Medical blog » Food

'The Instinct Diet' offers a biological base to fight food cravings

admin — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 17:24:28 +0000

With the quick swipe of a student ID and a plastic brown tray in hand, Megan Kono is left standing in the Dewick-MacPhie Dining Hall faced with a serious dilemma. As she moves from station to station, she must fight the ever-present temptation to grab a slice of fresh tomato pizza or dish out a serving of macaroni and cheese. She must walk quickly past the tub of French fries and the trays of cookies that Dewick offers on a daily basis.
As a swimmer at Tufts in the midst of an intense training season, Kono, a sophomore, has made a conscious decision to cut sweets and other unhealthy foods from her diet. But this is no simple task, as the stress of college and the abundance of food in the dining halls seems to work against anyone hoping to shed a few pounds.
If there is anyone that understands the importance of a healthy diet, it is Susan Roberts, professor of nutrition and psychiatry at Tufts Medical School and author of “The Instinct Diet: Use Your Five Food Instincts to Lose Weight and Keep It Off” (2008).
Roberts, an expert on nutrition and obesity control, has made a career out of helping people lose weight. In her new book, she stresses that the key to weight control is in understanding the biology behind our eating habits. Once we recognize what drives us to eat the way we do, we can begin to change our sometimes harmful routines.
“The Instinct Diet is all about controlling your five food instincts,” Roberts said in an e-mail to the Daily.
As described in her book, humans are born with five food instincts that have been instilled in us for the purpose of early survival. These instincts include hunger (we like to feel full), availability (we eat simply because food is present), calorie density (we prefer food that is heavy in calories), familiarity (we enjoy comfort foods that we’re used to) and variety (the more variety we have in food, the more we will eat).
Roberts considers the recognition of these instincts to be a key component in the process of losing weight, noting that humans must first understand why the body craves certain foods in order to control these urges and eat healthily.
It seems that all five food instincts must be fought in order to make it through a trip to the dining hall with a waistline still intact. With a menu that boasts items as diverse as red curry beef and grilled tuna steak and a wide array of comfort foods such as lasagna and chicken parmesan, the dining halls can be a danger zone for dieters at Tufts.
“As much as I want to [do so], eating healthy at college can be hard sometimes,” sophomore Eliza Walters said. “When there isn’t anything appealing for dinner at the dining hall, the fallback choices are usually pretty unhealthy, such as waffles or sugary cereal.”
Roberts recognizes that college life can leave one vulnerable to poor nutrition but stresses that by following the Instinct Diet, one can be back on track to a healthy lifestyle.
“College dining is a challenge,” Roberts said. “The first thing is you have to stay satisfied 24/7 or you can’t control yourself.”
With Roberts’ advice, every meal in the dining hall can potentially be a healthy one. For breakfast, Roberts recommends a high-fiber cereal such as Fiber One or All Bran Extra Fiber.
“With high fiber cereal … fruit on top for taste, and milk, you have a great start to the day,” Roberts said. For lunch, she recommends a salad with the addition of chicken or chickpeas. Dinner should be comprised of whole grains, lots of vegetables, and lean meats. Although allowed, dessert should be eaten sparingly and only on a few select days of the week.
To keep hunger and cravings at bay, Roberts stresses the importance of healthy snacks. “Carry some apples or an orange and nuts for snacks so you don’t get hungry and buy cookies or chips,” she said. “Timing is really important as well. When you cut calories for weight control, snacks become really important.”
Although Roberts’ ideas make sense, they may be easier to carry out in theory than in practice. And though it seems easy enough to follow a diet, we often find ourselves vowing to start eating more healthily after that final slice of chocolate cake or that one last potato chip.
“You’re told what you should be eating, but your body also knows what tastes good to you. It’s a little bit harder when it comes down to it,” Kono said. “I know how many calories I should be eating based on how much I work out each day but I’m not going to sit around and calorie-count.”
To these foibles, Roberts has simple advice. “You practice,” she said. “That is really almost all it takes … Our brain is amazingly adaptable. If you satisfy your instincts by eating the right way, then all the temptations die down and it gets easier to make the permanent changes that keep your weight under control from here on out.”

