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"disqusTitle": "Big Soda And The Ballot: Soda Industry Takes Cues From Tobacco To Combat Taxes",
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"content": "\u003cp>Taxing soda is an increasingly popular approach to raising revenue while combating obesity, which affects \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html\">40 percent\u003c/a> of American adults. But the sweetened-beverage industry is not about to go away quietly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, the soda industry poured millions of dollars into fighting taxes on sugary drinks. In recent years, it has been largely successful in shutting down new taxes, except in a handful of major cities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The industry is now pushing statewide measures that strip cities and towns of their ability to tax soda. Two of these initiatives will be on the ballot Tuesday in \u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1634,_Prohibit_Local_Taxes_on_Groceries_Measure_(2018)\">Washington\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Measure_103,_Ban_Tax_on_Groceries_Initiative_(2018)\">Oregon\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/legislature/2018/03/19/arizona-bans-extra-taxes-soda-sugary-drinks/433235002/\">Arizona\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2017/10/no_soda_taxes_for_local_govern.html\">Michigan\u003c/a> already ban localities from enacting soda taxes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, where four cities have soda taxes, the beverage industry pressured lawmakers this summer into accepting \u003ca href=\"https://californiahealthline.org/news/under-pressure-california-lawmakers-ban-soda-taxes-for-12-years/\">a 12-year moratorium\u003c/a> on local taxes on sugar-sweetened drinks. Some lawmakers say Californians are being \"held hostage\" over the measure by the soda industry, which spent \u003ca href=\"https://californiahealthline.org/news/under-pressure-california-lawmakers-ban-soda-taxes-for-12-years/\">$7 million\u003c/a> on a ballot initiative that would have made it much harder for cities to raise taxes of any kind. The beverage industry dropped the initiative after lawmakers agreed to the moratorium.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sweetened-beverage industry is also \u003ca href=\"https://www.vitalstrategies.org/foolmetwice/FoolMeTwice_Report.pdf\">cultivating relationships\u003c/a> with doctors and scientists, which public health advocates say they've seen before. \"There are definitely parallels with the tobacco industry,\" says Betsy Janes of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fightcancer.org\">American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network\u003c/a>. Soda makers \"are happy to take a page from their playbook.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's because for years, tobacco companies used their lobbying clout to persuade state lawmakers to block cities and counties from passing smoke-free ordinances. By 2006, 21 states had pre-empted local smoke-free laws, according to Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights. Even today, 13 states have some sort of ban on local smoke-free laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By comparison more than \u003ca href=\"http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SyGsO1b23WgJ:https://www.worldobesity.org/news/wof-press-release-sugar-taxes/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0\">30 countries\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://cspinet.org/sites/default/files/attachment/soda-taxes-passed-to-date.pdf\">seven U.S. cities\u003c/a> — including Seattle, San Francisco and Boulder, Colo. — now tax sugary drinks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most public health advocates describe soda taxes as a \u003ca href=\"https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170222.058886/full/\">proven way\u003c/a> to reduce Americans' consumption of added sugars, which, along with other dietary factors, have been linked to \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5852674/pdf/nihms946949.pdf\">40,000 deaths\u003c/a> from heart disease every year. A \u003ca href=\"https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176336\">study\u003c/a> published last year in \u003cem>PLOS One\u003c/em> projects that Mexico's soda tax will prevent up to 134,000 cases of diabetes by 2030. And in Philadelphia, sales of sweetened beverages fell 57 percent after a city tax of 1.5 cents per ounce took effect, \u003ca href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/philadelphia-soda-tax-sales/\">according to a 2017 study\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Soda companies are using their war chests to fund the Washington and Oregon ballot measures. Coca-Cola has contributed nearly half the \u003ca href=\"https://www.pdc.wa.gov/browse/campaign-explorer/committee?filer_id=YESTA%252520%252520015&election_year=2018\">$20 million\u003c/a> raised in support of the Washington initiative, while the \u003ca href=\"https://secure.sos.state.or.us/orestar/cneSearch.do?cneSearchButtonName=search&cneSearchFilerCommitteeId=19419\">American Beverage Association\u003c/a> has contributed about half the \u003ca href=\"https://secure.sos.state.or.us/orestar/publicAccountSummary.do?filerId=19419\">$5.6 million\u003c/a> behind the Oregon measure, according to state records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tax impacts on business, health\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PepsiCo, one of the largest soda companies, did not respond to calls or emails. Coca-Cola declined to comment on the issue, referring all questions to the American Beverage Association, which represents the soda industry. \u003ca href=\"https://www.ameribev.org/about-us/aba-team/\">William Dermody\u003c/a>, a spokesman for the beverage association, declined to comment on the comparison with Big Tobacco. But Dermody says the soda industry supports \"keeping food and beverages affordable\" and is \"standing up for small business and working families\" by supporting the ballot measures. Taxes on soda and other groceries \"are harmful; they raise prices and they cost jobs,\" he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Health advocates say the ballot measures aren't really about groceries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Washington state, basic groceries are exempt from sales taxes, notes state \u003ca href=\"http://sdc.wastateleg.org/carlyle/\">Sen. Reuven Carlyle\u003c/a>, a Seattle Democrat opposed to the initiative to limit cities' ability to tax soda. He recently \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Reuvencarlyle/status/1059175331083341824\">tweeted\u003c/a>: \"Coke and Pepsi's undignified $22 million campaign to strip local gov't authority sent 11 campaign advertisements to my wife alone. Regardless of their short term wins, one day big soda will find their brand equity in the same league as the NRA, big tobacco, big oil.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/about/our-team/matt-myers\">Matthew Myers\u003c/a> of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids is a veteran of the tobacco wars. He notes that the tobacco industry fought smoke-free laws by warning that they would drive customers away from restaurants and bars. In fact, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/secondhand_smoke/protection/hospitality/index.htm\">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention\u003c/a> has reported that smoking bans increase business at bars and restaurants because customers enjoy clean air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Similarly, research shows that Philadelphia's sugary drink tax hasn't hurt other aspects of the grocery business, Myers says. Although sales of sugary drinks have fallen, overall business at chain stores hasn't suffered, \u003ca href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/philadelphia-soda-tax-sales/\">according to a 2017 study\u003c/a>. A \u003ca href=\"https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002283\">study of a soda tax in Berkeley, Calif.\u003c/a>, found similar results, with residents buying less soda but more bottled water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Public health groups said they aren't giving up on soda taxes. In California, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cda.org/Portals/0/press/pr_0718_soda_tax.pdf\">state dental and medical associations\u003c/a> have filed a ballot measure for 2020 to create a statewide tax on sugary drinks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A show of financial force\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Soda makers have plenty of money for a fight. The food and beverage industry spent \u003ca href=\"https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying.php?cycle=2018&ind=N01\">$22.3 million\u003c/a> in 2018 on lobbying, which includes $5.4 million by Coca-Cola and $2.8 million by PepsiCo. That's more than the tobacco industry, which spent \u003ca href=\"https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying.php?cycle=2018&ind=A02\">$16.7 million\u003c/a> on lobbying in 2018. In 1998, when the tobacco industry was under similar pressure, it spent $72 million on lobbying, according to \u003ca href=\"http://OpenSecrets.org\">OpenSecrets.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tobacco industry also spent decades funneling money into research that made cigarettes look less harmful than they really were, Myers says. Now beverage companies are trying to win over scientists and medical societies too, says \u003ca href=\"https://www.foodpolitics.com/\">Marion Nestle,\u003c/a> an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and author of \"Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.coca-colacompany.com/transparency/transparency-faq\">Coca-Cola\u003c/a> spent $146 million on \"well-being related scientific research, partnership and health professional activities\" from 2010 through 2017, according to the company's own records. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(16)30331-2/fulltext\">2016 study\u003c/a> found that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo funded 95 national medical organizations from 2011 to 2015, while lobbying against 29 public health bills that aimed to reduce soda consumption or improve diet. Coca-Cola funded the publication of 389 articles in 169 journals from 2008 to 2016, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/cocacola-a-model-of-transparency-in-research-partnerships-a-network-analysis-of-cocacolas-research-funding-20082016/D73D7B77A29BFED193858AE79780B703\">study\u003c/a> published this year in the journal \u003cem>Public Health Nutrition\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nestle says no one should be surprised that \u003ca href=\"http://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2578450/do-sugar-sweetened-beverages-cause-obesity-diabetes-industry-manufacture-scientific\">industry-funded research\u003c/a> tends to absolve soda from any role in causing obesity. Beverage industry research typically shifts the blame for obesity onto inactivity and \"energy balance,\" suggesting that exercise is far more important to weight loss than cutting back on sugar and calories, she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While independent researchers have found evidence linking sugary drinks to \u003ca href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/benefits-of-limiting-sugary-beverages/\">obesity, heart disease and diabetes\u003c/a>, Dermody questions the link between sugary drinks and obesity. Obesity has increased steadily over the past three decades. Yet in 2015, sales of carbonated soft drinks fell to their \u003ca href=\"http://fortune.com/2016/03/29/soda-sales-drop-11th-year/\">lowest level in 30 years\u003c/a>, suggesting the obesity epidemic is being driven by something other than soda, Dermody says. He notes that half the soft drinks sold today have no calories. That shows that voluntary industry efforts to reduce sugar and calories in soft drinks are working, and that taxes aren't needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Medical groups and industry funds\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A number of medical groups and universities stopped accepting soda industry funding in 2015 after extensive publicity of Coca-Cola's attempts to influence science. Most \u003ca href=\"https://newsroom.heart.org/news/health-and-justice-nonprofits-oppose-sweetheart-deal-american-beverage-association-seeks-from-california\">health groups\u003c/a> — including the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and American Diabetes Association – now support soda taxes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But two medical groups have defied this trend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In July, just after California lawmakers approved the moratorium on soda taxes, the Obesity Society, which represents doctors who treat overweight patients, issued a \u003ca href=\"https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/07/12/1536602/0/en/The-Obesity-Society-Calls-for-More-Research-on-Sugar-Sweetened-Beverage-Tax.html\">statement\u003c/a> saying there's no proof that such measures will save lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which includes dietitians, has taken a \"neutral\" stand on soda taxes, noting that \"scientific evidence is insufficiently clear.\" In a statement similar to positions taken by the beverage industry, the nutrition academy said, \"No single food or beverage leads to overweight or obesity when consumed in moderate amounts and within the context of the total diet.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both the obesity and nutrition groups have had close relationships with the soda industry. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo were \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.eatrightpro.org/-/media/eatrightpro-files/about-us/annual-reports/annualreport-2016.pdf?la=en&hash=AF58BF192B7A8C78B901CB26ED59DF7B6FAB0225\">premier sponsors\u003c/a>\" of the nutrition academy in 2016, according to the group's annual report. PepsiCo and Ocean Spray paid for \u003ca href=\"https://s19.a2zinc.net/clients/Academy/FNCE2018/Public/EventMap.aspx?shavailable=1&ID=2430\">\"premium\" exhibit booths\u003c/a> at the nutrition academy's national conference in October. Booths that size cost \u003ca href=\"https://eatrightfnce.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/ExhibitorProspectusFNCE18.pdf\">$40,000 to $50,000\u003c/a> each.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In October, PepsiCo underwrote a special issue of the \u003ca href=\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1930739x/2018/26/S3\">Obesity Society's journal\u003c/a>, which was devoted entirely to the science of artificial sweeteners, at a cost of $26,880. Although PepsiCo paid the journal's publisher for the special issue, part of the money also went to the Obesity Society, says Dr. \u003ca href=\"http://tosconnect.obesity.org/obesity/content/new-item5/steven-heymsfield\">Steven Heymsfield\u003c/a>, the group's president-elect. The Obesity Society has nurtured close ties with soda makers through a \u003ca href=\"https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/OBESITY/004d4f70-37d5-434e-b24d-08a32dfdfcd9/UploadedImages/Web_Summary_Sept_2015_FIEC_Meeting.pdf\">food industry engagement council\u003c/a>. Past meetings were chaired by executives of PepsiCo and attended by employees of the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, now known as Keurig Dr Pepper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://tosconnect.obesity.org/obesity/about/executive-director\">Anthony Comuzzie\u003c/a>, the Obesity Society's executive director, says the society has disbanded the food industry council. In an email, Comuzzie denied that the society's ties to industry have influenced its position on soda taxes. \"To imply that the group or society collectively is biased by food companies has no basis in reality,\" he wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Nestle is not buying it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It is shameful that the academy is not strongly supporting public health measures to prevent obesity,\" Nestle says. \"The academy's position puts it squarely on the side of the food industry and against public health.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 Kaiser Health News. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/\">Kaiser Health News\u003c/a>.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Big+Soda+And+The+Ballot%3A+Soda+Industry+Takes+Cues+From+Tobacco+To+Combat+Taxes&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Taxing soda is an increasingly popular approach to raising revenue while combating obesity, which affects \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html\">40 percent\u003c/a> of American adults. But the sweetened-beverage industry is not about to go away quietly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, the soda industry poured millions of dollars into fighting taxes on sugary drinks. In recent years, it has been largely successful in shutting down new taxes, except in a handful of major cities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The industry is now pushing statewide measures that strip cities and towns of their ability to tax soda. Two of these initiatives will be on the ballot Tuesday in \u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Initiative_1634,_Prohibit_Local_Taxes_on_Groceries_Measure_(2018)\">Washington\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/Oregon_Measure_103,_Ban_Tax_on_Groceries_Initiative_(2018)\">Oregon\u003c/a>. \u003ca href=\"https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/legislature/2018/03/19/arizona-bans-extra-taxes-soda-sugary-drinks/433235002/\">Arizona\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2017/10/no_soda_taxes_for_local_govern.html\">Michigan\u003c/a> already ban localities from enacting soda taxes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, where four cities have soda taxes, the beverage industry pressured lawmakers this summer into accepting \u003ca href=\"https://californiahealthline.org/news/under-pressure-california-lawmakers-ban-soda-taxes-for-12-years/\">a 12-year moratorium\u003c/a> on local taxes on sugar-sweetened drinks. Some lawmakers say Californians are being \"held hostage\" over the measure by the soda industry, which spent \u003ca href=\"https://californiahealthline.org/news/under-pressure-california-lawmakers-ban-soda-taxes-for-12-years/\">$7 million\u003c/a> on a ballot initiative that would have made it much harder for cities to raise taxes of any kind. The beverage industry dropped the initiative after lawmakers agreed to the moratorium.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sweetened-beverage industry is also \u003ca href=\"https://www.vitalstrategies.org/foolmetwice/FoolMeTwice_Report.pdf\">cultivating relationships\u003c/a> with doctors and scientists, which public health advocates say they've seen before. \"There are definitely parallels with the tobacco industry,\" says Betsy Janes of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fightcancer.org\">American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network\u003c/a>. Soda makers \"are happy to take a page from their playbook.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's because for years, tobacco companies used their lobbying clout to persuade state lawmakers to block cities and counties from passing smoke-free ordinances. By 2006, 21 states had pre-empted local smoke-free laws, according to Americans for Nonsmokers' Rights. Even today, 13 states have some sort of ban on local smoke-free laws.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By comparison more than \u003ca href=\"http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:SyGsO1b23WgJ:https://www.worldobesity.org/news/wof-press-release-sugar-taxes/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0\">30 countries\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://cspinet.org/sites/default/files/attachment/soda-taxes-passed-to-date.pdf\">seven U.S. cities\u003c/a> — including Seattle, San Francisco and Boulder, Colo. — now tax sugary drinks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most public health advocates describe soda taxes as a \u003ca href=\"https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/10.1377/hblog20170222.058886/full/\">proven way\u003c/a> to reduce Americans' consumption of added sugars, which, along with other dietary factors, have been linked to \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5852674/pdf/nihms946949.pdf\">40,000 deaths\u003c/a> from heart disease every year. A \u003ca href=\"https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0176336\">study\u003c/a> published last year in \u003cem>PLOS One\u003c/em> projects that Mexico's soda tax will prevent up to 134,000 cases of diabetes by 2030. And in Philadelphia, sales of sweetened beverages fell 57 percent after a city tax of 1.5 cents per ounce took effect, \u003ca href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/philadelphia-soda-tax-sales/\">according to a 2017 study\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Soda companies are using their war chests to fund the Washington and Oregon ballot measures. Coca-Cola has contributed nearly half the \u003ca href=\"https://www.pdc.wa.gov/browse/campaign-explorer/committee?filer_id=YESTA%252520%252520015&election_year=2018\">$20 million\u003c/a> raised in support of the Washington initiative, while the \u003ca href=\"https://secure.sos.state.or.us/orestar/cneSearch.do?cneSearchButtonName=search&cneSearchFilerCommitteeId=19419\">American Beverage Association\u003c/a> has contributed about half the \u003ca href=\"https://secure.sos.state.or.us/orestar/publicAccountSummary.do?filerId=19419\">$5.6 million\u003c/a> behind the Oregon measure, according to state records.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tax impacts on business, health\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PepsiCo, one of the largest soda companies, did not respond to calls or emails. Coca-Cola declined to comment on the issue, referring all questions to the American Beverage Association, which represents the soda industry. \u003ca href=\"https://www.ameribev.org/about-us/aba-team/\">William Dermody\u003c/a>, a spokesman for the beverage association, declined to comment on the comparison with Big Tobacco. But Dermody says the soda industry supports \"keeping food and beverages affordable\" and is \"standing up for small business and working families\" by supporting the ballot measures. Taxes on soda and other groceries \"are harmful; they raise prices and they cost jobs,\" he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Health advocates say the ballot measures aren't really about groceries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Washington state, basic groceries are exempt from sales taxes, notes state \u003ca href=\"http://sdc.wastateleg.org/carlyle/\">Sen. Reuven Carlyle\u003c/a>, a Seattle Democrat opposed to the initiative to limit cities' ability to tax soda. He recently \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/Reuvencarlyle/status/1059175331083341824\">tweeted\u003c/a>: \"Coke and Pepsi's undignified $22 million campaign to strip local gov't authority sent 11 campaign advertisements to my wife alone. Regardless of their short term wins, one day big soda will find their brand equity in the same league as the NRA, big tobacco, big oil.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.tobaccofreekids.org/about/our-team/matt-myers\">Matthew Myers\u003c/a> of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids is a veteran of the tobacco wars. He notes that the tobacco industry fought smoke-free laws by warning that they would drive customers away from restaurants and bars. In fact, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/secondhand_smoke/protection/hospitality/index.htm\">Centers for Disease Control and Prevention\u003c/a> has reported that smoking bans increase business at bars and restaurants because customers enjoy clean air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Similarly, research shows that Philadelphia's sugary drink tax hasn't hurt other aspects of the grocery business, Myers says. Although sales of sugary drinks have fallen, overall business at chain stores hasn't suffered, \u003ca href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/philadelphia-soda-tax-sales/\">according to a 2017 study\u003c/a>. A \u003ca href=\"https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002283\">study of a soda tax in Berkeley, Calif.\u003c/a>, found similar results, with residents buying less soda but more bottled water.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Public health groups said they aren't giving up on soda taxes. In California, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.cda.org/Portals/0/press/pr_0718_soda_tax.pdf\">state dental and medical associations\u003c/a> have filed a ballot measure for 2020 to create a statewide tax on sugary drinks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A show of financial force\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Soda makers have plenty of money for a fight. The food and beverage industry spent \u003ca href=\"https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying.php?cycle=2018&ind=N01\">$22.3 million\u003c/a> in 2018 on lobbying, which includes $5.4 million by Coca-Cola and $2.8 million by PepsiCo. That's more than the tobacco industry, which spent \u003ca href=\"https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/lobbying.php?cycle=2018&ind=A02\">$16.7 million\u003c/a> on lobbying in 2018. In 1998, when the tobacco industry was under similar pressure, it spent $72 million on lobbying, according to \u003ca href=\"http://OpenSecrets.org\">OpenSecrets.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The tobacco industry also spent decades funneling money into research that made cigarettes look less harmful than they really were, Myers says. Now beverage companies are trying to win over scientists and medical societies too, says \u003ca href=\"https://www.foodpolitics.com/\">Marion Nestle,\u003c/a> an emeritus professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University and author of \"Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://www.coca-colacompany.com/transparency/transparency-faq\">Coca-Cola\u003c/a> spent $146 million on \"well-being related scientific research, partnership and health professional activities\" from 2010 through 2017, according to the company's own records. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(16)30331-2/fulltext\">2016 study\u003c/a> found that Coca-Cola and PepsiCo funded 95 national medical organizations from 2011 to 2015, while lobbying against 29 public health bills that aimed to reduce soda consumption or improve diet. Coca-Cola funded the publication of 389 articles in 169 journals from 2008 to 2016, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/cocacola-a-model-of-transparency-in-research-partnerships-a-network-analysis-of-cocacolas-research-funding-20082016/D73D7B77A29BFED193858AE79780B703\">study\u003c/a> published this year in the journal \u003cem>Public Health Nutrition\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nestle says no one should be surprised that \u003ca href=\"http://annals.org/aim/article-abstract/2578450/do-sugar-sweetened-beverages-cause-obesity-diabetes-industry-manufacture-scientific\">industry-funded research\u003c/a> tends to absolve soda from any role in causing obesity. Beverage industry research typically shifts the blame for obesity onto inactivity and \"energy balance,\" suggesting that exercise is far more important to weight loss than cutting back on sugar and calories, she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While independent researchers have found evidence linking sugary drinks to \u003ca href=\"https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/benefits-of-limiting-sugary-beverages/\">obesity, heart disease and diabetes\u003c/a>, Dermody questions the link between sugary drinks and obesity. Obesity has increased steadily over the past three decades. Yet in 2015, sales of carbonated soft drinks fell to their \u003ca href=\"http://fortune.com/2016/03/29/soda-sales-drop-11th-year/\">lowest level in 30 years\u003c/a>, suggesting the obesity epidemic is being driven by something other than soda, Dermody says. He notes that half the soft drinks sold today have no calories. That shows that voluntary industry efforts to reduce sugar and calories in soft drinks are working, and that taxes aren't needed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Medical groups and industry funds\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A number of medical groups and universities stopped accepting soda industry funding in 2015 after extensive publicity of Coca-Cola's attempts to influence science. Most \u003ca href=\"https://newsroom.heart.org/news/health-and-justice-nonprofits-oppose-sweetheart-deal-american-beverage-association-seeks-from-california\">health groups\u003c/a> — including the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society and American Diabetes Association – now support soda taxes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But two medical groups have defied this trend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In July, just after California lawmakers approved the moratorium on soda taxes, the Obesity Society, which represents doctors who treat overweight patients, issued a \u003ca href=\"https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/07/12/1536602/0/en/The-Obesity-Society-Calls-for-More-Research-on-Sugar-Sweetened-Beverage-Tax.html\">statement\u003c/a> saying there's no proof that such measures will save lives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which includes dietitians, has taken a \"neutral\" stand on soda taxes, noting that \"scientific evidence is insufficiently clear.\" In a statement similar to positions taken by the beverage industry, the nutrition academy said, \"No single food or beverage leads to overweight or obesity when consumed in moderate amounts and within the context of the total diet.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Both the obesity and nutrition groups have had close relationships with the soda industry. Coca-Cola and PepsiCo were \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.eatrightpro.org/-/media/eatrightpro-files/about-us/annual-reports/annualreport-2016.pdf?la=en&hash=AF58BF192B7A8C78B901CB26ED59DF7B6FAB0225\">premier sponsors\u003c/a>\" of the nutrition academy in 2016, according to the group's annual report. PepsiCo and Ocean Spray paid for \u003ca href=\"https://s19.a2zinc.net/clients/Academy/FNCE2018/Public/EventMap.aspx?shavailable=1&ID=2430\">\"premium\" exhibit booths\u003c/a> at the nutrition academy's national conference in October. Booths that size cost \u003ca href=\"https://eatrightfnce.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/ExhibitorProspectusFNCE18.pdf\">$40,000 to $50,000\u003c/a> each.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In October, PepsiCo underwrote a special issue of the \u003ca href=\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/1930739x/2018/26/S3\">Obesity Society's journal\u003c/a>, which was devoted entirely to the science of artificial sweeteners, at a cost of $26,880. Although PepsiCo paid the journal's publisher for the special issue, part of the money also went to the Obesity Society, says Dr. \u003ca href=\"http://tosconnect.obesity.org/obesity/content/new-item5/steven-heymsfield\">Steven Heymsfield\u003c/a>, the group's president-elect. The Obesity Society has nurtured close ties with soda makers through a \u003ca href=\"https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/OBESITY/004d4f70-37d5-434e-b24d-08a32dfdfcd9/UploadedImages/Web_Summary_Sept_2015_FIEC_Meeting.pdf\">food industry engagement council\u003c/a>. Past meetings were chaired by executives of PepsiCo and attended by employees of the Dr Pepper Snapple Group, now known as Keurig Dr Pepper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"http://tosconnect.obesity.org/obesity/about/executive-director\">Anthony Comuzzie\u003c/a>, the Obesity Society's executive director, says the society has disbanded the food industry council. In an email, Comuzzie denied that the society's ties to industry have influenced its position on soda taxes. \"To imply that the group or society collectively is biased by food companies has no basis in reality,\" he wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Nestle is not buying it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It is shameful that the academy is not strongly supporting public health measures to prevent obesity,\" Nestle says. \"The academy's position puts it squarely on the side of the food industry and against public health.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 Kaiser Health News. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/\">Kaiser Health News\u003c/a>.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Big+Soda+And+The+Ballot%3A+Soda+Industry+Takes+Cues+From+Tobacco+To+Combat+Taxes&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Food Stamps For Soda: Time To End Billion-Dollar Subsidy For Sugary Drinks?",
