By Melanie Warner via www.industry.bnet.com
Frito-Lay has decided to reformulate its snacks so that by mid-2011 more than half of the company’s sales will come from products without things like MSG and artificial colorings and flavorings. The move illustrates why PepsiCo (PEP), Frito’s corporate parent, is the most savvy and proactive of the major food companies when it comes to health and nutrition.
Recent ill-conceived remarks about obesity aside, PepsiCo executives are taking the lead in responding to Americans’ increasingly sophisticated concerns about the healthfulness of food. A Deloitte survey done in March found that 31% of respondents said “over-processed food” was among their top concerns. And 29% said they were highly concerned about the “possible use of chemical ingredients that are detrimental to long-term health.”
It’s this kind of consumer sentiment that’s inspiring major manufacturers, Pepsi among them, to ditch high fructose corn syrup and replace it with sugar, which is thought to be more natural.
Clearly, Pepsi can’t stop making processed food any time soon, but it can make its products a bit healthier and more closely resembling actual food. In the age of Michelle Obama, that’s what every major packaged food company (restaurants are a different story) wants to do, and virtually all them have pledged to cut back on some combination of sodium, calories and/or saturated fat.
But Frito-Lay’s full-fledged embrace of what the industry likes to calls “clean labels,” which was announced at the company’s annual meeting last week, takes the endeavor to a whole new level. It’s a rare acknowledgment that the healthfulness of a product depends not just on easily manipulated things like calories and fat, but on the quality of the ingredients that go into the product. Artificial food colorings, which can cause hyperactivity in children and are linked to cancer in lab rats, and MSG, which causes some people to have allergic reactions, are the kind of things that make food products sound more like a chemistry experiment than something made from things that once grew in soil or from a tree. According to that Deliotte survey, a majority of consumers — 55% — say they understand half or less of the ingredients in food these days.
The fact that Frito-Lay is already making products without chemical additives in its line of so-called natural snacks will no doubt help make the transition easier. The company has already figured out how to make Cheetos, for instance, without yellow 6, MSG and partially hydrogenated soybean oil that was extracted using hexane, a neurotoxic and highly flammable chemical.
The big challenge will be taking out all this “dirty” stuff without raising prices significantly, since Frito Lay’s core customers are accustomed to getting their snacks for cheap.
Image by Flckr user Merry~Blues
Continue reading about Why Frito-Lay’s Move Towards “Clean Labels” Is Smart Marketing
By Jane Palmer, Mercury News Correspondent
original link: www.mercurynews.com
Tom Willey is so concerned about food safety he is willing to bet the farm on it.
Literally.
Willey and his wife, Densesse, own an organic farm just outside of Madera in the central San Joaquin Valley, where they grow lettuce, carrots, cabbage and nearly 50 other hand-harvested vegetables. They supply 800 local families and West Coast retailers with a year-round supply of fresh produce.
But in the last three years, a dark cloud has gathered over Willey’s farm. He and other organic farmers say stricter food-safety regulations, developed after a cluster of outbreaks of bacterial contamination in spinach and lettuce in 2006, threaten the principles upon which their farms are based.
While Willey already adheres to the voluntary food-safety regulations deemed necessary by the organic farm community, he feels that many of the rules — which include cutting bare buffer zones around crops, using poison to kill rodents and washing produce with chlorinated water — run contrary to growing healthy and safe food.
“Healthy produce cannot be grown in sterile environments,” Willey said. “That’s both ignorant and dangerous.”
Moreover, opponents of the regulations say that the new measures are threatening the livelihood of small-scale and organic farms. Willey, who refuses to adhere to regulations he believes are ultimately harmful, runs the risk of not being able to sell his crops. Other small farms that do comply face burdensome
costs.
But supporters of the regulations, part of the California Leafy Green Marketing Agreement, argue that all farms should comply in the interests of food safety.
“For the smaller growers, I don’t think it is reasonable to throw up their hands and say it doesn’t apply to us, or we are not the problem or we can never be the problem,” said Trevor Suslow, a food-safety expert and plant pathologist at UC Davis whose research helped form the basis of the regulations.
The incentive for the California agreement was a virulent outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 in spinach grown in San Benito County in 2006. It resulted in the hospitalization of more than 200 people in the U.S. and Canada, and the death of three. The pathogen also claimed another victim: the leafy greens industry.
“Spinach was off the menu nationwide,” said Paul Simonds, spokesman for the Western Growers Association. The outbreak cost the industry $100 million in lost sales as customer confidence in all leafy greens plummeted.
Continue reading about New Food-Safety Rules Threaten Small, Organic Farms
By JoNel Aleccia, Health writer via www.msnbc.com
Exposure to pesticides used on common kid-friendly foods — including frozen blueberries, fresh strawberries and celery — appears to boost the chances that children will be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, new research shows.
Youngsters with high levels of pesticide residue in their urine, particularly from widely used types of insecticide such as malathion, were more likely to have ADHD, the behavior disorder that often disrupts school and social life, scientists in the United States and Canada found.
Kids with higher-than-average levels of one pesticide marker were nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD as children who showed no traces of the poison.
“I think it’s fairly significant. A doubling is a strong effect,” said Maryse F. Bouchard, a researcher at the University of Montreal in Quebec and lead author of the study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.
The take-home message for parents, according to Bouchard: “I would say buy organic as much as possible,” she said. “I would also recommend washing fruits and vegetables as much as possible.”
Diet is a major source of pesticide exposure in children, according to the National Academy of Sciences, and much of that exposure comes from favorite fruits and vegetables. In 2008, detectable concentrations of malathion were found in 28 percent of frozen blueberry samples, 25 percent of fresh strawberry samples and 19 percent of celery samples, a government report found.
Jeffrey Smith is author of Seeds of Deception, the world’s bestselling and #1 rated book on the topic of GMO’s. Mr. Smith is the Executive Director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, whose Campaign for Healthier Eating in America is designed to create the tipping point for consumer rejection of GMOs, forcing them out of our food supply. He is a close ally of Citizens For Health and will be providing us with frequent blog posts over the next several months.
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It’s time to reclaim a food supply without dangerous genetically modified organisms (GMOs). And we can do it—together.
When European consumers said no to GMOs, the food companies kicked them out. As more and more US consumers rejected GM bovine growth hormone, most dairies and brands, including Wal-Mart, Starbucks, Kroger, Dannon, and Yoplait, responded.
Now we are joining forces nationwide in the Campaign for Healthier Eating in America—designed to achieve the tipping point of consumer rejection of GMO to force them out of the market.
October is Non-GMO Month and 10-10-10 is Non-GMO Day. Between now and then, we will send out a series of articles you won’t want to miss.