Northeast Iowa Food & Fitness Initiative seeking proposals in …

admin — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 09:30:49 +0000

The Northeast Iowa Food and Fitness Initiative (FFI) has announced it is seeking requests for activities to support and build on its efforts. This initiative is about people working together to create vibrant communities where the healthy choice is the easy choice.
This work began in April 2007 when the W.K. Kellogg Foundation selected Northeast Iowa as one of nine communities locations across the country to become models of community change. Each project received a planning grant and for the past two years FFI has assessed this region’s access to food and places to be active and play.
Two years of intensive community participation and planning have helped Northeast Iowa identify three strategies to improve food and fitness environments through policy and system change. Those strategies include:
• Ensure that school district policies and practices support healthy living of children, families and community members.
• Ensure that fresh, local, healthy food is available and affordable in all communities, neighborhoods and institutions.
• Ensure that communities have a built environment that supports abundant opportunities for physical activity and play.
The FFI regional planning team is now developing a community action plan based on these strategies. The plan will be submitted to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation this summer for implementation support and will be based on the activities selected through the Request for Activities (RFA) process.
Citizens representing any 501(c)3 organization/agency, educational or governmental institution in Northeast Iowa may submit an RFA. Northeast Iowa is defined as the counties of Allamakee, Clayton, Fayette, Howard, and Winneshiek. The NE Iowa Food and Fitness Initiative strongly encourages involvement and collaboration between representatives of the farming community, schools, active living work, healthcare, and food-based businesses in the proposal process.
Proposal forms, instructions and criteria for the RFA can be found at the Food and Fitness Initiative website (www.iowafoodandfitness.org). A one- to two-page concept paper and proposed budget must be submitted by 4:30 p.m., April 1, 2009 to the Iowa State University Extension, Winneshiek County office. Electronic copies are encouraged and may be sent via email.
Funding of activities may be for up to two years, beginning October 1, 2009. Budgets must demonstrate a 25% match in leveraging of other funds (cash and/or in-kind match). Proposals may range between $1,000 and $50,000.
All proposals will be screened and scored by the NE Iowa FFI Regional Team and its work groups. All applicants will be notified in June 2009 if their proposal will be included in the FFI Community Action Plan application sent to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
Proposals should demonstrate how the proposed work will build on the NE Iowa FFI Regional Team’s efforts or other northeast Iowa projects to create the initiative’s vision: “For Northeast Iowa to be a unique place where all residents and guests experience, celebrate and promote healthy locally grown food with abundant opportunities for physical activity and play EVERY DAY. Healthier people make stronger families and vibrant communities.”
Activities that support or complement the work of the Regional Team work groups are encouraged. These groups are: School Work Group, Youth Work Group, Northeast Iowa Food and Farm (NIFF) Coalition, Built Environment Work Group, Communication Work Group, Community Health Work Group, and Inclusive Team Work Group. To learn about their work go to http://www.extension.iastate.edu/allamakee/info/rtworkgroups.htm or contact co-conveners Brenda Ranum or Ann Mansfield.
Additional information and complete instructions can be downloaded from www.iowafoodandfitness.org or obtained from the ISU County Extension offices in Cresco, Elkader, Waukon, Fayette, and Decorah. The NE Iowa FFI co-conveners, Brenda Ranum or Ann Mansfield, can be reached at ISU Extension – Winneshiek County, Decorah, (563)382-2949.

How would you eat if food mattered?

admin — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 03:03:45 +0000

We don’t need another diet book. There are already far too many plans that all basically come down to the same thing: you have to cut something (carbs, fat, calories, anything but cabbage soup) and usually add exercise as well, in order to get results. Probably any of them could be effective if a person could follow them consistently for a long period of time.
But the trouble with diets is, first, a lot of people can’t seem to follow them religiously; second, once people lose weight they want to go off the diet, and reverting to old habits will cause weight regain.
Mark Bittman, cookbook author,
, knows all this. He also understands that the current American diet — full as it is of junk food, processed food and mass-produced meat — isn’t just a problem for individual waistlines. It’s damaging to the planet as well.
He notes that worldwide, livestock production accounts for a fifth of all greenhouse gasses, and that it takes 40 calories of energy (fossil fuels) to produce one calorie of beef protein, compared to 2.2 calories for one calorie of corn.
It’s not just meat that’s a problem, though, lots of processed foods take a lot of energy to produce and provide little in return in the way of nutrition. More than 12 percent of all calories consumer in the United States come from sweets and desserts, the most of any “food group.” Seven percent of calories consumed in America come from non-diet soft drinks alone.
Bittman doesn’t advocate a diet free of meat or even completely without junk food. In fact, he doesn’t call his approach a diet at all, again since diet implies something you do for awhile, then stop.
It could well be — and this is as close as I can get to Something I’m Very Nearly Sure Of — that by eating simple, natural, minimally processed foods, known to be at least benign if not beneficial, in place of foods that are suspect in any quantity (junk food, highly processed carbohydrates), or those that may be damaging if consumed in large quantities (animal products), you’re going to be healthier and quite likely thinner.
The way he follows that advice is by eating a more or less vegan diet (no meat or animal products) along with a focus on minimally processed, whole grain and otherwise healthy foods, until his evening meal, when he is free to enjoy meat, cheese, alcohol, white bread, dessert or any combination of the above.
While sanctioned cheating on a daily basis could just lead to gorging on lots of unhealthy stuff at the end of the day, Bittman says with time eating healthier choices throughout the day will become the norm.
As months of this style of eating turned into years, I found myself front-loading even grand meals with vegetables, and becoming less interested in the heavier meat dishes that followed. This is an important point: My food choices have changed, even when I go out, and they reflect my mood more than what was surely a habit of focusing on meat, with simple carbs in second place. That balance has shifted.
When he started the “diet,” Bittman weighed 214 pounds and had high cholesterol and blood sugar, as well as sleep apnea. After a month he’d lost 15 pounds, within two months his cholesterol had dropped 60 points and his sleep apnea was gone. Over the course of four months he’d lost 35 pounds and was lighter than he’d been in 30 years.
The book includes general information about what’ wrong with the current state of food in America and, increasingly, the rest of the world, as well as details of his approach to sane eating.
There are also a variety of recipes for meals, snacks, desserts and breads, many of which have options for varying the meat or eliminating meat altogether.
He also offers hints for making this way of eating easier for people to whom avoiding processed foods is a foreign concept, such as eating fewer animal products and more fruits, veggies and legumes, chosing whole grains over white stuff, snacking on nuts or olives (and always carrying healthy snacks with you), using olive oil for most applications and allowing yourself treats daily.
In a nutshell: Buy lots of fresh and supplement with some frozen and dried produce. Buy correspondingly less meat, fish, and poultry, but buy the highest quality you can afford, ideally from sources you know and trust. Stay away from any processed food that has more than five ingredients; and ingredients with more than three syllables (in other words, stay away from preservatives and additives).
Bittman offers a sane, simple, easy-to-follow plan that should allow followers to lose weight and get healthier without a lot of deprivation. It’s not intended to be a temporary fix but instead a permanent solution to the American way of overeating that will help make both individuals and the planet healthier.
(By Sarah E. White for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)
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Lawmakers seek new gov't agency for food safety

