" I heard it through the AgLine"

January 21, 2011

 

 

·        Wal-Mart on the healthy food bandwagon

·        5-a-Day not enough fruits and veggies

·        Biotech crop limits sharply criticized

·        New pesticide may be behind bee deaths

·        Columbians succeed with alternative crops

 

 

Wal-Mart on the healthy food bandwagon

 

(AP via Yahoo! Finance) WASHINGTON -- Wal-Mart, the nation's largest grocer, says it will reformulate thousands of products to make them healthier and push its suppliers to do the same, joining first lady Michelle Obama's effort to combat childhood obesity.

 

Wal-Mart also said it would reduce prices on fruits and vegetables by $1 billion a year by attempting to cut unnecessary costs from the supply chain. The company also said it would work to reduce price premiums on healthier items made with more expensive ingredients.

 

"Our customers often ask us why whole wheat pasta sometimes costs more than regular pasta made by the same manufacturer," said Wal-Mart's Andrea Thomas, senior vice president of sustainability.

 

The first lady accompanied Wal-Mart executives Thursday as they announced the effort in Washington. The company plans to reduce sodium and added sugars in some items, build stores in poor areas that don't already have grocery stores, reduce prices on produce and develop a logo for healthier items.

 

"No family should have to choose between food that is healthier for them and food they can afford," said Bill Simon, president and CEO of Wal-Mart's U.S. division.

 

As the largest grocer in the United States, Wal-Mart's size gives it unique power to shape what people eat. The grocery business is nearly twice the size of No. 2 competitor Kroger. The company also has massive influence on products made by other manufacturers and sold at the store.

 

Mrs. Obama said the announcement has "the potential to transform the marketplace and help Americans put healthier foods on their tables every single day."

 

"We are really gaining some momentum on this issue, we're beginning to see things move," she said.

 

Wal-Mart plans to reduce sodium by a quarter and cut added sugars in some of its private label products by 2015. It also plans to remove remaining industrially produced trans fats.

 

A number of food makers have made similar moves, lowering sodium in their products based on shopper demand and increasing scrutiny by health groups. Bumble Bee Foods, General Mills Inc., Campbell Soup Co., PepsiCo Inc. and Kraft Foods Inc. all announced sodium reductions to their products in this spring alone.

 

Food makers say they are trying to reduce sodium gradually, making it a more palatable change to its customers and giving the industry time to reformulate products. Most said they support efforts to curb sodium in American's diets but are waiting to see if the Food and Drug Administration decides to mandate a reduction.

 

Mrs. Obama has a history of working with Wal-Mart. She once served on the board of Westchester, Ill.-based TreeHouse Foods Inc., a food supplier for the store, but resigned in 2007 while her husband was campaigning for the presidency. Barack Obama had criticized the store over wages and benefits it pays employees.

 

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5-a-Day not enough fruits and veggies

 

(WebMD.com) – We’re all urged to eat five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, but new research finds eight servings may be needed to cut the risk of dying from heart disease.

 

The diet and lifestyles of more than 300,000 people across eight countries in Europe found that people who ate at least eight portions of fruits and vegetables a day had a 22% lower risk of dying from heart disease than those who ate three portions a day.

Each additional portion in fruits and vegetables was linked to a 4% lower risk of death.

 

One portion counted as 80 grams, such as a small banana, a medium apple, or a small carrot.

 

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S. and around the world, accounting for more than one in every four deaths in the United States, according to the CDC.

 

Average Intake of Fruits and Vegetables

 

The average intake of fruits and vegetables in the various countries was five servings a day.

 

Spain, Greece, and Italy were the leaders in fruit and vegetable eating. Italian men enjoyed 7.5 portions a day, and Spanish women 6.7 portions.

 

Healthy eating tailed off the further north the researchers looked in Europe.

 

U.K. men managed 4.1 portions a day, and women 4.8 portions.

 

Swedish men and women were the worst, with only 3.5 and 2.9 portions a day.

 

The researchers say factors like cost and availability of fruit and vegetables are likely to account for differences in intake.

 

Data came from the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Heart study.

 

Every Portion Counts

 

Study researcher Francesca Crowe, MD, of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford in England, tells WebMD by email, “We do need to be cautious in our interpretation of these findings as participants with a higher intake of fruits and vegetables tended to be slightly healthier overall. So we are unable to say whether the association between fruits and vegetables and heart disease is causal.”

 

In other words, did the fruits and vegetables make people healthier, or are people who eat better also more likely to have healthier lifestyles?

 

Crowe says healthy eating also needs to be added to healthy lifestyle behaviors as well as other recommendations “such as not smoking, not having high blood pressure or high blood lipids [cholesterol] and being in a healthy weight range.”

 

Stepping up from five servings to eight servings a day might be hard, but Crowe says, “It may be a more manageable public health guideline to recommend that everyone increases their intake by one portion per day.

 

“This is a much more modest effect for an individual but if everyone could achieve this then at a population level the impact would be quite large.”

 

In a statement, Victoria Taylor, senior dietitian at the British Heart Foundation, says, “The take-home message is still that eating fruit and vegetables is healthy for your heart. We need to remember to make five portions our minimum as the more fruit and vegetables people ate the lower their risk of dying from heart disease became.”

 

Recent research from the British Heart Foundation and the University of Oxford suggested that 15,000 lives a year could be saved if everyone ate five servings a day.

 

Taylor continues: “We still don’t know exactly why we see this relationship between fruit and vegetables and heart disease. It may be something in the fruit and vegetables itself, but equally it could be something in the lifestyles of people who tend to eat more fruit and vegetables. There’s still work to be done by researchers to answer these questions.”

 

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Biotech crop limits sharply criticized

 

(DesMoinesRegister.com) Washington, D.C. — Lawmakers challenged Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack's legal authority to restrict where a biotech crop can be grown, saying the rules would be unfair to farmers who want to use the gene-altered seeds.

 

Vilsack is considering planting restrictions for a biotech version of alfalfa to protect growers of organic and other nonbiotech varieties from contamination. A court challenge has slowed commercialization of the crop, developed by Monsanto Co.

 

While the biotech crop is safe, the planting restrictions may be needed for the alfalfa and some future crops to protect the financial interests of nonbiotech farmers, Vilsack told the House Agriculture Committee on Thursday.

 

The panel's chairman, Frank Lucas, R-Okla., said the proposed restrictions would set a bad precedent and "shift the financial burden from those who choose to produce organic to other producers who choose a different cropping system."

 

A decision on planting rules could come next week. Vilsack said the proposed rules would essentially ban the use of the biotech alfalfa seed in some parts of the nation.

 

"This is not picking sides," he said. "This is trying to figure out how we can have all sides of agriculture be able to prosper in this country."

 

The biotech industry and conventional farm groups are furious at the proposed restrictions, saying they threaten to slow development and commercialization of new biotech crops.

 

Vilsack argued that the industry is threatened by endless litigation that could be avoided if agricultural interests compromise on a policy for protecting organic and nonbiotech farmers from the genetically engineered products.

 

Some lawmakers, including Reps. Leonard Boswell, D-Ia., and Steve King, R-Ia., raised questions about whether the proposed policy could undermine U.S. efforts to convince other countries that biotech crops are safe. The European Union has been especially resistant to biotech food.

 

Vilsack said the policy would be "very consistent with the positions we've taken on the international scene" as long as it is "justified by the science and is within the rules we have."

 

Collin Peterson, D-Minn., the committee's ranking Democrat, said the USDA proposal creates more questions than answers and expressed doubts that the litigation would end. "Some folks will apparently use every tool possible to try to shut down biotech crops."

 

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New pesticide may be behind bee deaths

 

(The Independent) – A new generation of pesticides is making honeybees far more susceptible to disease, even at tiny doses, and may be a clue to the mysterious colony collapse disorder that has devastated bees across the world, the US government's leading bee researcher has found. Yet the discovery has remained unpublished for nearly two years since it was made by the US Department of Agriculture's Bee Research Laboratory.

 

The release of such a finding from the American government's own bee lab would put a major question mark over the use of neonicotinoid insecticides – relatively new compounds which mimic the insect-killing properties of nicotine, and which are increasingly used on crops in the US, Britain and around the world.

 

Bayer, the German chemicals giant which developed the insecticides and makes most of them, insists that they are safe for bees if used properly, but they have already been widely linked to bee mortality. The US findings raise questions about the substance used in the bee lab's experiment, imidacloprid, which was Bayer's top-selling insecticide in 2009, earning the company £510m. The worry is that neonicotinoids, which are neurotoxins – that is, they attack the central nervous system – are also "systemic", meaning they are taken up into every part of the plant which is treated with them, including the pollen and nectar. This means that bees and other pollinating insects can absorb them and carry them back to their hives or nests – even if they are not the insecticide's target species.

 

In Britain, more than 1.4 million acres were treated with the chemical in 2008, as part of total neonicotinoid use of more than 2.5 million acres – about a quarter of Britain's arable cropland.

 

The American study, led by Dr Jeffrey Pettis, research leader at the US government bee lab in Beltsville, Maryland, has demonstrated that the insects' vulnerability to infection is increased by the presence of imidacloprid, even at the most microscopic doses. Dr Pettis and his team found that increased disease infection happened even when the levels of the insecticide were so tiny that they could not subsequently be detected in the bees, although the researchers knew that they had been dosed with it.

 

Dr Pettis told The Independent his research had now been put forward for publication. "[It] was completed almost two years ago but it has been too long in getting out," he said. "I have submitted my manuscript to a new journal but cannot give a publication date or share more of this with you at this time."

 

However, it is known about, because Dr Pettis and a member of his team, Dennis van Engelsdorp, of Penn State University – both leaders in research focusing on colony collapse disorder (CCD) – have spoken about it at some length in a film about bee deaths which has been shown widely in Europe, but not yet in Britain or the US – although it has been seen by The Independent.

 

In The Strange Disappearance of The Bees, made by the American film-maker Mark Daniels, Pettis and van Engelsdorp reveal that they exposed two groups of bees to the well-known bee disease nosema. One of the groups was also fed tiny doses of imidacloprid. There was a higher uptake of infection in the bees fed the insecticide, even though it could not subsequently be detected, which raises the possibility that such a phenomenon occurring in the wild might be simply undetectable.

 

Although the US study remains unpublished, it has been almost exactly replicated by French researchers at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Avignon. They published their study in the journal Environmental Microbiology and said: "We demonstrated that the interaction between nosema and a neonicotinoid (imidacloprid) significantly weakened honeybees."

 

Neonicotinoids have attracted growing controversy since their introduction by Bayer in the 1990s, and have been blamed by some beekeepers and environmental campaigners as a potential cause of CCD, first observed in the US in 2006, in which billions of worker bees abruptly disappear from their hives.

 

Between 20 and 40 per cent of American hives have been affected, and CCD has since been observed in several other countries from France to Taiwan, though it has not yet been detected in Britain. Although Bayer insists its products are bee-safe, French and German beekeepers have blamed them for large bee losses. Neonicotinoids have been banned, to different degrees, in France, Germany, Italy and Slovenia, although they are freely sold and widely used in the US and Britain.

 

In the UK, the Co-op has banned them from farms from which it sources vegetables, but the Government has rejected appeals from beekeepers and environmentalists for their use to be suspended as a precaution. This week, however, an Early-Day Motion was tabled in the Commons by Martin Paton, the Labour MP for Gower, calling again for the Government to suspend use of the compounds following major new controversy in the US surrounding Bayer's latest neonicotinoid – clothianidin – which is increasingly being used in Britain. In November, a leaked internal document from the US Environmental Protection Agency showed that it was continuing to license clothianidin, even though its own scientists reported that the tests Bayer carried out to show the compound was safe were invalid.

 

Leading the calls for neonicotinoids to be banned in the Britain is Buglife, the invertebrate conservation charity, which last year published a review of all the research done on the chemicals' impact on "non-target" insects such as honeybees and other pollinators.

