With all the concern about childhood obesity there’s some good news to report in survey data that indicates children and adolescents are drinking less soda. But what they are drinking (or not drinking) instead of soda may be cause for concern.

The new data describes trends in what kids have been drinking in the last decade. First the good news:

• The percentage of kids age 6-12 who drink soda fell from 55% to 45%
• For teens 13-17 years old, the percentage of soda drinkers dropped from 67% to 53%

Because most soda contains little or no nutritional value, drinking less will help cut calories from sugar and reduce the amount of acidic drinks that can damage teeth.

Juice: Too Much of a Good Thing?

Trends in juice consumption are not as clear-cut. Until recently, the consumption of 100% fruit juice was rising steadily among all age groups. Now the trend is reversing in teenagers who are turning to other beverages like sports drinks, energy drinks, coffee and tea.

Young children and toddlers are still chugging juice but many pediatricians believe they may be drinking too much juice. The American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines for fruit juice are:

• 0-6 months: no juice
• 6 months-1 year: 1-3 oz
• 1-6 years: 4-6 oz
• 6-18 years: 8-12 oz

The concern with juice is the high amount of sugar—including naturally occurring sugars. Too much sugar is associated with many health problems including obesity, type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

Fruit juice is often missing some of the nutrients and fiber that whole fruit contains.  For this reason, many health experts recommend whole fruit over juice to gain all of the potential benefits of fruit.

Got Milk?

On the down side, the survey data shows a steady decline in milk consumption. For example:

• Among children age 6-12 only 73% drink milk, down from 90%
• For teenagers the numbers are much worse. The number of milk-drinking teenagers dropped from just over 75% down to 57%.
• Also sliding is the amount of milk that kids are drinking when they do choose milk. (between 4 and 5 ounces less per day)

In drinking less milk kids are missing out on many important nutrients necessary for growth and health maintenance like calcium, vitamin D and potassium. These nutrients are needed for healthy bones and muscles and a strong immune system.

Drinking less milk would not be a problem if what kids drank instead of milk provided these nutrients, but that’s not the case.

Functional Beverages

Another growing trend in the drink category is the popularity of a new class of drinks called “functional beverages.” Popular with kids and adults, these drinks are often marketed as healthy alternatives to soda, but are they really better? Find out which drinks make the grade and which ones miss the mark with our review, Functional Drinks Exposed.

Sources:

Food Navigator

American Academy of Pediatrics

According to estimates, as much as one-third of all “100% Honey” sold in stores contains something other than honey. In this example of “food fraud,” a cheaper substitute ingredient such as high fructose corn syrup or glucose is added to the honey to boost profits.

Unscrupulous food producers have been committing food fraud for some time, but until now, there hasn’t been a public database that compiles all the data surrounding these foodie crimes—an important first step in stopping food fraud.

A new database, which is available at www.foodfraud.org consists of data from over 1,305 cases of food fraud that occurred between 1980 and 2010. The database was created by the U.S. Pharmacopeial Convention (USP), a nonprofit scientific organization that develops standards to help ensure the identity, quality and purity of food ingredients, dietary supplements and pharmaceuticals.

Top Ten Adulterated Foods

According to the USP research, below are the most adulterated foods along with a list of the “fake” ingredients found in them.

1. Olive Oil – non-olive oils such as corn oil, hazelnut oil and palm oil.
2. Milk – whey, bovine milk protein, melamine, and cane sugar.
3. Honey – high fructose corn syrup, glucose, and fructose.
4. Saffron – sandlewood dust, starch, yellow dye, and gelatin threads.
5. Orange Juice – grapefruit juice, marigold flower extract, corn sugar and paprika extract.
6. Coffee – chicory, roasted corn, caramel, malt, glucose, leguminous plants and maltodextrins.
7. Apple Juice (Tie) – high-fructose corn syrup, raisin sweetener and synthetic malic acid.
8. Grape Wine (Tie) – apple juice and a toxic sweet chemical called diethyleneglycol.
9. Maple Syrup (Tie) – corn syrup, beet sugar, and cane sugar.
10. Vanilla Extract – synthetically-produced vanillin and maltol.

Danger to Food Supply

If you consumed honey that contained corn syrup, you’d probably never know it or suffer any ill effects, but that’s not always the case. There are many notorious examples of food fraud that involved toxic substitute ingredients that claimed many lives and went undiscovered for years.

How could problems go undetected for so long? It’s because current food protection systems are not designed to look for the nearly infinite number of potential adulterants that may show up in the food supply.

Melamine, for example, was considered neither a potential contaminant nor an adulterant in the food supply before the episodes of adulteration of pet food in 2007 and infant formula and other milk products in 2008. Melamine was used as an adulterant to mimic protein as early as 1979, but this remained virtually unknown until 2007. Therefore, testing for melamine was not included in routine quality assurance or quality control analyses.

In some ways food fraud may be more risky than traditional threats to the food supply. The adulterants used in these activities often are unconventional and designed to avoid detection through routine analyses.

The researchers pointed out that food ingredients and additives present a unique risk because they are used in so many food products and often do not have visual or functional properties that enable easy discrimination from other similar ingredients or adulterants throughout the supply chain.

