Balance of Food

Kraft can use Oreos commercial leak to promote breastfeeding

News outlets reporting on Kraft's controversial Oreo breastfeeding ad felt the need to censor the photograph to protect sensitive readers. The outlets chose to blur out the 20% of the exposed nipple of a breastfeeding woman doing what comes naturally.

They should have blurred out the cookie.

The United States is the one major country that freaks out over female nipples, yet high-fructose corn syrup was created in that country and its food policy works terribly hard to export high-fructose corn syrup to other countries. And yes, while a baby holding a processed cookie is offensive enough, holding a cookie tied into Kraft's insistence on using high-fructose corn syrup in Oreos is that much more disturbing.

BalanceofFood.com strongly encourages adults to make proper nutrition choices, but recognizes that free will allows us true freedom to choose good vs. not-so-good. Babies haven't earned that right.

Kraft tells us the ad "was never intended for public distribution or use with consumers" though the possible South Korean audience are much more confident in their ability to handle a partial female nipple. Taking them at their word, someone still set up a photo shoot, put the cookie in the baby's hands, and took the picture. And that picture sends a terrible message about babies and food marketing.

Advocates against marketing food to children who are tougher on that subject than I am point out that children can't process the ability to make good food decisions. True, babies aren't pressuring their parents to buy Oreos or other cookies, but "Milk's favorite cookie" in that context putting unnecessary pressure on newborn mothers and fathers.

The growth that babies experience between 0-3 years old requires extra care about their nutrition, not less. We have also gone on the record as saying breastfeeding is the best choice for young babies whenever and wherever possible.

If Kraft and Oreos wanted to do it right, the tagline on the ad would read something like:

"Someday, this child will enjoy an Oreo cookie for the very first time. But until then, this child should settle for milk … without the cookie."

Food companies pour millions into advertising while fruits and vegetables and breastfeeding get a tiny fraction of the ad time and space. Having a major food marketer push a pro-breastfeeding agenda with a sly nod to one of its products would be a win-win situation in the marketplace — provided that Americans get over their phobia of the female nipple.

photo credit

Temptation of the Week: Trying to feed 7 billion with less food

Imagine if the now 7 billion world citizens shared one dinner table.

If you have lived in Battle Creek, MI (as I have), you likely participated in the world's longest breakfast table, a festival spotlighting regionally manufactured breakfast foods (Kellogg's plus others). That was a long table, but nothing like what it would take to feed 7 billion people.

In sharing that proverbial table, we would make sure everyone would have enough to eat, but we would also make sure that we had enough food.

Even with 7 billion people on the planet and millions starving or undernourished, the good news is that we can grow enough food for 7 billion people without doing significant damage to the planet. The bad news is that involves us not growing food for livestock or biofuels. According to a study in Nature magazine, only 62% percent of our crops go towards people food.

As bad as things are with food supplies, if the rest of the world starts eating meat at the rate Americans do, the current world food struggles will be mild compared to what will come. So this also means Americans eating more like the rest of the world instead of the world eating like Americans.

Government — through brutality, war, and yes, policy — and its role in food inequity. We think of Africa and the PSAs on TV asking us to donate money to feed those who don't have food, but look at what NAFTA has done to Mexico.

Growing food in factory farms causes havoc with our food supplies and the environment. So even with more people, we need to grow less food. Those people who have better access to meat should eat less meat. Save some for the rest of the world. Let the animals eat the grass that we can't, and we can get the benefits of the grass by eating those animals. Smaller is better, farm-wise. For those who can, we should supplement what we can buy with what we can grow.

We are all connected at the world dinner table. Our instincts in a much smaller dinner table are to make sure everyone gets enough; that instinct doesn't go away just because we can't see the people at the other end.

Temptation of the Week: Fat tax

Fat tax, not to be confused with VAT tax, is growing almost as fast as we are as a people.

The Danes (Danish?) placed a tax on saturated fat, including of all ironies, danish. And Denmark isn't the only country that is going after obesity through taxation.

Even in the United States, taxes on soft drinks and high-fructose corn syrup have been pushed as an option to deal with growing obesity levels.

Denmark is taxing anything at 2.3% saturated fat or higher, paying about $3 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) of saturated fat in a product.

Other countries outside of North America that are dealing with a "larger" population don't have high-fructose corn syrup. Canada and Mexico are suffering with HFCS thanks to NAFTA. The United States' food policy subsidizes high-fructose corn syrup.

So for the U.S., a tax isn't needed so much as making the cost of sugar and high-fructose corn syrup reflect their true cost. Tax problem solved.

