Happy Friday and welcome to Food Fix! I’m in Bellingham, Wash., where it’s been in the 70s and sunny with no humidity and very few mosquitos – so basically, heaven. (I love D.C., but not in August!)
Food Fix on air: Last week, I wrote about how universal free school meals have been catapulted into the election discourse – and that trend has only accelerated. I was interviewed on this phenomenon for “The Briefing with Steve Scully” on SiriusXM and on “America Tonight” with Maritsa Georgiou for Scripps News.
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Alright, let’s get to it –
Helena
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FDA takes another crack at cutting sodium across the food supply
The FDA on Thursday issued a fresh batch of voluntary sodium reduction goals for the food industry – an effort to help consumers eat less sodium and prevent thousands of cardiovascular deaths each year.
Zooming out: The targets unveiled this week across more than 150 food categories (think pizza, pickles, bread, etc.) are a bit stricter than what FDA laid out in an initial set of reduction goals in 2021. An important thing to remember here, however, is that the government’s effort to nudge food makers to cut sodium out of their products has been extremely slow. As I’ve flagged in Food Fix and previously at Politico, it’s now been more than a decade since FDA first embarked on this path of voluntary sodium reduction – and this effort ultimately came decades after consumer advocates asked the agency to do so.
The targets: If met, the FDA’s initial set of short-term targets (AKA “phase one”) would decrease a consumer’s average sodium intake from 3,400 to 3,000 milligrams per day. Those targets were supposed to fully “kick in” by April 2024. This new set of targets, or “phase two,” aims for a further reduction: down to 2,750 milligrams of sodium per day. Notably, that’s still higher than the 2,300 milligrams per day recommended by the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
“Reducing sodium in the food supply has the potential to be one of the most important public health initiatives in a generation,” said Jim Jones, FDA deputy commissioner for human foods. “The FDA’s sodium reduction and other nutrition initiatives are central to a broader, whole-of-government approach to help reduce the burden of diet-related chronic diseases and advance health equity.”
Is this approach working? Along with these new targets, FDA on Thursday also issued its first-ever progress report on how all of this goal-setting is going. (As I reported last fall, we previously had no idea whether FDA’s voluntary approach was working.) The agency’s progress report was light on details, but it said overall 40 percent of food categories are meeting or within 10 percent of the phase one targets. The agency called this a sign of “early success.”
FDA’s preliminary assessment compares data from 2022 to a 2010 baseline (back when the agency started this whole process). It divides its 163 food categories with sodium targets into two broad groups: packaged food categories and restaurant food categories. While the agency has yet to analyze post-2022 data – these phase one targets were due to be achieved by April 2024 – the results so far show that some parts of the food industry are doing a much better job of reducing sodium than others.
Tale of two sectors: Between packaged food and restaurant food, the former is the clear winner. More than 60 percent of packaged food categories cut sodium, nearly a third of which decreased their sodium content by more than 10 percent, per the assessment. However, the report doesn’t provide any insight on the individual packaged food categories, so we don’t know what’s performing well and what needs some work. The report also indicates 25 percent saw increases in sodium, though it doesn’t specify by how much.
The FDA does offer more data on what it calls overarching food categories, some of which include both packaged and restaurant foods. Toddler and baby food, for example, got the gold medal. The report shows that 100 percent of toddler and baby food categories saw sodium reductions. More than two-thirds of both the dairy and cereal food categories also decreased sodium, per the report.
The laggards: Nearly 50 percent of all restaurant food categories saw overall increases in sodium content in their products from 2022 to 2010. Of the 35 percent of restaurant food categories that did achieve sodium reductions, 40 percent of them decreased by more than 10 percent. (The agency studied packaged food labels, restaurant menus and sales data to conduct its assessment.)
A few overarching food categories stand out as big offenders: 56 percent of food categories in the “mixed ingredient dishes” group (think pot pies, fried rice, pastas) increased their sodium contents, along with 47 percent of fruits, vegetables and legumes and 43 percent of soups.
Ignoring FDA: Seeing so many food categories not only fail to decrease sodium but actually move in the opposite direction lays bare the limits of taking a voluntary approach. Clearly, quite a few food companies have determined that there’s little to no downside for dialing up sodium even with these government-backed goals on the books. (Caveat: The FDA noted that it doesn’t have complete data for this phase one time period, so this is very much an interim report card.)
Advocacy angst: Because this report from the FDA doesn’t focus on the relevant time frame – roughly 2021 to 2024 – and doesn’t break things down by specific food category (only by broader category groups), it’s hard to nail down what progress has really been made here. That’s according to Peter Lurie, president and executive director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which has urged FDA to crack down on sodium since the 1970s.
A central problem with the FDA’s interim report is that we don’t know which categories have reduced and which haven’t, Lurie noted. This is important because not all food categories drive sodium consumption to the same extent – pizza contributes more than pickles, for example.
“If you look at [this report], you tend to see something that looks more beneficial than not. But you really don’t have the data from this [study] to know that with certainty,” Lurie said. “It’s hard to say where we are.”
Lurie said the agency’s latest targets are “a step in the right direction, but could have been more ambitious.”
“There are lives to be saved here,” he added. “A non-aggressive approach results in fewer lives being saved.”
