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." ...

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? ...

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.

Kelly Brownell and his colleagues at the Rudd Center at Yale have produced another well researched – and in this case, gorgeously presented – report (PDF) on the ways cereal companies market their products.

Even a quick look at its summary (PDF) gives an unambiguous result: most of the marketing dollars are aimed at pushing sugary cereals at kids.  Companies use TV and the Internet to push the least nutritious cereals.

Big news! According to an AP report, the group that runs the Smart Choices program has announced that it will "postpone" active recruitment of new products and will not encourage use of the logo while the FDA is in the process of examining front-of-package labeling issues.

Who says the FDA does not have any power? I think it does. And let's welcome it back on the job.

As for my nutrition colleagues in the American Society of Nutrition, the group that competed to manage the program and has been defending it ever since, here's what they now say:

After Froot Loops were labeled "Smart Choice" the FDA takes a stand.

The FDA has a new “Dear Industry” letter announcing that it is going to set some rules for those “better-for-you” stickers on the front of junk food packages.  Why?   “FDA’s intent is to provide standardized, science-based criteria on which FOP [front of package] nutrition labeling must be based.”

I can think of many reasons why school food is such a hot topic these days: kids eat a significant portion of their daily calories in schools, schools set an example for what is appropriate for kids to eat, and schools are a learning environment.  Here’s the latest on what’s happening on the school food scene

Coca-Cola reveals calories?

Well, sort of reveals. Coca-Cola announces that it will put calories on the front of its packages (so you don't have to search for and put on glasses to read the Nutrition Facts). You can see what the label will look like in the story in USA Today.

This sounds good but I view this action as another end run around FDA's proposed regulations. In March 2004, the FDA proposed to require the full number of calories to be placed on the front of food packages likely to be consumed by one person, like a 20-ounce soda for example. A 20-ounce soda is 275 calories, not 100.

1.  Let’s start with the great video by ABC News.  It features an incredulous Mark Bittman pulling check-marked products off supermarket shelves, along with Richard Kahn defending the program.  Kahn, as I discussed in What to Eat, defended the American Diabetes Association’s (ADA) implied endorsement of Post sugary cereals.  When Jane Brody wrote about this in the New York Times, the Association promised to remove its logo from the products and did so after a bit.

I served as a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production which issued its final report (pdf) in April 2008. Our most important recommendation: reduce the widespread use of antibiotics as growth promoters and as a routine method of preventing infections. Why? Because of increasing evidence of human resistance to the kinds of antibiotics used in farm animal production and to related antibiotics.

You think everyone involved in production of farm animals understands the dangers of continued overuse of these drugs? Not a chance. ...

At last, the American Heart Association (AHA) has done something useful.  It advises eating less sugar.  Americans eat way too much, it says, a whopping 22 teaspoons a day on average.  Let’s work this out.  A teaspoon is 4 grams.  A gram is 4 calories.  So the 275 calories in that default 20-ounce soda you picked up from a vending machine come from nearly 70 teaspoons (!) of sugar.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO), which does research in response to questions from members of Congress (in this case, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa), has just released a report (pdf) on agricultural concentration and food prices. Concentration, for this purpose, has a specific meaning: the share of sales held by the four largest companies.

Grassley wanted to know: is increasing concentration in the food sector responsible for the recent rise in food prices. The GAO says no, but check out its findings about what’s happening in the food industry. Examples: