A group of major grocery retailers — including Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and Aldi — have pledged not to sell genetically engineered (GE) seafood if it’s approved in the U.S., Friends of the Earth announced Wednesday. The retailers are among more than 2,000 national and local grocery stores that have signed a pledge as part of the environmental group’s new campaign to push grocery stores to refuse to sell GE seafood.

The announcement comes as the Food and Drug Administration appears poised to approve what would be the first non-plant GE food to enter the U.S. market. AquAdvantage Salmon — which contain a Chinook salmon gene allowing the fish to grow about twice as fast as a wild Atlantic salmon — passed the FDA’s environmental assessment, which was released last year. Along with salmon, the Center for Food Safety reports that there are at least 34 other species of fish undergoing GE development around the world, including tilapia, trout and flounder.

The debate surrounding genetically modified foods, or GMOs, has intensified in recent months. Whole Foods announced earlier this month that it would label all GMO foods sold in Whole Foods stores by 2018, becoming the first national grocery store to set a timeline on GMO labeling. California’s Proposition 37, which would have mandated GMO labeling in the state, was narrowly defeated in November, after food industry giants like Monsanto and Hershey poured $44 million dollars into an anti-Prop 37 campaign. Polling shows that more than 90 percent of consumers support GMO labeling, and a 91 percent of Americans don’t want GE meat and fish in the U.S. marketplace.

The grocery retailers’ pledges are encouraging, but they don’t make up for the FDA’s oversight in labeling GE salmon as environmentally sound. Opponents of GE seafood stress that not enough research has been done on its health effects, and that GE fish could pose an environmental threat if they escape into open waters. With their ability to grow more quickly than other salmon, GE salmon could out-compete wild salmon for food and space, and could potentially mate with wild seafood, weakening the wild species’ gene pool. AquAdvantage’s developer AquaBounty maintains that all of its salmon are grown as sterile females, but during a 2010 FDA hearing, AquaBounty clarified that 95 to 99 percent of its salmon were sterile — which means up to 750,000 of the eggs AquaBounty plans to grow could be fertile. On top of that, even farmed salmon that aren’t genetically modified pose potential health and environmental risks — they typically contain higher concentrations of PCBs, pesticides and other toxins; generate vast amounts of waste, which pollutes the water surrounding their pens and can harbor disease; and emit nearly as much greenhouse gasses as pork. GE farmed salmon will also carry all those risks.

There are still many other grocery retailers in the U.S. that haven’t signed the pledge, which means that if AquAdvantage salmon are approved, they will still find their way into the American market. The FDA hasn’t had much success with encouraging the food industry to self-regulate on its own, so the federal government will need a broader policy to limit Americans’ exposure to GMO foods — by labeling them or, in the case of GE salmon, by keeping them off shelves altogether.

Two more states are considering bills that would prevent whistleblowers from exposing cruel or unsafe practices in factory farms, joining five other states with similar “ag gag” bills. If passed, the pending legislation in Tennessee and California would require that evidence of animal abuse be turned over to law enforcement authorities within 24 to 48 hours.

Such bills are touted — and, in some cases, sponsored — by agriculture industry officials as a lawful attempt to stop animal cruelty in farming operations. But they actually undermine advocates’ work to develop animal cruelty or food safety cases against the agricultural industry.

And it turns out the real basis for the bills has its origins in the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative think tank that has been behind such legislative pushes as “stand your ground” gun laws, voter ID laws and laws mandating states teach climate change denial in schools. Several of the lawmakers who are pushing ag gag laws have agriculture industry ties and ties to ALEC — nearly one in four Iowa lawmakers who voted for Iowa’s ag gag law, for example, are members of ALEC.

