How problematic are food deserts?

Not very according to this piece in Slate:

Unfortunately, more fresh food closer to home likely does nothing for folks at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Obesity levels don’t drop when low-income city neighborhoods have or get grocery stores. A 2011 study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine showed no connection between access to grocery stores and more healthful diets using 15 years’ worth of data from more than 5,000 people in five cities. One 2012 study showed that the local food environment did not influence the diet of middle-school children in California. Another 2012 study, published inSocial Science and Medicine, used national data on store availability and a multiyear study of grade-schoolers to show no connection between food environment and diet. And this month, a study in Health Affairs examined one of the Philadelphia grocery stores that opened with help from the Fresh Food Financing Initiative. The authors found that the store had no significant impact on reducing obesity or increasing daily fruit and vegetable consumption in the four years since it opened.

and

Earlier research suggesting that better fresh-food access improves diet and would therefore improve the health of people living in poverty was drawn from small samples or looked at store availability in narrow geographical slices—often without information about how or where the people who lived there shopped. “They never link the neighborhood characteristics to actual individuals,” explains Helen Lee, author of the Social Science and Medicine study. “Without that, all you have is speculation.”

Lee also notes in her study that, on closer inspection, food deserts don’t actually exist in the U.S., at least not as a national problem—on average, poor neighborhoods have more grocery stores than wealthier neighborhoods.

The writer concludes on a note which which I agree.  The real issue here probably isn't access to fruits and veggies.  These are simply symptoms of a larger problem.  Poverty.  Alas, solving the problem of poverty is no easier or no less complex than solving the problem of obesity.  But, if you could made headway on poverty, I'd argue people would have a greater incentive to consider their own future health outcomes.  

Big Food = Big Tobacco?

From Politico:

Lawyers are pitching state attorneys general in 16 states with a radical idea: make the food industry pay for soaring obesity-related health care costs.

It’s a move straight from the playbook of the Big Tobacco takedown of the 1990s, which ended in a $246 billion settlement with 46 states, a ban on cigarette marketing to young people and the Food and Drug Administration stepping in to regulate.

Who is behind the action?

McDonald’s [not be be confused with the food company by the same name] law firm has allied with a number of well-known obesity and diabetes researchers, including Barry Popkin at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Robert Lustig at the University of California San Francisco and economist Frank Chaloupka at the University of Illinois at Chicago, to help hash out the strategy. . . . “We need policy to change,” said Lustig, who recently got a law degree and launched a nonprofit to continue his advocacy. “I think we’re going to have to battle [the food industry] like we battled tobacco.”

Some are skeptical:

James Tierney, director of the National State Attorneys General Program at Columbia Law School and former attorney general of Maine, laughed when asked about the proposal.

“It’s just not going to happen,” said Tierney, who noted that tobacco companies lied about the health effects of their products for decades. “The food industry doesn’t deny that eating lots of food causes obesity.”

Others are cynical:

The proposal drew ire, in part, because it would rely on a contingency fee agreement, which allows a private firm to do legal work for attorneys general offices in exchange for a cut of the settlement. It’s an increasingly common practice because it allows cash-strapped AG offices to tackle expensive litigation without taking as much risk.

“Pay-to-play relationships between [plaintiff’s attorneys and attorneys general] that exchange campaign contributions for lucrative government lawsuit contracts mean the food industry has a big target on its back,” said Lisa Rickard, president of the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform

February 2014 Food Demand Survey (FooDS)

The latest release of the monthly Food Demand Survey (FooDS) is now up.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the Super Bowl earlier this month, consumer willingness-to-pay (WTP) for chicken wings was up 11% this month.  Consumers also appear to be poised to spend more on food away from home this month compared to previous months.  

We repeated a question we asked last month on trust in information about meat and livestock from different sources.  

