Seth Roberts, he of the Shangri La diet, has a blog. I see it in my RSS reader. I was amazed to see a post that seemed to have been, er, penetrated, thusly:

So I went to the blog post itself. And lo! all those nasties were invisible.

So I checked the source, and they’re not there either. (Data not shown). One commenter mentions the problem. But there doesn’t seem to have been a response. So we don’t know whether Seth cleaned up the mess or whether this is some particularly weird hack that puts its spam into the RSS feed but nowhere else.

And if it is, what’s the point?

Start: 95.4 Last week: 89.3 This week: 88.7

Drifting, very slowly, down. I think.

Marion Nestle, Colin Tudge, Michael Pollan. Any one of them could have said this.

Let the scientists and their interpreters fight it out over single nutrients. Eat food and enjoy your dinner.

It was, in fact, Marion Nestle.

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.6 This week: 87.5

A day late, because I wanted to get yesterday’s bread recipe done. But that’s yesterday’s weight up there.

Everyone knows that kids need advertisements to tell them what to nag for. Food is no exception. But food manufacturers, smarting under recent attacks, decided in 2007 to launch a Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative and limit their advertising to children on TV. Responsible, eh?

Children Now, a public policy group, commissioned an independent survey of the Initiative’s impact from researchers at the University of Arizona. The report, available at the Children Now website, makes interesting reading.

Adverts for the nutritionally worst foods have dropped by almost 14%.

From 84% of food ads to 72.5%. C’mon! Credit where credit is due. That can’t have been easy.

I particularly like the categorizations that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has devised to guide food choices for children. The worst, nutritionally, are known as “Whoa” foods; these products should be consumed only on “special occasions, such as your birthday”. Truly healthy foods, such as vegetables and fruits, are known as “Go” products, while the middle ground is occupied by “Slow” foods.

More nice headline numbers: Industry more than doubled advertising of “Slow” foods — which remember the DHSS says are better for children — from 12.9% of food ads to a whopping 26.6%. Alas, the industry let itself down on “Go” foods. Adverts for fruits and vegetables shrank by more than two-thirds, from 3.0% of food ads to 0.9%. As one pusillanimous do-gooding website whined:

If you are looking for ads about fruits and vegetables, be prepared to wait, and wait, and wait: the authors found that you’d need to watch children’s programs for 10 hours before seeing one.

On the bright side, those adverts are no longer interrupting TV viewing and contributing to ADHD.

The US Federal Trade Commission was due to hold a hearing on Sizing Up Food Marketing and Childhood Obesity yesterday.

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.6 This week: 87.6

Blast. Plateaued again.

The Economist alerted me to a paper in PLOS One by Kevin Hall and his colleagues at the Laboratory of Biological Modeling at the NIH in the US. The Progressive Increase of Food Waste in America and Its Environmental Impact, subtly published the day before Thanksgiving, concluded that America wasted close to 40% of its food supply in 2003. That figure is far higher than the USDA’s own estimate of around 27%.

What is neat about this study is the methodology. Previous estimates of waste have examined small samples of garbage or interviewed people. Hall and his colleague took a different tack. They calculated the difference between food production, as revealed by the FAO’s food balance sheets for the US, and food consumption, based on a model they developed that takes the average weight of people and figures out how much they would need to eat to weigh that much. The difference, they say, is wasted, and most of their assumptions suggest that their estimate will generally be conservative. In 1974, the difference was 900 kcal per person per day. In 2003 it was 1400 kcal per person per day, a total of 150 trillion kcal per year.

I could be wrong but I reckon that’s 174.5 TWh, which as it happens is the annual energy consumption of Scotland and the hydroelectric production of Russia, two countries also not known for their wonderful diet. Not that it matters.

What slightly surprised me about the Hall et al. study was that it took rising weight as a given and used it to estimate waste, without saying much about the consequences of obesity. The main thrust of their conclusion seems to be the environmental impact of throwing all that food away; water to grow it in the first place, fuel used in transport, greenhouse gas emissions in growing it and then as it decomposes, and so on. Of course that’s their privilege. But health barely gets a look in.

The calculated progressive increase of food waste suggests that the US obesity epidemic has been the result of a “push effect” of increased food availability and marketing with Americans being unable to match their food intake with the increased supply of cheap, readily available food. Thus, addressing the oversupply of food energy in the US may help curb the obesity epidemic as well as decrease food waste, which has profound environmental consequences.

That, however is precisely the point of studies by Lisa Young and Marion Nestle. Young has shown a tight correlation between food supply, portion size and obesity, a topic I’ve mentioned before. Nestle has pointed out eloquently that there is almost no lobby in the US that stands to benefit from people eating less, and hence no impetus to change either the amount of food produced or advice on what (and how much) to eat. In that light, maybe the push to turn food into biofuel is not such a sin, if it increases food prices at home and thus helps people to eat (and waste) less.

Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but the latest Economist Debate launched today, on the motion This house believes that governments should play a stronger role in guiding food and nutrition choices. I’ll be keeping an eye on the main contributions, but so far, I’m not impressed by either the food industry spokeswoman or the professor of psychology.

Start: 95.4 Last week: 87.3 This week: 87.6

Two helpings of everything for Thanksgiving cannot have been the only issue. Maybe it was the fresh almonds?

Does anyone need a choice of more than 50 breakfast cereals? Many more.

I’m trying to remember that fancy word from economics, where a single supplier creates several goods that look different, so that the poor befuddled consumer doesn’t realize that no matter what they choose, the company wins. It isn’t a monopsony, is it? Anyway, detergents and breakfast cereals are among the classic examples.

I ask partly because it gives me the opportunity to link to this wondrous flow chart (click it to enlarge) that might help you reach a decision. And also because I can link to Marion Nestle’s posts about Smart Choices. Such fun. Form an industry group. Decide what levels of which ingredients are “good for you”. Slap a label on those products that meet your own standards, like 44% sugar on a breakfast cereal. And then get professional bodies to give your labels their stamp of approval. An appalling instance of marketing hoopla.

Breakfast cereals, however, also offer a truly wondrous instance of marketing hoopla. I refer to Diamond Shreddies, a development I had not been aware of until it was so brilliantly exposed on a Tedtalk by Rory Sutherland. I’m not even going to try and gloss the idea of Diamond Shreddies. You can see some of the TV ads here and here and I strongly advise you to do so. The campaign seems to have worked, and has been dissected in many places. What I love about it is that it is so knowing and also that the focus groups, which I’m assured were “real”, are so bereft of real content. Perfection.

Seriously, though, how many breakfast cereals would be enough?