admin — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 11:51:34 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — So, a guy walks into a restaurant. Who makes sure his food is safe? It depends on what he eats.
A cheese pizza that arrived at the restaurant frozen? The Food and Drug Administration is in charge of inspecting it.
A frozen pepperoni pizza? That’s the Agriculture Department.
A fresh pizza, made at the restaurant? Both departments would be responsible for the original ingredients, if the pizza has meat on it. What if he eats eggs? It depends whether the eggs are inside the shell, in liquid form or have been processed. Fish? Some fish is inspected by the Commerce Department.
The FDA bears the brunt of food safety oversight, a mission called into question in the wake of a massive recall of peanut products. But at least 15 government agencies have a hand in making sure food is safe under at least 30 different laws, some of which date back to the early 1900s.
It’s a convoluted system.
“There is no one person, no individual today who is responsible for food safety,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn. “We have an immediate crisis which requires a real restructuring.”
DeLauro and Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have been proposing an overhaul of the nation’s food safety structure for more than a decade. There might now be the political will to do something following the outbreak of salmonella traced to peanuts blamed for sickening 600 people and killing at least nine others.
They may be making headway. President Barack Obama’s new agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, said he supports creating a single, combined food safety agency. It’s a major break from his predecessors.
“You can’t have two systems and be able to reassure people you’ve got the job covered,” Vilsack said.
Such a radical overhaul would be difficult. Many in the food industry have long opposed any changes, fearing increased oversight could cut into profits. Allies in Congress have resisted new laws.
But resistance appears to be softening, the result of high-profile outbreaks of foodborne illness from domestic and foreign food sources.
Industry is open to change, said Scott Faber, a top lobbyist for the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents large food and beverage companies.
“The food industry recognizes that we need to give FDA new powers and new resources to address new challenges,” Faber said.
Businesses are concerned about reorganizing the entire system. The priority should be strengthening the current agencies before rearranging them, he said.
The old system is an overlapping patchwork of inspections. Both the Agriculture Department and the FDA inspect shipments of imported food at 18 U.S. ports of entry. Sometimes, the FDA stores products at Agriculture Department warehouses, where they wait to be inspected by the FDA because agriculture employees aren’t allowed to inspect them.
The two agencies also differ on how frequently they inspect businesses. Meat inspectors visit processing facilities daily in most cases, while FDA inspects much less frequently.
Most manufacturers of prepackaged, open-faced meat sandwiches, for example, are inspected daily by the Agriculture Department. But add a second piece of bread to make it a traditional sandwich and the FDA takes over. That means inspections probably happen once every five years, according to a study by the Government Accountability Office.
The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, recommended two years ago that Congress re-examine the system. It said 76 million people are sickened by foodborne illness each year and 5,000 die.
But few changes have been made. And despite the salmonella outbreak, even the lawmakers urging changes say a streamlined new agency is unlikely any time soon.
A flurry of food safety bills have been introduced in Congress. Many would strengthen FDA’s oversight rather than creating a single lead agency. DeLauro’s bill would not combine agencies onto one. It would divide the FDA in two, separating the agency’s drug oversight and food safety duties.
“We have a crisis at the moment. Let’s try to address that,” DeLauro said.

Food companies work to ensure safety from salmonella

admin — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:30:21 +0000

“They put about $50 million into completely reconstructing the place – new roof, new separation area between the roaster and production lines,” said Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney who specializes in litigating food poisonings and was invited to ConAgra’s headquarters to discuss the outbreak last summer. He settled more than 1,200 salmonella poisoning cases with ConAgra for an undisclosed sum last year.
The redesigned facility is seen as state of the art, a model for others in the industry to follow, though not everyone has, Marler said.
The company’s actions went far beyond Food and Drug Administration guidelines established after the 2007 outbreak, guidelines critics say do little to assure protection of the food supply or ease the ability to trace the source of contamination. What’s more, the FDA has too few inspectors to visit the nation’s 65,520 domestic food production facilities more than once a decade on average, critics say.
“Guidelines don’t work,” said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. “Many companies may choose not to implement them.”
With the last outbreak only 23 months ago, “You would think the industry would have learned a lesson,” said Jean Halloran, director of food safety for Consumer’s Union in Yonkers.
site, the Peanut Corporation of America’s plant in Blakely. Its peanut butter and paste are purchased in bulk containers ranging from 5 to 1,700 pounds, by at least 70 companies nationwide that manufacture hundreds of different products.
Almost 200 products, running a wide gamut from cookies, crackers, ice cream and pet food, have been voluntarily recalled because of possible salmonella contamination. PCA also sells bulk peanut butter to institutions, such as schools, nursing homes and prisons.
Next week, Marler said he will travel to Georgia to photograph PCA’s facility, a trip that could clarify whether conditions were like those that led to salmonella contamination at ConAgra two years ago.
On Friday, George Clarke, spokesman for PCA, said the company would not comment on the current outbreak.
“PCA is focusing on the ongoing investigation with the FDA and working with its customers,” he said of companies that purchased its peanut butter. “That’s the top priority right now.”
estimated 25 people in 47 states were sickened two years ago in the salmonella outbreak. No deaths were attributed to the illness. In the current scare, more than 490 people in 43 states have gotten sick and at least seven deaths have been linked to peanut products tainted with Salmonella typhimurium.
ConAgra spokeswoman Stephanie Childs emphasized none of its products is involved in the current scare. The company’s peanut butter products, she said, are safe.
“We reached out to our suppliers and through that work we were able to quickly determine that PCA is not a supplier to ConAgra nor is it a supplier to any of our suppliers,” she said.
As with the makers of other major grocery brands – Jif and Skippy – several manufacturers have posted prominent notices on their Web sites stating they do not purchase from PCA.