In 2002, ALEC introduced a piece of mock legislation titled the Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act, which labels people who interfere with any animal operations “terrorists” and made it illegal for anyone to enter “an animal or research facility to take pictures by photograph, video camera, or other means with the intent to commit criminal activities or defame the facility or its owner.” ALEC began pushing the legislation in 2004, and several of the bills currently being considered borrow language from AETA — Indiana’s bill aims to keep farming operations “free from the threat of terrorism and interference from unauthorized third persons,” for instance. And ALEC continues to support these bills, as an ALEC spokesman told the AP:

“At the end of the day it’s about personal property rights or the individual right to privacy,” said spokesman Bill Meierling. “You wouldn’t want me coming into your home with a hidden camera.“

In fact, these proposed laws aren’t about personal property or privacy rights: they’re about consumers’ rights to know where their food comes from versus the agriculture industry’s desire to protect itself from negative press. Undercover videos have played a key role in exposing cruelty in some of the nation’s most well-known agriculture companies, and videos of sows crammed in gestation crates helped garner enough public outcry that McDonald’s announced it would phase-out gestation crates from its supply chain. But ag gag laws that require videos and photos to be immediately turned over to law enforcement, instead of delivered to the press, makes it doubtful that the public — the people who are consuming the meat, eggs and milk from these factory farms — will ever see them.

Six states already have ag gag laws on the books, and these laws have led to a chilling effect on advocacy groups’ investigations. If these new bills are passed, they would further close off the agriculture industry from the public eye — and we’ll have ALEC to partially thank for that.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I-NY) may have lost this round of sparring over his proposed limits on sugary drinks, but another of his public health initiatives, requiring chain restaurants to post nutritional information on menus, seems promising. According to a new study in the research journal Appetite, people are most affected by menus listing not only calorie content of a menu item but also how long they would have to walk in order to burn it off.

An online survey presented 802 people with one of four menus: some saw just the calorie count, some were given the calories and the amount of time it would take to burn off the meal, others saw the calories and the distance needed to walk it off, and some were given no nutritional information at all. People who received no nutritional information ordered the most caloric meals, while people who saw the distance they needed to walk to burn it off ordered meals that were 200 calories lighter:

People who viewed the menu without nutritional information ordered a meal totaling 1,020 calories, on average, significantly more than the average 826 calories ordered by those who viewed menus that included information about walking-distance. Study participants ordered meals adding up to averages of 927 calories and 916 calories from menus with only calorie information or calorie information plus minutes walking, respectively, although the differences between these two totals were not statistically significant.

Other studies on menu labeling have proven inconclusive, though some evidence indicates restaurants modify recipes and portion sizes in order to post a lower calorie count. This new study, however, suggests that the problem is not necessarily customers’ apathy to their health but lack of context in which to read calorie counts on menus. A menu that directly translates calories into physical activity may be the key to changing eating habits.

A more detailed menu labeling rule could have a huge impact on the national obesity crisis. The average American eats restaurant food 5.8 times per week, ingesting a third of their daily calories from eating out.

Since fall 2011, New Yorkers have already been exposed to posters warning they would need to walk 3 miles to burn off the calories in a 20-ounce soda as part of a public health campaign. Restaurants are already required to post the calories of each dish by 21 state and local laws. As part of the Affordable Care Act, the rest of the nation should soon start seeing calorie counts at restaurants with 20 or more chains. While the restaurant industry vehemently opposed New York’s original menu labeling law in 2006, they have since come around to support a national menu labeling standard. The FDA, however, has dragged its feet on releasing the rules.

A new food inspection rule proposed by the US Department of Agriculture would let poultry plants conduct their own inspections, removing federal food inspectors from the assembly line. At a House appropriations oversight hearing on Wednesday, Food Safety and Inspection Service administrators argued the move would save taxpayers money and allow the department to focus on testing for pathogens like e. coli and salmonella.

But other FSIS inspectors working in poultry plants piloting the new rule protest that public health is sacrificed by outsourcing inspections. Poultry plant employees often miss contaminated birds, and are even discouraged from removing the ones they do flag:

In affidavits given to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers, several inspectors who work at plants where the pilot program is in place said the main problem is that they are removed from positions on the assembly line and put at the end of the line, which makes it impossible for them to spot diseased birds.

The inspectors, whose names were redacted, said they had observed numerous instances of poultry plant employees allowing birds contaminated with fecal matter or other substances to pass. And even when the employees try to remove diseased birds, they face reprimands, the inspectors said.