 

Yesterday the Buglife director, Matt Shardlow, said of the Pettis study: "This new research from America confirms that at very, very low concentrations neonicotinoid chemicals can make a honeybee vulnerable to fatal disease. If these pesticides are causing large numbers of honeybees, bumblebees, solitary bees, hoverflies and moths to get sick and die from diseases they would otherwise have survived, then neonicotinoid chemicals could be the main cause of both colony collapse disorder and the loss of wild pollinator populations.

 

"The weight of evidence against neonicotinoids is becoming irresistible – Government should act now to ban the risky uses of these toxins."

 

Bayer insists its neonicotinoids are safe for bees when used properly. Dr Julian Little, a spokesman for Bayer CropScience UK, said it was difficult for it to comment on an unpublished study. "It makes it impossible to look at their methods, it makes it impossible to check whether you can repeat the work, you don't know where they got the imidacloprid from, you don't know how they gave that to the bees," he said. But he added: "I'm sure there are some very interesting effects Dr Pettis has seen in a laboratory, but in reality, when you get to what's important to everybody, which is what happens in the field, you don't see these things happening. Bees are very, very important insects to Bayer CropScience and we recognise their importance."

 

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Columbians succeed with alternative crops

 

Bogota, Colombia (CNN) -- Jorge Elias Benjumea proudly inspects his plantain field. The 46-year-old father of three says he's not only happy his crops are doing well, but also, for the first time in years, he can tell the world that what he's growing is legal.

 

Benjumea, a resident of the Colombian province of Meta; used to grow coca, the plant from which cocaine is produced.

 

"Everything is different now, more peaceful. I go to bed at night with no worries," Benjumea says.

 

He used to make $2,800 a month growing coca. Now he makes about $840 with plantains. On the flip side, he doesn't have to deal with guerrillas or drug traffickers anymore. The Colombian government has greatly increased its military presence in the area, improving security and giving farmers an alternative to growing coca.

 

Benjumea says his peace of mind and the safety of his family are priceless. "Coca is a plant that can make you a lot of money, but also gives you a lot of headaches," he says.

 

He's part of a new wave of Colombian farmers growing alternative crops in a region called La Macarena. This region was known for decades as a stronghold of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the guerrilla group commonly called FARC. La Macarena used to be not only a recruiting and training hub for guerrillas, but also a major coca production center and a key transit route for illegal armed groups.

 

In a community called Albania, farmers grow and process sugar cane. Not far from there, in El Pinalito, also in the province of Meta, another group is venturing into fish farming. Last year they sold 1.5 metric tons of a fish known regionally as cachama.

 

The United States has provided more than $7 billion in the past 10 years to help Colombia fight drug trafficking. Most of the money has been used to help Colombia strengthen its military with equipment, training and intelligence. But another portion, recently rising, has been used to provide assistance to farmers interested in developing alternative crops like cacao (from which chocolate is made), plantains, yucca and papaya.

 

Colombian National Security Adviser Sergio Jaramillo said government partnerships with the farmers in Meta have been very successful, but he emphasized that none of this would have been possible without a military presence to improve security.

 

"You need to stabilize those drug-producing areas. That's what we're doing here, and there's no better investment for prosperity in a country like Colombia than supporting the integrated approach of security and social development," Jaramillo said.

 

During a three-day visit to Colombia, U.S. Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske visited several communities that are developing alternative crops and met with President Juan Manuel Santos, a key U.S. ally in Latin America.

 

"We have to continue to be supportive of Colombia in a whole host of ways, (and) none of this was possible without safety and security first," Kerlikowske said.

 

According to U.S. government figures, cocaine production in the South American country fell from 700 metric tons in 2001 to 270 in 2009, a 61 percent decrease.

 

Going into alternative crops hasn't been easy for local farmers. At the fish farm in El Pinalito, the locals say at the beginning they only saw "failures." But after getting specialized training and equipment from the government, production began to increase considerably. At the sugar cane processing plant in the Albania community, farmers say they received financial support to buy machinery, which "made all the difference."

 

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