ETN 238: History & Nutrition
Hello
Things do seem to cluster, or perhaps my attention makes that happen. So here is a little history and a lot of nutrition
Unravelled by Climate
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has always been a bit of a strange publication, best known, perhaps, for the Doomsday Clock, currently at a scary minute-and-a-half to midnight. Not somewhere I would expect to read a fascinating article about the Antonine Plague that cut through the Roman Empire in 166 CE.
Though we still don’t know which pathogen caused the plague, the article looks at the various factors that contributed to the spread of what might well have been the world’s first epidemic. Trade, of course, and the widespread movement of people, including the army tramping back and forth, helped the pathogen move around. Crowded cities, especially Rome itself, allowed rapid spread among the people. Most interesting, to me at least, in the 150s CE a succession of droughts near the source of the Nile disrupted the annual floods that nourished the wheat in Roman Egypt. At the same time, more frequent storms in the Mediterranean increased the risk that shipments of scarce grain would be lost at sea. The result was hunger and malnutrition in Rome and other cities, with a weakened population probably more susceptible to the newly arrived pathogen.
May’s issue of The Bulletin contains several articles on food and climate. The moral, of course, is that everything is connected, and I found it impossible to read about the history of this pandemic and the role food might have played in it without thinking of pandemics to come.
“Substances Derived From Foods”
A big medical study of associations between eating ultra-processed foods and various causes of death received a fair bit of coverage after it was published in the British Medical Journal a couple of weeks ago. Bottom line: UPFs are not good for you:
Conclusions This study found that a higher intake of ultra-processed foods was associated with slightly higher all cause mortality, driven by causes other than cancer and cardiovascular diseases. The associations varied across subgroups of ultra-processed foods, with meat/poultry/seafood based ready-to-eat products showing particularly strong associations with mortality.
That’s not why I am linking to the study. Rather, I want to point to its definition of ultra-processed foods.
Ultra-processed foods are ready-to-eat/heat industrial formulations made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods, including flavors, colors, texturizers, and other additives, with little if any intact whole food.
This is much clearer than the original NOVA classification, which divided foods into four groups that were increasingly processed. That classification gave opponents — mostly those associated with the manufacture of processed foods — opportunities to point out that some foods considered “healthy” could be labelled processed or ultra-processed. A 2019 follow-up gave sound advice on how to identify UPFs: “check to see if its list of ingredients contains at least one item characteristic of the ultra-processed food group”. The latest definition clarifies that further and may make it more difficult to muddy the waters.
Score One for Nutri-Score
One reason people choose ultra-processed foods is that they can be yummy, tweaked relentlessly to make them irresistible. And one form of state-sponsored resistance is to require labelling not merely of ingredients, the clearest sign of ultra-processing if you take time to look, but also simplified signals that aim to make it easier to identify foods that might be bad for you in the long run.
Evidence of the effectiveness of these labels in guiding consumer choices is surprisingly weak, although industry opposition suggests they may have something to worry about. A new study on Nutri-Score, a system developed in France, suggests that labels might help. More than 27,000 people were divided into three groups. One was shown advertisements for several different foods. A second was shown the same advertisements, but this time the packages sported Nutri-Score labels. The third group saw no adverts. All were then quizzed about how they perceived the products and whether they would buy and eat them.
Nutri-Score did influence what people thought. Products of good nutritional quality (Nutri-Score A or B) became more positive while those of poor nutritional quality (Nutri-Score D or E) became more negative.
The authors say this is the first demonstration that showing the Nutri-Score in advertisements “assists consumers in directing their choices towards healthier foods”. There are just a couple of flies in the ointment.
The people said what they thought of the product and whether they would buy and eat it; they didn’t actually buy or eat it.
As far as I can tell, Nutri-Score still gives an A to plain pasta and to ultra-processed pasta with a lot of additives and parmesan and oil, even though parmesan gets a D (too much salt) and olive oil a C (too much fat).
Could Do Better
School meals offer an alternative locus for state-sponsored interference in the free market resistance to industrialised food. So it is good to know that it can work. The USDA recently highlighted one finding from a 2023 study of changes in how much whole grains people were eating.
The study looked at changes in grain intake between 1994 and 2018. Overall, and for all age groups, people are still eating far less whole grain than the US government recommends. One group, however, bucks the trend: schoolchildren. Starting in 2013, their diets have contained more whole grains. And that is down to a 2012 change in policy that required grain offerings in the National School Lunch Program to contain at least 50% whole grains, a requirement later expanded to other foods available to children at school.
An improvement, no doubt, although there is still a long way to go in the consumption of whole grains.
Slippery Message on Oils
It ain’t what you grow it’s the way that you grow it is the refrain of a new report from the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Exploring the future of vegetable oils. “The report acknowledges that within each vegetable oil system, there are both good and bad actors and outcomes, and urges for a nuanced perspective.”
That seems fair, if obvious, though I wonder if the no bad crops, only bad practices message will have any impact on those who depend on bad practices to supply a product inexpensive enough to make it a worthwhile ingredient in ultra-processed foods.
The report runs to 186 pages. I had a quick read of an article from Wageningen University, home to some of the report’s authors, instead.
Take care
p.s. Destruction, from the cycle Course of Empire by Thomas Cole, from Wikimedia Commons.