"title": "Food Stamps For Soda: Time To End Billion-Dollar Subsidy For Sugary Drinks?",
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"content": "\u003cp>If you peer into Americans' grocery carts, you're unlikely to see a mix of foods and beverages that make for an ideal diet. And this is true for many of the nearly 42 million people who receive food stamps, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to a\u003ca href=\"https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/ops/SNAPFoodsTypicallyPurchased-Summary.pdf\"> 2016 report\u003c/a> from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sweetened beverages, including soda, are among the most commonly purchased items by recipients of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap\">Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program\u003c/a> — or SNAP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SNAP households spend about 10 percent of food dollars on sugary drinks, which is about three times more than the amount they spend on milk. In New York City alone, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2010/10/07/130399285/new-york-city-wants-to-ban-food-stamps-for-sodas\">as we've reported\u003c/a>, this translates into more than $75 million in sugary drink purchases each year that are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given our \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/09/26/140753048/kids-sugar-cravings-might-be-biological\">biological attraction to sugar\u003c/a>, perhaps it's not a surprise. Our collective sweet tooth — which was \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/04/547315191/coca-cola-offers-a-sweet-quest-a-million-bucks-to-replace-sugar\">shaped by evolutionary forces\u003c/a> — extends far beyond SNAP households. In general, non-SNAP households spend almost as much on sweetened drinks — about 7 percent of food purchases, according to the USDA report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The health stakes are high\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, since taxpayers foot the roughly $70 billion bill for SNAP each year, critics question whether it makes sense to support the purchase of sugary drinks, which have been shown to play a significant role in weight gain and the onset of Type 2 diabetes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Low-income American adults now consume nearly two [sugar-sweetened beverage] servings a day, and for every one to two daily servings consumed, the lifetime risk of developing diabetes increases by 30 percent,\" \u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s12115-018-0260-z?author_access_token=RLXOJ4_BEtqckezmXpaZZPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4jUl7voikCvoMYov3YkSXkwPAWFEb9x6FtkvB8h-7pZ_XAN9TzsRBnCctW7rCB6NJDWo-iMsP5ZnjGzn6xOj2f9RIhQ7csFhOCzYTjObmCeA%3D%3D\">according to a paper published\u003c/a> this year by Harvard adjunct public policy professor \u003ca href=\"https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/robert-paarlberg\">Robert Paarlberg\u003c/a> and collaborators in the journal \u003cem>Society\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper explains why the challenge of changing the SNAP program is so daunting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the food stamp program was initiated back in the 1960s, some Americans did not get enough calories. Now, \"partly thanks to SNAP, calorie and micro-nutrient deficiencies are a far less serious problem,\" Paarlberg and his co-authors write. \"But the obesity rate has soared, reaching 39.8 percent in 2015-16.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So how might lawmakers change the SNAP program to nudge people toward healthier choices? As Congress debates a new farm bill containing billions in SNAP funding\u003cstrong>,\u003c/strong> there's an increasing appetite to overhaul the program while at the same time preserving the benefits it provides in keeping low-income Americans fed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One idea comes from researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In a paper \u003ca href=\"https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002661\">published this month in PLOS Medicine\u003c/a>, they've modeled the potential health effects and cost-effectiveness of a few approaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One would incentivize the purchase of healthy foods, by offering a 30 percent subsidy for people to buy such things as fruits and vegetables, nuts, whole grains and fish. \"People could still buy less healthy foods, but they'd get 30 percent less for their dollars,\" explains\u003ca href=\"https://nutrition.tufts.edu/profile/faculty/dariush-mozaffarian\"> Dariush Mozaffarian\u003c/a>, dean of the Friedman School.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers estimate that over the course of a few decades, this approach could lead to billions of dollars in health care savings and help prevent hundreds of thousands of cardiovascular events, such as heart attacks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This approach may also help counter critics who argue that SNAP recipients should have the freedom to make their own dietary choices. \"We would preserve choice, but nudge people towards healthier eating,\" Mozaffarian says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But not everyone is convinced. \"It really wouldn't work,\" says \u003ca href=\"https://www.heritage.org/staff/robert-rector\">Robert Rector\u003c/a>, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He points out that SNAP recipients use both SNAP benefits and their own money to purchase foods and beverages. \"People would just use their own money for those [unhealthy] foods,\" he says. Despite his skepticism, Rector says he would support a simpler approach: preventing the use of SNAP benefits to purchase sugary drinks and junk food items. \"This would be much easier to implement,\" Rector says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Time is tight for Congress to act, and elections are looming. It's likely too late in the game to change the SNAP program during this go-round of farm bill negotiations. The bill is reauthorized every five years, and currently there is a bipartisan fight over other controversial provisions, such as work requirements for SNAP recipients. For now, the focus is not on improving diet quality. But Congress could support pilots or research into the effectiveness of change proposals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Credit incentives can work\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One pilot, carried out in Massachusetts several years ago, offers some evidence that financial incentives for healthy food purchases can shift habits. \u003ca href=\"https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/ops/HIP-Final-Summary.pdf\">Here's how the pilot worked\u003c/a>: SNAP recipients received a 30 cent incentive for every SNAP dollar they spent on fruits and vegetables. This included canned and frozen products, which \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/05/17/611693137/frozen-food-fan-as-sales-rise-studies-show-frozen-produce-is-as-healthy-as-fresh\">can be just as healthy\u003c/a> as fresh. The incentive was credited back to their account, so they had more money to spend on other foods. About 7,500 households participated in the pilot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What happened? Participants in the pilot consumed about 26 percent more fruits and vegetables. And they reported higher consumption of dark leafy greens, as well as nutrition-packed orange and red vegetables such as carrots and tomatoes. About two-thirds of the participants reported buying larger amounts and a greater variety of fruits and vegetables. Nearly three-fourths said they felt that vegetables and fruits had become more affordable, thanks to the incentives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are some other real-world examples of how \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/03/18/174667020/cash-back-on-broccoli-health-insurers-nudge-shoppers-to-be-well\">financial incentives can help shift grocery purchases\u003c/a> among the population at large — not just SNAP recipients. For instance, a \u003ca href=\"http://www.ajpmonline.org/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/AMEPRE_3774%5B3%5D-stamped-031913.pdf\">study\u003c/a> published in the\u003ca href=\"http://www.ajpmonline.org/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/AMEPRE_3774%5B3%5D-stamped-031913.pdf\"> \u003c/a>\u003cem>American Journal of Preventive Medicine\u003c/em> in 2013 found that rebates on healthy food purchases can prompt significant changes in consumer behavior. Researchers found that a 25 percent rebate led to about a 9 percent increase in spending on healthy food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There's growing evidence that obesity and poor nutrition are the epidemics of our day. An estimated \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/11/519443324/eating-more-or-less-of-10-foods-may-cut-risk-of-death-from-heart-disease\">1 out of every 2 deaths from heart disease in the U.S\u003c/a>. is linked to how we eat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a recent \u003ca href=\"https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/401209-focusing-on-nutrition-is-paramount-to-getting-a-sound-bipartisan-farm-bill\">opinion piece\u003c/a>, former USDA secretaries who served in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations respectively call for more focus on nutrition in the SNAP program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There has never been a more important time to refocus the farm bill on nutrition. Diet-related disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, surpassing tobacco, drug, and alcohol usage. More than 1,000 deaths every day are due to poor diets,\" Dan Glickman, Ann Veneman and Tom Vilsack wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Cabinet secretaries argue that Congress should authorize another pilot program. \"Once we have a more robust understanding of which interventions are most successful at encouraging Americans to make the healthiest choices, we can ensure that both SNAP and non-SNAP recipients have diets that lead to health and longevity,\" they wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The politics challenging change\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are\u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s12115-018-0260-z?author_access_token=RLXOJ4_BEtqckezmXpaZZPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4jUl7voikCvoMYov3YkSXkwPAWFEb9x6FtkvB8h-7pZ_XAN9TzsRBnCctW7rCB6NJDWo-iMsP5ZnjGzn6xOj2f9RIhQ7csFhOCzYTjObmCeA%3D%3D\"> roadblocks to change\u003c/a>, as spelled out by Paarlberg and his collaborators in the \u003cem>Society \u003c/em>paper earlier this year. \"Among many reasons, one surprising answer is the joining of pro-poor liberal conviction and corporate lobby power, supported by institutional inertia,\" they wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other words, some anti-hunger groups have joined with industry groups, including the beverage industry, to fight back proposals to limit or block the purchase of unhealthy foods with SNAP dollars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This happened back in 2012, when a Florida state senator sponsored a bill to restrict the use of food stamps to buy soda and junk food in her state. \"Should we give hungry kids food? Absolutely,\" Ronda Storms, then a state senator, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/02/06/146481752/taxes-and-food-stamp-restrictions-proposed-to-tame-americas-sweet-tooth\">told me back in 2012\u003c/a>. (She no longer serves in the state Senate.) \"But I don't think the goal is to provide Oreos and Mountain Dew,\" she said, calling such purchases a misuse of public-assistance dollars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, anti-hunger groups said the proposal would limit choice for low-income Americans, who sometimes face stigma by participating in SNAP. Anti-hunger proponents also argued that it would be hard for grocers to separate out what's covered by SNAP, if new rules were put forth. The bill never passed, but even if it had, the state of Florida would have needed a waiver from the USDA to make the changes. This may not have been granted readily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2010, the USDA denied a request by New York City to place limits on purchases with food stamp dollars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It seems these obstacles are still in play. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Food+Stamps+For+Soda%3A+Time+To+End+Billion-Dollar+Subsidy+For+Sugary+Drinks%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "SNAP provides nutrition assistance for about 42 million Americans, but critics say now is the time to restructure the $70 billion annual program in a way that promotes healthier food choices.",
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"description": "SNAP provides nutrition assistance for about 42 million Americans, but critics say now is the time to restructure the $70 billion annual program in a way that promotes healthier food choices.",
"title": "Food Stamps For Soda: Time To End Billion-Dollar Subsidy For Sugary Drinks? | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>If you peer into Americans' grocery carts, you're unlikely to see a mix of foods and beverages that make for an ideal diet. And this is true for many of the nearly 42 million people who receive food stamps, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to a\u003ca href=\"https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/ops/SNAPFoodsTypicallyPurchased-Summary.pdf\"> 2016 report\u003c/a> from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, sweetened beverages, including soda, are among the most commonly purchased items by recipients of the \u003ca href=\"https://www.fns.usda.gov/snap/supplemental-nutrition-assistance-program-snap\">Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program\u003c/a> — or SNAP.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>SNAP households spend about 10 percent of food dollars on sugary drinks, which is about three times more than the amount they spend on milk. In New York City alone, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2010/10/07/130399285/new-york-city-wants-to-ban-food-stamps-for-sodas\">as we've reported\u003c/a>, this translates into more than $75 million in sugary drink purchases each year that are subsidized by U.S. taxpayers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given our \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2011/09/26/140753048/kids-sugar-cravings-might-be-biological\">biological attraction to sugar\u003c/a>, perhaps it's not a surprise. Our collective sweet tooth — which was \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/09/04/547315191/coca-cola-offers-a-sweet-quest-a-million-bucks-to-replace-sugar\">shaped by evolutionary forces\u003c/a> — extends far beyond SNAP households. In general, non-SNAP households spend almost as much on sweetened drinks — about 7 percent of food purchases, according to the USDA report.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The health stakes are high\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>However, since taxpayers foot the roughly $70 billion bill for SNAP each year, critics question whether it makes sense to support the purchase of sugary drinks, which have been shown to play a significant role in weight gain and the onset of Type 2 diabetes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Low-income American adults now consume nearly two [sugar-sweetened beverage] servings a day, and for every one to two daily servings consumed, the lifetime risk of developing diabetes increases by 30 percent,\" \u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s12115-018-0260-z?author_access_token=RLXOJ4_BEtqckezmXpaZZPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4jUl7voikCvoMYov3YkSXkwPAWFEb9x6FtkvB8h-7pZ_XAN9TzsRBnCctW7rCB6NJDWo-iMsP5ZnjGzn6xOj2f9RIhQ7csFhOCzYTjObmCeA%3D%3D\">according to a paper published\u003c/a> this year by Harvard adjunct public policy professor \u003ca href=\"https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/robert-paarlberg\">Robert Paarlberg\u003c/a> and collaborators in the journal \u003cem>Society\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The paper explains why the challenge of changing the SNAP program is so daunting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the food stamp program was initiated back in the 1960s, some Americans did not get enough calories. Now, \"partly thanks to SNAP, calorie and micro-nutrient deficiencies are a far less serious problem,\" Paarlberg and his co-authors write. \"But the obesity rate has soared, reaching 39.8 percent in 2015-16.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So how might lawmakers change the SNAP program to nudge people toward healthier choices? As Congress debates a new farm bill containing billions in SNAP funding\u003cstrong>,\u003c/strong> there's an increasing appetite to overhaul the program while at the same time preserving the benefits it provides in keeping low-income Americans fed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One idea comes from researchers at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. In a paper \u003ca href=\"https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1002661\">published this month in PLOS Medicine\u003c/a>, they've modeled the potential health effects and cost-effectiveness of a few approaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One would incentivize the purchase of healthy foods, by offering a 30 percent subsidy for people to buy such things as fruits and vegetables, nuts, whole grains and fish. \"People could still buy less healthy foods, but they'd get 30 percent less for their dollars,\" explains\u003ca href=\"https://nutrition.tufts.edu/profile/faculty/dariush-mozaffarian\"> Dariush Mozaffarian\u003c/a>, dean of the Friedman School.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers estimate that over the course of a few decades, this approach could lead to billions of dollars in health care savings and help prevent hundreds of thousands of cardiovascular events, such as heart attacks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This approach may also help counter critics who argue that SNAP recipients should have the freedom to make their own dietary choices. \"We would preserve choice, but nudge people towards healthier eating,\" Mozaffarian says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But not everyone is convinced. \"It really wouldn't work,\" says \u003ca href=\"https://www.heritage.org/staff/robert-rector\">Robert Rector\u003c/a>, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. He points out that SNAP recipients use both SNAP benefits and their own money to purchase foods and beverages. \"People would just use their own money for those [unhealthy] foods,\" he says. Despite his skepticism, Rector says he would support a simpler approach: preventing the use of SNAP benefits to purchase sugary drinks and junk food items. \"This would be much easier to implement,\" Rector says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Time is tight for Congress to act, and elections are looming. It's likely too late in the game to change the SNAP program during this go-round of farm bill negotiations. The bill is reauthorized every five years, and currently there is a bipartisan fight over other controversial provisions, such as work requirements for SNAP recipients. For now, the focus is not on improving diet quality. But Congress could support pilots or research into the effectiveness of change proposals.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Credit incentives can work\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One pilot, carried out in Massachusetts several years ago, offers some evidence that financial incentives for healthy food purchases can shift habits. \u003ca href=\"https://fns-prod.azureedge.net/sites/default/files/ops/HIP-Final-Summary.pdf\">Here's how the pilot worked\u003c/a>: SNAP recipients received a 30 cent incentive for every SNAP dollar they spent on fruits and vegetables. This included canned and frozen products, which \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/05/17/611693137/frozen-food-fan-as-sales-rise-studies-show-frozen-produce-is-as-healthy-as-fresh\">can be just as healthy\u003c/a> as fresh. The incentive was credited back to their account, so they had more money to spend on other foods. About 7,500 households participated in the pilot.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What happened? Participants in the pilot consumed about 26 percent more fruits and vegetables. And they reported higher consumption of dark leafy greens, as well as nutrition-packed orange and red vegetables such as carrots and tomatoes. About two-thirds of the participants reported buying larger amounts and a greater variety of fruits and vegetables. Nearly three-fourths said they felt that vegetables and fruits had become more affordable, thanks to the incentives.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are some other real-world examples of how \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/03/18/174667020/cash-back-on-broccoli-health-insurers-nudge-shoppers-to-be-well\">financial incentives can help shift grocery purchases\u003c/a> among the population at large — not just SNAP recipients. For instance, a \u003ca href=\"http://www.ajpmonline.org/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/AMEPRE_3774%5B3%5D-stamped-031913.pdf\">study\u003c/a> published in the\u003ca href=\"http://www.ajpmonline.org/webfiles/images/journals/amepre/AMEPRE_3774%5B3%5D-stamped-031913.pdf\"> \u003c/a>\u003cem>American Journal of Preventive Medicine\u003c/em> in 2013 found that rebates on healthy food purchases can prompt significant changes in consumer behavior. Researchers found that a 25 percent rebate led to about a 9 percent increase in spending on healthy food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There's growing evidence that obesity and poor nutrition are the epidemics of our day. An estimated \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/03/11/519443324/eating-more-or-less-of-10-foods-may-cut-risk-of-death-from-heart-disease\">1 out of every 2 deaths from heart disease in the U.S\u003c/a>. is linked to how we eat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a recent \u003ca href=\"https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/401209-focusing-on-nutrition-is-paramount-to-getting-a-sound-bipartisan-farm-bill\">opinion piece\u003c/a>, former USDA secretaries who served in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations respectively call for more focus on nutrition in the SNAP program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There has never been a more important time to refocus the farm bill on nutrition. Diet-related disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, surpassing tobacco, drug, and alcohol usage. More than 1,000 deaths every day are due to poor diets,\" Dan Glickman, Ann Veneman and Tom Vilsack wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Cabinet secretaries argue that Congress should authorize another pilot program. \"Once we have a more robust understanding of which interventions are most successful at encouraging Americans to make the healthiest choices, we can ensure that both SNAP and non-SNAP recipients have diets that lead to health and longevity,\" they wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The politics challenging change\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are\u003ca href=\"https://link.springer.com/epdf/10.1007/s12115-018-0260-z?author_access_token=RLXOJ4_BEtqckezmXpaZZPe4RwlQNchNByi7wbcMAY4jUl7voikCvoMYov3YkSXkwPAWFEb9x6FtkvB8h-7pZ_XAN9TzsRBnCctW7rCB6NJDWo-iMsP5ZnjGzn6xOj2f9RIhQ7csFhOCzYTjObmCeA%3D%3D\"> roadblocks to change\u003c/a>, as spelled out by Paarlberg and his collaborators in the \u003cem>Society \u003c/em>paper earlier this year. \"Among many reasons, one surprising answer is the joining of pro-poor liberal conviction and corporate lobby power, supported by institutional inertia,\" they wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other words, some anti-hunger groups have joined with industry groups, including the beverage industry, to fight back proposals to limit or block the purchase of unhealthy foods with SNAP dollars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This happened back in 2012, when a Florida state senator sponsored a bill to restrict the use of food stamps to buy soda and junk food in her state. \"Should we give hungry kids food? Absolutely,\" Ronda Storms, then a state senator, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/02/06/146481752/taxes-and-food-stamp-restrictions-proposed-to-tame-americas-sweet-tooth\">told me back in 2012\u003c/a>. (She no longer serves in the state Senate.) \"But I don't think the goal is to provide Oreos and Mountain Dew,\" she said, calling such purchases a misuse of public-assistance dollars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the time, anti-hunger groups said the proposal would limit choice for low-income Americans, who sometimes face stigma by participating in SNAP. Anti-hunger proponents also argued that it would be hard for grocers to separate out what's covered by SNAP, if new rules were put forth. The bill never passed, but even if it had, the state of Florida would have needed a waiver from the USDA to make the changes. This may not have been granted readily.