Legislators potentially stall changes to dietary recommendations

An appropriations bill in the House of Representatives was passed out of the agricultural subcommittee last week.  It contained the following language:

“None of the funds made available by this Act may be used to release or implement the final version of the eighth edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, revised pursuant to section 301 of the National Nutrition Monitoring and Related Research Act of 1990 (7 20 U.S.C. 5341), unless the Secretary of Agriculture and the Secretary of Health and Human Services comply with each of the following requirements:
(1) Each revision to any nutritional or dietary information or guideline contained in the 2010 edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and any new nutritional or dietary information or guide line to be included in the eighth edition of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans—
(A) shall be based on scientific evidence that has been rated ‘‘Grade I: Strong’’ by the 6 grading rubric developed by the Nutrition Evidence Library of the Department of Agriculture; and
(B) shall be limited in scope to only matters of diet and nutrient intake. ”

Not surprisingly, the move has raised the ire of some nutritionists.  Here's one who pushes back by saying

“The type of studies that could produce “Grade 1: Strong” evidence is extremely difficult to do in nutrition science research, because of the realities of studying free-living human beings”

and

“It makes no sense to use different standards for existing recommendations than for new recommendations. ”

So, because it is too hard to get good evidence that goes beyond correlational analysis, we should be permitted to continue to use the voice of the government to promote weak evidence and advise millions of people how to eat?  And, because we've used weak science in the past, we should continue to to use it now?  

I'd ask many of these same people if drug companies should be able to get approval from the FDA for a new drug based on the same types of studies being used to make nutritional recommendations?  If the issue here is standards of scientific evidence, why the different bars of scientific scrutiny in one case vs. the other?

I'm sympathetic to the nutritionist's concerns about politics affecting science, and I don't have a position one way or the other on aforementioned language in the appropriations bill (which may or may not make into law).  Nonetheless, there is a presumption implicit in many arguments that support the recommendations that the scientists are relying on good, compelling scientific evidence.  But, they are people too, after all, as are our elected officials.  Moreover, as I've pointed out before with regard to these guidelines, there is as much value judgement going on here as there is science.  Another challenge is that the authors of the guidelines seem to presume that people will follow - precisely - the recommendations to a tee (rather than, say, substituting meat for more carbs) and will ignore cost implications, but this misses insights from behavioral research on how people will actually respond and substitute.  Most people won't follow the precise recommendations and that should be taken into consideration by the recommendation makers. The fact that we citizens are "free-living humans beings" not only makes the research hard, it should give us pause in expecting too much of high minded regulation.  

How do USDA and EPA regulations affect farm profitability and productivity?

In a new working paper by Levi Russel, John Crespi, and Michael Langemeier, the authors create indices of the amount of regulation affecting farmers and study the extent to which such regulation affect profit and productivity growth.  

They write: 

“This paper examines the effect of USDA and EPA regulation on state-level farm performance from 1997 to 2012. The degree to which each agency regulated the agricultural sector was measured by total regulatory spending for each agency and by an index of regulatory restrictions in the Code of Federal Regulations. Two measures of farm performance were used: profitability and productivity growth. The data used to calculate profitability and productivity growth include state-level revenue and expenses data on crops, livestock, forestry, and other agricultural outputs taken from the USDA-ARMS database.

Effects of regulation are found to differ across measures of regulation and farm performance. When regulation is measured by regulatory spending, USDA regulation has a negative effect on both productivity growth whereas EPA regulation positively impacts both profitability and productivity growth. When regulatory restrictions are used to measure regulation, USDA and EPA regulations have a statistically significant, negative effect on profitability and productivity growth. The effects on profitability are measurably smaller than those on productivity growth.”

The take home:

“Productivity growth is likely to be a better measure of farm performance than
profitability . . . we find cumulative reductions in productivity growth over the 1997-2012 period of 19.94% and 25.92% due to growth in USDA and EPA regulation, respectively. It is important to note that these are reductions in the growth rate of productivity,
not its level.”

Jurassic World

On Father's day, we had a family outing to see the new movie Jurassic World, which set box office sales records when it was released about a week ago.  

It was an entertaining flick with some good visuals and graphics.  But, I also couldn't help seeing part of the film as an implicit critique against genetically modified food.  There is one scene where one of the bad guys is discussing the new transgenic beast they've created, and his dialog was almost verbatim from the talking points from pro-biotech groups.  A couple comments I remember him saying (though these aren't exact quotes)  were things like "nothing's natural here" and "we've been genetically modifying things since the beginning".  

In many ways the new animal they created reminds me much more of what might happen from mutagenesis (a technique widely practice in plant breeding for many decades and is NOT regulated as biotechnology, in which seeds are exposed to radiation or chemicals to cause mutations).  The reason I say that is  mutagenesis could cause several possible (and unexpected) genetic changes, which is exactly what happened with the dinosaur.  By contrast,  transgenic (or intragenic) biotechnology typically involves moving one gene from one species (or within a species) to another, in cases where it is well understood what the particular gene does.  

What the movie described as occurring with the dinosaur was pretty far flung as far as the genetics go. It was asserted that because the dinosaur had genes from a certain frog it could take on not only the intended frog-characteristic but also other frog-like characteristics, even supernatural type camouflaging that avoided heat sensing.   

In any event, one of the ironies of the move is (SPOILER ALERT) that the new genetically engineered beast is (partially) defeated by the evil genetic villains of the first movie - the velociraptors.  The story's hero has learned to train and communicate with the velociraptors.  So maybe the final lesson the movie makers are trying to get across isn't that all biotechnology is bad - just that we should sure we know how to control the technology to affect good ends.  

Alas, I doubt that's the lesson the millions of movie goers will take home.  Rather, they're more likely left with the impression that genetic modification is a dangerous, uncontrollable technology used by evil capitalists just to make a buck.  Even though there are hundreds of scientists trying to communicate with the public on this issue, they rarely (never?) have such an audience like this movie will draw.

Or, maybe I'm just reading too much in to it.  My kids were thoroughly entertained, and when I asked them what lessons they learned from the movie, neither mentioned anything remotely related to GMOs.  

Local Foods on Stossel Show

Here's a slice of my interview with Stossel about local food that they released on YouTube (which I presume means this portion of the interview got cut from what will appear later tonight on Fox Business).  

Assorted Links

• Friday at 7pm cst I'll be on Fox Business with John Stossel.  He asked me about veganism, Meatless Monday, gluten-free, organic, local, and Beyonce.  Try tackling all that in 5 minutes!
• I suspect most of you have already seen the FDA's final decision was released that will essentially ban transfats.  This article worries about the potential slippery slope set by this precedent.
• Steven Savage writes in Forbes about his concerns over the future of the food supply.   I'd be curious to see more research on his claims about "brain drain" in agriculture and about effects of "absentee" owners.
• Effects of bird flu being felt on egg prices