What’s next: The FDA will solicit comments on this latest set of proposed goals for 90 days, and it’s possible (though probably unlikely) that the agency will be able to finalize the policy before the end of President Joe Biden’s term in January. If Vice President Kamala Harris wins the presidential election in November, the prevailing assumption is that her administration would continue on this path and likely issue another set of stricter, longer-term goals. If former President Donald Trump wins in November, health advocates worry that this work will be frozen or unwound completely. (Though, as we’ve noted in the past, the FDA didn’t toss out its work on sodium during the previous Trump administration. Then-FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb publicly said it was important.)
Front-of-pack on track? While we’re here, FDA is forging ahead on several key nutrition policies right now. The agency is aiming to push out its front-of-pack labeling proposal in October – so, before the election – per FDA’s latest regulatory agenda update. Of course, that proposal has not yet reached the White House Office of Management and Budget, where it needs to be reviewed, so getting the proposed rule out by October certainly seems ambitious at this point. Stay tuned.
Lauren Ng contributed reporting.
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What I’m reading
Kamala Harris to call for ‘price gouging’ ban on food and groceries (TIME). “Vice President Kamala Harris will call for a federal ban on food and grocery price gouging as part of a broader set of proposals intended to reduce consumer costs, her campaign said in a preview of the first policy speech of her nascent presidential bid,” reports Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg. “The Democratic nominee is promising to target price gouging and price-fixing within her first 100 days in office, along with other measures to ease the burden of high prices that have weighed on American households and contributed to many voters’ low marks for President Joe Biden’s handling of the economy. Harris plans to direct the Federal Trade Commission and other agencies to investigate and penalize ‘big corporations’ that violate the rules, and to find other ways of tackling price fixing and other anti-competitive practices in the food and grocery industries, her campaign said late Wednesday night.”
Trump makes the case that Kamala Harris is responsible for rising food prices (National Review). “During the Thursday afternoon press conference at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., Trump highlighted Harris’s role in higher inflation over the almost four years that she’s been in the White House,” writes David Zimmermann. “He delivered the remarks while standing in front of two tables of groceries, including cereal, deli meat, milk, eggs, bread, and other perishables. ‘You don’t have to imagine what a Kamala Harris presidency would be because you are living through that nightmare right now,’ Trump said.”
JD Vance and the politics of vegetarianism in a red-meat Republican Party (Los Angeles Times). “Although he’s a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy, he adapted to my vegetarian diet and learned to cook food from my mother – Indian food,” Usha Vance said of her husband, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate. “In politics, people – from the average voter to the seasoned analyst – tend to paint with broad brushes,” Daniel Miller writes. “This extends to generalizations about food: Vegetarians are coastal-dwelling, blue-state swells awash in kombucha; and the Republican Party is one of red meat and religion, especially in its MAGA guise. So, Vance’s willingness to have his wife mention vegetarianism in her prime-time speech seems to some observers like a perception-bucking decision.”
California Senate committee advances bill to shield schoolchildren from harmful food dyes (Environmental Working Group). The California Senate Appropriations Committee “voted to advance a bipartisan bill to ban six harmful dyes from food provided in the state’s public schools during regular school hours” on Thursday. “As a lawmaker, a parent and someone who struggled with ADHD, I find it unacceptable that we allow schools to serve foods with additives that are linked to cancer, hyperactivity and neurobehavioral harms,” said Assemblymember Jesse Gabriel. “This bill will empower schools to better protect the health and well-being of our kids and encourage manufacturers to stop using these dangerous additives.”
FDA issues warning letter to manufacturer of lead-tainted cinnamon applesauce pouches (Food Safety Magazine). “The FDA has issued a warning letter to Ecuadorian company Austrofood S.A.S., the manufacturer of the apple cinnamon fruit puree pouches that gave hundreds of children across the U.S. lead poisoning in late 2023.” The pouches contained “extremely high concentrations of lead” according to lab analysis, “rendering the products to be adulterated” under federal law.
Inactive bird flu virus found in 17 percent of U.S. dairy foods in study (Bloomberg). “One in six dairy products in U.S. retail stores contained signs of inactive bird flu virus this summer, regulators said, slightly lower than the numbers seen in a different survey when the pathogen was first found in the nation’s dairy herds,” Sophia Vahanvaty reports. (Results from the two surveys “may not be directly comparable,” FDA warned.) “None of the 167 samples, which included milk, ice cream, hard cheese, butter, cream cheese and aged raw milk cheese, contained viable H5N1 bird flu virus, the FDA said. The results show pasteurized dairy remains safe to consume.”
McDonald’s, long influential in U.S. diets, throws its weight into local elections (The Wall Street Journal). “Now the Golden Arches are playing a growing role in politics, as the company and its franchisees spend millions of dollars on donations to candidates for public office and political action groups, and have engaged in lobbying in at least 10 states, an analysis of filings shows,” Heather Haddon writes. “In California, the Chicago-based company and its franchisees are seeking to unseat politicians who backed the state’s new minimum wage law for fast-food workers. The chain’s New York restaurant operators helped sponsor ads this year against state legislation that would allow workers to sue employers over wage, health and safety violations.”
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