As for Europe and elsewhere, they are dealing with a cultural impact, coming mostly from the United States. France's traditions of sit-down dinners has suffered as the younger generation is eating more on the go, and not eating as well as previous generations.

What is particularly surprising is that the Denmark tax is geared at saturated fat, regardless of the source. Equating a food with butter with a food with artificially saturated fat isn't fair nor helpful. This would be like taxing grape juice because it's high in sugar, not accounting for that fact that grape juice is natural sugar.

As good as it would seem to tax something to make things "healthier," intent can't be enough.

Even in a well-researched tax on food, you still punish the people who can afford the tax the least. We tax the heck out of cigarettes, and people still buy them because they want to do so. And unlike cigarettes, you need food to live. Well, maybe not some of this food.

Instead of another useless tax, why not subsidize broccoli? Or carrots? Why not rethink a food system where unhealthy food gets subsidies and healthy food doesn't.

Even if you think a subsidy is a hidden tax, "subsidies" have a better political perception than taxes, and aren't regressive toward the poor.

Temptation of the Week: Hunger strikes

This week's temptation has little to do with food, but more about the significance of food ...

News of the famine in Somalia has been lost in debt ceiling crisis stories and the usual celebrity pop news. And this is likely difficult to believe given how much food people have in the United States, but more people are starving or underfed in new ways.

Being poor can often mean you don't have much, but you have some food. When you are very poor and food prices are rising at amazing levels, harder choices are the result.

This summer, outside a major downtown metropolis farmers market, I have seen two different people for two different reasons on a hunger strike.

Having a hunger strike outside a farmers market is only part of the point; the market is right across the street from City Hall. But the juxtaposition of food and hunger strike, plus the world's rising food costs, made for a curious question. For what reason would you go on a hunger strike? And how long would that strike likely be?

We are also in the month of Ramadan, the Muslim observance where they fast from dawn to dusk, but then feast once the sun is down. Ramadan is going without food as a sacrifice, not as a hunger strike.

Unfortunately, some people have a harder time doing a hunger strike because of low blood sugar.

Naturally, we go about 10 hours without food on a regular basis each day. We sleep during that time. But the idea of going 20 hours without food is extraordinary.

When you are on a hunger strike — a real hunger strike — you go 24, 48, 72 hours, and longer without food.

Whether your cause is social, political, or some other form of -al, hunger strikes are serious business. And even if you go a short time without food, maybe even in solidarity with someone's cause, you might just appreciate food all the more, especially when you live in a country with an abundance of food.

Colbert looks at food shortages and 72-hour pastrami

In case you missed it last week, Colbert had two poignant takes on food. The most dramatic is the impact of food shortages on the world.

Laurie Garrett from the Council on Foreign Relations stopped by to discuss several factors in this crisis, including the use of food to create fuel and market speculators. Natural disasters and disease certainly have made their impact. Focusing on what humans can control will help reduce the problem.

And if you think the impact is on countries we may never visit, U.S. food prices are rising as well.

On a lighter note, Nathan Myhrvold was on Colbert to talk about his 6-volume "Modernist Cuisine" on molecular gastronomy. Colbert got to try 72-hour pastrami where he doesn't need teeth and pistachio ice cream that has no cream.

As much as Colbert eats and drinks on-camera, this was particularly fun because he wasn't sure how things would go if he ate it.

The "Colbert Report" airs Monday-Thursday nights at 11:30p on Comedy Central.

Breast milk is the ultimate natural food

We talk about many foods in the Balance of Food: some that are just gross yet fun, and some that are really beneficial.

And we talk about natural being better whenever possible. Does it get any more natural than breast milk?

The news was beyond disturbing of babies growing breasts as a result of drinking tainted Chinese baby formula.

Long before this story, Balance of Food has endorsed breast milk as the ultimate natural food.

All the statistics back up breastfeeding as the way to go. And a society that appreciates infant health — and long-term health — would do whatever it can to make breastfeeding more acceptable in our society.

Yes, we've improved access and perception to breastfeeding and breast milk, but we can do so much more.

Longer maternity periods would be a start, more accepting environments for women to breastfeed in public — fewer blankets would be nice. Better education for all women on how to make it work.

There are issues that can't be avoided. Too many women have to go back to work too soon for financial reasons. Too many people still frown on public breastfeeding.

Oh, and I couldn't post this picture (above) of one of the most natural things you can ever do until I changed the name of the picture.

This isn't to say that formula in the United States will do what the Chinese formula is apparently doing, but starting out natural can lead to better habits. And don't we want that for our children, and for ourselves?

picture credit

American McNuggets proof of lax food standards in United States

If you have traveled outside the United States, you likely have found that a similar food back home taste different overseas.

