by Jeff Sovern Here (behind paywall). Excerpt: The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show. The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and […]
Category Archives: Food and Nutrition
Andrew Cheyne, Pamela Mejia, Laura Nixon, and Lori Dorfman, all of the Berkeley Media Studies Group, have written Food and Beverage Marketing to Youth, Current Obesity Reports, September 2014. Here's the abstract: After nearly a decade of concern over the role of food and beverage marketing to youth in the childhood obesity epidemic, American children […]
Here. A TV comic excursion into the law of supplements (HT: Charles Shafer).
by Deepak Gupta Should a defendant in a consumer fraud class action be able to defeat certification through evidence that its customers say they are "satisfied," even when the the allegation is that the product is snake oil? Or would that transform the placebo effect into a defense to fraud? That's the question the Ninth […]
Chipotle is causing a stir with an evocative new video: A silent scarecrow working in a foodlike-substance factory grows dismayed by the treatment of animals while Fiona Apple croons a haunting reinterpretion of "Pure Imagination" from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Soon, the scarecrow has an epiphany. He strikes out on his own and opens a food stand […]
Lewis A. Grossman of American has written FDA and the Rise of the Empowered Consumer. Here's the abstract: This paper traces the historical evolution of a view of consumers as informed, rational, and rights-bearing decision makers, and the corresponding diminution of FDA’s role as a paternalistic gatekeeper acting in conjunction with medical and scientific experts […]
by Jeff Sovern Mark Bittman has an interesting column in today’s Times, My Dream Food Label, describing how his ideal food label would use traffic lights–green, yellow, or red– to signal qualities such as the healthfulness of the food. Though Bittman doesn’t mention the health department restaurant grading system, which uses letter grades, it’s a […]
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