nutrition

The Los Angeles school board voted, 6-1, to loosen its ban, dating from 2011, on sugary, flavored milk in lunchrooms, in the hopes that more relaxed rules will reduce food waste and encourage consumption of plain milk, says the Los Angeles Times. "We wouldn't serve caramel apples to increase apple consumption," objected Brent Walmsley, founder of the advocacy group Sugarwatch.

The United States is one of the five largest vegetable producers in the world, yet Americans have for decades disregarded the advice to eat more vegetables, say USDA economists Hodan Wells and Jeanine Bentley. "For Americans to meet the (Dietary) Guidelines' recommendations, their intake of overall vegetables, including legumes, would need to increase by 50 percent," or 0.84 cup per day per person, they write in a special article in the Vegetables and Pulses Outlook.

In a study of the Berkeley's first-in-the-nation soda tax, researchers found that lower-income residents had reduced their consumption by 21 percent, compared to the pre-tax days, the Los Angeles Times reported. The study, published Tuesday in the American Journal of Public Health, looked at the impact of the tax in the first five months after it went into effect.

Researchers at the USDA have developed a new food-packaging material made out of milk-protein (i.e. casein) that is both biodegradable and edible, says EurekAlert. Compared to petroleum-based plastics, the casein-based packaging is 500 times more effective at keeping out oxygen, which could dramatically reduce food waste from spoilage.

The USDA's Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion has created a series of quizzes on the five food groups that are "designed to challenge, teach, and even entertain," says Feedstuffs.

Better access to supermarkets and grocery stores doesn’t necessarily inspire people to eat better, according to a study out of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In fact, researchers found that U.S. adults buy most of their junk-food at such stores. The findings fly in the face of the “food desert” theory, which holds that people in neighborhoods without grocery stores are more likely to eat unhealthy food.

$100,000 NAS Prize in Food and Agriculture Sciences. The prize, to recognize "a mid-career scientist at a U.S. institution who has made contribution" to the fields, would join the $250,000 World Food Prize as a prestigious award for work in food and agriculture.

Only three countries show no serious signs of malnutrition: China, Vietnam and South Korea, according to the 2016 Global Nutrition Report. The rest of the world is plagued by such poor nutrition indicators as “stunted toddlers, anemic young women and obese adults,” says The New York Times. In the United States, each obese family member costs families an average of 8 percent of their income in additional healthcare.

More carbon dioxide in the air is decreasing the amount of protein in pollen and may be contributing to Colony Collapse Disorder, says Yale Environment 360. Researchers compared samples of the plant goldenrod – a staple for wild honeybees – collected from 1842 to 2014 and found that protein levels in the most recent goldenrod samples were lower by 30 percent.

“Ugly” fruits and vegetables might actually be more nutritious than blemish-free produce, says NPR. Scabs and scars on the skin are a sign that the plant fought off invaders, whether pests or fungus.

Some 46 million people, roughly one out of seven Americans, use food stamps each month to help put food on the table, says the White House. A report by the Council of Economic Advisors says, "New research ... shows benefit levels are often inadequate to sustain families through the end of the month.

In an editorial, the Washington Post advocates a national tax on sugar as the best way to discourage consumption and improve the general health of Americans. Some 16 percent of the calories consumed by Americans daily comes from sugar added to foods during processing, says the Post.

The No 1 fast food company, McDonald's, "has quietly pulled the link" on the Internet to a 20-minute film, "540 Meals: Choices Make a Difference," that was being promoted for nutrition education classes in middle and high schools, says the blog The Lunch Tray. The author of the blog, Bettina Siegel, says the film features "features McDonald's paid brand ambassador John Cisna, an Iowa science teacher who lost weight eating McDonald's for 90 days" and "is little more than an infomercial."

The Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program is a tiny part of USDA's child-nutrition portfolio, yet plenty of groups want their products approved for the trays of healthy snacks given for free to schoolchildren in the poorest neighborhoods, says Politico.

The Senate version of the USDA/FDA funding bill includes language that would restrict the new edition of the Dietary Guidelines to solely nutritional and dietary matters.

Domestic production of olive oil, based mostly in California, is six times larger than it was 20 years ago but it amounts to less than 2 percent of the U.S.'s steadily growing consumption, forecast to be more than 400,000 metric tons this year, say USDA analysts. Drought in Europe, the major producer, drove import prices to record highs but they are projected to decline in the year ahead as production recovers.