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2010, the USDA denied a request by New York City to place limits on purchases with food stamp dollars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It seems these obstacles are still in play. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Food+Stamps+For+Soda%3A+Time+To+End+Billion-Dollar+Subsidy+For+Sugary+Drinks%3F&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>You probably don't think of cotton as food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There's a good reason for that. Farmers grow it mostly for the fluffy white fibers that turn into T-shirts or sheets. Cotton plants do produce seeds, but those seeds are poisonous, at least to humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week, though,the U.S. Department of Agriculture \u003ca href=\"https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/biotechnology/brs-news-and-information/2018_brs_news/texas_am_low_gossypol_cotton\">approved\u003c/a> a new kind of cotton — one that's been genetically engineered so that the seeds are safe to eat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The invention promises to open new markets for cottonseed, and it could give cotton farming a big boost. Because cotton plants are prodigious seed producers: Every pound of cotton fiber, or lint, comes with 1.6 pounds of seed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"You're getting more cottonseed than you are lint,\" says Greg Holt, who leads research on cotton production and processing at a USDA research station in Lubbock, Texas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each seed is the size of a small peanut. In principle, it could be highly nutritious. It contains lots of oil and protein. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is that the seeds, like the cotton plant's leaves, contain little dark glands full of something called gossypol. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Gossypol in and of itself is a toxin,\" explains Holt. It's helpful for the cotton plant, because it helps fend off insect pests. But it makes the seed unhealthy for people to eat. It's toxic to most animals, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So there are limited options for the 40 million tons of cottonseed that stream out of cotton gins around the world each year. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Seed can go in one of two directions,\" Holt says. \"You're either going to the dairy industry, or you're going to the oil mill.\" \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cows don't mind gossypol; their digestive systems can handle it. And the oil mills are set up to crush the seed and then purify the oil, removing the gossypol, so you can use it in human food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \u003ca href=\"https://ipgb.tamu.edu/people/rathore-keerti-s/\">Keerti Rathore\u003c/a> wanted to expand those options. So 23 years ago, when he arrived at Texas A&M University, he set out to make a cotton plant with seeds that people can eat. \"This was my first project, and hopefully it's coming to an end, and a good conclusion,\" he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rathore inserted a new piece of DNA into the cotton plant. In the plant's seeds, it turned off a key gene, the one responsible for producing gossypol. The gene stayed active in the rest of the plant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it \u003ca href=\"https://today.tamu.edu/2018/10/16/edible-cottonseed-research-at-texas-am-receives-usda-approval/\">worked\u003c/a>. There's still gossypol in leaves of this genetically engineered plant, to protect against insects. But the seeds are almost completely gossypol-free. They're safe to eat. Cut them open, and they even look different. They don't have those little dark glands. Researchers at Texas A&M tested the plants in greenhouses and small field plots. They also roasted a few and ate them. Rathore says they taste like chickpeas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture gave this new cotton a green light. Anybody in the U.S. can grow them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the seeds can be sold as food or feed, they'll need approval from the Food and Drug Administration. If that happens, all kind of doors will open. Cottonseed could be used to feed chickens, or fish. The meal could go into protein bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rathore's real goal, though, is to see it growing in places like India, where he grew up; places where a lot of people aren't eating well. \"A lot of these countries that do suffer from malnutrition are also cotton producers,\" he says. \"So I think that those countries may benefit much more from this technology.\" China and India are the world's two top cotton-growing countries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Texas A&M is already talking to seed companies that could breed this new genetic trait into cotton varieties that they sell to farmers in the U.S. and abroad. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Not+Just+For+Cows+Anymore%3A+New+Cottonseed+Is+Safe+For+People+To+Eat&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Cottonseed is full of protein but toxic to humans and most animals. The USDA has approved a genetically engineered cotton with edible seeds. They could eventually feed chickens, fish — or even people.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>You probably don't think of cotton as food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There's a good reason for that. Farmers grow it mostly for the fluffy white fibers that turn into T-shirts or sheets. Cotton plants do produce seeds, but those seeds are poisonous, at least to humans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week, though,the U.S. Department of Agriculture \u003ca href=\"https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/biotechnology/brs-news-and-information/2018_brs_news/texas_am_low_gossypol_cotton\">approved\u003c/a> a new kind of cotton — one that's been genetically engineered so that the seeds are safe to eat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The invention promises to open new markets for cottonseed, and it could give cotton farming a big boost. Because cotton plants are prodigious seed producers: Every pound of cotton fiber, or lint, comes with 1.6 pounds of seed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"You're getting more cottonseed than you are lint,\" says Greg Holt, who leads research on cotton production and processing at a USDA research station in Lubbock, Texas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each seed is the size of a small peanut. In principle, it could be highly nutritious. It contains lots of oil and protein. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is that the seeds, like the cotton plant's leaves, contain little dark glands full of something called gossypol. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Gossypol in and of itself is a toxin,\" explains Holt. It's helpful for the cotton plant, because it helps fend off insect pests. But it makes the seed unhealthy for people to eat. It's toxic to most animals, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So there are limited options for the 40 million tons of cottonseed that stream out of cotton gins around the world each year. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Seed can go in one of two directions,\" Holt says. \"You're either going to the dairy industry, or you're going to the oil mill.\" \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cows don't mind gossypol; their digestive systems can handle it. And the oil mills are set up to crush the seed and then purify the oil, removing the gossypol, so you can use it in human food.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \u003ca href=\"https://ipgb.tamu.edu/people/rathore-keerti-s/\">Keerti Rathore\u003c/a> wanted to expand those options. So 23 years ago, when he arrived at Texas A&M University, he set out to make a cotton plant with seeds that people can eat. \"This was my first project, and hopefully it's coming to an end, and a good conclusion,\" he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rathore inserted a new piece of DNA into the cotton plant. In the plant's seeds, it turned off a key gene, the one responsible for producing gossypol. The gene stayed active in the rest of the plant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And it \u003ca href=\"https://today.tamu.edu/2018/10/16/edible-cottonseed-research-at-texas-am-receives-usda-approval/\">worked\u003c/a>. There's still gossypol in leaves of this genetically engineered plant, to protect against insects. But the seeds are almost completely gossypol-free. They're safe to eat. Cut them open, and they even look different. They don't have those little dark glands. Researchers at Texas A&M tested the plants in greenhouses and small field plots. They also roasted a few and ate them. Rathore says they taste like chickpeas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture gave this new cotton a green light. Anybody in the U.S. can grow them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Before the seeds can be sold as food or feed, they'll need approval from the Food and Drug Administration. If that happens, all kind of doors will open. Cottonseed could be used to feed chickens, or fish. The meal could go into protein bars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rathore's real goal, though, is to see it growing in places like India, where he grew up; places where a lot of people aren't eating well. \"A lot of these countries that do suffer from malnutrition are also cotton producers,\" he says. \"So I think that those countries may benefit much more from this technology.\" China and India are the world's two top cotton-growing countries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Texas A&M is already talking to seed companies that could breed this new genetic trait into cotton varieties that they sell to farmers in the U.S. and abroad. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Not+Just+For+Cows+Anymore%3A+New+Cottonseed+Is+Safe+For+People+To+Eat&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Unlabeled stimulants in soft drinks. Formaldehyde in meat and milk. Borax — the stuff used to kill ants! — used as a common food preservative. The American food industry was once a wild and dangerous place for the consumer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Deborah Blum's new book, \u003cem>The Poison Squad,\u003c/em> is a true story about how Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, named chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1883, conducted a rather grisly experiment on human volunteers to help make food safer for consumers — and his work still echoes on today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wiley was an indefatigable activist for food safety regulations during a time when the food industry was organizing and adding substances to food without any oversight, using its might to put profits before people. But Wiley and his small band of chemists began methodically testing suspected harmful additives and revealing the effects of these dangerous compounds to the government and public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a long battle, but one that did make things better. Nevertheless, we still have debates today over what is safe for us to eat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Blum about her new book and Wiley, a formidable pioneer of food-safety regulations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and contains some Web-only expanded answers.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You start the book by noting that we have this conception of the food our ancestors ate as being pure and authentic, straight from the farm. What was the reality?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was about the opposite of that. To be fair, there were people who lived on the farm and ate wonderful produce from their gardens, but most people were in this period of migration to the cities. This is the rise of industrialized America in the late 19th century, so most people were eating manufactured, grocery store-bought food. I was actually shocked to discover it was horrifyingly fake, fraudulent and tainted by any and all chemicals [people] felt like putting in it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>So what might people in 1900 have found in their milk, or their coffee, or their spices?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I took a close look at milk, because it's a great example of just how bad things could get. Dairymen seeking to stretch their profits would thin it with water – and not always clean water. At one point, there was a case in Indiana in which it was pond water. The family found worms wiggling in it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>And pond water was actually some of the safer stuff that milk was contaminated with!\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's exactly right, because once you had thinned the milk, you had to reconstitute it in all kinds of weird ways. People put chalk or plaster dust in it. They sometimes put in toxic dyes to make it more golden instead of grayish or bluish. And because it was prone to rot — this was before pasteurization and refrigeration — they would dump preservatives in it. The most popular one was formaldehyde, an embalming compound, which is not good for humans to ingest. You can actually go out and see newspaper headlines around the country during this period with \"embalmed milk scandals.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You tell stories of kids dying from eating candy that was contaminated with lead. Given that this was causing real suffering in consumers, what kinds of arguments were people making for leaving this unregulated?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It's baffling, because you are in this period where food makers are knowingly using very bad things. I gave the example of arsenic, which was a green food dye also used to make the shellac that glosses up chocolate. But lead was used to color candies, and red lead was used in cheese. If people wanted to make a beautiful, orange cheddar cheese, they just dumped a little red lead in it. This is not people who didn't know it was bad, but there were things that made it permissible. There were no labels, and so there was no public pressure. It was just a pre-regulatory Wild West of food that permitted bad actors to do what they will, and so they did. It saved them a lot of money. You get this capitalistic feedback loop of people who were trying to make a living – and wanting to make more of a living. The consumer was both the guinea pig and the victim.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130836\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 395px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85.jpg\" alt=\"The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum\" width=\"395\" height=\"600\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130836\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85.jpg 395w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85-160x243.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85-240x365.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85-375x570.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 395px) 100vw, 395px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum \u003ccite>(Penguin Group USA)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>So along comes a protagonist of your story: Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Why did he care so much about this issue?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I've always thought of him as kind of a holy roller kind of chemist. He was the son of an itinerant preacher and farmer in Indiana who was also a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Wiley was raised to think that what he did needed to be a higher calling. He would describe chemistry that way: Chemistry is the service of good. So this tiny group of chemists that he commanded at the USDA was it on food safety. He took up that cause.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Your book is called \u003cem>The Poison Squad\u003c/em>, which comes from a project that he undertook that really shows his commitment. Describe what The Poison Squad was.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wiley basically goes out and recruits other people at the USDA, especially young clerks, to volunteer to dine very dangerously. The idea of The Poison Squad was that these young men would get three free meals a day, seven days a week – all of them paid for by the U.S. government. They have to agree not to have snacks or eat outside of these free meals. These are super fancy meals cooked by a professional chef. All of the ingredients are amazing. The only catch is: You have to agree that half of you at any given period in this experiment are going to be given capsules that contain suspect food additives. And these did include formaldehyde, and the cleaning product Borax, and salicylic acid, which we know from aspirin. And the amazing thing is that there were people lining up to volunteer for this experiment. And you wonder, 'Is this crazy or what?' You are testing suspected toxic compounds on human volunteers. But he felt that was the only way he could deal with this. You had this rising tide of really dangerous food additives and there were no safety regulations. 'How do I make a case that perhaps this is not a good idea? I'll just test it on people.' And so he did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>To no one's surprise, if you feed people formaldehyde, or arsenic or lead, they will get sick. And when you demonstrate that, why does it still remain so difficult to outlaw these substances in food? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The food industry had been organizing itself to fight regulation. Wiley had been advocating and working with congressmen to get some kind of basic consumer protection. And these experiments caught national attention — they were front-page news, there were songs about them — and everyone was realizing that there is a lot of bad stuff in their food. There was an immediate pushback. Suddenly, congressmen are on the side of food business or getting offered more money. The food industry organizes to create a Food Manufacturers Association. They were phenomenally effective. They did a great job trying to damage Wiley's reputation publicly and deny what he was finding, and bullied and threatened congressmen to kill regulation every time it came up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Despite these long-fought fights, today there isn't formaldehyde and lead and arsenic in food the way that there was 100 years ago. Progress really was made!\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, and I would be completely irresponsible if I said that food today is as dangerous as it was in the 19th century. Once the first food-safety law was passed in 1906, two years after Wiley finished his Poison Squad experiments, you see government stepping up against some of these extremely dangerous compounds. But we are still having fights about what's safe. The list of dyes that we have in food today is the exact list that Wiley approved, minus a couple that fell out when they became known to be more toxic. So we've both improved things, and not moved forward as much as Wiley would have liked or I have come to believe we should. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=How+A+19th+Century+Chemist+Took+On+The+Food+Industry+With+A+Grisly+Experiment&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Unlabeled stimulants in soft drinks. Formaldehyde in meat and milk. Borax — the stuff used to kill ants! — used as a common food preservative. The American food industry was once a wild and dangerous place for the consumer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Deborah Blum's new book, \u003cem>The Poison Squad,\u003c/em> is a true story about how Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, named chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1883, conducted a rather grisly experiment on human volunteers to help make food safer for consumers — and his work still echoes on today.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wiley was an indefatigable activist for food safety regulations during a time when the food industry was organizing and adding substances to food without any oversight, using its might to put profits before people. But Wiley and his small band of chemists began methodically testing suspected harmful additives and revealing the effects of these dangerous compounds to the government and public.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a long battle, but one that did make things better. Nevertheless, we still have debates today over what is safe for us to eat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Blum about her new book and Wiley, a formidable pioneer of food-safety regulations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and contains some Web-only expanded answers.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You start the book by noting that we have this conception of the food our ancestors ate as being pure and authentic, straight from the farm. What was the reality?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was about the opposite of that. To be fair, there were people who lived on the farm and ate wonderful produce from their gardens, but most people were in this period of migration to the cities. This is the rise of industrialized America in the late 19th century, so most people were eating manufactured, grocery store-bought food. I was actually shocked to discover it was horrifyingly fake, fraudulent and tainted by any and all chemicals [people] felt like putting in it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>So what might people in 1900 have found in their milk, or their coffee, or their spices?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I took a close look at milk, because it's a great example of just how bad things could get. Dairymen seeking to stretch their profits would thin it with water – and not always clean water. At one point, there was a case in Indiana in which it was pond water. The family found worms wiggling in it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>And pond water was actually some of the safer stuff that milk was contaminated with!\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's exactly right, because once you had thinned the milk, you had to reconstitute it in all kinds of weird ways. People put chalk or plaster dust in it. They sometimes put in toxic dyes to make it more golden instead of grayish or bluish. And because it was prone to rot — this was before pasteurization and refrigeration — they would dump preservatives in it. The most popular one was formaldehyde, an embalming compound, which is not good for humans to ingest. You can actually go out and see newspaper headlines around the country during this period with \"embalmed milk scandals.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>You tell stories of kids dying from eating candy that was contaminated with lead. Given that this was causing real suffering in consumers, what kinds of arguments were people making for leaving this unregulated?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It's baffling, because you are in this period where food makers are knowingly using very bad things. I gave the example of arsenic, which was a green food dye also used to make the shellac that glosses up chocolate. But lead was used to color candies, and red lead was used in cheese. If people wanted to make a beautiful, orange cheddar cheese, they just dumped a little red lead in it. This is not people who didn't know it was bad, but there were things that made it permissible. There were no labels, and so there was no public pressure. It was just a pre-regulatory Wild West of food that permitted bad actors to do what they will, and so they did. It saved them a lot of money. You get this capitalistic feedback loop of people who were trying to make a living – and wanting to make more of a living. The consumer was both the guinea pig and the victim.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130836\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 395px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85.jpg\" alt=\"The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum\" width=\"395\" height=\"600\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130836\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85.jpg 395w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85-160x243.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85-240x365.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/10/9781594205149_custom-81e56572b9681c66ffe39c6e3013265a0ad7b8cb-s700-c85-375x570.jpg 375w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 395px) 100vw, 395px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The Poison Squad by Deborah Blum \u003ccite>(Penguin Group USA)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>So along comes a protagonist of your story: Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Why did he care so much about this issue?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I've always thought of him as kind of a holy roller kind of chemist. He was the son of an itinerant preacher and farmer in Indiana who was also a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Wiley was raised to think that what he did needed to be a higher calling. He would describe chemistry that way: Chemistry is the service of good. So this tiny group of chemists that he commanded at the USDA was it on food safety. He took up that cause.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Your book is called \u003cem>The Poison Squad\u003c/em>, which comes from a project that he undertook that really shows his commitment. Describe what The Poison Squad was.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wiley basically goes out and recruits other people at the USDA, especially young clerks, to volunteer to dine very dangerously. The idea of The Poison Squad was that these young men would get three free meals a day, seven days a week – all of them paid for by the U.S. government. They have to agree not to have snacks or eat outside of these free meals. These are super fancy meals cooked by a professional chef. All of the ingredients are amazing. The only catch is: You have to agree that half of you at any given period in this experiment are going to be given capsules that contain suspect food additives. And these did include formaldehyde, and the cleaning product Borax, and salicylic acid, which we know from aspirin. And the amazing thing is that there were people lining up to volunteer for this experiment. And you wonder, 'Is this crazy or what?' You are testing suspected toxic compounds on human volunteers. But he felt that was the only way he could deal with this. You had this rising tide of really dangerous food additives and there were no safety regulations. 'How do I make a case that perhaps this is not a good idea? I'll just test it on people.' And so he did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>To no one's surprise, if you feed people formaldehyde, or arsenic or lead, they will get sick. And when you demonstrate that, why does it still remain so difficult to outlaw these substances in food? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The food industry had been organizing itself to fight regulation. Wiley had been advocating and working with congressmen to get some kind of basic consumer protection. And these experiments caught national attention — they were front-page news, there were songs about them — and everyone was realizing that there is a lot of bad stuff in their food. There was an immediate pushback. Suddenly, congressmen are on the side of food business or getting offered more money. The food industry organizes to create a Food Manufacturers Association. They were phenomenally effective. They did a great job trying to damage Wiley's reputation publicly and deny what he was finding, and bullied and threatened congressmen to kill regulation every time it came up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Despite these long-fought fights, today there isn't formaldehyde and lead and arsenic in food the way that there was 100 years ago. Progress really was made!\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, and I would be completely irresponsible if I said that food today is as dangerous as it was in the 19th century. Once the first food-safety law was passed in 1906, two years after Wiley finished his Poison Squad experiments, you see government stepping up against some of these extremely dangerous compounds. But we are still having fights about what's safe. The list of dyes that we have in food today is the exact list that Wiley approved, minus a couple that fell out when they became known to be more toxic. So we've both improved things, and not moved forward as much as Wiley would have liked or I have come to believe we should. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=How+A+19th+Century+Chemist+Took+On+The+Food+Industry+With+A+Grisly+Experiment&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Ever heard of these food additives? Synthetically-derived benzophenone, ethyl acrylate, methyl eugenol, myrcene, pulegone, or pyridine?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These compounds can help mimic natural flavors and are used to infuse foods with mint, cinnamon and other flavors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You've likely never seen them on food labels because food manufacturers are permitted to label them simply as \"artificial flavors.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, the Food and Drug Administration has announced these compounds will no longer be allowed to be used as food additives. The FDA is giving manufacturers time to remove them from the food supply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The decision comes in response to a petition brought by environmental and consumer groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Food Safety, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We think this is a win for consumers,\" says \u003ca href=\"https://www.nrdc.org/experts/erik-d-olson\">Erik Olson\u003c/a> of the Natural Resources Defense Council.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\"\u003c/strong>Our petition laid out the science\" linking these flavoring chemicals to cancer in animals, Olson says. \"The law is very clear that any chemical that causes cancer is not supposed to be added to our food supply,\" Olson told us\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FDA had concluded that these flavoring compounds do not pose a health risk to consumers. \"The synthetic flavoring substances that are the subject of this petition are typically used in foods available in the U.S. marketplace in very small amounts and their use results in very low levels of exposures and low risk,\" concludes an \u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/Food/NewsEvents/ConstituentUpdates/ucm622475.htm\">FDA statement\u003c/a> on the petition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"While the FDA's recent exposure assessment of these substances does not indicate that they pose a risk to public health under the conditions of their intended use, the petitioners provided evidence that these substances caused cancer in animals who were exposed to much higher doses,\" the FDA statement says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal law spelled out in the decades-old \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK216642/\">Delaney Clause\u003c/a>, which is an amendment to the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmetic_Act\">Food, Drugs, and Cosmetic Act of 1938\u003c/a>, stipulates that if a substance is found to cause cancer in humans or animals, it cannot be used as a food additive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FDA says it will de-list six of the synthetic compounds from its food additives list, given the evidence that these\u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/10/09/2018-21807/food-additive-regulations-synthetic-flavoring-agents-and-adjuvants\"> substances caused cancer \u003c/a>in animal laboratory studies. The FDA says the \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/10/09/2018-21807/food-additive-regulations-synthetic-flavoring-agents-and-adjuvants\">seventh synthetic flavor\u003c/a>, styrene, is being de-listed because it is no longer used by the industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Natural Resources Defense Council says the compounds that are being de-listed have likely been used in a variety of food products — from ice cream and baked goods to beer and gum. NRDC's Olson says it's tough to know how widely they're used, or in which products, because manufacturers are not required to disclose this information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trade association that represents flavor manufacturers, The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, \u003ca href=\"https://www.femaflavor.org/fda-announces-decision-ngo-petition-7-synthetic-substances\">released a statement\u003c/a> underscoring the FDA's exposure assessment that concluded the flavor compounds do not pose a risk to people under the conditions of their intended use. \"FEMA believes that the Delaney Clause demonstrates a limited interpretation of animal studies and cancer by failing to address risk or relevance in humans,\" the statement says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FDA, in its c\u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/Food/NewsEvents/ConstituentUpdates/ucm622475.htm\">onstituent update on this action,\u003c/a> says it will give manufacturers 24 months to \"identify suitable replacement ingredients and reformulate their food products.\" \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=FDA+Bans+Use+of+7+Synthetic+Food+Additives+After+Environmental+Groups+Sue&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The Food and Drug Administration is banning the use of several synthetic flavoring compounds used to infuse flavors such as mint and cinnamon in foods. Environmental groups sued, citing cancer risks.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Ever heard of these food additives? Synthetically-derived benzophenone, ethyl acrylate, methyl eugenol, myrcene, pulegone, or pyridine?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These compounds can help mimic natural flavors and are used to infuse foods with mint, cinnamon and other flavors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You've likely never seen them on food labels because food manufacturers are permitted to label them simply as \"artificial flavors.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, the Food and Drug Administration has announced these compounds will no longer be allowed to be used as food additives. The FDA is giving manufacturers time to remove them from the food supply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The decision comes in response to a petition brought by environmental and consumer groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Center for Food Safety, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We think this is a win for consumers,\" says \u003ca href=\"https://www.nrdc.org/experts/erik-d-olson\">Erik Olson\u003c/a> of the Natural Resources Defense Council.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\"\u003c/strong>Our petition laid out the science\" linking these flavoring chemicals to cancer in animals, Olson says. \"The law is very clear that any chemical that causes cancer is not supposed to be added to our food supply,\" Olson told us\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FDA had concluded that these flavoring compounds do not pose a health risk to consumers. \"The synthetic flavoring substances that are the subject of this petition are typically used in foods available in the U.S. marketplace in very small amounts and their use results in very low levels of exposures and low risk,\" concludes an \u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/Food/NewsEvents/ConstituentUpdates/ucm622475.htm\">FDA statement\u003c/a> on the petition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"While the FDA's recent exposure assessment of these substances does not indicate that they pose a risk to public health under the conditions of their intended use, the petitioners provided evidence that these substances caused cancer in animals who were exposed to much higher doses,\" the FDA statement says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The federal law spelled out in the decades-old \u003ca href=\"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK216642/\">Delaney Clause\u003c/a>, which is an amendment to the \u003ca href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Food,_Drug,_and_Cosmetic_Act\">Food, Drugs, and Cosmetic Act of 1938\u003c/a>, stipulates that if a substance is found to cause cancer in humans or animals, it cannot be used as a food additive.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FDA says it will de-list six of the synthetic compounds from its food additives list, given the evidence that these\u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/10/09/2018-21807/food-additive-regulations-synthetic-flavoring-agents-and-adjuvants\"> substances caused cancer \u003c/a>in animal laboratory studies. The FDA says the \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/10/09/2018-21807/food-additive-regulations-synthetic-flavoring-agents-and-adjuvants\">seventh synthetic flavor\u003c/a>, styrene, is being de-listed because it is no longer used by the industry.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Natural Resources Defense Council says the compounds that are being de-listed have likely been used in a variety of food products — from ice cream and baked goods to beer and gum. NRDC's Olson says it's tough to know how widely they're used, or in which products, because manufacturers are not required to disclose this information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The trade association that represents flavor manufacturers, The Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association, \u003ca href=\"https://www.femaflavor.org/fda-announces-decision-ngo-petition-7-synthetic-substances\">released a statement\u003c/a> underscoring the FDA's exposure assessment that concluded the flavor compounds do not pose a risk to people under the conditions of their intended use. \"FEMA believes that the Delaney Clause demonstrates a limited interpretation of animal studies and cancer by failing to address risk or relevance in humans,\" the statement says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The FDA, in its c\u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/Food/NewsEvents/ConstituentUpdates/ucm622475.htm\">onstituent update on this action,\u003c/a> says it will give manufacturers 24 months to \"identify suitable replacement ingredients and reformulate their food products.\" \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=FDA+Bans+Use+of+7+Synthetic+Food+Additives+After+Environmental+Groups+Sue&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>In the last few years, consumer advocacy groups have pressed restaurant chains to offer healthier kids meals and more nutritious side options like milk and fruit, and the restaurants have responded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2013, McDonald's \u003ca href=\"https://www.healthiergeneration.org/news__events/2013/09/26/820/mcdonalds_joins\">pledged\u003c/a> to remove all mentions and images of soda from Happy Meal menu boards, and shortly thereafter, other fast food restaurants began to devise policies to introduce nutritious drink and side options beyond fries and dessert. McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and Subway — the four biggest fast food chains — \u003ca href=\"http://www.uconnruddcenter.org/files/Pdfs/272-9%2520_%2520Rudd_Healthier%2520Kids%2520Meals%2520Report_Final%2520Round_Web-150dpi_080117.pdf\">replaced\u003c/a> soda on kids' meal menus with low-fat milk, water, and 100 percent juice, and McDonald's and Subway \u003ca href=\"http://www.uconnruddcenter.org/files/Pdfs/272-9%2520_%2520Rudd_Healthier%2520Kids%2520Meals%2520Report_Final%2520Round_Web-150dpi_080117.pdf\">promised\u003c/a> to make fruit and vegetable sides available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So have the voluntary pledges to make fast food healthier mean parents are purchasing more of the healthier food for their kids at the restaurants?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not really, says a \u003ca href=\"http://uconnruddcenter.org/files/272-10%20%20Healthier%20Kids'%20Meals%20Parent%20Survey%20Report_Release_8_31_18.pdf\">study\u003c/a> released Thursday by the University of Connecticut's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. And that may not be a good sign for children's health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study documented about 800 parents' purchases for their children at McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and Subway through online surveys conducted in 2010, 2013 and 2016.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Between 2010 and 2016, the percentage of parents who purchased kids' meals and received healthier drinks remained about the same at 59-60 percent. And, from 2013 to 2016, the percentage of parents who purchased kids' meals with healthier sides actually declined from 67 percent in 2013 to 50 percent in 2016.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, parents report buying fast food for their children more often. In fact, 91 percent of parents surveyed in 2016 said they purchased a meal for their child at the four largest fast-food chains in the past week, compared to 79 percent in 2010.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It appears that restaurants' voluntary policies as currently implemented are unlikely to substantially reduce children's fast-food consumption overall, or increase their consumption of healthy items,\" the study says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report doesn't really surprise researchers. Past studies conducted by Rudd have shown that fast food restaurants are following their own voluntary pledges inconsistently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, at one McDonald's location, the cashier may automatically include soda with a kids' meal, at another location you might need to ask, and the same goes for french fries, the study found. While all chains removed the items listed in their pledges from their online menus, many still listed soda on kids' meal menus in the brick-and-mortar restaurants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the \"health halo\" of the healthy offering policies seems to resonate with parents. Nearly all parents surveyed in the latest Rudd study said they would purchase food for their children at that restaurant more frequently because of the healthy offerings. But Harris says while they may have health in mind when entering the restaurant, this doesn't always lead to healthy choices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The marketing of the healthy options available is getting people in the door, but it's unlikely they'll take the effort to ask if [the restaurant has] something healthier,\" says the study's lead author \u003ca href=\"http://www.uconnruddcenter.org/faculty-and-staff-jennifer-harris\">Dr. Jennifer L. Harris\u003c/a>, the director of marketing initiatives at the Rudd Center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, Harris says, the best option for public health would be to automatically include the healthy options with the kids' meals. \"If fast food restaurants start automatically giving patients healthy choices, that would be encouraging,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://cspinet.org/biography/hillary-caron\">Hillary Caron\u003c/a>, a senior policy associate at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says that the Rudd Center's study is particularly interesting because it demonstrates the power of defaults in consumer decision-making. That is, if the meal comes with fries unless you ask for apple slices instead, you're likely to get fries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some government officials have already taken this message to heart. Just last week, California became to first state to pass a healthy kids' meal policy when Governor Jerry Brown signed \u003ca href=\"https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/09/20/kids-meals-drinks-law/\">legislation\u003c/a> that prohibits soda and other sugary drinks from being the designated beverages that come with kids' meals. Similar bills have passed in cities like \u003ca href=\"https://health.baltimorecity.gov/news/press-releases/2018-07-18-baltimore-city-healthy-kids-meals-bill-becomes-law\">Baltimore \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://louisvilleky.gov/news/louisville-metro-council-passes-first-nation-ordinance\">Louisville\u003c/a>, and have been proposed in \u003ca href=\"https://council.nyc.gov/press/2018/08/27/1636/\">New York City\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://cspinet.org/news/healthy-kids%25E2%2580%2599-meal-bill-introduced-district-columbia-20180918\">D.C.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harris says that the findings of the latest Rudd study indicate a need for such public policies. Voluntary and mandatory policies could work hand in hand, though, according to Caron.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Both approaches reinforce each other,\" Caron writes in an email to NPR. Voluntary commitments from restaurants, she says, help make the case for state and local policies because they show that the changes are achievable. But state and local policies ensure that the principles apply to all restaurants, not just chains that propose voluntary health policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Harris wants people to remember that even if the fast food offered at restaurants is billed as healthy, most fast food meals still consist of chicken nuggets, burgers, and fries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's important to communicate that fast food meals are not healthy options,\" Harris says. \"Replacing soda with milk or water doesn't make the meal healthy,\" she adds. \"It's a small step, but in the right direction.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Rachel D. Cohen is an intern on NPR's Science Desk.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Apples+Or+Fries+With+That%3F+When+It+Comes+To+Kids+Meals%2C+Fries+Are+Hard+To+Beat&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Even though many fast food chain restaurants are offering healthier sides, a new report says parents choose them only about half the time, and restaurants aren't consistent in how they offer them.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>In the last few years, consumer advocacy groups have pressed restaurant chains to offer healthier kids meals and more nutritious side options like milk and fruit, and the restaurants have responded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 2013, McDonald's \u003ca href=\"https://www.healthiergeneration.org/news__events/2013/09/26/820/mcdonalds_joins\">pledged\u003c/a> to remove all mentions and images of soda from Happy Meal menu boards, and shortly thereafter, other fast food restaurants began to devise policies to introduce nutritious drink and side options beyond fries and dessert. McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, and Subway — the four biggest fast food chains — \u003ca href=\"http://www.uconnruddcenter.org/files/Pdfs/272-9%2520_%2520Rudd_Healthier%2520Kids%2520Meals%2520Report_Final%2520Round_Web-150dpi_080117.pdf\">replaced\u003c/a> soda on kids' meal menus with low-fat milk, water, and 100 percent juice, and McDonald's and Subway \u003ca href=\"http://www.uconnruddcenter.org/files/Pdfs/272-9%2520_%2520Rudd_Healthier%2520Kids%2520Meals%2520Report_Final%2520Round_Web-150dpi_080117.pdf\">promised\u003c/a> to make fruit and vegetable sides available.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So have the voluntary pledges to make fast food healthier mean parents are purchasing more of the healthier food for their kids at the restaurants?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Not really, says a \u003ca href=\"http://uconnruddcenter.org/files/272-10%20%20Healthier%20Kids'%20Meals%20Parent%20Survey%20Report_Release_8_31_18.pdf\">study\u003c/a> released Thursday by the University of Connecticut's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. And that may not be a good sign for children's health.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study documented about 800 parents' purchases for their children at McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and Subway through online surveys conducted in 2010, 2013 and 2016.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Between 2010 and 2016, the percentage of parents who purchased kids' meals and received healthier drinks remained about the same at 59-60 percent. And, from 2013 to 2016, the percentage of parents who purchased kids' meals with healthier sides actually declined from 67 percent in 2013 to 50 percent in 2016.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Also, parents report buying fast food for their children more often. In fact, 91 percent of parents surveyed in 2016 said they purchased a meal for their child at the four largest fast-food chains in the past week, compared to 79 percent in 2010.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It appears that restaurants' voluntary policies as currently implemented are unlikely to substantially reduce children's fast-food consumption overall, or increase their consumption of healthy items,\" the study says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report doesn't really surprise researchers. Past studies conducted by Rudd have shown that fast food restaurants are following their own voluntary pledges inconsistently.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For example, at one McDonald's location, the cashier may automatically include soda with a kids' meal, at another location you might need to ask, and the same goes for french fries, the study found. While all chains removed the items listed in their pledges from their online menus, many still listed soda on kids' meal menus in the brick-and-mortar restaurants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the \"health halo\" of the healthy offering policies seems to resonate with parents. Nearly all parents surveyed in the latest Rudd study said they would purchase food for their children at that restaurant more frequently because of the healthy offerings. But Harris says while they may have health in mind when entering the restaurant, this doesn't always lead to healthy choices.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The marketing of the healthy options available is getting people in the door, but it's unlikely they'll take the effort to ask if [the restaurant has] something healthier,\" says the study's lead author \u003ca href=\"http://www.uconnruddcenter.org/faculty-and-staff-jennifer-harris\">Dr. Jennifer L. Harris\u003c/a>, the director of marketing initiatives at the Rudd Center.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, Harris says, the best option for public health would be to automatically include the healthy options with the kids' meals. \"If fast food restaurants start automatically giving patients healthy choices, that would be encouraging,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://cspinet.org/biography/hillary-caron\">Hillary Caron\u003c/a>, a senior policy associate at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, says that the Rudd Center's study is particularly interesting because it demonstrates the power of defaults in consumer decision-making. That is, if the meal comes with fries unless you ask for apple slices instead, you're likely to get fries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some government officials have already taken this message to heart. Just last week, California became to first state to pass a healthy kids' meal policy when Governor Jerry Brown signed \u003ca href=\"https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/09/20/kids-meals-drinks-law/\">legislation\u003c/a> that prohibits soda and other sugary drinks from being the designated beverages that come with kids' meals. Similar bills have passed in cities like \u003ca href=\"https://health.baltimorecity.gov/news/press-releases/2018-07-18-baltimore-city-healthy-kids-meals-bill-becomes-law\">Baltimore \u003c/a>and \u003ca href=\"https://louisvilleky.gov/news/louisville-metro-council-passes-first-nation-ordinance\">Louisville\u003c/a>, and have been proposed in \u003ca href=\"https://council.nyc.gov/press/2018/08/27/1636/\">New York City\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://cspinet.org/news/healthy-kids%25E2%2580%2599-meal-bill-introduced-district-columbia-20180918\">D.C.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Harris says that the findings of the latest Rudd study indicate a need for such public policies. Voluntary and mandatory policies could work hand in hand, though, according to Caron.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Both approaches reinforce each other,\" Caron writes in an email to NPR. Voluntary commitments from restaurants, she says, help make the case for state and local policies because they show that the changes are achievable. But state and local policies ensure that the principles apply to all restaurants, not just chains that propose voluntary health policies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, Harris wants people to remember that even if the fast food offered at restaurants is billed as healthy, most fast food meals still consist of chicken nuggets, burgers, and fries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's important to communicate that fast food meals are not healthy options,\" Harris says. \"Replacing soda with milk or water doesn't make the meal healthy,\" she adds. \"It's a small step, but in the right direction.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Rachel D. Cohen is an intern on NPR's Science Desk.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Apples+Or+Fries+With+That%3F+When+It+Comes+To+Kids+Meals%2C+Fries+Are+Hard+To+Beat&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Cornell Food Researcher's Downfall Raises Larger Questions For Science",
"title": "Cornell Food Researcher's Downfall Raises Larger Questions For Science",
"headTitle": "Bay Area Bites | KQED Food",