Follow nature's lead when making decisions on food, fitness

admin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 06:05:17 +0000

“Keep it simple, keep it consistent, keep it as close to nature as possible.” This is my wellness philosophy. Feel free to borrow from it, or adopt it outright. A few people have asked me why I include “as close to nature” Short answer: good common sense.
Good common sense tells me that all the scientific and medical miracles in the world can’t replace a life lived vibrantly. Modern medicine can help you fix problems once the ole’ body starts to break down, But we are each, individually and collectively, responsible for reasonable ongoing maintenance. Nature dictates we need to eat real food. We need to move our bodies. We need happiness, pleasure and, maybe most importantly, love.
Although I often write on such topics as antioxidants, carotenes, fiber and omega 6 fatty acids, the reality is, I don’t like to think about the parts of food, I like to think about the whole. Eating well is pretty much a matter of eating as close to nature as possible. This can happen on several levels.
As an individual, you can choose whole foods instead of processed. Eat an apple instead of processed applesauce. Enjoy corn on the cob, but limit corn syrups. Potatoes instead of French fries, blueberries instead of blueberry-flavored snack bars … You get the point. Whole foods have everything you need: vitamins, minerals, water, fiber. Science keeps reporting on the wondrous potential of the components, but they forget to remind us that the easiest way to ensure you get those components is to eat whole foods.
Collectively, if we choose to eat as seasonally and locally as possible, we accomplish many wellness objectives. Eating seasonally and locally not only reduces the travel miles of your food (don’t forget, that’s petroleum we use to move it around), but increases the nutrient value, freshness and taste of your food. In addition, you are stoking the fire of your local economy and improving the odds that any given insect, blight or scourge will not take out an entire segment of our food supply. (I’ll save the bee discussion for another day!)
The cost of modern convenience is obesity and the myriad of diseases it contributes to. Nature designed you to be active. Move more! Even if you never become an extremely fit person, you will be happier and healthier the more you move your body. Move more today than you did yesterday.
Humans are also very social animals. Ever notice how miserable a dog is when it is chained up outside all day, away from the “pack”? People don’t fare much better. We need to talk to each other, laugh with each other, hug each other. Over and over, science shows us the health benefits of having great relationships. And yet, how often do we let relationships of all kinds (professional, personal, romantic, familial) founder or fail because we don’t want to spend energy attending to them?
Modern medicine can indeed prolong your life, but true wellness comes from a life well lived.
Lee Welles is a fitness consultant and owner of MARS Fitness Services in Corning. E-mail her at
.

Farm animals' drugs showing up in food crops

admin — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 02:08:28 +0000

You’ve no doubt heard about the flap over using antibiotics in livestock. But a new story out in Environmental Health News shows that these drugs, apparently via manure, are finding their way into food crops that we eat.
by EHN’s Matthew Cimitile focuses on research out of the University of Minnesota that has some troubling implications. For instance, how might this drug transference figure into antibiotic resistance? From Cimitile’s story:
Scientists believe antibiotics also may have contributed to the explosive rise in asthma and allergies in children over the last 20 years. Researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, following 448 children from birth for 7 years, reported that children who received antibiotics within their first six months had a higher risk of developing allergies and asthma.
Such health concerns led the European Union in 2006 to ban antibiotic use as feed additives for promoting livestock growth. But in the United States, nearly 25 million pounds of antibiotics per year, up from 16 million in the mid-1980s, are given to healthy animals for agriculture purposes, according to a 2000 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists.
And don’t think you’re escaping this effect by going organic. Organic crops are often fertilized with manure. It’s natural, dontchasee? Here’s part of what the story has to say on that point:
High-temperature composting of manure, designed to kill pathogens, is required for crops certified under the USDA organic label. That could eliminate some antibiotics. But others are resistant, according to a study by Dolliver and Kupta published last year. Growers are not required to monitor crops for the drugs.