While public health may suffer, the poultry plants will reap huge benefits from this rule change. The USDA says the elimination of inspector jobs will save $90 million in taxpayer dollars over three years — but poultry businesses are projected to save $125 million a year. The rule would also let plants speed up the production line to 175 birds per minute from 140, giving inspectors a third of a second to check each chicken for contamination.

Not only does speeding up production make it impossible to screen contaminated chickens on the assembly line, it also endangers workers. According to interviews conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center with over 300 poultry workers, nearly 75 percent of workers have suffered a workplace injury or illness. As many of them are immigrants, their employers threaten them with deportation or firing for offenses like taking a bathroom break (many workers reported wetting themselves because they were not allowed to leave the line), falling ill, or seeking medical treatment from someone outside the company. Poultry plant assembly lines already run at rapidfire speeds, and workers are forced to handle the birds even if they are injured, sick, or bleeding.

Foodborne illness sickens 48 million Americans and kills about 3,000 people every year. The most common culprits are pathogens carried by feces in tightly-packed factory farms. Despite the ubiquity of foodborne illness, food safety inspectors stationed in these plants are notoriously lax. Shortly before an e. coli outbreak caused by Cargill hamburger meat, federal inspectors repeatedly discovered violations of Cargill’s own standards at 55 plants in handling beef, but never imposed penalties or sanctions. Soon, 940 people fell ill. Many suffered permanent damage. If plants are allowed to swap out federal inspectors with their own employees, this haphazard approach to food safety will only worsen.

On Wednesday, First Lady Michelle Obama launched her third “Let’s Move!” tour to combat childhood obesity. Before she kicked off the tour in Mississippi, Illinois, and Missouri, Mrs. Obama appeared on “Good Morning America” to praise her campaign’s success in changing children’s eating and exercise habits. She also unveiled Let’s Move latest initiative, the MyPlate Recipe Partnership geared toward parents looking for easy, nutritious recipes:

OBAMA: We’ve really changed the conversation in this country. When we started, there were a lot of people in this country who would have never thought that childhood obesity was a health crisis. But now we’re starting to see some movement on this issue. Our kids are eating better at school. They’re moving more. And we’re starting…to see rates of obesity coming down like never before.

Childhood obesity rates are indeed showing small declines for the first time in decades, especially in cities with aggressive nutrition policies. As Mrs. Obama pointed out, “Let’s Move” has helped call attention to the childhood obesity crisis, and one of her cornerstone achievements was comprehensive school lunch reform that increased funding for public school meals and gave the USDA the ability to regulate foods sold in schools.

Besides school lunch reform, however, “Let’s Move” has deliberately veered away from pushing actual legislation, instead focusing on personal responsibility in nutrition and fitness. That’s a very different approach than the one Mrs. Obama took during the inception of her fight against childhood obesity. In 2010, the First Lady gave a fiery speech at a Grocery Manufacturers Association conference, arguing that changing personal habits won’t work if big companies like Kraft and General Mills continue to target children with misleading ads for sugary, fatty food:

This is a shared responsibility. That’s why I’ve gone to parents and I’ve asked them to do their part. They have a responsibility to watch what their kids eat and teach good habits.[...]And all of you have a responsibility as well.

And we need you not just to tweak around the edges, but to entirely rethink the products that you’re offering, the information that you provide about these products, and how you market those products to our children. That starts with revamping or ramping up your efforts to reformulate your products, particularly those aimed at kids, so that they have less fat, salt, and sugar, and more of the nutrients that our kids need.

As a mom, I know it is my responsibility — and no one else’s — to raise my kids. But what does it mean when so many parents are finding that their best efforts are undermined by an avalanche of advertisements aimed at their kids? And what are these ads teaching kids about food and nutrition? That it’s good to have salty, sugary food and snacks every day — breakfast, lunch, and dinner?

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As state legislatures begin their 2013 sessions, a flurry of new “ag gag” bills to protect factory farms from potential undercover whistleblowers have been introduced in 5 states. This week, the Indiana Senate is debating a proposal to criminalize taking photographs or videos inside an agricultural or industrial operation without permission.

Senate Bill 373 is the first of two ag gag bills introduced during Indiana’s 2013 session. New Hampshire, Nebraska, Wyoming and Arkansas are also considering them.