"content": "\u003cp>The fall of a prominent food and marketing researcher may be a cautionary tale for scientists who are tempted to manipulate data and chase headlines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brian Wansink, the head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, announced last week that he would retire from the university at the end of the academic year. Less than 48 hours earlier, \u003cem>JAMA,\u003c/em> a journal published by the American Medical Association, had \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2703449\">retracted\u003c/a> six of Wansink's studies, after Cornell told the journal's editors that Wansink had not kept the original data and the university could not vouch for the validity of his studies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an internal review conducted at \u003cem>JAMA's\u003c/em> request, a Cornell faculty committee \u003ca href=\"http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/09/provost-issues-statement-wansink-academic-misconduct-investigation\">reported\u003c/a> a litany of faults with Wansink's work, including \"misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship.\" Cornell apologized for Wansink's \"academic misconduct,\" removed him from his teaching and research posts, and obligated him to spend the remainder of his time there \"cooperating with the university in its ongoing review of his prior research.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a stunning fall from grace for Wansink, who'd become famous for producing pithy, palatable studies that connected people's eating habits with cues from their environment. Among his many well-known findings: People eat more when they're served in large bowls, and when they're watching an action movie, and when they sit close to the buffet at an all-you-can-eat restaurant. His work was cited in \u003ca href=\"https://www.today.com/series/one-small-thing/weigh-yourself-day-week-most-accurate-reading-t87046\">national\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/how-post-workout-food-rewards-can-sabotage-your-goals/2015/01/12/1a556c16-8af2-11e4-9e8d-0c687bc18da4_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.68a4cb9b589e\">news\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/business/02leonhardt.html\">outlets\u003c/a>, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/search?query=brian%2520wansink&page=1\">NPR\u003c/a>, and he had a hand in developing the new U.S. dietary guidelines in 2010.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wansink's perch at the top of his field began to wobble in early 2017. That's when \u003ca href=\"http://www.apple.com\">Tim van der Zee\u003c/a>, a doctoral student in\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>educational psychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, went public with the results of an investigation that began when he stumbled across a blog post Wansink had written on his \u003ca href=\"http://www.brianwansink.com/\">personal website\u003c/a> the year prior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://web.archive.org/web/20170312041524/http:/www.brianwansink.com/phd-advice/the-grad-student-who-never-said-no\">post\u003c/a>, since removed from Wansink's site but accessible today as a cached version, was aimed at aspiring academics. The most promising post-doctoral students, Wansink wrote, \"unhesitatingly say 'Yes'\" to research projects, \"even if they are not exactly sure how they'll do it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But van der Zee was more interested in Wansink's description of the work he was assigning to his post-docs. Those descriptions, van der Zee says, appeared to contain a \"strange admission\" of \"highly questionable research practices.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The gold standard of scientific studies is to make a single hypothesis, gather data to test it, and analyze the results to see if it holds up. By Wansink's own admission in the blog post, that's not what happened in his lab.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, when his first hypothesis didn't bear out, Wansink wrote that he used the same data to test other hypotheses. \"He just kept analyzing those datasets over and over and over again, and he instructed others to do so as well, until he found something,\" van der Zee says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's not necessarily bad, says \u003ca href=\"https://www.dept-med.pitt.edu/card/faculty_info.aspx/Althouse6848\">Andrew Althouse\u003c/a>, a statistician at the University of Pittsburgh who has followed the controversy around Wansink's research methods. \"There's nothing wrong with having a lot of data and looking at it carefully,\" Althouse says. \"The problem is p-hacking.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To understand p-hacking, you need to understand p-values.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://galton.uchicago.edu/~thisted/Distribute/pvalue.pdf\">P-values\u003c/a> are how researchers\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>measure the likelihood that a result in an experiment did not happen due to random chance. They're the odds, for example, that your new diet is what caused you to lose weight, as opposed to natural background fluctuations in myriad bodily functions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://blogs.plos.org/scicomm/2015/05/19/p-hacking-megan-head-on-why-its-not-good-for-science/\">P-hacking\u003c/a> is when researchers play with the data, often using complex statistical models, to arrive at results that look like they're not random.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Large datasets can be prone to p-hacking, Althouse says. \"Let's say you flip a coin a million times. At some point you're going to get 10 heads in a row.\" That does not mean the coin is weighted, even though looking at that sliver of data makes a random result look like it's not due to chance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, Wansink's lab collected reams of information in its research, often from pencil-and-paper surveys, logging everything from participants' age and gender to where they sat in a restaurant, the size of their group, and whether they ordered alcohol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then they analyzed that data to find connections to what, and how much, people ate. As \u003cem>Buzzfeed News\u003c/em> reporter Stephanie Lee\u003ca href=\"https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/brian-wansink-cornell-p-hacking\"> found\u003c/a> in a trove of emails released through various records requests, Wansink encouraged his students to dig through the numbers to find results that would \"go virally big time.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wansink seemed to admit to this practice in his 2016 blog post. \"He, in a very honest manner, describes how he was actually doing the studies,\" van der Zee says. Wansink's blog post pulled back the curtain on dozens of failed analyses that never showed up in his published articles.\u003cstrong>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>Van der Zee and two other early-career researchers, Jordan Anaya and Nick Brown, piqued by what they saw as Wansink's acknowledgement of p-hacking, \u003ca href=\"http://www.timvanderzee.com/the-wansink-dossier-an-overview/\">dug deeper\u003c/a> into his work starting late in 2016.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The team found 150 problems with data collection and statistical analysis in the first four of Wansink's papers they scrutinized. The team's findings were validated earlier this month when Cornell reported the conclusions of its year-long internal probe to \u003cem>JAMA\u003c/em>, resulting in the journal's retractions of Wansink's work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Wansink is perhaps the most prominent researcher in recent history to be brought down by allegations of p-hacking, this type of academic malpractice is not specific to one lab at one university, say Van der Zee and Althouse. And it may be because there is a rush to publish. \"Science has become faster than is healthy,\" van der Zee says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cornell agrees. \"Van der Zee is right to note that as the pace and reach of news has become instant and global, there may be a temptation\" for universities and researchers to get caught up in a race for the next attention-grabbing conclusion, says Joel Malina, vice president for communications at Cornell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in this media climate, food and nutrition science in particular has \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/28/410313446/why-a-journalist-scammed-the-media-into-spreading-bad-chocolate-science\">come under scrutiny\u003c/a> — some have called it a \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/09/what-is-food-science/571105/\">credibility crisis\u003c/a>.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nonetheless, Malina says, \"We believe that the overwhelming majority of scientists are committed to rigorous and transparent work of the highest caliber.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wansink says he stands by his studies and is confident that his lab's results will be validated by other groups. \"I thought we had all of this nailed,\" Wansink wrote to his colleagues after getting news of the retractions, in an email he shared with NPR, suggesting that he felt the information he shared would clear him of wrongdoing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He acknowledged some of the errors in a \u003ca href=\"https://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/research-statement-april-2017\">2017 statement\u003c/a> and says he provided as much information as he could to help the Cornell faculty committee corroborate his work. \"We never kept the surveys once their data was entered into spreadsheets. None of us have ever heard that a person was expected to keep all of those old surveys,\" Wansink told NPR in an email last week.\u003cstrong>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>Despite the questions surrounding Wansink's work and the unraveling of his academic career, some of his findings — such as the suggestion to use smaller bowls — can be useful to people with healthy relationships with food, says \u003ca href=\"http://jeanfain.com/biography.html\">Jean Fain\u003c/a>, a psychotherapist affiliated with Harvard Medical School who has \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/28/597625364/mindful-eating-authors-secret-recipe-for-cooking-and-living-there-is-none\">contributed\u003c/a> to NPR on dieting topics in the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, she adds, \"they can be dangerous to people with diagnosable eating disorders, who, in following Wansink's advice to a T, are more apt to ignore their internal experience of hunger and fullness, satisfaction and nourishment, and focus exclusively on externals, like plate and portion size.\"\u003cstrong>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We can't simply reduce our portion sizes and stop overeating,\" she says. \"In fact, restricting food in the short-term is one of the best ways to predict out-of-control eating in the future.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For all of Wansink's influence in the field of food and marketing, though, Althouse says he worries that the lessons of Wansink's mistakes will not be a wakeup call to the broader scientific community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I would love to send out a survey right now, right this minute, to all the faculty at my institution, and ask how many people have heard of this, because I bet you it's not that many,\" Althouse says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But he's hoping that changes. \"This should be the cautionary tale that gets brought up in Research Methods 101 across a number of disciplines,\" he says. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 WXXI News. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.wxxinews.org\">WXXI News\u003c/a>.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Cornell+Food+Researcher%27s+Downfall+Raises+Larger+Questions+For+Science&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Brian Wansink made a name for himself producing pithy, palatable studies that connected people's eating habits with cues from their environment. His data manipulation now serves as a cautionary tale.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The fall of a prominent food and marketing researcher may be a cautionary tale for scientists who are tempted to manipulate data and chase headlines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brian Wansink, the head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, announced last week that he would retire from the university at the end of the academic year. Less than 48 hours earlier, \u003cem>JAMA,\u003c/em> a journal published by the American Medical Association, had \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2703449\">retracted\u003c/a> six of Wansink's studies, after Cornell told the journal's editors that Wansink had not kept the original data and the university could not vouch for the validity of his studies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In an internal review conducted at \u003cem>JAMA's\u003c/em> request, a Cornell faculty committee \u003ca href=\"http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/09/provost-issues-statement-wansink-academic-misconduct-investigation\">reported\u003c/a> a litany of faults with Wansink's work, including \"misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship.\" Cornell apologized for Wansink's \"academic misconduct,\" removed him from his teaching and research posts, and obligated him to spend the remainder of his time there \"cooperating with the university in its ongoing review of his prior research.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was a stunning fall from grace for Wansink, who'd become famous for producing pithy, palatable studies that connected people's eating habits with cues from their environment. Among his many well-known findings: People eat more when they're served in large bowls, and when they're watching an action movie, and when they sit close to the buffet at an all-you-can-eat restaurant. His work was cited in \u003ca href=\"https://www.today.com/series/one-small-thing/weigh-yourself-day-week-most-accurate-reading-t87046\">national\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/how-post-workout-food-rewards-can-sabotage-your-goals/2015/01/12/1a556c16-8af2-11e4-9e8d-0c687bc18da4_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.68a4cb9b589e\">news\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/02/business/02leonhardt.html\">outlets\u003c/a>, including \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/search?query=brian%2520wansink&page=1\">NPR\u003c/a>, and he had a hand in developing the new U.S. dietary guidelines in 2010.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wansink's perch at the top of his field began to wobble in early 2017. That's when \u003ca href=\"http://www.apple.com\">Tim van der Zee\u003c/a>, a doctoral student in\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>educational psychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, went public with the results of an investigation that began when he stumbled across a blog post Wansink had written on his \u003ca href=\"http://www.brianwansink.com/\">personal website\u003c/a> the year prior.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://web.archive.org/web/20170312041524/http:/www.brianwansink.com/phd-advice/the-grad-student-who-never-said-no\">post\u003c/a>, since removed from Wansink's site but accessible today as a cached version, was aimed at aspiring academics. The most promising post-doctoral students, Wansink wrote, \"unhesitatingly say 'Yes'\" to research projects, \"even if they are not exactly sure how they'll do it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But van der Zee was more interested in Wansink's description of the work he was assigning to his post-docs. Those descriptions, van der Zee says, appeared to contain a \"strange admission\" of \"highly questionable research practices.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The gold standard of scientific studies is to make a single hypothesis, gather data to test it, and analyze the results to see if it holds up. By Wansink's own admission in the blog post, that's not what happened in his lab.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, when his first hypothesis didn't bear out, Wansink wrote that he used the same data to test other hypotheses. \"He just kept analyzing those datasets over and over and over again, and he instructed others to do so as well, until he found something,\" van der Zee says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's not necessarily bad, says \u003ca href=\"https://www.dept-med.pitt.edu/card/faculty_info.aspx/Althouse6848\">Andrew Althouse\u003c/a>, a statistician at the University of Pittsburgh who has followed the controversy around Wansink's research methods. \"There's nothing wrong with having a lot of data and looking at it carefully,\" Althouse says. \"The problem is p-hacking.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To understand p-hacking, you need to understand p-values.\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003ca href=\"https://galton.uchicago.edu/~thisted/Distribute/pvalue.pdf\">P-values\u003c/a> are how researchers\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>measure the likelihood that a result in an experiment did not happen due to random chance. They're the odds, for example, that your new diet is what caused you to lose weight, as opposed to natural background fluctuations in myriad bodily functions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://blogs.plos.org/scicomm/2015/05/19/p-hacking-megan-head-on-why-its-not-good-for-science/\">P-hacking\u003c/a> is when researchers play with the data, often using complex statistical models, to arrive at results that look like they're not random.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Large datasets can be prone to p-hacking, Althouse says. \"Let's say you flip a coin a million times. At some point you're going to get 10 heads in a row.\" That does not mean the coin is weighted, even though looking at that sliver of data makes a random result look like it's not due to chance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, Wansink's lab collected reams of information in its research, often from pencil-and-paper surveys, logging everything from participants' age and gender to where they sat in a restaurant, the size of their group, and whether they ordered alcohol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then they analyzed that data to find connections to what, and how much, people ate. As \u003cem>Buzzfeed News\u003c/em> reporter Stephanie Lee\u003ca href=\"https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/brian-wansink-cornell-p-hacking\"> found\u003c/a> in a trove of emails released through various records requests, Wansink encouraged his students to dig through the numbers to find results that would \"go virally big time.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wansink seemed to admit to this practice in his 2016 blog post. \"He, in a very honest manner, describes how he was actually doing the studies,\" van der Zee says. Wansink's blog post pulled back the curtain on dozens of failed analyses that never showed up in his published articles.\u003cstrong>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>Van der Zee and two other early-career researchers, Jordan Anaya and Nick Brown, piqued by what they saw as Wansink's acknowledgement of p-hacking, \u003ca href=\"http://www.timvanderzee.com/the-wansink-dossier-an-overview/\">dug deeper\u003c/a> into his work starting late in 2016.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The team found 150 problems with data collection and statistical analysis in the first four of Wansink's papers they scrutinized. The team's findings were validated earlier this month when Cornell reported the conclusions of its year-long internal probe to \u003cem>JAMA\u003c/em>, resulting in the journal's retractions of Wansink's work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Wansink is perhaps the most prominent researcher in recent history to be brought down by allegations of p-hacking, this type of academic malpractice is not specific to one lab at one university, say Van der Zee and Althouse. And it may be because there is a rush to publish. \"Science has become faster than is healthy,\" van der Zee says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cornell agrees. \"Van der Zee is right to note that as the pace and reach of news has become instant and global, there may be a temptation\" for universities and researchers to get caught up in a race for the next attention-grabbing conclusion, says Joel Malina, vice president for communications at Cornell.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And in this media climate, food and nutrition science in particular has \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/05/28/410313446/why-a-journalist-scammed-the-media-into-spreading-bad-chocolate-science\">come under scrutiny\u003c/a> — some have called it a \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/09/what-is-food-science/571105/\">credibility crisis\u003c/a>.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nonetheless, Malina says, \"We believe that the overwhelming majority of scientists are committed to rigorous and transparent work of the highest caliber.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wansink says he stands by his studies and is confident that his lab's results will be validated by other groups. \"I thought we had all of this nailed,\" Wansink wrote to his colleagues after getting news of the retractions, in an email he shared with NPR, suggesting that he felt the information he shared would clear him of wrongdoing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He acknowledged some of the errors in a \u003ca href=\"https://foodpsychology.cornell.edu/research-statement-april-2017\">2017 statement\u003c/a> and says he provided as much information as he could to help the Cornell faculty committee corroborate his work. \"We never kept the surveys once their data was entered into spreadsheets. None of us have ever heard that a person was expected to keep all of those old surveys,\" Wansink told NPR in an email last week.\u003cstrong>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>Despite the questions surrounding Wansink's work and the unraveling of his academic career, some of his findings — such as the suggestion to use smaller bowls — can be useful to people with healthy relationships with food, says \u003ca href=\"http://jeanfain.com/biography.html\">Jean Fain\u003c/a>, a psychotherapist affiliated with Harvard Medical School who has \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/28/597625364/mindful-eating-authors-secret-recipe-for-cooking-and-living-there-is-none\">contributed\u003c/a> to NPR on dieting topics in the past.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, she adds, \"they can be dangerous to people with diagnosable eating disorders, who, in following Wansink's advice to a T, are more apt to ignore their internal experience of hunger and fullness, satisfaction and nourishment, and focus exclusively on externals, like plate and portion size.\"\u003cstrong>\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We can't simply reduce our portion sizes and stop overeating,\" she says. \"In fact, restricting food in the short-term is one of the best ways to predict out-of-control eating in the future.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For all of Wansink's influence in the field of food and marketing, though, Althouse says he worries that the lessons of Wansink's mistakes will not be a wakeup call to the broader scientific community.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I would love to send out a survey right now, right this minute, to all the faculty at my institution, and ask how many people have heard of this, because I bet you it's not that many,\" Althouse says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But he's hoping that changes. \"This should be the cautionary tale that gets brought up in Research Methods 101 across a number of disciplines,\" he says. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 WXXI News. To see more, visit \u003ca href=\"http://www.wxxinews.org\">WXXI News\u003c/a>.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Cornell+Food+Researcher%27s+Downfall+Raises+Larger+Questions+For+Science&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Yogurt May Not Be So Healthy If It's Pumped Full Of Sugar",
"title": "Yogurt May Not Be So Healthy If It's Pumped Full Of Sugar",
"headTitle": "Bay Area Bites | KQED Food",
"content": "\u003cp>If you look at the sugar content of some yogurts in the supermarket, you might mistakenly think you're in the dessert aisle. Yogurt is marketed as a healthy food, but a \u003ca href=\"https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/8/e021387\">study\u003c/a> published this week in the \u003cem>British Medical Journal\u003c/em> is the latest reminder that not all yogurt is created equal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers surveyed the sugar content of over 900 yogurts in U.K. supermarkets and found that the average amount of sugar across yogurt categories (children's, organic, flavored, etc.) was well above 10 grams per 100 gram serving. To receive a low-sugar label in the U.K., products cannot have more than 5 grams of sugar per 100 gram serving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sugar accounted for the majority of total calories in all but natural or Greek yogurts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One finding of the study that might come as a surprise to consumers is that organic yogurts were some of the sweetest of all. The median sugar content for organic yogurts was 13.1 grams per 100 gram serving, and some brands had almost 17 grams of sugar per 100 gram serving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A source of probiotic cultures, protein, calcium, iodine, and vitamin B12, yogurt is frequently recommended as a part of a healthy diet. In fact, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/02/05/271153568/ladies-good-bacteria-in-yogurt-may-be-good-for-waistlines-too\">studies\u003c/a> have shown yogurt consumers have a lower risk of obesity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So in 2017 when the U.K. government \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sugar-reduction-achieving-the-20\">announced\u003c/a> the top nine food categories after sodas, juices, and smoothies that contribute to children's sugar intake, and yogurt made the list, it took \u003ca href=\"https://physicalsciences.leeds.ac.uk/staff/157/dr-j-bernadette-moore%23journal_article_div\">Dr. J. Bernadette Moore\u003c/a>, an associate professor at the University of Leeds' School of Food Science and Nutrition, aback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a mother she wondered, just how much sugar was she giving her daughter?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I discovered that for my young daughter's favorite yogurt, sugar accounted for 60 percent of the calories,\" Moore says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore suspects the amount of sugar in yogurt in the U.S. is about the same as in the U.K.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130583\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/09/img_0517-2_vert-6c70a3feb56332c83bfac3cc2e6c10682b112d41-e1537815784945.jpg\" alt=\"Yogurts found in a U.S. supermarket have similar amounts of sugar to those found in U.K. stores. And experts say those sugars can add up quickly.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"2560\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130583\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Yogurts found in a U.S. supermarket have similar amounts of sugar to those found in U.K. stores. And experts say those sugars can add up quickly. \u003ccite>(April Fulton/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A quick trip down the yogurt aisle of a big U.S. supermarket chain in Los Angeles seems to bear this out. One Yoplait yogurt, marketed with Disney's popular Frozen characters on it, contains 13 grams of sugar in a 113 gram serving. Chobani Kids had 9 grams of sugar in a 99 gram serving. YoCrunch low-fat yogurt sported 12 grams of sugar in a 113 gram serving, but that number spikes up to 19 grams of sugar if you add the accompanying \"mix-ins,\" like Oreo cookies or M&M candies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, the halo effect of yogurt is powerful, and for Moore, this is perhaps the most significant implication of the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"What is worrisome is that yogurt, as a perceived 'healthy food', may be an unrecognized source of free/added sugars in the diet,\" the researchers write.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to \u003ca href=\"https://cspinet.org/biography/lindsay-moyer-0\">Lindsay Moyer\u003c/a>, a Senior Nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, consumers may get around 25 percent or more of the WHO's \u003ca href=\"http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-guideline/en/\">recommended daily sugar limit\u003c/a> for adults (from 25 to 50 grams or less than 10 percent of total energy) from just one serving of yogurt. What is worrying, she says, is that people are often not aware just how much sugar they're consuming when they eat yogurt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most dairy products contain a naturally occurring sugar — lactose — that is included in the total sugar count. That's less worrisome than added sugar. So how can you tell what kind of sugar you're getting?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Greek yogurts, there might be four to six grams of naturally occurring lactose and 8 to 10 grams in non-Greek yogurts. Anything above that is likely added sugar, Moyer says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What may also help in the U.S. is that by January 2020, most companies will be required to use the Food and Drug Administration's \u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm385663.htm\">new nutrition labels\u003c/a>, which call out \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/20/478837157/the-added-sugar-label-is-coming-to-a-packaged-food-near-you\">added sugars\u003c/a>.The healthiest yogurts, Moyer and Moore agree, are plain, unsweetened yogurts and Greek yogurts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore's research prompted her to wean her daughter off of sugary, dessert-like yogurts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We've switched to using natural yogurt and she sweetens it with jam,\" Moore says. She recognizes that jam, fruit, honey, and other popular yogurt toppings are sweet, but at least when you're adding them yourself, she says, you know roughly how much sugar you are consuming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Yogurt+May+Not+Be+So+Healthy+If+It%27s+Pumped+Full+Of+Sugar&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "A study of some 900 yogurts sold in supermarkets in the U.K. found a shocking amount of sugar is hiding in this so-called healthy food, particularly in organic yogurts.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>If you look at the sugar content of some yogurts in the supermarket, you might mistakenly think you're in the dessert aisle. Yogurt is marketed as a healthy food, but a \u003ca href=\"https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/8/8/e021387\">study\u003c/a> published this week in the \u003cem>British Medical Journal\u003c/em> is the latest reminder that not all yogurt is created equal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The researchers surveyed the sugar content of over 900 yogurts in U.K. supermarkets and found that the average amount of sugar across yogurt categories (children's, organic, flavored, etc.) was well above 10 grams per 100 gram serving. To receive a low-sugar label in the U.K., products cannot have more than 5 grams of sugar per 100 gram serving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sugar accounted for the majority of total calories in all but natural or Greek yogurts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One finding of the study that might come as a surprise to consumers is that organic yogurts were some of the sweetest of all. The median sugar content for organic yogurts was 13.1 grams per 100 gram serving, and some brands had almost 17 grams of sugar per 100 gram serving.