Obama Faults FDA on Food Safety

admin — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:32:17 +0000

“I think the FDA has not been able to catch some of these things as quickly as I expect them to catch them, so we’re going to be doing a complete review of FDA operations,” Obama told Matt Lauer during an interview broadcast on NBC’s “Today” show.
“At a bare minimum, we should be able to count on our government keeping our kids safe when they eat peanut butter,” the president said.
“That’s what Sasha eats for lunch,” Obama said, referring to his 7-year-old daughter. “Probably three times a week. I don’t want to worry about whether she’s going to get sick as a consequence of eating her lunch.”
While all of the fatalities involved people older than 59, half of the reported cases of salmonella illness have involved children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Government Accountability Office, consumer groups, congressional critics and industry associations have been calling for an overhaul of the FDA, which is charged with ensuring the safety of the country’s food and drug supply but has been buffeted by a string of crises involving tainted spinach, contaminated baby formula and pet food, and the current problem with peanut products.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill say they have questions for the FDA about its operations. The Senate Agriculture Committee has called a hearing for later this week;
the House Energy and Commerce Committee plans one next week.
The agency is being run by an acting commissioner; Obama has yet to name a new agency chief, although the White House has said an appointment is likely to come within days.
The outbreak of salmonella illness began in late summer and has been traced to a Blakely, Ga., plant owned by Peanut Corporation of America. The company sells peanut butter to nursing homes, hospitals and other institutions and makes peanut ingredients that are used in a variety of products, including cookies and dog biscuits.
FDA officials said last week that the company knowingly shipped products that tested positive for salmonella on 12 occasions in 2007 and 2008, sometimes after sending the product to another laboratory and getting a negative reading for salmonella.
Food safety experts say salmonella can live in pockets of peanut butter, so that one batch could test both negative and positive. In that case, it should have been destroyed, they said.
In one of the largest recalls in history, the FDA and the company have recalled every product made from peanuts processed at the plant in the past two years. That list, which grows daily, now includes more than 800 products.

Giant Food giving away generic drugs

admin — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 23:59:38 +0000

will give away free generic drugs for the next three months.
The Landover-based grocer — which has 184 supermarkets and 164 pharmacies in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Washington, D.C. — will launch the program from Jan. 2 through March 21. About 36 prescription generic antibiotics will be free.
“We wanted to provide something to help customers in these tough economic times,” said Robin Michel, executive vice president and general manager of Giant Food. “These are products that our customers may need more of during the colder months.”
The move could also give Giant a leg up in the growing battle of retailers to grab more drug revenue and prescription business. The company introduced a discount generic drug program this summer offering a 90-day supply of some prescriptions for as low as $9.99.
Wal-Mart Stores and Target Corp. expanded their reduced price prescription drug programs in May including its stores in Maryland. And Wegmans Food Market Inc., one of Giant’s top competitors in the region, has also offered a 90-day supply of some of its drugs for $11.99.
Small health clinics have also cropped up at CVS, Walgreens, Target, Wal-Mart, Kroger and other retail stores throughout the country as a means to grab more drug business.
“We have a lot more competition these days,” Michel said. “And there’s no way you can be more competitive than free.”
She declined to comment on the cost of the program or how much of the company’s revenue come from its pharmacies.
Giant Food reported roughly $16.7 billion in revenue in 2007 and employs 6,456 people in the Greater Baltimore region.