Since trespassing is already illegal, ag gag laws can only have one clear motive: to punish whistleblowers, advocates, and investigative reporters who use undercover recordings to reveal the abysmal conditions in which our food is produced. Undercover investigations have captured factory farms all over the country abusing livestock, passing off sick cattle as healthy, and discharging unregulated amounts of animal manure, which the US Geological Survey identified as the largest source of nitrogen pollution in the country.

The bill’s author, Sen. Travis Holdman (R), added a provision exempting anyone who turns over their video or photos to law enforcement within 48 hours — as long as they do not also share the footage with non-law enforcement, such as media or an animal rights group. But, as the Indy Star points out, many exposés are “undertaken precisely because the authorities failed to do their job. Sometimes, they have spotlighted conditions that were not illegal but were disturbing enough to inspire new laws.”

Indeed, factory farms have largely escaped regulatory and legal scrutiny. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency abandoned an effort to require these operations to report even basic information like location, number of animals, and amount of manure discharged. Meanwhile, the meat lobby’s grip on lawmakers is so powerful that the USDA was pressured into apologizing for an internal “Meatless Monday” last year by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Rep. Steve King (R-IA), who claimed the optional vegetarian day was a full-scale attack on agriculture.

One USDA inspector even had his job threatened after he tried to report egregious violations at a California slaughterhouse. He then tipped off the Humane Society, which released an infamous video of employees torturing and slaughtering downer cows (sick cows deemed “unfit for human food” by the USDA). The video triggered the largest beef recall in U.S. history and resulted in an unprecedented $500 million penalty.
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In just a week, the United States will hit the deadline for the sequester — the automatic spending cuts that were negotiated during the 2011 debt ceiling deal. The spending cuts will begin going into effect on March 1 unless lawmakers broker a compromise to avert sequestration, as they did at the beginning of this year when they agreed to push the deadline back two months. But so far, there’s no sign of a deal.

The sequester’s across-the-board indiscriminate cuts were designed to force lawmakers to reach a deal to reduce the deficit. If they end up going into effect, they could have disastrous consequences on Americans’ health. Here are the top five ways that sequestration will make the nation a less healthy place:

1. More Americans could be put at risk for foodborne illnesses. The number of Americans who get sick or die after consuming contaminated food has increased 44 percent over the last two years. The FDA is currently stretched too thin after rounds of budget cuts to food safety programs, and the sequester will only worsen the situation even more. Cuts to the FDA would lead to 2,100 fewer food inspections across the country, putting more Americans at risk for contracting foodborne illnesses — which already cost the United States about $152 million each year to treat.

2. Medical researchers will be forced to delay the development of treatments that could help sick Americans. An 8.2 percent across-the-board cut to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) could set back medical science for a generation, according to a former NIH director. Existing research would have to be scaled back, and new research projects would have to be postponed — potentially eliminating thousands of research positions across the country, and preventing scientists from doing critical work to develop new treatments for chronic conditions and rare diseases.

3. The government will have fewer resources to provide Americans with health coverage. Under Obamacare, an estimated 9 million previously uninsured Americans will gain health coverage in health insurance marketplaces that states are getting ready for 2014 — but sequestration could slow the implementation of that provision by cutting $66 million in grants intended to help states set up those marketplaces. Similarly, the agency that oversees the public Medicare and Medicaid programs will lose more than $60 million for its program management if the sequester cuts go into effect. And reductions in grants that help fund community health centers, which often serve the most vulnerable Americans, could result in 900,000 fewer adults receiving medical care.

4. Thousands of Americans living with mental illnesses could go untreated. The sequester would result in a $275 million cut to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and the Mental Health Block Grant program, which help Americans access the mental health care they need. That means that up to 373,000 “seriously mentally ill adults and seriously emotionally disturbed children” may be forced to go without the treatment they rely on, which could lead to an uptick in hospitalizations. And an estimated 8,900 homeless people with mental illnesses may not be able to receive the kind of support — including outreach, treatment, and housing assistance — that is critical to helping their recovery process.

