2009, 95% of U.S. sugar beets were grown from Monsanto's patented varieties.

Oops. When it approved the beets, the USDA let them be planted without the required environmental impact statement (EIS). Advocacy groups argued that the beets should not be planted without that assessment. A judge agreed and blocked further plantings. The judge is still sitting on the case. Until he rules, no GM sugar beets can be planted....

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Thanks to Carol for this question: "I am wondering if you are planning to write anything about the current Salmonella Tennessee in hydrolyzed vegetable protein... and how it just might be in 'everything.'"

I wasn't planning to make a big deal of the recall of hydrolyzed vegetable protein (HVP) - and the more than 100 products containing this flavor ingredient in the United States and in Canada – because the FDA seems on the job and nobody is getting sick (as far as we know).

But this one now looks like another food safety scandal.

To begin with, HVP is one of those fifth flavor, umami substances. As the FDA explains,

HVP is a flavor enhancer used in a wide variety of processed food products, such as soups, sauces, chilis, stews, hot dogs, gravies, seasoned snack foods, dips, and dressings. It is often blended with other spices to make seasonings that are used in or on foods.

Translation: it is indeed in everything....

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USDA’s 2002 organic rules said that dairy herds must have access to pasture. They did not say the animals had to actually be fed on pasture. This loophole is now supposed to be fixed. USDA has just issued new rules.

Starting in June, organic dairy herds must be sent to pasture for the entire grazing season of at least 120 days and must get at least 30% of their food from pasture during that season. Smaller organic dairy farmers are already doing this. Now the big ones will have to come into line. And about time too.

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I can’t resist dealing with the questions just asked by Elliot and Johannes. From Elliot:

A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease or cardiovascular disease (see: American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, January 13, 2010) ... [but] in his book, Good Calories Bad Calories, Gary Taubes clearly attributes most of our chronic disease problems — including heart disease — to carbohydrates (see page 454). In contrast, Colin Campbell in his book The China Study (pages 113-133) forcefully argues that animal proteins contribute to CVD. Yet, Dr. David Katz in his book Nutrition in Clinical Practice (pages 130, 133) asserts that to prevent heart disease, "saturated and trans fat should be restricted to below 7% (or even 5%) of total calories...." Who’s right? We badly need your unbiased wisdom on this topic.

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Are vegetarian diets ok?

I can't believe the number of times I have been asked that question but it has just come up again in the context of recent complaints about the health and environmental hazards of eating meat. So here, once again, is my nutrition academic's take on the nutritional implications of vegetarian diets.

Full disclosure: I eat meat. Humans are omnivores and I am one nutritionist who fully subscribes to basic, if banal, principles of healthful diets: variety, balance, and moderation. As I explain in my book, What to Eat, if you eat a variety of foods within and among groups – meat, dairy, fruit, vegetables, and grains – you don't have to worry about nutritional details. As long as calories are adequate and the foods are relatively unprocessed, the different kinds of foods complement each other's nutrient contents and provide everything that is needed in reasonable amounts and proportions.

With that said, it is not necessary to eat meat. Meat is not an essential nutrient. I can think of plenty of advantages to eating no meat, eating less meat, or eating meat produced in ways that are far better for the health of animals, people, and the planet.

Why anyone would question the benefits of eating vegetarian diets, or diets that are largely vegetarian is beyond me. People who eat vegetarian diets are usually healthier – sometimes a lot healthier – than people who eat meat.

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I received this note yesterday from Michael Jacobson, director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, about his latest column in The Huffington Post:

How would you feel if you had to pay $8.50 a gallon for gasoline?

Then why on Earth would you pay that much for water and high-fructose corn syrup?

That’s how much Coke costs in those new 7.5-ounce, 90-calorie cans....

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Q: Does the caloric value of a food change when it's cooked? In his latest book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made us Human, Harvard Primatologist Richard Wrangham argues that cooking foods changes the available nutrient content and actually raises the available calories.

A: The rules of physical chemistry tell us that matter cannot be destroyed or created so the number of calories available in a food does not change with temperature. What can change is our ability to use (digest, absorb) the calories that are there as well as our desire to eat the foods. Cooking makes the calories in potato starch more available, for example, but has hardly any effect on the calories in meat. Both, in my opinion at least, taste better cooked. But cooked or not, the calorie differences will be small and unlikely to account significantly for weight change....

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For years, some people – not me – have been saying that eating one extra 50-calorie cookie a day can make you put on 5 pounds per year. This calculation comes from basic math: if about 3,500 extra calories make you put on a pound of body fat, then 50 times 365 is 18,250 extra calories which, divided by 3,500, equals about 5 pounds.

This never made sense to me. It is impossible to know how much you are eating each day within 50 calories let alone how many calories you are using in daily activities. Yet people used to be able to keep their weight steady without thinking about calories at all.

This is because the body regulates weight and can easily compensate for such small changes in calorie intake or output with small changes in metabolic rate. It takes more calories to move heavier bodies, and fewer to move lighter ones.