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A source of probiotic cultures, protein, calcium, iodine, and vitamin B12, yogurt is frequently recommended as a part of a healthy diet. In fact, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/02/05/271153568/ladies-good-bacteria-in-yogurt-may-be-good-for-waistlines-too\">studies\u003c/a> have shown yogurt consumers have a lower risk of obesity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So in 2017 when the U.K. government \u003ca href=\"https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/sugar-reduction-achieving-the-20\">announced\u003c/a> the top nine food categories after sodas, juices, and smoothies that contribute to children's sugar intake, and yogurt made the list, it took \u003ca href=\"https://physicalsciences.leeds.ac.uk/staff/157/dr-j-bernadette-moore%23journal_article_div\">Dr. J. Bernadette Moore\u003c/a>, an associate professor at the University of Leeds' School of Food Science and Nutrition, aback.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a mother she wondered, just how much sugar was she giving her daughter?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I discovered that for my young daughter's favorite yogurt, sugar accounted for 60 percent of the calories,\" Moore says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore suspects the amount of sugar in yogurt in the U.S. is about the same as in the U.K.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130583\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/09/img_0517-2_vert-6c70a3feb56332c83bfac3cc2e6c10682b112d41-e1537815784945.jpg\" alt=\"Yogurts found in a U.S. supermarket have similar amounts of sugar to those found in U.K. stores. And experts say those sugars can add up quickly.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"2560\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130583\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Yogurts found in a U.S. supermarket have similar amounts of sugar to those found in U.K. stores. And experts say those sugars can add up quickly. \u003ccite>(April Fulton/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>A quick trip down the yogurt aisle of a big U.S. supermarket chain in Los Angeles seems to bear this out. One Yoplait yogurt, marketed with Disney's popular Frozen characters on it, contains 13 grams of sugar in a 113 gram serving. Chobani Kids had 9 grams of sugar in a 99 gram serving. YoCrunch low-fat yogurt sported 12 grams of sugar in a 113 gram serving, but that number spikes up to 19 grams of sugar if you add the accompanying \"mix-ins,\" like Oreo cookies or M&M candies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet, the halo effect of yogurt is powerful, and for Moore, this is perhaps the most significant implication of the study.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"What is worrisome is that yogurt, as a perceived 'healthy food', may be an unrecognized source of free/added sugars in the diet,\" the researchers write.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to \u003ca href=\"https://cspinet.org/biography/lindsay-moyer-0\">Lindsay Moyer\u003c/a>, a Senior Nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, consumers may get around 25 percent or more of the WHO's \u003ca href=\"http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2015/sugar-guideline/en/\">recommended daily sugar limit\u003c/a> for adults (from 25 to 50 grams or less than 10 percent of total energy) from just one serving of yogurt. What is worrying, she says, is that people are often not aware just how much sugar they're consuming when they eat yogurt.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most dairy products contain a naturally occurring sugar — lactose — that is included in the total sugar count. That's less worrisome than added sugar. So how can you tell what kind of sugar you're getting?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Greek yogurts, there might be four to six grams of naturally occurring lactose and 8 to 10 grams in non-Greek yogurts. Anything above that is likely added sugar, Moyer says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What may also help in the U.S. is that by January 2020, most companies will be required to use the Food and Drug Administration's \u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/LabelingNutrition/ucm385663.htm\">new nutrition labels\u003c/a>, which call out \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/05/20/478837157/the-added-sugar-label-is-coming-to-a-packaged-food-near-you\">added sugars\u003c/a>.The healthiest yogurts, Moyer and Moore agree, are plain, unsweetened yogurts and Greek yogurts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Moore's research prompted her to wean her daughter off of sugary, dessert-like yogurts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We've switched to using natural yogurt and she sweetens it with jam,\" Moore says. She recognizes that jam, fruit, honey, and other popular yogurt toppings are sweet, but at least when you're adding them yourself, she says, you know roughly how much sugar you are consuming.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Yogurt+May+Not+Be+So+Healthy+If+It%27s+Pumped+Full+Of+Sugar&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>A visit to your primary care physician may focus on your headaches or that achy back. But if your body mass index is over 30, a panel of national experts says, it should also include a referral to an intensive weight-loss program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's the latest recommendation of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of national experts in disease and public health that advises primary care physicians on best practices. The group \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2702878\">published\u003c/a> an evidence review and the recommendation in the \u003cem>Journal of the American Medical Association\u003c/em> on Tuesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recommendation is identical to one made in 2012, with a few key differences. The first is the evidence: Thanks to 83 new studies published since the last recommendation, the panel is even more convinced that intensive weight loss programs — ones that last between one and two years — work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What's \"intensive\"? Most programs studied lasted between one and two years and focused on changing both dietary intake and physical activity. Though the programs used different strategies for behavior change, most encouraged patients to self-monitor their weight and provided tools to help maintain weight loss, like scales, pedometers, or exercise videos. Counseling was a part of most programs, and most involved 12 or more sessions in the first year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2012, the panel also assessed all five medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration for long-term management of obesity. When paired with behavior-based programs, the panel concluded, the drugs are more effective than participating in the program alone, at least for 12 to 18 months. But the panel also noted that some of the medications have adverse side effects and that there's limited research data on weight loss medications and how well they work over the long term.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group's main recommendation, though, remains the same: If patients are obese, their physicians should refer them to behavior-based weight loss programs or offer their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sounds simple, right? Not exactly, says, \u003ca href=\"https://www.med.upenn.edu/apps/faculty/index.php/g275/p8557190\">Chyke Doubeni\u003c/a>, a University of Pennsylvania primary care physician and professor of family medicine and community health who's on the USPSTF.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Affordable Care Act requires insurance providers to cover all recommended preventive services.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \"the evidence suggests that primary care doctors are not talking to their patients about obesity and not offering them the services that could be helpful in losing weight and maintaining physical fitness,\" Doubeni tells NPR's Allison Aubrey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ashley Mason, a behavioral psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco's \u003ca href=\"http://www.beelab.ucsf.edu/\">Biology and Experience of Eating Lab\u003c/a>, says the reason might be time. \"Those 14-minute visits with your [primary care physician] aren't enough time for everything,\" she says. And whenever a patient leaves their doctor's office without a plan for addressing obesity, they remain at risk for developing negative health outcomes like diabetes and hypertension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For \u003ca href=\"https://brownschool.wustl.edu/Faculty-and-Research/Pages/Debra-Haire-Joshu.aspx\">Debra Haire-Joshu\u003c/a>, who directs the Center for Obesity Prevention and Policy Research at Washington University in St. Louis, the challenge is how to put the recommendations into practice. In an \u003ca href=\"http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/10.1001/jamainternmed.2018.5259\">editorial\u003c/a> published concurrently in \u003cem>JAMA Internal Medicine\u003c/em>, she argues that the recommendations don't necessarily match up with how primary care physicians practice medicine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Primary care doctors shouldn't feel like they have to go it alone when it comes to counseling obese patients, she says. Instead, they should refer these patients to others in the health community — like dietitians, lifestyle coaches and psychologists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We know what works,\" says Haire-Joshu. \"Now we've got to find a way to deliver something better than what we're doing right now.\" \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Doctors+Should+Send+Obese+Patients+To+Diet+Counseling%2C+Panel+Says.+But+Many+Don%27t&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A visit to your primary care physician may focus on your headaches or that achy back. But if your body mass index is over 30, a panel of national experts says, it should also include a referral to an intensive weight-loss program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That's the latest recommendation of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of national experts in disease and public health that advises primary care physicians on best practices. The group \u003ca href=\"https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2702878\">published\u003c/a> an evidence review and the recommendation in the \u003cem>Journal of the American Medical Association\u003c/em> on Tuesday.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The recommendation is identical to one made in 2012, with a few key differences. The first is the evidence: Thanks to 83 new studies published since the last recommendation, the panel is even more convinced that intensive weight loss programs — ones that last between one and two years — work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What's \"intensive\"? Most programs studied lasted between one and two years and focused on changing both dietary intake and physical activity. Though the programs used different strategies for behavior change, most encouraged patients to self-monitor their weight and provided tools to help maintain weight loss, like scales, pedometers, or exercise videos. Counseling was a part of most programs, and most involved 12 or more sessions in the first year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2012, the panel also assessed all five medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration for long-term management of obesity. When paired with behavior-based programs, the panel concluded, the drugs are more effective than participating in the program alone, at least for 12 to 18 months. But the panel also noted that some of the medications have adverse side effects and that there's limited research data on weight loss medications and how well they work over the long term.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The group's main recommendation, though, remains the same: If patients are obese, their physicians should refer them to behavior-based weight loss programs or offer their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sounds simple, right? Not exactly, says, \u003ca href=\"https://www.med.upenn.edu/apps/faculty/index.php/g275/p8557190\">Chyke Doubeni\u003c/a>, a University of Pennsylvania primary care physician and professor of family medicine and community health who's on the USPSTF.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Affordable Care Act requires insurance providers to cover all recommended preventive services.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But \"the evidence suggests that primary care doctors are not talking to their patients about obesity and not offering them the services that could be helpful in losing weight and maintaining physical fitness,\" Doubeni tells NPR's Allison Aubrey.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ashley Mason, a behavioral psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco's \u003ca href=\"http://www.beelab.ucsf.edu/\">Biology and Experience of Eating Lab\u003c/a>, says the reason might be time. \"Those 14-minute visits with your [primary care physician] aren't enough time for everything,\" she says. And whenever a patient leaves their doctor's office without a plan for addressing obesity, they remain at risk for developing negative health outcomes like diabetes and hypertension.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For \u003ca href=\"https://brownschool.wustl.edu/Faculty-and-Research/Pages/Debra-Haire-Joshu.aspx\">Debra Haire-Joshu\u003c/a>, who directs the Center for Obesity Prevention and Policy Research at Washington University in St. Louis, the challenge is how to put the recommendations into practice. In an \u003ca href=\"http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/10.1001/jamainternmed.2018.5259\">editorial\u003c/a> published concurrently in \u003cem>JAMA Internal Medicine\u003c/em>, she argues that the recommendations don't necessarily match up with how primary care physicians practice medicine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Primary care doctors shouldn't feel like they have to go it alone when it comes to counseling obese patients, she says. Instead, they should refer these patients to others in the health community — like dietitians, lifestyle coaches and psychologists.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We know what works,\" says Haire-Joshu. \"Now we've got to find a way to deliver something better than what we're doing right now.\" \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Doctors+Should+Send+Obese+Patients+To+Diet+Counseling%2C+Panel+Says.+But+Many+Don%27t&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Food Safety Scares Are Up In 2018. Here's Why You Shouldn't Freak Out",
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"content": "\u003cp>https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/me/2018/09/20180910_me_food_safety_scares_are_up_in_2018_heres_why_you_shouldnt_freak_out.mp3\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Matt Arteaga, 51, is one of about \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/cyclosporiasis/outbreaks/2018/b-071318/index.html\">500 people who got sick this summer in an outbreak linked to McDonald's salads\u003c/a>. The cause was a parasite, cyclospora.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arteaga fell ill on a Thursday afternoon in June. He was in his office in Danville, Ill., when he says the symptoms came on quickly. \"The chills, and body aches, severe cramping, sharp pain in my stomach,\" Arteaga recalls. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp> After a test revealed he was infected with cyclospora, his case was reported to the Illinois Department of Public Health. At about the same time, there was \"an uptick in reports of cyclospora that were being submitted to us,\" the director of the department, Dr. \u003ca href=\"http://www.dph.illinois.gov/about-ipdh\">Nirav Shah\u003c/a>, told us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To figure out what the source of the cyclospora might be, health department investigators asked Arteaga — and others who'd gotten sick — to make a list of every food they'd eaten before they fell ill. Arteaga says he used bank records to jog his memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I pay with my debit card all the time. [I] just went through every restaurant [transaction] in the two weeks prior to getting sick,\" he recalls. \"I had a salad at McDonald's three times.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When many of the others sickened by cyclospora also reported they'd eaten salads at the chain, Shah says his department took action. They notified the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other public health agencies in nearby states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We got on the phone with McDonald's and advised them of what we recommended, and made sure we notified the public immediately,\" Shah says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McDonald's \u003ca href=\"http://news.mcdonalds.com/media-statements/our-food-details/statement-on-salads-illness\">halted sales of salads at about 3,000 locations\u003c/a> until it could switch to a different lettuce supplier. An FDA analysis \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/cyclosporiasis/outbreaks/2018/b-071318/index.html\">confirmed the presence of cyclospora\u003c/a> in an unused package of lettuce that had been distributed to to the chain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, is this a success story? An example of quick coordination and detective work by public health agencies to identify and halt an outbreak before it grew bigger? Or, is it evidence of the risks that exist in the food supply?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It's both.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twenty years ago, this outbreak may have been hidden. \"It's unlikely we would have detected this outbreak, because \u003ca href=\"https://www.biofiredx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/PRESS_RELEASE-BioFire___s_FilmArray___Gastrointestinal_Panel_Receives_FDA_Clearance_05052014.pdf\">the test that doctors use to diagnose cyclospora\u003c/a> wasn't even approved by the FDA until May of 2014,\" Shah told us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back then, Arteaga and others may have chalked up their sicknesses to a stomach bug and moved on. Earlier tests for cyclospora were more complicated and less reliable. And testing for cyclospora wasn't automatic — a clinician had to suspect the parasite and specifically request testing for it. What's more, older testing methods required visual inspection of a stool sample, and sometimes multiple stool specimens, to find the parasite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the tests yield quick results — within an hour or two — and can detect many common pathogens at once.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Technology has been a game changer for foodborne outbreaks,\" Shah says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, perhaps not surprisingly, diagnoses of cyclospora are up. In Illinois, there were 47 cases in 2017, compared with just two cases in 2012.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \"We're now in a situation where people know, if I go to my doctor I can get tested, I can get a diagnosis,\" Shah says. And when these foodborne illnesses are reported to health authorities, \"we can actually link up what's going on.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to better testing for pathogens, detection of outbreaks has improved, too. \"We've seen a great advance in the methodologies that we use for detecting foodborne outbreaks,\" says \u003ca href=\"https://foodscience.psu.edu/directory/egd100\">Edward Dudley\u003c/a>, an associate professor of food science at Penn State.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He points to the use of a technique known as whole genome sequencing to help detect a l\u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/listeria/outbreaks/ice-cream-03-15/index.html\">isteria outbreak linked to Blue Bell \u003c/a>brand ice cream.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There were only 10 individuals that were ever linked to the outbreak. The first one became ill in 2010 and the last one [became ill] in 2015,\" explains Dudley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, how did scientists figure out these 10 cases were all connected to Blue Bell's ice cream products? After all, there were hundreds of other cases of listeria sicknesses from other foods during that time period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whole genome sequencing allows scientists to produce high-resolution DNA fingerprints of the organisms under investigation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The advantage of whole genome sequencing is that it gives us a lot more information when we're trying to tell whether an organism we isolate from a food is the same exact [organism] that we isolate from the individuals who became ill,\" says Dudley. In outbreaks, scientists are looking for a direct match.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Older technology gives only a few dozen data points, Dudley says. \"Whereas whole genome sequencing is giving us 4 to 5 million pieces of data\" to make the match.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>With Improved Detection Comes Perception of More Risk\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>So, this takes us back to a key question. Since we tend to hear more about foodborne illness outbreaks, there's a perception that the risk has gone up. But, is our food supply any more or less safe than it used to be? All the experts I spoke with had similar answers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There's really no evidence that our food supply is more unsafe than it has been in the past,\" Dudley told us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This view is echoed by Nirav Shah. \"Our food system today is probably the safest it's ever been in history of the United States,\" he told us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has weighed in as well. In a statement last June he wrote, \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm612187.htm\">We believe food is safer than perhaps ever before\u003c/a>.\" He went on: \"What's happening is that our ability to identify outbreaks has dramatically improved due to new information technologies and laboratory techniques.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, though it may seem like a paradox, even as the CDC investigates lots of multi-state outbreaks, by many accounts our food supply is no less safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another thing that adds to the perception of risk: We hear about recalls — even when they're not linked to illness. Take for example, the recent Goldfish cracker recall. In this case there were no sicknesses linked to the cracker. However, the manufacturer of an ingredient used in some varieties of Goldfish found salmonella in its facility. So, Pepperidge Farm, out of an abundance of caution, \u003ca href=\"https://www.pepperidgefarm.com/goldfishupdate/\">voluntarily recalled four varieties of \u003cem>Goldfish \u003c/em>crackers\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another example: Kraft Heinz \u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm614642.htm\">recalled\u003c/a> its Taco Bell brand of queso from stores because of a risk of botulism. No illnesses were linked to the product, but jars showed signs of separation, which could create the conditions for the bacteria that causes botulism to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When you look at the overall number of people getting sick from foodborne illness in the U.S., it's relatively stable. From year to year, the numbers vary some, but \"the overall picture is that we're not seeing a large increase in the number of people getting sick,\" says \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/dfwed/orpb/index.html\">Matt Wise\u003c/a> of the CDC's outbreak response and prevention branch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, there seems to be an increase in outbreaks this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"You can't question that this year's been a, sort of, bumper year. We've had a lot of outbreaks that have been detected and investigated,\" says Wise. \"So, we'll have to wait and see whether this becomes a new normal, or whether this just happened to be a blip on the radar.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, of course, there's still plenty of room for improvement when it comes to food safety. The CDC estimates that about \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html\">1 in 6 people get a foodborne illnesses each year\u003c/a>. That equates to millions of sicknesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, Matt Arteaga says the cyclospora infection took its toll. His GI distress lasted for weeks. He has hired a lawyer who is \u003ca href=\"https://www.spiroslaw.com/tag/mcdonalds-cyclospora/\">considering legal action\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Food+Safety+Scares+Are+Up+In+2018.+Here%27s+Why+You+Shouldn%27t+Freak+Out&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "From Romaine lettuce to McDonald's salads, Goldfish crackers and Taco Bell queso, we hear more about food recalls and outbreaks. But many experts say our food supply is as safe as ever.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Matt Arteaga, 51, is one of about \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/cyclosporiasis/outbreaks/2018/b-071318/index.html\">500 people who got sick this summer in an outbreak linked to McDonald's salads\u003c/a>. The cause was a parasite, cyclospora.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Arteaga fell ill on a Thursday afternoon in June. He was in his office in Danville, Ill., when he says the symptoms came on quickly. \"The chills, and body aches, severe cramping, sharp pain in my stomach,\" Arteaga recalls. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp> After a test revealed he was infected with cyclospora, his case was reported to the Illinois Department of Public Health. At about the same time, there was \"an uptick in reports of cyclospora that were being submitted to us,\" the director of the department, Dr. \u003ca href=\"http://www.dph.illinois.gov/about-ipdh\">Nirav Shah\u003c/a>, told us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To figure out what the source of the cyclospora might be, health department investigators asked Arteaga — and others who'd gotten sick — to make a list of every food they'd eaten before they fell ill. Arteaga says he used bank records to jog his memory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"I pay with my debit card all the time. [I] just went through every restaurant [transaction] in the two weeks prior to getting sick,\" he recalls. \"I had a salad at McDonald's three times.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When many of the others sickened by cyclospora also reported they'd eaten salads at the chain, Shah says his department took action. They notified the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other public health agencies in nearby states.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"We got on the phone with McDonald's and advised them of what we recommended, and made sure we notified the public immediately,\" Shah says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McDonald's \u003ca href=\"http://news.mcdonalds.com/media-statements/our-food-details/statement-on-salads-illness\">halted sales of salads at about 3,000 locations\u003c/a> until it could switch to a different lettuce supplier. An FDA analysis \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/cyclosporiasis/outbreaks/2018/b-071318/index.html\">confirmed the presence of cyclospora\u003c/a> in an unused package of lettuce that had been distributed to to the chain.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, is this a success story? An example of quick coordination and detective work by public health agencies to identify and halt an outbreak before it grew bigger? Or, is it evidence of the risks that exist in the food supply?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It's both.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Twenty years ago, this outbreak may have been hidden. \"It's unlikely we would have detected this outbreak, because \u003ca href=\"https://www.biofiredx.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/PRESS_RELEASE-BioFire___s_FilmArray___Gastrointestinal_Panel_Receives_FDA_Clearance_05052014.pdf\">the test that doctors use to diagnose cyclospora\u003c/a> wasn't even approved by the FDA until May of 2014,\" Shah told us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Back then, Arteaga and others may have chalked up their sicknesses to a stomach bug and moved on. Earlier tests for cyclospora were more complicated and less reliable. And testing for cyclospora wasn't automatic — a clinician had to suspect the parasite and specifically request testing for it. What's more, older testing methods required visual inspection of a stool sample, and sometimes multiple stool specimens, to find the parasite.