CNN, of all places, looked into the difference between McNuggets from McDonald's in the United States vs. England. They took a tip from a comment and discovered the the tipster was right. And Americans are worse off.

Let's quote from CNN:

American McNuggets (190 calories, 12 grams of fat, 2 grams of saturated fat for 4 pieces) contain the chemical preservative tBHQ, tertiary butylhydroquinone, a petroleum-based product. They also contain dimethylpolysiloxane, "an anti-foaming agent" also used in Silly Putty.

By contrast, British McNuggets (170 calories, 9 grams of fat, 1 gram of saturated fat for 4 pieces) lists neither chemical among its ingredients.

When do we reach the point where we say what should go into food in the U.S.?

Not having been to England, but I have had McDonald's in Paris. Before you criticize, my stomach was upset for about a day, and eating the food was soothing.

The McDonald's food in Paris automatically tasted better because there is no high-fructose corn syrup. They use French beef without hormones and antibiotics. And these are just the obvious differences.

The idea that questionable chemicals can exist in food -- and no one in power has an objection to doing so -- speaks volumes on what we consider to be "food." The difference, of course, is that Europe has regulations over what can be in food and the United States doesn't.

Deregulation is a term heard in politics, but we clearly have had a deregulation mentality over our food supply for decades now. And this is how chemicals end up in our food.

More from the CNN report:

TBHQ is a preservative for vegetable oils and animal fats, limited to .02 percent of the oil in the nugget. One gram (one-thirtieth of an ounce) can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse," according to “A Consumer’s Dictionary of Food Additives.”

Fast food is fast: the effects of fast food shouldn't make us that slow.

There is this new American reality that corporations should be free to do whatever they want, food safety be damned. America used to stand for pride in food, but that has disappeared.

And why should we be finding out from a comment on a blog? CNN has 24 hours to fill and a Web site -- give them credit for following it up -- but it needed a push to look into this. "60 Minutes" and "Dateline NBC" and "20/20" could have a field day on what is in our food supply.

Next time you are in McDonald's, see if you can order McNuggets without tBHQ.

Jamie Oliver Round 2: Progress in the school lunchroom

In the second episode, there is a sense of progress in "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" on ABC. But the progress is a little messy.

Oliver makes more progress in the school lunchroom, though that came across as slow. Oliver did do well in a week's time, which is still rather amazing.

The meal that finally put him over the top, at least a little bit, was beef fajitas. One obvious point that Oliver has been slow to learn is that the food has to look similar to what kids are used to for them to want to try it.

His first school lunch in this episode was a tuna pasta bake with 7 vegetables and tomato sauce, mixed salad, and homemade foccacia bread. That would be a difficult meal for an adult to handle, much less a child used to chicken nuggets.

The kids don't like it, because well, they aren't used to it. "in England, what I do is I send them back to the table," says Oliver. Welcome to the United States.

Since Oliver did this in England, believing that Oliver knows what he is doing would appear obvious. But clearly, Oliver is learning about America, and struggling with this.

Early in the episode, Oliver replicates an experiment he did in England, showing kids the worst parts of a chicken and turning into patties to see if the kids will eat them.

In the sequence, Oliver describes the experiment. All of a sudden, the sound quality changes as if someone had entered a different audio track. Oliver's tone changes as he says in a upbeat fashion, "Thankfully, chicken nuggets in this country are not made this way."

Yikes! What lovely wording. Sounds more like a "disclaimer" required either by lawyers for chicken patty manufacturers or for ABC.

So assuming this is true, and it's not done this way in the U.S., why show us the experiment? Give Oliver credit: the experiment failed badly and he aired the clip. But it came across more like the experiment matched what happened in the U.S. and as the last minute, the program was threatened unless the disclaimer was aired.

Kids wanted to eat the chicken patties because they were hungry. Though if you are going to do it this way, it would be the best quality of that type. At the same time, Oliver is serving them something that the claim is that we don't do that in the United States. Very strange.

Jamie Oliver runs into an unexpected issue: he wants kids to have a fork and knife to go along with the fajitas. But all they get is a spoon for every meal. The principal and lunch ladies give Oliver a great big hassle. I'm on Jamie's side on this one; if these kids are eating finger foods all the time, they aren't learning how to appreciate food.

Watching how bad the kids do with a fork and knife shows that Oliver was right. If they learn nothing else, at least they will know cutlery.

As the kids struggle with using forks and knives, Oliver asks them for more time. In a lot of schools in the United States, they don't have enough time to eat what they get. In real life, kids aren't surrounded by cameras putting pressure to give them extra time.

