The Leading Voices in Food

By: Duke World Food Policy Center
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  • Summary

  • The Leading Voices in Food podcast series features real people, scientists, farmers, policy experts and world leaders all working to improve our food system and food policy. You'll learn about issues across the food system spectrum such as food insecurity, obesity, agriculture, access and equity, food safety, food defense, and food policy. Produced by the Duke World Food Policy Center at wfpc.sanford.duke.edu.
    Duke World Food Policy Center
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Hygiene & Healthy Living Science Social Sciences
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Episodes
  • E260: Food Recovery Network Urges Food Date Labeling Reform

    E260: Food Recovery Network Urges Food Date Labeling Reform
    Jan 14 2025
    I don't know about you and your household, but in my home, we have a long history of opening the refrigerator and discovering pasta sauce or mayonnaise that we don't remember when it was put in the refrigerator, when we last opened it, and we're confused. We open the container; we smell it; we check out the date label. And if we're confused, we have a mantra: when in doubt, throw it out. But aren't those date labels supposed to help us make good decisions about whether or not a food product is safe? Currently, there is no federal regulation on what those labels should say. Best Buy, Use Buy, Sell Buy, or what have you. However, there is legislation in the Congress called the Food Date Labeling Act to help us address this issue. And today's guest, Regina Harmon, will help us explore this particular issue. She is the executive director of the Food Recovery Network, the largest student led movement fighting food waste and hunger in the United States. Interview Summary First, some of our listeners may not be familiar with the Food Recovery Network. Could you tell us more about the organization and what it hopes to accomplish? Absolutely. Thank you so much. Food Recovery Network was started in 2011 by college students at the University of Maryland who saw a couple of things happening. They saw a lot of food waste on their college campus, and they also saw a lot of people who were experiencing hunger in their communities. And so, they thought, hey, instead of throwing this perfectly good food away, what we could do is package this food up and give it to those in our neighborhood that we know need some help. And that's how Food Recovery Network was started. They started at the University of Maryland, one dining hall, one carload of food. They started calling other friends that went to different colleges and universities across the United States. And over the last decade and some change, we've grown into, as you said, the largest movement of students who are fighting food waste and hunger. We have about 200 college campuses that have food recovery network chapters. We've recovered over 16 million pounds of food through the power of young people. And today we also help other sectors that would like to also do the right thing with their surplus food. We help farms, we help corporate events, large scale events, we help conferences. You name it, wherever there's surplus food, Food Recovery Network can help make sure that food doesn't go into landfill and helps feed those in need. I would love to hear a little bit about who you are able to serve through the Recovered Food. Are you working with food banks? Are you working with the pantries directly? Tell me a little more about that connection. It's a beautiful connection. We have about 400 nonprofits all over the United States. That directly receive the surplus food that we donate. We go to the sites where the food is. So again, in college dining halls, large scale events, you name it, and that food is packaged up safely. And then it's brought to what we call hunger fighting nonprofits. These are nonprofits on the front lines in all of our communities that are in some way feeding our neighbors in need. These are homeless shelters, soup kitchens, food banks. These are domestic violence shelters. These are afterschool programs, churches, anywhere that can also handle the food safely and then distribute it to our neighbors directly. So through that, we've been able to meet so many incredible people, and a lot of times volunteers themselves who work at these incredible locations that again, are just helping those who need support to make their ends meet. Great. This is really important work. Thank you so much for the work that you all are doing. So, how does the Food Recovery Network activate to end food waste and make a positive impact on the environment? There's a lot of things that are happening here. You know, millions of tons of food is wasted every single year. And I know we'll get into the Food Date Limiting Act in just a moment, but every part of our food system, there's food waste. On farm fields, during transportation, at supermarkets, in our own homes. And so, a lot of times, most of the time, the majority of the time, all of the food that is wasted is actually thrown into landfills. You know, we see those images of whole entire tractor trailer trucks of food being dumped into landfill. And that is the problem. The majority of food, much of which is still perfectly good to eat, perfectly good to consume, is being driven into landfill, where it then is covered up, it begins to rot, and this is where the environmental harm starts. The food rots, and it creates additional CO2 into our environment and other greenhouse gases that is really difficult for our environment to reabsorb because it's happening at such an increased rate. And that is directly causing what we now know as global warming. Food all across the United States, all across the globe, is the third ...
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    14 mins
  • E259: Your state of the science on weight loss drugs