5. Fewer Americans will get screened and treated for HIV. According to the Department for Health and Human Services, the sequestration cuts will have a serious impact on federal official’s ability to continue combating the nation’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. Since an estimated 20 percent of HIV-positive Americans still don’t know they have the virus, the CDC warns that testing needs to be a top priority — but the cuts to the CDC’s programs would result in about 424,000 fewer HIV tests conducted by state agencies. And an estimated 7,400 fewer patients would have access to their HIV medications through the AIDS Drug Assistance Program.

American children are still consuming far too many calories from fatty foods, even as U.S. adults have made modest cuts in their caloric intakes, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).

Between 2009 and 2010, American adults cut back on eating pizzas, french fries, and other greasy fast foods by about two percent — and while children also reduced their caloric consumption in the aggregate, they still received a high share of their daily calories from saturated fats during that time period:

Recommended U.S. guidelines suggest that no more than 10 percent of one’s daily calories should come from such fat, but American youth took in between 11 percent and 12 percent from 2009 to 2010, data from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics showed.

Americans’ diets and weight is a source of constant scrutiny and research in a country where two-thirds of the population is considered overweight or obese. According to the CDC, 36 percent of U.S. adults, or 78 million, and 17 percent of youth, or 12.5 million, are obese. Another third are overweight. [...]

Still, Americans lead the world in calorie consumption. Portion sizes also have increased over the years, coupled with an increasingly sedentary lifestyle, have added up to extra pounds. Complications from obesity include diabetes, heart disease, arthritis and some cancers.

What is particularly worrying about the report is the fact that “those who are already obese” are among the groups that consumed the most unhealthy foods, highlighting the fact that not only does America remain ill-equipped to prevent obesity in its nascent stages, but is also failing to improve obese Americans’ health after the fact. That doesn’t bode well for national health expenditures, considering that somewhere between 10 and 12 percent of all health insurance spending is driven by obesity-related conditions.

Furthermore, the obesity epidemic is disproportionately impacting black Americans, who are more likely to excessively consume fatty and sugary foods. That isn’t just a coincidence — the food industry is notorious for its efforts to undermine public health with misleading ad campaigns and product information opacity, and those efforts are often targeted in low-income, racially diverse communities. Soda advertising campaigns in particular take aim at poor, young black Americans, contributing to a status quo where low-income black youth are far more likely to consume calories from sugary drinks.

Of course, that doesn’t mean there hasn’t been any progress in the war on American obesity. Public health advocates have successfully lobbied major food companies to cut back on sodium in their products, and are now asking the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to pass rules cracking down on sweeteners in foods and drinks. The FDA has also taken efforts to eliminate fatty foods from school lunch menus. Still, the FDA and American food manufacturers could — and should — do much more, as historical evidence shows that localities with aggressive nutrition policies experienced significant drops in childhood obesity.

Food regulators recently uncovered horsemeat masquerading as beef in Burger Kings, school cafeterias, and hospitals across Europe and the UK, prompting multiple product recalls and widespread horror. The horsemeat scandal has not touched the US, and many experts and journalists have rushed to reassure Americans that their burgers are safe from horse contamination. But compared to the dangerous pathogens hiding in US-produced meat, Americans might want to consider replacing their beef patties with European horsemeat.

The debacle has exposed weaknesses in the EU’s food safety procedures. However, horsemeat poses a negligible health risk. There have been no reported deaths or illnesses caused by this contamination. Though a harmful horse painkiller called bute was found in 8 of the 206 horses, a human would have to eat more than 500 burgers made entirely of horsemeat to ingest a human dose.

On the other side of the Atlantic, the average American consumes roughly 270 pounds of meat per year, and it’s unlikely that horsemeat is in the mix. There is, however, plenty of evidence that many Americans are inadvertently eating a side of deadly bacteria like salmonella or e. coli with their burgers. According to Center for Disease Control estimates, 48 million Americans get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die from foodborne illnesses every year. In comparison, the entire European Union had roughly 45,000 illnesses and 32 deaths from contaminated food in 2008. That means foodborne illness strikes 15 percent of Americans each year, but only .00009 percent of Europeans.