For years, I’ve been thinking that it must take a lot more than 50 extra calories a day – I guessed hundreds - to make people gain weight. I thought this for two reasons:

Portions Are Bigger and Calorie Counts Are Underestimated

First reason: Portion sizes have increased greatly in recent years, and larger portions have more calories. Sometimes, they have a lot more. Foods eaten outside the home often have more calories in them than anyone suspects.

That’s why calorie labeling matters. Labeling may underestimate the actual calories present in a food according to Tufts researchers (see this week’s Time for commentary and also see the industry response). But even so, a new study shows that labeling encourages people to cut down on food intake, at least at Starbucks. Make that two new studies: one from the Rudd Center at Yale comes to the same conclusion.

We're Eating a Lot More Calories

Second reason: I keep hearing from pediatricians who treat overweight kids that they have kids in their practices who drink from 1,000 to 2,000 calories a day from sodas alone. I can’t judge whether these figures are correct or not, but several different kinds of studies suggest that many people today are eating a lot more calories than their counterparts of 25 years ago.

Now Martin Katan and David Ludwig have done the actual calculations in a paper in this week’s JAMA titled “Extra calories cause weight gain–but how much?” Their conservative estimate is that it would take an excess of 370 calories to gain 35 pounds in 28 years. To become obese in 25 years, you would need to eat 680 calories a day more than you expended.

To become 58 pounds overweight at age 17, they predict that a child would need to overconsume 700 to 1,000 calories a day from the age of 5 or so.

These figures are quite consistent with what those pediatricians were telling me. By other estimates, average caloric intake has increased by 200-500 calories a day since the early 1980s, along with a 700 calorie-a-day rise in the availability of energy in the food supply (from 3,200 to 3,900 per day per capita).

As Katan and Ludwig conclude:

small changes in lifestyle would have a minor effect on obesity prevention. Walking an extra mile a day expends, roughly an additional 60 kcal compared with resting – equal to the energy in a small cookie. Physiological considerations suggest that the apparent energy imbalance for much of the US population is 5- to 10-fold greater, far beyond the ability of most individuals to address on a personal level. Rather, an effective public health approach to obesity prevention will require fundamental changes in the food supply and the social infrastructure.

This is because on the personal level, prevention of weight gain means eating hundreds of calories a day less. Moving more, useful as it is, will not do the trick unless people eat less as well.

On the societal level, we need measures to make it easier for people to eat less.

I can think of a bunch of examples. You?

It’s been quite a while since Eating Liberally's kat had a question for me, but this one certainly got my attention. My book about pet food with Malden Nesheim, Feed Your Pet Right, has just progressed past its second set of page-proof corrections and is slowly making its way to publication on May 11. Here’s her question:

Is Fido The New Hummer?

Kat: Dog lovers are howling over a new book called Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living. The book claims that "the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle," according to a report from the Agence France Presse.

The book’s authors, Robert and Brenda Vale, sustainable living experts at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, estimate that a medium-sized dog’s annual diet–about 360 pounds of meat and 200 pounds of grains–requires roughly double the resources it would take to drive an SUV 6,200 miles a year.

You’ve become an expert on the pet food industry in recent years with Pet Food Politics: The Chihuahua in the Coal Mine, and your upcoming book, Feed Your Pet Right. So, what’s your take on the Vales’ claims? Is Fido really the new Hummer?...

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On November 13, the FDA announced indefinite postponement of rules requiring raw oysters from the Gulf of Mexico to undergo postharvest processing to destroy their content of Vibrio vulnificus, a particularly nasty "flesh-eating" bacterium. According to accounts in the New York Times and in industry newsletters, the FDA caved under pressure from the oyster industry and members of Congress representing oyster-harvesting regions in the Gulf.

The FDA has been trying for years to get the oyster industry to clean up its act and use post-harvest technologies to sterilize oysters in order to prevent the 15 or so deaths they cause every year. The technologies include quick freezing, frozen storage, high hydrostatic pressure, mild heat, and low dose gamma irradiation. When used, the methods reduce bacteria to undectable levels and deaths from Vibrio vulnificus infections to zero. As the FDA puts it, "seldom is the evidence on a food safety problem and solution so unambiguous." ...

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The newspapers and the Internet are full of reports that men exposed to bisphenol A (BPA) have higher levels of erectile dysfunction. Before going into a panic, take a look at the study details. This one was a survey of factory workers in China exposed to exceptionally high levels of this endocrine-disrupting chemical.

(BPA is found in many plastics, food packaging and in the lining of most cans.)

What does the study mean for men exposed to much lower levels? We don’t have a clue. But we’ve heard plenty of unsettling things about BPA (see previous posts), including accounts by Jill Richardson and others of the extraordinary efforts of industry lobbyists to prevent officials from banning BPA. This new research suggests that a ban is a pretty good idea, even if most people are not harmed by small amounts.

Reasons? ...

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Here’s a good reason why food manufacturers don’t want to test for harmful chemicals.  If you test, you might find something you don’t want to.

Consumer Reports did just that It tested a bunch of canned juices, soups, tuna, and green beans and found bisphenol A (BPA) in almost all of them — even the ones labeled organic or bisphenol A-free.

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