    E259: Your state of the science on weight loss drugs
    Jan 9 2025
    About two years ago, we released a podcast with Dr. Thomas Wadden of the University of Pennsylvania describing work on a new generation of medications to treat diabetes and obesity. They were really taking the field by storm. Since then, much more is known since many additional studies have been published and so many people have been using the drugs. So many, in fact, the market value of the Danish company, Novo Nordisk, one of the two major companies selling the drugs, has gone up. It is now greater than the entire budget of the country of Denmark. This single company is responsible for about half of Denmark's economic expansion this year. So, a lot of people are now taking the drugs and this is a great time for an update on the drugs. And we're fortunate to have two of the world's leading experts join us: Dr. Wadden, Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and the inaugural Albert J. Stunkard Professor of Psychiatry at Penn. Joining us as well as Dr. Robert Kushner, a physician and professor of medicine at Northwestern University and a pioneer in testing treatments for obesity. Interview Summary Tom, you and I were colleagues at Penn decades ago. And I got frustrated the treatments for obesity didn't work very well. People tended to regain the weight. And I turned my attention to prevention and policy. But you hung in there and I admired you for that patience and persistence. And Bob, the same for you. You worked on this tenacious problem for many years. But for both of you, your patience has been rewarded with what seems to me to be a seismic shift in the way obesity and diabetes can be treated. Tom, I'll begin with you. Is this as big of a deal as it seems to me? Well, I think it is as big of a deal as it seems to you. These medications have had a huge impact on improving the treatment of type 2 diabetes, but particularly the management of obesity. With older medications, patients lost about 7 percent of their starting weight. If you weighed 200 pounds, you'd lose about 15 pounds. That was also true of our best diet and exercise programs. You would lose about 7 percent on those programs with rigorous effort. But with the new medications, patients are now losing about 15 to 20 percent of their starting body weight at approximately one year. And that's a 30-to-40-pound loss for a person who started at 200 pounds. And with these larger weight losses, we get larger improvements in health in terms of complications of obesity. So, to quote a good friend of mine, Bob Kushner, these medications have been a real game changer. Thanks for putting that in perspective. I mean, we're talking about not just little incremental changes in what treatments can produce, which is what we've seen for years. But just orders of magnitude of change, which is really nice to see. So, Bob what are these medications that we're talking about? What are the names of the drugs and how do they work? Well, Kelly, this transformation of obesity really came about by finding the target that is really highly effective for obesity. It's called the gut brain axis. And when it comes to the gut it's starting off with a naturally occurring gut hormone called GLP 1. I think everyone in the country's heard of GLP 1. It's released after we eat, and it helps the pancreas produce insulin, slows the stomach release of food, and reduces appetite. And that's where the obesity story comes in. So pharmaceutical companies have taken this hormone and synthesized it, something similar to GLP 1. It mimics the action of GLP 1. So, you could actually take it and give it back and have it injected so it augments or highlights this hormonal effect. Now, that same process of mimicking a hormone is used for another gut hormone called GIP that also reduces appetite. These two hormones are the backbone of the currently available medication. There's two on the market. One is called Semaglutide. That's a GLP 1 analog. Trade name is Wegovy. Now, it's also marketed for diabetes. Tom talked about how it is used for diabetes and increases insulin. That trade name is Ozempic. That's also familiar with everyone around the country. The other one that combined GLP 1 and GIP, these two gut hormones, so it's a dual agonist, the trade name for obesity is called Zep Bound, and the same compound for diabetes is called Mounjaro. These are terms that are becoming familiar, I think, to everyone in the country. Tom mentioned some about the, how much weight people lose on these drugs, but what sort of medical changes occur? Just to reiterate what Tom said, I'll say it in another way. For Semaglutide one third of individuals are losing 20 percent of their body weight in these trials. For Tirzepatide, it even outpaces that. And I got a third of individuals losing a quarter of their body weight. These are unheard of weight losses. And with these weight losses and these independent effects from weight, what we're seeing in the trials ...
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    42 mins
  • E258: Do 'market driven epidemics' drive your food choices?

