Marion Nestle's Food Politics

Not quite. I'm a lobbyist in the health care industry, and policy related to alcohol and tobacco are designed to meet a very different policy goal from over the counter medications. The latter is a can of worms beyond the scope of this but let's narrow to alcohol and tobacco.

First, alcohol is not as highly regulated as you might think. The contents of the bottle are not strongly regulated, and producers are actually forbidden under the law from listing the ingredients on the bottle.[3] How do you know you're drinking true vodka, and not a mixture of grain alcohol or something worse? Without testing there is no way to find out, and the government doesn't do that unless there is a strong reason to do so. The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau regulates the label, they regulate those labels a LOT, but along with advertising that's about it.[4] The rest of alcohol regulation is devoted to keeping it away from those under 21, with some PSA's on pregnancy, alcoholism, etc.

Tobacco is almost as highly regulated. Science has proven, more than we can count, and completely indisputable, that tobacco use leads to serious, life threatening health concerns.[5] The best policy position to take on tobacco is to ban it, but they don't.[6] The next best thing would be to set standards that limit the chemicals in tobacco.[0][8] They don't. (Incidentally tobacco products weren’t even regulated by the FDA until 2009)[8] This leaves regulation on packaging, advertising [7], where you…

I tend to just pay attention roughly to what I eat, and not eat foods that are generally bad for me/empty calories. However on some days I'll consume twice the amount of "recommended daily calories" for an adult my size. Yet I remain an 140lb adult male.

There are no hard/fast rules for calorie consumption, and I don't believe a calorie counter will help. In-fact, it is the precise quantification of food that leads to poor diets/eating habits.

EDIT: My fear is that focusing on only a small part of nutrition will further harm the nutrition of individuals. If we place too much attention on calories other things can be overlooked such as vital fats and acids or minerals. I'm trying to make the case that increased awareness and education of food and the human diet/nutrition is more important than counting calories. As someone points out below, there are many situations where calories are not labeled. In my case, I'm aware of what food is decent, and what food is junk and this allows me to forgo strict quantification of the food I consume. I know that food from most food chains is generally junk. This extends beyond the nutrition of the food as well. Food chains typically source their food from the cheapest distributors, and these are often the same distributors that end up distributing massive quantities of contaminated foods.

Here's another case. I could potentially consume 5 sodas in a single day and remain under my caloric restriction, but I would have consumed a ton of…

> Also, patronizing. And quite possibly mistaken.

Perhaps I was unclear. It was my intention to point out two things. First, that the base ingredient grains we eat now are a great deal different from what was regularly consumed in 1914. Second that our sources of grains are more likely to be prepackaged foods containing ingredients that were very uncommon in 1914. This was done as a means of pointing out a significant logical fallacy in the original article.

Seems like we've got some scope mismatch here. I very specifically want to point out that what goes into a loaf of bread now is not the same as what went into a loaf of bread in 1914. Fine white flour (and sugar) were still somewhat dear around the turn of the century. It's no surprise that a dishonest baker would extend it with chalk. The less close you were to the city, the more dear they were or the more likely you were to grow your own or do without. I made the assumption that most people would eat more coarse bread. Just for kicks, I looked up the ingredients of three different brands of bread. The main ingredient was, indeed, flour. Typically followed by HCFS, water, yeast and less than 2% of stuff like barley malt, soybean oil, diglycerides, and guar gum. Thus I am willing to accept "exaggerated" over "wrong" -- while I was writing, my frustration over the afore-mentioned ingredients in DAIRY products was foremost in my mind. If you haven't already read it, I recommend _Food Politics_ by Marion Nestle.…

It isn't the American Medical Association which I'm referring to, but rather the American Heart Association. From the parent's source:

> The DGAC used the 2013 American Heart Association/American College of Cardiology (AHA/ACC) report on lifestyle management to reduce CVD risk for its evaluation of saturated fat intake. The DGAC concurred with the AHA/ACC report that saturated fat intake exceeds current recommendations in the United States and that lower levels of consumption would further reduce the population level risk of CVD.

The cited work is http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/129/25_suppl_2/S76.long

This page explains it well - http://www.pcrm.org/nbBlog/index.php/new-dietary-guidelines-the-good-the-bad-and-the-downright-confusing

> The report suggested that cholesterol in foods is not a major danger, contrasting with the Institute of Medicine, which found that cholesterol in foods does indeed raise blood cholesterol levels, especially in people whose diets are modest in cholesterol to start with. On this topic, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee did no original research and instead deferred to a 2014 report by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology. However, the American Heart Association receives substantial cash payments for certifying food products, including cholesterol-containing food products as “heart healthy,” creating a financial incentive for discounting the relationship between dietary cholesterol and serum…

You can find the original paper at http://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/HFCS_Rats_10.pdf.

The statistics are a bit confusing to me, but it looks like they only find a significant difference for males over 8 weeks, not females over 7 months. The "significant" difference for males seems pretty small given that the rats started out weighing between 300 and 375 grams. And the conclusion doesn't mention sucrose at all:

In summary, rats maintained on a diet rich in HFCS for 6 or 7 months show abnormal weight gain, increased circulating TG and augmented fat deposition. All of these factors indicate obesity. Thus, over-consumption of HFCS could very well be a major factor in the “obesity epidemic,” which correlates with the upsurge in the use of HFCS.

Does anyone know if these results have been replicated anywhere?

All those studies are as shady as the studies that used to promote cigarettes as healthy. There is enough evidence out there to the contrary, including recent studies :
http://www.atherosclerosis-journal.com/article/S0021-9150(12)00504-7/abstract

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(84)92168-8/abstract

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/25/6/589.abstract

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199112123252405#t=articleTop

The current rehabilitation of cholesterol is about politics :
http://www.foodpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2015-08-24-How-the-Egg-Industry-Fooled-America_AutumnGM.docx
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/102/2/235.extract

http://time.com/4225819/eggs-nutrition-egg-yolk/ ( 2016 )