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, the tests yield quick results — within an hour or two — and can detect many common pathogens at once.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Technology has been a game changer for foodborne outbreaks,\" Shah says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, perhaps not surprisingly, diagnoses of cyclospora are up. In Illinois, there were 47 cases in 2017, compared with just two cases in 2012.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> \"We're now in a situation where people know, if I go to my doctor I can get tested, I can get a diagnosis,\" Shah says. And when these foodborne illnesses are reported to health authorities, \"we can actually link up what's going on.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In addition to better testing for pathogens, detection of outbreaks has improved, too. \"We've seen a great advance in the methodologies that we use for detecting foodborne outbreaks,\" says \u003ca href=\"https://foodscience.psu.edu/directory/egd100\">Edward Dudley\u003c/a>, an associate professor of food science at Penn State.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He points to the use of a technique known as whole genome sequencing to help detect a l\u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/listeria/outbreaks/ice-cream-03-15/index.html\">isteria outbreak linked to Blue Bell \u003c/a>brand ice cream.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There were only 10 individuals that were ever linked to the outbreak. The first one became ill in 2010 and the last one [became ill] in 2015,\" explains Dudley.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, how did scientists figure out these 10 cases were all connected to Blue Bell's ice cream products? After all, there were hundreds of other cases of listeria sicknesses from other foods during that time period.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whole genome sequencing allows scientists to produce high-resolution DNA fingerprints of the organisms under investigation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The advantage of whole genome sequencing is that it gives us a lot more information when we're trying to tell whether an organism we isolate from a food is the same exact [organism] that we isolate from the individuals who became ill,\" says Dudley. In outbreaks, scientists are looking for a direct match.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Older technology gives only a few dozen data points, Dudley says. \"Whereas whole genome sequencing is giving us 4 to 5 million pieces of data\" to make the match.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>With Improved Detection Comes Perception of More Risk\u003c/h3>\n\u003cp>So, this takes us back to a key question. Since we tend to hear more about foodborne illness outbreaks, there's a perception that the risk has gone up. But, is our food supply any more or less safe than it used to be? All the experts I spoke with had similar answers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"There's really no evidence that our food supply is more unsafe than it has been in the past,\" Dudley told us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This view is echoed by Nirav Shah. \"Our food system today is probably the safest it's ever been in history of the United States,\" he told us.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp> FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has weighed in as well. In a statement last June he wrote, \"\u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm612187.htm\">We believe food is safer than perhaps ever before\u003c/a>.\" He went on: \"What's happening is that our ability to identify outbreaks has dramatically improved due to new information technologies and laboratory techniques.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, though it may seem like a paradox, even as the CDC investigates lots of multi-state outbreaks, by many accounts our food supply is no less safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another thing that adds to the perception of risk: We hear about recalls — even when they're not linked to illness. Take for example, the recent Goldfish cracker recall. In this case there were no sicknesses linked to the cracker. However, the manufacturer of an ingredient used in some varieties of Goldfish found salmonella in its facility. So, Pepperidge Farm, out of an abundance of caution, \u003ca href=\"https://www.pepperidgefarm.com/goldfishupdate/\">voluntarily recalled four varieties of \u003cem>Goldfish \u003c/em>crackers\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another example: Kraft Heinz \u003ca href=\"https://www.fda.gov/Safety/Recalls/ucm614642.htm\">recalled\u003c/a> its Taco Bell brand of queso from stores because of a risk of botulism. No illnesses were linked to the product, but jars showed signs of separation, which could create the conditions for the bacteria that causes botulism to grow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When you look at the overall number of people getting sick from foodborne illness in the U.S., it's relatively stable. From year to year, the numbers vary some, but \"the overall picture is that we're not seeing a large increase in the number of people getting sick,\" says \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/ncezid/dfwed/orpb/index.html\">Matt Wise\u003c/a> of the CDC's outbreak response and prevention branch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, there seems to be an increase in outbreaks this year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"You can't question that this year's been a, sort of, bumper year. We've had a lot of outbreaks that have been detected and investigated,\" says Wise. \"So, we'll have to wait and see whether this becomes a new normal, or whether this just happened to be a blip on the radar.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, of course, there's still plenty of room for improvement when it comes to food safety. The CDC estimates that about \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/foodborneburden/index.html\">1 in 6 people get a foodborne illnesses each year\u003c/a>. That equates to millions of sicknesses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the meantime, Matt Arteaga says the cyclospora infection took its toll. His GI distress lasted for weeks. He has hired a lawyer who is \u003ca href=\"https://www.spiroslaw.com/tag/mcdonalds-cyclospora/\">considering legal action\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Food+Safety+Scares+Are+Up+In+2018.+Here%27s+Why+You+Shouldn%27t+Freak+Out&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Fad Or The Future? Robot-Made Burgers Wow The Crowds In San Francisco",
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"content": "\u003cp>An audience gathers around the transparent 14-foot-long \"culinary instrument\" in a restaurant called \u003ca href=\"http://creator.rest/\" target=\"_blank\">Creator\u003c/a> in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brioche buns are sliced, buttered and toasted by paddles moving like waves in the ocean. They land in specially designed, compostable hamburger boxes. The buns are topped with fresh produce, sourced from local farms, which is sliced on the spot. Cheese is shredded from blocks and added. The in-machine meat grinder has been calibrated to vertically align the meat with diner's incisors. The 4.5-ounce beef patties are ground from brisket and cooked using the induction method, both sides at once, then slid into the boxes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the fumes from cooking? They are cleaned inside the machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sleek hamburger-producing machine, featuring organic curves and copper detail, fits in perfectly with Creator's airy 2,200 square-foot space, white walls and high ceiling. It attracted a waitlist this summer for its bi-weekly lunches, and will open full time in September. It fits with the city as well — the restaurant is just two miles away from where the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI lab recently tested a \u003ca href=\"https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611724/artificial-intelligence-driven-robot-hand-spends-a-hundred-years-teaching-itself-to-rotate/\" target=\"_blank\">robot hand named Dactyl\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130152\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1708px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b.jpg\" alt=\"A Creator Burger fresh out of the robot that toasted the buns, sliced the produce, shredded the cheese, and cooked the beef.\" width=\"1708\" height=\"1280\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130152\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b.jpg 1708w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-160x120.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-800x600.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-768x576.jpg 768w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-1020x764.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-1200x899.jpg 1200w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-1180x884.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-960x719.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-240x180.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-375x281.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1708px) 100vw, 1708px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Creator Burger fresh out of the robot that toasted the buns, sliced the produce, shredded the cheese, and cooked the beef. \u003ccite>(Saroyan Humphrey)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Creator's parent company is a culinary robotics firm founded by 33-year-old Alex Vardakostas, who grew up in the burger business in Southern California. \"I really got going on the griddle when I was like 14, 15,\" says Vardakostas, whose family owns the two Orange County \u003ca href=\"http://asburgersrestaurant.com\" target=\"_blank\">A's Burgers\u003c/a> locations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The inspiration struck Vardakostas while he was a junior at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying physics. He woke up at 4 a.m. with the idea for a robot-made burger. \"A lot of people don't talk about this or realize it, but it is incredibly unhealthy — inhaling grease-laden vapors and soot all day. So that was this really exciting idea for me, where I could just have this beautiful instrument and I could take control of it,\" says Vardakostas. (The World Health Organization has \u003ca href=\"https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/8676/Select_pollutants_guidelines.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y\" target=\"_blank\">identified\u003c/a> a number of hazardous compounds released into the air by cooking, and while many oven hoods in \u003ca href=\"https://www.ijsr.net/archive/v5i10/ART20162453.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">commercial\u003c/a> and residential kitchens filter some of the bad stuff out, some do a \u003ca href=\"https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/8676/Select_pollutants_guidelines.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y\" target=\"_blank\">better job\u003c/a> than others.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Vardakostas has focused on creating a healthier work environment and developing a better way to make high-quality food at a reasonable price. Four years after he had his bot-burger vision, he built his first hamburger-making robot in his childhood garage. \"I would drive up to Menlo Park and get machine parts at TechShop and drive all the way back down to Orange County and hope they fit together and try to make it work,\" he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A move to San Francisco and a collaboration with 32-year-old Steve Frehn, now Creator's co-founder and COO, led to the second rendition of the burger machine. Now on version four, the machine, comprised of food-safe plastic tubes and over 350 sensors run by software and 20 computers, is fully operational. It is stocked with carefully sourced produce, bread and meat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Bordow, 32, culinary lead and experience designer, emphasizes the importance of quality and carefully chosen seasonal ingredients. \"The philosophy is, 'Let's find the best stuff that is available,' \" he says. The beef is antibiotic- and hormone-free, sourced from \u003ca href=\"https://www.countrynaturalbeef.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Country Natural Beef\u003c/a>, a family ranch owned co-op.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Creator, there's more to the staff than just a robot. All burger sides are human-made. The obligatory fries are on the menu, along with seasonal salads and vegetables.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are currently four kinds of burgers, including the Tumami, created by \u003cem>Top Chef\u003c/em>'s Tu David Phu, which features an oyster aioli and shiitake mushroom sauce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually, customers will get to control how much sauce and seasonings they want the robot to add. \"The nice thing about using a machine is that it's very precise, so if someone has a sodium limit, or something like that, we can track that sort of thing and provide a little customization,\" says Frehn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a city of pricy \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/30/634086689/bubble-tea-sellers-say-plastic-straw-ban-won-t-be-good-for-business\" target=\"_blank\">boba drinks\u003c/a> and marked up avocado toast, Vardakostas says Creator's mission is to improve food quality and make it accessible. Burgers are $6. \"We want everyone to be able to partake,\" he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Word is spreading. Los Angeles-based high school student Moses Rosales heard about Creator on YouTube and convinced his mom and aunt to dine there during a two-day trip to the Bay Area. \"It was amazing to see how a robot made a burger,\" Rosales says. \"I didn't know how far you could go with it. Now I'm seeing it's a really high-end burger.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For now, Creator is the only home to two burger-making robotic machines, although Frehn says they hope to expand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the ground floor of the San Francisco building that's also home to offices for Microsoft and Riverbed, approximately 10 Creator staffers worked the soft-launch lunch shift this summer. Employees, who start at $16 an hour, are allowed to spend 5 percent of their time on the clock reading or learning a new skill. Bookstore-style \"staff picks\" fill the three bookshelves, with titles including Alice Waters' \u003cem>The Art of Simple Food\u003c/em> and Michael Pollan's \u003cem>The\u003c/em> \u003cem>Omnivore's Dilemma.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Creator is focused on the service and culinary side of the business, too. \"We've been pretty firm about not having an automated ordering process, with kiosks or something like that,\" says Vardakostas. \"So we have people, and that costs us money. But at the end of the day, that makes for a better guest experience and it's a more human-centered restaurant.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Creator is not the only restaurant to feature a food-making robot while also making an effort to retain its humanity. \u003ca href=\"https://cafexapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Cafe X\u003c/a> has three San Francisco locations. Each features a robotic coffee-making arm that can produce drinks in 30 to 40 seconds. Customers retrieve their beverages by punching in a texted code sent to their phone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Opal Franklin, a recent college grad working at the Market Street Cafe X location, walks the small space on a Friday afternoon\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong> She offers customers and curiosity-seekers oat milk samples before explaining, \"Often times people say that we take away barista jobs, but we in a sense shift the job. The robot is very precise and it's very practical, so we have a product specialist on site to answer questions and help people out and make it more humanistic.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While still in their early days, culinary robots are starting to pop up beyond San Francisco. In nearby Silicon Valley, \u003ca href=\"https://zumepizza.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Zume Pizza\u003c/a> delivers pies pressed by a \"Doughbot\" in nine seconds. Across the pond in Paris, startup \u003ca href=\"https://ekim.fr/\" target=\"_blank\">Ekim\u003c/a> has created a three-armed robot that makes pizzas from start to finish. On the East Coast, four MIT grads opened \u003ca href=\"https://www.spyce.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Spyce\u003c/a> in Boston in May, which features robotic tumbling woks that create customized bowls, under the culinary direction of renowned French chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the culinary robotics show at Creator wows, this isn't a novelty to the team. \"We put a lot of care and effort into making sure this would have a positive effect on consumers,\" says Frehn. \"And we worked to create a better retail job as well.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Fad+Or+The+Future%3F+Robot-Made+Burgers+Wow+The+Crowds+In+San+Francisco&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>An audience gathers around the transparent 14-foot-long \"culinary instrument\" in a restaurant called \u003ca href=\"http://creator.rest/\" target=\"_blank\">Creator\u003c/a> in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brioche buns are sliced, buttered and toasted by paddles moving like waves in the ocean. They land in specially designed, compostable hamburger boxes. The buns are topped with fresh produce, sourced from local farms, which is sliced on the spot. Cheese is shredded from blocks and added. The in-machine meat grinder has been calibrated to vertically align the meat with diner's incisors. The 4.5-ounce beef patties are ground from brisket and cooked using the induction method, both sides at once, then slid into the boxes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the fumes from cooking? They are cleaned inside the machine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sleek hamburger-producing machine, featuring organic curves and copper detail, fits in perfectly with Creator's airy 2,200 square-foot space, white walls and high ceiling. It attracted a waitlist this summer for its bi-weekly lunches, and will open full time in September. It fits with the city as well — the restaurant is just two miles away from where the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI lab recently tested a \u003ca href=\"https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611724/artificial-intelligence-driven-robot-hand-spends-a-hundred-years-teaching-itself-to-rotate/\" target=\"_blank\">robot hand named Dactyl\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130152\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1708px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b.jpg\" alt=\"A Creator Burger fresh out of the robot that toasted the buns, sliced the produce, shredded the cheese, and cooked the beef.\" width=\"1708\" height=\"1280\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130152\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b.jpg 1708w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-160x120.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-800x600.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-768x576.jpg 768w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-1020x764.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-1200x899.jpg 1200w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-1180x884.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-960x719.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-240x180.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-375x281.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/1808_creator_-shumphreyphoto_9371-09d2899532dbbf0716d1d5a87ace84ed3797fb0b-520x390.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1708px) 100vw, 1708px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A Creator Burger fresh out of the robot that toasted the buns, sliced the produce, shredded the cheese, and cooked the beef. \u003ccite>(Saroyan Humphrey)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Creator's parent company is a culinary robotics firm founded by 33-year-old Alex Vardakostas, who grew up in the burger business in Southern California. \"I really got going on the griddle when I was like 14, 15,\" says Vardakostas, whose family owns the two Orange County \u003ca href=\"http://asburgersrestaurant.com\" target=\"_blank\">A's Burgers\u003c/a> locations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The inspiration struck Vardakostas while he was a junior at the University of California, Santa Barbara, studying physics. He woke up at 4 a.m. with the idea for a robot-made burger. \"A lot of people don't talk about this or realize it, but it is incredibly unhealthy — inhaling grease-laden vapors and soot all day. So that was this really exciting idea for me, where I could just have this beautiful instrument and I could take control of it,\" says Vardakostas. (The World Health Organization has \u003ca href=\"https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/8676/Select_pollutants_guidelines.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y\" target=\"_blank\">identified\u003c/a> a number of hazardous compounds released into the air by cooking, and while many oven hoods in \u003ca href=\"https://www.ijsr.net/archive/v5i10/ART20162453.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">commercial\u003c/a> and residential kitchens filter some of the bad stuff out, some do a \u003ca href=\"https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/8676/Select_pollutants_guidelines.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y\" target=\"_blank\">better job\u003c/a> than others.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since then, Vardakostas has focused on creating a healthier work environment and developing a better way to make high-quality food at a reasonable price. Four years after he had his bot-burger vision, he built his first hamburger-making robot in his childhood garage. \"I would drive up to Menlo Park and get machine parts at TechShop and drive all the way back down to Orange County and hope they fit together and try to make it work,\" he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A move to San Francisco and a collaboration with 32-year-old Steve Frehn, now Creator's co-founder and COO, led to the second rendition of the burger machine. Now on version four, the machine, comprised of food-safe plastic tubes and over 350 sensors run by software and 20 computers, is fully operational. It is stocked with carefully sourced produce, bread and meat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>David Bordow, 32, culinary lead and experience designer, emphasizes the importance of quality and carefully chosen seasonal ingredients. \"The philosophy is, 'Let's find the best stuff that is available,' \" he says. The beef is antibiotic- and hormone-free, sourced from \u003ca href=\"https://www.countrynaturalbeef.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Country Natural Beef\u003c/a>, a family ranch owned co-op.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Creator, there's more to the staff than just a robot. All burger sides are human-made. The obligatory fries are on the menu, along with seasonal salads and vegetables.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are currently four kinds of burgers, including the Tumami, created by \u003cem>Top Chef\u003c/em>'s Tu David Phu, which features an oyster aioli and shiitake mushroom sauce.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Eventually, customers will get to control how much sauce and seasonings they want the robot to add. \"The nice thing about using a machine is that it's very precise, so if someone has a sodium limit, or something like that, we can track that sort of thing and provide a little customization,\" says Frehn.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a city of pricy \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/30/634086689/bubble-tea-sellers-say-plastic-straw-ban-won-t-be-good-for-business\" target=\"_blank\">boba drinks\u003c/a> and marked up avocado toast, Vardakostas says Creator's mission is to improve food quality and make it accessible. Burgers are $6. \"We want everyone to be able to partake,\" he says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Word is spreading. Los Angeles-based high school student Moses Rosales heard about Creator on YouTube and convinced his mom and aunt to dine there during a two-day trip to the Bay Area. \"It was amazing to see how a robot made a burger,\" Rosales says. \"I didn't know how far you could go with it. Now I'm seeing it's a really high-end burger.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For now, Creator is the only home to two burger-making robotic machines, although Frehn says they hope to expand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the ground floor of the San Francisco building that's also home to offices for Microsoft and Riverbed, approximately 10 Creator staffers worked the soft-launch lunch shift this summer. Employees, who start at $16 an hour, are allowed to spend 5 percent of their time on the clock reading or learning a new skill. Bookstore-style \"staff picks\" fill the three bookshelves, with titles including Alice Waters' \u003cem>The Art of Simple Food\u003c/em> and Michael Pollan's \u003cem>The\u003c/em> \u003cem>Omnivore's Dilemma.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Creator is focused on the service and culinary side of the business, too. \"We've been pretty firm about not having an automated ordering process, with kiosks or something like that,\" says Vardakostas. \"So we have people, and that costs us money. But at the end of the day, that makes for a better guest experience and it's a more human-centered restaurant.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Creator is not the only restaurant to feature a food-making robot while also making an effort to retain its humanity. \u003ca href=\"https://cafexapp.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Cafe X\u003c/a> has three San Francisco locations. Each features a robotic coffee-making arm that can produce drinks in 30 to 40 seconds. Customers retrieve their beverages by punching in a texted code sent to their phone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Opal Franklin, a recent college grad working at the Market Street Cafe X location, walks the small space on a Friday afternoon\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong> She offers customers and curiosity-seekers oat milk samples before explaining, \"Often times people say that we take away barista jobs, but we in a sense shift the job. The robot is very precise and it's very practical, so we have a product specialist on site to answer questions and help people out and make it more humanistic.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While still in their early days, culinary robots are starting to pop up beyond San Francisco. In nearby Silicon Valley, \u003ca href=\"https://zumepizza.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Zume Pizza\u003c/a> delivers pies pressed by a \"Doughbot\" in nine seconds. Across the pond in Paris, startup \u003ca href=\"https://ekim.fr/\" target=\"_blank\">Ekim\u003c/a> has created a three-armed robot that makes pizzas from start to finish. On the East Coast, four MIT grads opened \u003ca href=\"https://www.spyce.com/\" target=\"_blank\">Spyce\u003c/a> in Boston in May, which features robotic tumbling woks that create customized bowls, under the culinary direction of renowned French chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While the culinary robotics show at Creator wows, this isn't a novelty to the team. \"We put a lot of care and effort into making sure this would have a positive effect on consumers,\" says Frehn. \"And we worked to create a better retail job as well.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Anna Mantzaris is a San Francisco-based writer.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Fad+Or+The+Future%3F+Robot-Made+Burgers+Wow+The+Crowds+In+San+Francisco&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"disqusTitle": "Beer, Drinking Water And Fish: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere",