    E258: Do 'market driven epidemics' drive your food choices?
    Dec 19 2024
    For much of history, the word 'epidemic' applied to infectious diseases. Large numbers of cases of disease caused by organisms such as bacteria and viruses that spread through water, air, or other means, sometimes transmitted from person to person, or back and forth between people and animals. Then came epidemics of chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease - diseases occurring in very large numbers and created not by infectious agents, but by drivers in our day to day lives, such as a bad food environment. A new paper was just published in the PLOS global health literature that I found fascinating. It focuses on another use of the concept of epidemics: market driven epidemics. Let's find out what these are and find out a little bit more about their implications for our health and wellbeing. Our guests today are two of the authors of that paper. Dr. Jonathan Quick is a physician and expert on global health and epidemics. He is an adjunct professor at Duke University's Global Health Institute. Eszter Rimanyi joins us as well. She works on chronic disease and addiction epidemiology at Duke university. Interview Summary Access the PLOS article “Dynamics of combatting market-driven epidemics: Insights from U.S. reduction of cigarette, sugar, and prescription opioid consumption.” So, Jono, let's start with you. Tell us what you mean by market driven epidemics. The pattern is familiar to people. There is a product that that humans like and the business community says we can make a lot of money on this unmet need. And so they do that and they start selling a lot of it. And then people start noticing that this thing that the humans like is killing some of them. And so, the scientists do the public health. And then the business community says these scientists are going to kill the golden goose. They buy up other scientists and try to defend themselves. And then it goes on and on before we really bend the epidemic curves. This pattern of consumer products that have harmful effects, those products are major contributors to the root causes of at least a million deaths a year in the US, and over 20 million deaths worldwide. So, to try to look at this from an epidemic point of view, we first established a case definition. Our definition of market driven epidemic is a significant increase in death, disability and other harmful effects on humans and human health and wellbeing. It's arising from a consumer product whose use has been accelerated by aggressive marketing. Whose harmful effects have been denied or otherwise minimized by producers. And for which effective mitigation is possible but actively opposed by producers. So, we looked at the natural history of this, and we found five phases through which these epidemics pass. There's market development, either inventing a new product, developing a product like prescription opioids, or transforming an existing product like tobacco. Phase two is evidence of harm. First, there's suspicion, astute clinicians, whistleblowers, and then eventually proof of harm. Phase three is corporate resistance. Companies deny harm, seek to discredit accusers, commission counter science, manufacture doubt, mount legal challenges. All the while deaths and social upheaval and economic costs are mounting. And finally, our next phase four is mitigation. We get some regulatory efforts going, and there's a tipping point for the consumption and resulting deaths. And then finally, phase five of this is market adaptation. In a response to decreasing or threatened consumption, companies and consumers typically seek alternatives. Adaptations can be positive or negative. Some are healthier, some are equally or more harmful. Thanks very much for that description. It really helps explain what the concept is all about. You chose three areas of focus. You could have chosen others, but you chose cigarettes, sugar, and prescription opioid use. Why those in particular? We wanted to identify differences in these market driven epidemics in a few product categories. We wanted to look at distinctly different consumer experiences so we could see what worked and what didn't in terms of bending the epidemic curve. We picked nicotine delivery, food, and prescription medicine. And to choose within those categories we established five inclusion criteria. So, number one, the product had to have proven adverse health effects. Number two, there needed to be well documented histories of product development, marketing, mitigation efforts, and so forth. Number three, the product needed to meet the overall case definition. That is, companies knew they were doing harm, continued to do harm, and fought that harm. Number four, there needed to be long term data available for product consumption and associated impact. And number five, most important, we chose products for which mitigation efforts had already resulted in significant sustained reduction in product consumption. Based on these three criteria, ...
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    29 mins

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