American meat also often exceeds levels of contamination considered unacceptable in most of the developed world. Mexico refused a shipment of American beef in 2008 because it exceeded Mexico’s upper regulatory limit for copper contamination. Because the US has no such restrictions, the beef returned to the US to be sold to Americans instead.

The most common culprits behind foodborne illness are salmonella, norovirus, Campylobacter, toxoplasma gondii, and E. coli 0157, which are carried through feces. These pathogens have also been discovered in some fruit and vegetables that have soaked up infected waste runoff from nearby factory farms. But food safety regulators continue to avert their eyes when confronted with the appalling conditions in which the vast majority of American meat is produced. The New York Times highlighted the regulatory failure after a 2007 e. coli outbreak:

Within weeks of the Cargill outbreak in 2007, U.S.D.A. officials swept across the country, conducting spot checks at 224 meat plants to assess their efforts to combat E. coli. Although inspectors had been monitoring these plants all along, officials found serious problems at 55 that were failing to follow their own safety plans. [...] In the weeks before [an e. coli outbreak], federal inspectors had repeatedly found that Cargill was violating its own safety procedures in handling ground beef, but they imposed no fines or sanctions, records show. After the outbreak, the department threatened to withhold the seal of approval that declares “U.S. Inspected and Passed by the Department of Agriculture.”

The USDA is not the only agency that has dropped the regulatory ball. The Environmental Protection Agency recently abandoned an effort that would require factory farms to report basic information, such as their location, number of animals, and the amount of manure they discharge. Congress would go even further; the stalled House Farm Bill included provisions banning all state regulation of nearly any agricultural product. The fast-approaching sequester cuts will also eliminate roughly 600 food inspector positions at meat and poultry plants.

Several states have also passed “ag gag laws” to criminalize whistleblowers who secretly film inside facilities or take a job under false pretenses. These laws became popular after a Humane Society video documented a California slaughterhouse routinely abusing and killing sick cattle in 2008. The video triggered the largest beef recall in US history and resulted in a $500 million settlement, the largest penalty ever awarded for an animal abuse case. In response to the video, President Obama also banned the slaughter of these so-called “downer” cows, which have an increased risk of contracting mad cow disease and bacterial infections like e. coli. He did, however, lift the ban on horsemeat in the US last year.

Public health advocates have decided to take their fight against American obesity straight to one of its major sources, calling on the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to pass rules encouraging soda and food makers to limit the amount of sweeteners used in their products, the New York Times reports.

As U.S. obesity rates remain sky-high, public health advocates have been tackling the epidemic from all sides. But as Dr. Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest told the New York Times, curbing excess sugar consumption could go a long way towards getting Americans on a healthier track:

“Just to assure you that sugars are not toxins, I use a teaspoon of sugar in my tea every day and I’m sure it’s not poison,” Dr. Jacobson said. “It’s the overconsumption that is par for the course in the U.S. that we’re concerned about.”

The center is also asking the agency to set voluntary limits on sweeteners in packaged goods, like cereals and snacks, and to mount an educational campaign to help consumers reduce added sugars in their diet.

“This is on solid legal ground,” Dr. Jacobson said. “It’s just a question of whether the F.D.A. will act or what it will take to get the F.D.A. to act.”

Public health officials in the cities that signed the petition [encouraging the FDA to act] said they did so out of concerns that obesity was contributing to rising rates of health problems like high blood pressure, diabetes and even gout, all of which are increasing among the populations they serve.

While the FDA’s efforts to curb obesity — particularly childhood obesity — have centered on encouraging healthy school lunches and posting caloric information on vending machines, a rule encouraging producers to limit fatty substances in their products might be more effective. That way, the Americans who would like to indulge in sugary treats could still do so, but without causing as much harm to their bodies.

Some public health advocates have called for more extreme measures, such as provisions that are in place in some European countries that tax sugary products at a higher rate. However, as Aaron Carroll of the Incidental Economist points out, such measures tend to be politically difficult and lead to mediocre improvements in public health. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I) has successfully lobbied major food companies to reduce the sodium content in their products — the FDA could encourage them to take similar and more widespread action when it comes to sugar.