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"content": "\u003cp>Plastic trash is littering the land and fouling rivers and oceans. But what we can see is only a small fraction of what's out there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since modern plastic was first mass-produced, \u003ca href=\"https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-07/uog-sct071417.php\">8 billion tons\u003c/a> have been manufactured. And when it's thrown away, it doesn't just disappear. Much of it crumbles into small pieces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists call the tiny pieces \"microplastics\" and define them as objects smaller than 5 millimeters — about the size of one of the letters on a computer keyboard. Researchers started to pay serious attention to microplastics in the environment about 15 years ago. They're in oceans, rivers and lakes. They're also in soil. Recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/search?query=joyce%20plastic&page=1\">research\u003c/a> in Germany found that fertilizer made from composted household waste contains microplastics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, even more concerning, microplastics are in drinking water. \u003ca href=\"http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0194970#sec023\">In beer\u003c/a>. In sea salt. In \u003ca href=\"http://www.expeditionmed.eu/fr/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/02/Van-Cauwenberghe-2014-microplastics-in-cultured-shellfish1.pdf\">fish and shellfish\u003c/a>. How microplastics get into animals is something of a mystery, and \u003ca href=\"https://rochmanlab.com/people/\">Chelsea Rochman\u003c/a> is trying to solve it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rochman is an ecologist at the University of Toronto. She studies how plastic works its way into the food chain, from tiny plankton to fish larvae to fish, including fish we eat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says understanding how plastic gets into fish matters not just to the fish, but to us. \"We eat fish that eat plastic,\" she says. \"Are there things that transfer to the tissue? Does the plastic itself transfer to the tissue? Do the chemicals associated with the plastic transfer to the tissue?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130127\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-1-3788df03f392dd729423409c777db92a036554cc-e1534786746868.jpg\" alt=\"Bucci uses a microscope to look at a fathead minnow larva that has ingested plastic particles.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1440\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130127\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bucci uses a microscope to look at a fathead minnow larva that has ingested plastic particles. \u003ccite>(Chris Joyce/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Rochman says she has always loved cleaning up. She remembers how, as a 6-year-old, she puzzled her parents by volunteering to clean the house.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In high school in Arizona she got even more ambitious. \"I used to take my friends into the desert and clean up a mile of trash every Earth Day,\" she says. \"I remember finding weird old dolls and strange old toys that I thought were creepy, but that I would also keep.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a graduate student, she landed a spot on a research vessel to visit the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/22/596142560/the-trash-patch-in-the-pacific-is-many-times-bigger-than-we-thought\">infamous floating garbage patch\u003c/a> in the Pacific Ocean. She and the other scientists on the trip were supposed to count the plastic as it drifted by.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She remembers the moment they sailed into the patch, \"Everyone runs up to the bow and says, 'There's trash, there's trash, everyone start counting the trash.' And so we all start counting the trash.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But something was wrong. \"We're looking and it's, like, basically a soup of confetti, of tiny little plastic bits everywhere,\" she remembers. \"Everyone just stops counting. [They] sat there, their backs up against the wall and said, 'OK, this is a real issue, [and it's] not an island of trash you can pick up.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To Rochman, a third thing was also clear: \"The tiny stuff, for me as an ecologist, this is really getting into the food chain. You could spend a career studying this stuff.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So she did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130125\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-5_enl-8a99c5bafed71a9aa9accbc7ca91115b34c6041b-e1534786704166.jpg\" alt=\"Microplastics found along Lake Ontario by Rochman's team\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1928\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130125\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Microplastics found along Lake Ontario by Rochman's team \u003ccite>(Chris Joyce/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A world of plastic\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A typical day for Rochman might start alongside sparkling Lake Ontario, where parks line the shore and joggers and picnickers enjoy the shoreline scenery. The lake, however, hides a mostly invisible menace.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To see it, Rochman's student, Kennedy Bucci, brings us to an inlet that's ankle-deep in washed-up debris. An apartment building looms overhead. They squat down, reach into the muck and quickly find what they're looking for. \"I'm digging and just finding more and more,\" Rochman says. \"Like whole bottle caps. This is insane.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's so ingrained in the soil,\" says Bucci.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She comes here regularly to collect plastic for Rochman's research. They work quickly, filling a jar with bits of plastic. Rochman, who's not wearing gloves, inadvertently picks up something she wishes she hadn't. \"Oh!\" she laughs, flinging it aside. \"That's why you've got gloves on,\" she tells Bucci, and then gets right back to digging.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since she started studying microplastics, Rochman has found them in the outflow from sewage treatment plants. And they've \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/06/600174922/another-place-plastics-are-turning-up-organic-fertilizer-from-food-waste\">shown up\u003c/a> in insects, worms, clams, fish and birds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130128\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1496px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430.jpg\" alt=\"Rochman's scientific team drops a net into a stream in Toronto to collect tiny floating pieces of plastic.\" width=\"1496\" height=\"1992\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130128\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430.jpg 1496w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-160x213.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-800x1065.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-768x1023.jpg 768w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-1020x1358.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-901x1200.jpg 901w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-1180x1571.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-960x1278.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-240x320.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-375x499.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-520x692.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1496px) 100vw, 1496px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rochman's scientific team drops a net into a stream in Toronto to collect tiny floating pieces of plastic. \u003ccite>(Chris Joyce/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>To study how that happens, Bucci makes her own microplastics from the morning's collection. She takes a postage stamp-size piece of black plastic from the jar, and grinds it into particles using a coffee grinder. \"So this is the plastic that I feed to the fish,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The plastic particles go into beakers of water containing fish larvae from fathead minnows, the test-animals of choice in marine toxicology. Tanks full of them line the walls of the lab.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bucci uses a pipette to draw out a bunch of larvae that have already been exposed to these ground-up plastic particles. The larva's gut is translucent. We can see right into it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"You can see kind of a line of black, weirdly shaped black things,\" she points out. \"Those are the microplastics.\" The larva has ingested them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rochman says microplastic particles can sicken or even kill larvae and fish in their experiments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plastic can also get into fish tissue, particularly plastic fibers from clothing such as fleece. Rochman found fleece fibers in fish from San Francisco Bay. She also looked in fish from Indonesia, a tropical country whose residents are not known for dressing in fleece. She \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14340\">found plastic\u003c/a> in Indonesian fish guts, but no fibers, suggesting that fish bodies tell a story about what kind of plastic resides in local waters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rochman took this line of research a step further when she bought a washing machine for her lab and washed fleece clothing. Lots of plastic fibers came out in the filter she added to collect the wastewater. In fact, she has found microplastics floating in the air. \"If you put a piece of double-sided sticky tape on a lab bench for an hour, you come back and it's got four plastic fibers on it,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Resilient, durable and potentially dangerous\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most plastic is inert; it does not readily react chemically with other substances, and that's one reason it has been so successful. Plastic is resilient, durable and doesn't easily degrade. It's a vital part of medical equipment and has revolutionized packaging, especially food storage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, over time, plastic can break down and shed the chemicals that make it useful, such as \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/Phthalates_FactSheet.html\">phthalates\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/sya-bpa/index.cfm\">bisphenol A\u003c/a>. These substances are\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>common in the environment and their effects on human health are of concern to public health scientists and advocates, but few large-scale, definitive studies have been done. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plastic also \u003ca href=\"http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1526\">attracts other chemicals\u003c/a> in the water that latch onto it, including toxic industrial compounds like polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Plastic becomes a chemical Trojan horse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130129\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1500px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7.jpg\" alt=\"Researcher Kennedy Bucci collects plastics from the shore of Lake Ontario in Toronto.\" width=\"1500\" height=\"2000\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130129\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7.jpg 1500w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-160x213.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-900x1200.jpg 900w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-1180x1573.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-960x1280.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-240x320.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-375x500.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-520x693.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Researcher Kennedy Bucci collects plastics from the shore of Lake Ontario in Toronto. \u003ccite>(Chris Joyce/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Tracking all those chemicals is researcher Clara Thaysen's job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Right now we're starting with the common types of plastic, so polyethylene, polypropylene [and] polystyrene,\" she explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"But, there's...\" she pauses and sighs. \"There's tons.\" Plastic comes in many forms, with a wide variety of chemical additives depending on how the plastic is used. What happens to plastic over decades just hasn't been studied deeply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"This happens all the time,\" says Thaysen. \"We invent something that seems really great and ... we don't think and we become so dependent on it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rochman notes that this kind of research is relatively new; most of the environmental studies on microplastics have come out within the past 10 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The things we don't know,\" she says, are daunting. \"What are all the sources where it's coming from, so that we can think about where to turn it off? And once it gets in the ocean, where does it go? Which is super-important because then we can understand how it impacts wildlife and humans.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says she's ready to spend the rest of her career finding out. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2018 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Beer%2C+Drinking+Water+And+Fish%3A+Tiny+Plastic+Is+Everywhere&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Plastic trash less than 5 millimeters long is in the things we eat and drink, and the air we breathe. Scientists are just beginning to study where it comes from and how it might affect our health.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Plastic trash is littering the land and fouling rivers and oceans. But what we can see is only a small fraction of what's out there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since modern plastic was first mass-produced, \u003ca href=\"https://eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-07/uog-sct071417.php\">8 billion tons\u003c/a> have been manufactured. And when it's thrown away, it doesn't just disappear. Much of it crumbles into small pieces.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scientists call the tiny pieces \"microplastics\" and define them as objects smaller than 5 millimeters — about the size of one of the letters on a computer keyboard. Researchers started to pay serious attention to microplastics in the environment about 15 years ago. They're in oceans, rivers and lakes. They're also in soil. Recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/search?query=joyce%20plastic&page=1\">research\u003c/a> in Germany found that fertilizer made from composted household waste contains microplastics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, even more concerning, microplastics are in drinking water. \u003ca href=\"http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0194970#sec023\">In beer\u003c/a>. In sea salt. In \u003ca href=\"http://www.expeditionmed.eu/fr/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2015/02/Van-Cauwenberghe-2014-microplastics-in-cultured-shellfish1.pdf\">fish and shellfish\u003c/a>. How microplastics get into animals is something of a mystery, and \u003ca href=\"https://rochmanlab.com/people/\">Chelsea Rochman\u003c/a> is trying to solve it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rochman is an ecologist at the University of Toronto. She studies how plastic works its way into the food chain, from tiny plankton to fish larvae to fish, including fish we eat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She says understanding how plastic gets into fish matters not just to the fish, but to us. \"We eat fish that eat plastic,\" she says. \"Are there things that transfer to the tissue? Does the plastic itself transfer to the tissue? Do the chemicals associated with the plastic transfer to the tissue?\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130127\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-1-3788df03f392dd729423409c777db92a036554cc-e1534786746868.jpg\" alt=\"Bucci uses a microscope to look at a fathead minnow larva that has ingested plastic particles.\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1440\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130127\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bucci uses a microscope to look at a fathead minnow larva that has ingested plastic particles. \u003ccite>(Chris Joyce/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Rochman says she has always loved cleaning up. She remembers how, as a 6-year-old, she puzzled her parents by volunteering to clean the house.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In high school in Arizona she got even more ambitious. \"I used to take my friends into the desert and clean up a mile of trash every Earth Day,\" she says. \"I remember finding weird old dolls and strange old toys that I thought were creepy, but that I would also keep.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As a graduate student, she landed a spot on a research vessel to visit the \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/22/596142560/the-trash-patch-in-the-pacific-is-many-times-bigger-than-we-thought\">infamous floating garbage patch\u003c/a> in the Pacific Ocean. She and the other scientists on the trip were supposed to count the plastic as it drifted by.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She remembers the moment they sailed into the patch, \"Everyone runs up to the bow and says, 'There's trash, there's trash, everyone start counting the trash.' And so we all start counting the trash.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But something was wrong. \"We're looking and it's, like, basically a soup of confetti, of tiny little plastic bits everywhere,\" she remembers. \"Everyone just stops counting. [They] sat there, their backs up against the wall and said, 'OK, this is a real issue, [and it's] not an island of trash you can pick up.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To Rochman, a third thing was also clear: \"The tiny stuff, for me as an ecologist, this is really getting into the food chain. You could spend a career studying this stuff.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So she did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130125\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 1920px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-5_enl-8a99c5bafed71a9aa9accbc7ca91115b34c6041b-e1534786704166.jpg\" alt=\"Microplastics found along Lake Ontario by Rochman's team\" width=\"1920\" height=\"1928\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130125\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Microplastics found along Lake Ontario by Rochman's team \u003ccite>(Chris Joyce/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>A world of plastic\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A typical day for Rochman might start alongside sparkling Lake Ontario, where parks line the shore and joggers and picnickers enjoy the shoreline scenery. The lake, however, hides a mostly invisible menace.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To see it, Rochman's student, Kennedy Bucci, brings us to an inlet that's ankle-deep in washed-up debris. An apartment building looms overhead. They squat down, reach into the muck and quickly find what they're looking for. \"I'm digging and just finding more and more,\" Rochman says. \"Like whole bottle caps. This is insane.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"It's so ingrained in the soil,\" says Bucci.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She comes here regularly to collect plastic for Rochman's research. They work quickly, filling a jar with bits of plastic. Rochman, who's not wearing gloves, inadvertently picks up something she wishes she hadn't. \"Oh!\" she laughs, flinging it aside. \"That's why you've got gloves on,\" she tells Bucci, and then gets right back to digging.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since she started studying microplastics, Rochman has found them in the outflow from sewage treatment plants. And they've \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/04/06/600174922/another-place-plastics-are-turning-up-organic-fertilizer-from-food-waste\">shown up\u003c/a> in insects, worms, clams, fish and birds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130128\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1496px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430.jpg\" alt=\"Rochman's scientific team drops a net into a stream in Toronto to collect tiny floating pieces of plastic.\" width=\"1496\" height=\"1992\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130128\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430.jpg 1496w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-160x213.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-800x1065.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-768x1023.jpg 768w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-1020x1358.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-901x1200.jpg 901w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-1180x1571.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-960x1278.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-240x320.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-375x499.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-2_enl-2b570f6c97d4a88c63f65f89dae84fd53f7c3430-520x692.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1496px) 100vw, 1496px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Rochman's scientific team drops a net into a stream in Toronto to collect tiny floating pieces of plastic. \u003ccite>(Chris Joyce/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>To study how that happens, Bucci makes her own microplastics from the morning's collection. She takes a postage stamp-size piece of black plastic from the jar, and grinds it into particles using a coffee grinder. \"So this is the plastic that I feed to the fish,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The plastic particles go into beakers of water containing fish larvae from fathead minnows, the test-animals of choice in marine toxicology. Tanks full of them line the walls of the lab.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bucci uses a pipette to draw out a bunch of larvae that have already been exposed to these ground-up plastic particles. The larva's gut is translucent. We can see right into it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"You can see kind of a line of black, weirdly shaped black things,\" she points out. \"Those are the microplastics.\" The larva has ingested them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rochman says microplastic particles can sicken or even kill larvae and fish in their experiments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plastic can also get into fish tissue, particularly plastic fibers from clothing such as fleece. Rochman found fleece fibers in fish from San Francisco Bay. She also looked in fish from Indonesia, a tropical country whose residents are not known for dressing in fleece. She \u003ca href=\"https://www.nature.com/articles/srep14340\">found plastic\u003c/a> in Indonesian fish guts, but no fibers, suggesting that fish bodies tell a story about what kind of plastic resides in local waters.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rochman took this line of research a step further when she bought a washing machine for her lab and washed fleece clothing. Lots of plastic fibers came out in the filter she added to collect the wastewater. In fact, she has found microplastics floating in the air. \"If you put a piece of double-sided sticky tape on a lab bench for an hour, you come back and it's got four plastic fibers on it,\" she says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Resilient, durable and potentially dangerous\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most plastic is inert; it does not readily react chemically with other substances, and that's one reason it has been so successful. Plastic is resilient, durable and doesn't easily degrade. It's a vital part of medical equipment and has revolutionized packaging, especially food storage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, over time, plastic can break down and shed the chemicals that make it useful, such as \u003ca href=\"https://www.cdc.gov/biomonitoring/Phthalates_FactSheet.html\">phthalates\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://www.niehs.nih.gov/health/topics/agents/sya-bpa/index.cfm\">bisphenol A\u003c/a>. These substances are\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>common in the environment and their effects on human health are of concern to public health scientists and advocates, but few large-scale, definitive studies have been done. \u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Plastic also \u003ca href=\"http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/364/1526\">attracts other chemicals\u003c/a> in the water that latch onto it, including toxic industrial compounds like polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs. Plastic becomes a chemical Trojan horse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_130129\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\" style=\"max-width: 1500px\">\u003cimg src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/bayareabites/wp-content/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7.jpg\" alt=\"Researcher Kennedy Bucci collects plastics from the shore of Lake Ontario in Toronto.\" width=\"1500\" height=\"2000\" class=\"size-full wp-image-130129\" srcset=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7.jpg 1500w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-160x213.jpg 160w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-800x1067.jpg 800w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-768x1024.jpg 768w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-1020x1360.jpg 1020w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-900x1200.jpg 900w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-1180x1573.jpg 1180w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-960x1280.jpg 960w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-240x320.jpg 240w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-375x500.jpg 375w, https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/24/2018/08/micro-plastics-4_enl-3afcc42d56bf847e94d477e8225f08d9b2065fd7-520x693.jpg 520w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1500px) 100vw, 1500px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Researcher Kennedy Bucci collects plastics from the shore of Lake Ontario in Toronto. \u003ccite>(Chris Joyce/NPR)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Tracking all those chemicals is researcher Clara Thaysen's job.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"Right now we're starting with the common types of plastic, so polyethylene, polypropylene [and] polystyrene,\" she explains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"But, there's...\" she pauses and sighs. \"There's tons.\" Plastic comes in many forms, with a wide variety of chemical additives depending on how the plastic is used. What happens to plastic over decades just hasn't been studied deeply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"This happens all the time,\" says Thaysen. \"We invent something that seems really great and ... we don't think and we become so dependent on it.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rochman notes that this kind of research is relatively new; most of the environmental studies on microplastics have come out within the past 10 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\"The things we don't know,\" she says, are daunting. \"What are all the sources where it's coming from, so that we can think about where to turn it off? And once it gets in the ocean, where does it go? Which is super-important because then we can understand how it impacts wildlife and humans.\"\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
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"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
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"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
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"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
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"id": "code-switch-life-kit",
"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
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"meta": {
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"source": "WNYC"
},
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
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},
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"id": "fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"hidden-brain": {
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
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"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
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"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
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"meta": {
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"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
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"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
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