Glycerin, for example, is a sweet, clear, colorless liquid that is difficult to differentiate by sight or smell from other sweet, clear, colorless liquid syrups -- including toxic diethylene glycol, which has been substituted for glycerin with deadly consequences. Diethylene glycol has been fraudulently added to wines, and used as a substitute for glycerin used in pharmaceuticals.

Benefits of Database

The new USP database will help stop food fraud by:

• identifying specific food ingredients and food categories vulnerable to adulteration.
• indicating the types of analytical detection methods used to discover the fraud.
• classifying the type of fraud employed in each case using three categories: replacement, addition or removal.

The authors found 95 percent of food fraud cases involved replacement -- an authentic material replaced partially or completely by another, less expensive substitute.

Protecting Yourself

Unfortunately there’s not a lot consumers can do to protect themselves from food fraud, but here’s a few tips:

• Buy from reputable stores you trust.
• When possible, purchase from major brands.
• When purchasing olive oil, look for quality certifications on labels. (COOC for California oils and IOOC, DOP, DO or HAEPAO for imported oils)
• If it’s an option, consume whole foods rather than processed foods. (For example, purchase coffee beans rather than ground coffee or apples rather than apple sauce.)
• Price can be a good indication as well. If the price looks too cheap for an expensive item like saffron, then there’s a good chance you may not be getting an authentic product.

Sources:

Science Daily

CBS News

USP

It's one thing to shrink your risk of type 2 diabetes theoretically by drinking TOO MUCH coffee. It's entirely another to reduce them by doing something completely counter-intuitive to modern dietary strategies, however, like consuming whole-fat milk, cheeses and other dairy products.

Just like the health benefits associated with omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), we will be hearing and learning much more in the coming years about trans-palmitoleic acid, thanks to a recent study that tracked the health of more than 3,700 seniors (older than age 64) participating in the Cardiovascular Health Study for two decades.

Patients who had higher levels of trans-palmitoleic fatty acids at the get-go generally had healthier insulin levels and sensitivity, cholesterol numbers and inflammatory markers. During follow-up reviews, patients who maintained those high levels of trans-palmitoleic acids reduced their diabetes risks by some 60 percent.

Here's the trick: Your body naturally has circulating palmitoleic acid, but you can also get it from outside sources -- then it's called trans-palmitoleic acid -- like whole milk. Lead researcher Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian told HealthDay News, the amount of trans-palmitoleic acid is proportional to the dairy fat in whole-fat dairy foods. Also, the amount of trans-palmitoleic acid necessary to confer such benefits varies depending on the dairy product, so the number of servings one would need is hard to pinpoint too.

Before you head to the grocery store to stock up on whole-fat dairy products, however, medical experts warn it's way too early to adjust dietary recommendations. As we've pointed out here before, science is just coming around to the notion that our bodies are very much like living, breathing, walking and talking chemistry experiments.

Give this some time for other researchers to weigh in. Don't worry, we'll keep you posted…

Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 153, No. 12, p. 790-799, December 21, 2010

insciences.org December 21, 2010

healthfinder.gov December 20, 2010

CNN/The Chart December 20, 2010

Why do many Americans receive their daily vitamin D from a supplement? It can be tough to get the right amount for your health from food and safe sun exposure, and an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report on the first formal recommendations for calcium and vitamin D underscores the problem.

Yes, you can make a dent in that minimum 600 IU recommendation for vitamin D set by the IOM for most Americans on foods alone, but only if your daily diet includes lots of fatty fish and fortified foods like cereal, orange juice and milk. For example, 9 ounces of tuna or 6 cups of milk or orange juice per day would satisfy the IOM's new vitamin D minimum, but it's not terribly realistic for most folks.

Imagine how hard it would be to get the right amount without a supplement if your doctor recommended that you and your family needed a considerably higher amount of vitamin D (an upper limit of 4,000 IUs for anyone above age 9 was set by the IOM).

Another way to boost your vitamin D levels safely, according to an endocrinologist who served on the IOM panel that developed these recommendations: Fight the rising tide of obesity by getting a better handle on your weight.

Institute of Medicine November 30, 2010 Free Full Text Report

USA Today December 2, 2010

You may not have seen this latest salvo in the ongoing debate over organic and conventional foods during the recent Memorial Day holiday, but it was pretty easy to miss.

Not a word was mentioned about the war of words between the warring factions in this study touting the nutritional value of milk produced by grass-fed cows, but all the signs were there. After comparing the health of some 3,600 Costa Rican patients -- half of whom had experienced a non-fatal heart attack, while the rest were healthy -- the top 20 percent who had the highest amounts of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) in their bodies reduced their risk of a heart attack by 36 percent.

So, what does this have to do with the organic vs. conventional debate?

One of the best sources of CLA is milk produced by grass-fed cows. Previous studies have shown how these animals produce milk five times richer in CLA than those existing on conventional grains. What's more, cows largely graze on pastures -- rather than grains -- in this Central American country.

All the more reason, it may be very beneficial for your health to be on the lookout for cleaner, healthier food sources with the least amount of exposure to pesticides.

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition May 12, 2010

EmpowHER May 31, 2010

Vancouver Sun May 28, 2010