US relies on states for food safety inspections

admin — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 08:08:50 +0000

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government has increasingly relied on food-safety inspections performed by states, where budgets for inspections in many cases have remained stagnant and where overburdened officials are trained less than their federal counterparts and perform skimpier reviews, an Associated Press investigation has found.
The thoroughness of inspections performed by states has emerged as a key issue in the investigation of the national salmonella outbreak traced to a peanut processing plant in Blakely, Ga. The outbreak, which has highlighted weaknesses in the nation’s food-safety system, is blamed for more than 575 illnesses and at least eight deaths.
The House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee, which is to hold a hearing Wednesday on food safety, scheduled a meeting Tuesday to issue a subpoena for Peanut Corp. of America President Stewart Parnell, said a senior aide to a member of the panel. The aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity because panel members were still being notified, said Parnell was otherwise refusing to appear at the hearing.
State investigators performed more than half the Food and Drug Administration’s food inspections in 2007, according to an AP analysis of FDA data. That represents a dramatic rise from a decade ago, when FDA investigators performed three out of four of the federal government’s inspections. The Agriculture Department is responsible for meat and dairy safety.
Increased inspection responsibilities have not been accompanied by big spending increases in many states responsible for the bulk of the nation’s food production.
The FDA covers some costs for states to perform inspections. But in Pennsylvania and Ohio, for example, each state’s own food safety spending increased only slightly since 2003, less than the rate of inflation; in California and Massachusetts, just barely more than inflation; and in New Jersey, spending has remained about the same. Those are among states with the largest numbers of food-processing plants.
“It clearly is a passing the buck kind of thing and somebody is dropping the buck along the way,” said Cornell University food safety professor Joseph Hotchkiss.
A Georgia health inspector noted only two minor violations at the Peanut Corp. of America plant in October, and inspection reports indicate officials spent no more than a few hours inside the plant during visits there. But after the FDA became suspicious of the plant’s role in the outbreak months later, it found roaches, mold, a leaking roof and other sanitation problems. The federal agents spent days at the plant.
“To say that food safety in this country is a patchwork system is giving it too much credit,” said Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, chairman of the Agriculture Committee. “Food safety in America has become a hit or miss gamble, and that is truly frightening. It’s time to find the gaps in the system and remedy them.”
The FDA never followed up on the Georgia inspections because the problems discovered by the state “were considered to be somewhat resolved,” Michael Chappell, head of the FDA’s enforcement division, said during a congressional hearing last week.
The FDA relied on Georgia to inspect the Peanut Corp. plant in Blakely between 2006 and 2008, just as it relies on other states. But Georgia failed to identify problems, even as the company’s own internal testing repeatedly found salmonella in its products and Canada rejected a shipment of its peanuts because of metal contamination.
“Many of these state contract inspections are much briefer, much less intensive inspections than the FDA does,” said former FDA deputy commissioner Michael Taylor, who supports contracting to the states.
Taylor said the FDA doesn’t have enough money to perform its own inspections. But he acknowledges problems with state visits and has urged a dramatic overhaul of federal and state food safety.
The number of federal field food inspectors dropped by more than 400 between 2003 and 2007, according to the FDA’s budget. But the number of businesses requiring oversight increased by 7,200 between 2003 and 2007, according to the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress.
“What’s happened is the agency can do fewer and fewer (inspections) itself, so if it’s going to do anything it has to use the states,” said Bill Hubbard, a former associate FDA commissioner who now lobbies for increases in FDA funding. “The states can do it much more cheaply, but the states may not do as it thoroughly.”
Some states, such as New York and Florida, earn high praise among food safety experts for conducting professional inspections. And in some cases, state enforcement laws give state officials more authority than the FDA’s inspectors have under federal laws.
Florida’s food safety director, Dr. Marion Aller, said her inspectors are as good as the FDA’s. But even though Florida recently raised fees it charges for inspections, she acknowledged the state’s food safety budget “has not kept pace with the growth in the industry.”
“We are not inspecting 100 percent of the firms at 100 percent of the desired times,” she said.
In the wake of the Georgia case, food-safety inspections are facing new scrutiny from Congress. The FBI said Monday it has joined the criminal investigation involving the owner of the Georgia plant.
Associated Press writer Jim Drinkard contributed to this report.