School lunches need money to get better food, and more time to properly digest it.

Other highlights:

-- Jamie dresses up as a peapod "Mr. P." Cute idea, except the kids don't recognize the peas in his costume. this leads to the fresh food experiment that I profiled earlier.

For those who missed it, kids couldn't identify fresh vegetables. They could pick out chicken nuggets, pizza, and French fries. Later, the 1st grade teacher voluntarily put signs on the vegetables, the kids could pick them up when Oliver held them up.

Amusingly, I had suggested that Oliver should have compared side-by-side a potato and French fries. Sure enough, Oliver did just that. Great minds think alike.

-- Jamie did an experiment of showing what kids were eating in the school lunches for parents, kids, and teachers to see. Dumping a week's worth of chocolate milk: "more sugar in that than [not sure] your brand of soda. Put your hands up if you didn't know that as parents." Also dumps sloppy joes, French fries, and nachos, and shows fat consumed by kids in a year in a Dumpster. Didn't seem a good experiment to me, but parents saw it as a wakeup call.

-- In the beef fajitas lunch, only white milk was served. When some kids asked what happened, Oliver said the chocolate milk man didn't show up. If kids were eating really good meals, you might justify the chocolate milk. But given what they normally get, the chocolate milk is over the top.

-- Students were wearing stickers "I've tried something new." I was excited to see this simple solution. I would have loved to have that kind of incentive when I was a child. A girl in the class had the sticker earlier in the episode, but it wasn't really introduced until later. Not quite sure how that worked from a continuity standpoint.

-- Some ABC stations are offering an additional air time of the episode. In Chicago, WLS-TV is airing a rebroadcast Saturday afternoon at 3 pm Central. Check your local listings.

Matt Damon's new movie features HFCS favorite Archer Daniels Midland

The shots that we have taken against high-fructose corn syrup are also tied into the political power of Archer Daniels Midland. The power the company holds in Washington is part of why you can consume so much high-fructose corn syrup.

Archer Daniels Midland is a target of the new film, "The Informant!" Matt Damon plays Mark Whitacre, who helped the FBI go after the company for price-fixing of lysine. Whitacre ran into his own problems, of course.

But if you are looking for a Hollywood portrayal of some of the issues we talk about here in the Balance of Food, seeing the movie might help. Or, if nothing else, it will pique your curiosity about this part of the HFCS tidal wave.

And if you go see the movie, tell us what you thought in the comments below.

Mercury in high-fructose corn syrup; could this be the last straw?

As much as I have criticized high-fructose corn syrup over the years, and I was on the warpath long before knew what HFCS was even about, the study just released that mercury was found in high-fructose corn syrup shows a true disregard for the health of Americans.

The world outside the U.S. doesn't have to wrestle with this issue, though the U.S. is trying to force Mexico to take in products made with the substitute sweetener.

In the first study, researchers found detectable levels of mercury in 45% of the samples (20 in all). In the second study, nearly one in three of 55 brand-name foods contained mercury.

Experts say there is no safe level of mercury of the kinds found in high-fructose corn syrup. Women who are pregnant or may become pregnant, along with young children, are more susceptible to the effects of mercury.

On an average basis, Americans consume about 12 teaspoons per day of HFCS; not a surprise but some consumers, including many teens, can take in on average about 22 teaspoons per day of HFCS.

I can't say I completely avoid HFCS. It's difficult to live in the United States and completely avoid it. But I work really hard not to eat that much of it. The fact that mercury is now a threat may make me even more diligent about avoiding HFCS.

It would be fun to imagine myself either going back in time in this country or being in another country, and go up and down grocery store aisles, and not have to fear what I put into my body. No such luck in the U.S. and that is very depressing.

Will this study change the political realities that give HFCS so much power in the U.S.? Difficult to know, but hopefully it will be yet another step toward realization of a better food policy in this country.

* A side note. I know the difference between corn syrup and high-fructose corn syrup, and know that there is a major difference. Unfortunately, the Chicago Tribune doesn't seem to know based on this story about mercury and HFCS. The headline says "corn syrup" as does the first mention in the story. The only high up mention of high-fructose corn syrup is in the second paragraph.

The next mention, outside of two quotes at the end of the story, is in the 9th paragraph. Four of the first five mentions (not counting the headline) refer to it as "corn syrup" when in fact we're talking about high-fructose corn syrup.

In the past, the newspaper has gone soft on Archer Daniels Midland, a major company in Illinois and also a high up major player in why high-fructose corn syrup is so powerful. One would hope that the Tribune's mistakes are linked to laziness and lack of knowledge instead of something more sinister.