In particular, we asked, “How trustworthy is information about meat and livestock from the following sources?” Fifteen sources were listed (the order randomly varied across respondents), and respondents had to place five sources in the most trustworthy category and five sources in the least trustworthy category. A scale of importance was created by calculating the proportion of times a meat and livestock information source as ranked most trustworthy minus the proportion of times it was ranked least trustworthy.

This month, we added a question asking how much people knew about each source of potential information (on a 1 to 5 scale).  When you combine those two, the following emerges

People have a high level of trust and knowledge of federal regulatory agencies (USDA and FDA).  Although people say they know companies like McDonald's and Tyson, they place a lower level of relative trust in information about meat and livestock from them.  The New York Times, University professors, and Chipotle have relatively low trust and low knowledge.  

Interestingly, being more familiar with a source does not appear to make one more or less likely to trust the source (the correlation between the two measures is almost zero at 0.03).  

I suppose, as an organization, the "ideal" place to be on this graph is to be highly trusted and well known.  What if an organization wants to become more trustworthy?  I suspect that's harder to do for entities that are already well known - like McDonald's or Tyson.  Plus, anytime one has a vested interest in an outcome, their information is unlikely to be as credible as sources with no (apparent) conflict of interest.  That's why it surprises me a bit University professors don't score a bit higher on the trust scale. Maybe people just don't think we know much about meat and livestock (but that's why I picked two Universities that were likely to differ in this regard).  A lot of open questions here. 

What Message is General Mills Sending with Cheerios?

Julie Gunlock had an interesting editorial in the USA Today on General Mills decision to go "GMO free" with Cheerios.  She points out the tough pickle food companies are finding themselves in:

It is understandable that food companies are desperate to find a way to please their critics and reach détente with the powerful anti-GM movement. Yet, it appears these companies have settled on a strategy combining meek contrition (we're sorry we use perfectly safe GM ingredients) and appeasement (we'll get rid of perfectly safe GM ingredients in some…but not all…products). This squishy and schizophrenic policy will accomplish one thing: it will make the problem much worse.

For starters, while General Mills publicly states on its website that the company agrees with the wide consensus among scientists that GM ingredients are safe, the change to Cheerios sends a very different message to consumers: We've made the product safer. Do they mean to suggest Cheerios was previously unsafe.

From a business standpoint, by suggesting Cheerios has been made safer, the company puts its other products — those that still contain GM ingredients — in a bad light. The company might be spinning this as providing consumers more choices, but organic cereals (which cannot contain GM ingredients) have been available for years. Cheerios is hardly breaking ground.

I'm not sure I'd expect food companies to make a principled stand for scientific evidence when they could make money doing otherwise.  However, as Julie points out, it isn't even all that clear that this move is in the long-term best economic interest of the company even if it does cause a quick, short term bump in market share. 

What causes obesity?

According to Gary Taubes, writing in the New York Times Sunday Review, we don't really know.

I agree.

Here is Taubes:

Here’s another possibility: The 600,000 articles — along with several tens of thousands of diet books — are the noise generated by a dysfunctional research establishment. Because the nutrition research community has failed to establish reliable, unambiguous knowledge about the environmental triggers of obesity and diabetes, it has opened the door to a diversity of opinions on the subject, of hypotheses about cause, cure and prevention, many of which cannot be refuted by the existing evidence. Everyone has a theory. The evidence doesn’t exist to say unequivocally who’s wrong.

and

One lesson of science, though, is that if the best you can do isn’t good enough to establish reliable knowledge, first acknowledge it — relentless honesty about what can and cannot be extrapolated from data is another core principle of science — and then do more, or do something else. As it is, we have a field of sort-of-science in which hypotheses are treated as facts because they’re too hard or expensive to test, and there are so many hypotheses that what journalists like to call “leading authorities” disagree with one another daily.

If I'm not mistaken, Taubes is leading an effort to raise funds to experimentally test his conjecture  (related to effects of sugars and other carbs) about a cause of obesity.  He has written persuasively about his views, but rather than leaving it at that, he's putting his money where his mouth is, and using scientific experiments to test his theory.  Good for him.