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GMO Paranoia And The Hollow Health Claims Of Cheerios

February 10th, 2014 by admin in Health Tips, News, Quackery Exposed
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Make no mistake about it. General Mills’ introduction of Cheerios sporting the label “Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients” is a mere marketing ploy and has nothing to do with health or nutrition. Let’s start the dissection of this blatant attempt to capitalize on the anti-GMO paranoia by looking at the main ingredient in Cheerios, namely oats. Samuel Johnson, the 18^th century writer who compiled the first authoritative dictionary of the English language whimsically defined oats as the grain “eaten by people in Scotland, but fit only for horses in England.” A clever Scot supposedly retorted “that’s why England has such good horses, and Scotland has such fine men!”

Modern science, as it turns out, supports the ancient Scotch penchant for oats. A form of soluble fiber in the grain known as beta glucan has been shown to reduce levels of cholesterol in the blood which in turn is expected to reduce the risk of heart disease. You couldn’t tell this by the Scottish experience, though. Scotland has one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world. It seems all that haggis, refined carbs and a lack of veggies is too great a challenge for Scotch oats to cope with. Actually you need at least 3 grams of beta glucan daily to have any effect on blood cholesterol and that translates to roughly a cup of cooked oat bran or a cup and a half of oatmeal. Or about three servings of Cheerios. And that makes the cholesterol lowering claims prominently featured on the Cheerios box ring pretty hollow. There are far better ways to reduce cholesterol than gorging on Cheerios.

At least, though, the cholesterol lowering claim has some scientific merit. The “no GMO” claim has none. To start with, there are no genetically modified oats grown anywhere, at least not in the current sense of the term which refers to the splicing of specific foreign genes into the DNA of a seed. Such “recombinant DNA technology: is generally used to confer resistance to herbicides or protection from insects, but resistance to drought and enhancement with nutrients hold great potential. Although it is this new-fangled technology that garners attention these days, the fact is that virtually everything we eat has been genetically modified in some fashion over the years, either by traditional crossbreeding or through the use of chemicals or radiation both of which can scramble the genetic material in crops. The latter processes are based on the hope that a useful mutation will occur by chance, but basically it comes down to a roll of the dice. Just do enough experiments and a valuable mutant may surface. Radiation breeding has produced many varieties of rice, wheat, peanuts and bananas that are now widely grown. If you are eating red grapefruit, or sipping premium Scotch whisky made from barley, you are enjoying the products of this technology.

So if “genetically modified” oats do not exist, what sort of monsters is General Mills protecting us from? As is the case with any commercial cereal, Cheerios contains a number of ingredients with nutritious whole grain oats at the top of the list. Next come modified corn starch and sugar. It is to these two ingredients that General Mills refers when it talks about “GMO-free.” Much of the corn and some of the sugar beets grown in North America are genetically modified to resist herbicides and ward off insects. But by the time the highly processed starch and sugar extracted from these plants reach the food supply, they retain no vestige of any genetic modification. There is no way to distinguish the starch or sugar derived from genetically modified plants from the conventional varieties. The GMO-free Cheerios will not differ in any way from the currently marketed version except that the price may eventually reflect the greater cost of sourcing ingredients from plants that do not benefit from recombinant DNA technology.

The reason for the addition of sugar to Cheerios, actually in small doses compared with other cereals, is obvious. But why is corn starch added, and why is it modified? Nobody likes soggy cereal, and a thin layer of modified starch sprayed onto the little “O”s helps keep the interior dry. The modification in this case has nothing to do with genetic modification. Starch is a mixture of essentially two “polymers,” or giant molecules, both composed of units of glucose joined together. In amylose, the glucose units form a straight chain, while in amylopectin, the main glucose strand features many branches of shorter glucose chains. The properties of any starch depend on the relative proportion of amylose and amylopectin as well as on the degree of branching.

Starch has many uses in the food industry. It can thicken sauces, prevent French dressing from separating, substitute for fat or keep cereals dry. But these uses require starches of specific composition, either in terms of the length of the glucose chains or the degree of branching. In other words, the native starch has to be “modified” by treatment with acids, enzymes or oxidizing agents. There is no safety issue here, modified starches are approved food additives. Of course that doesn’t prevent scientifically illiterate alarmists from scaring the public by blathering on about modified starch being used as wallpaper glue and insinuating that any food made with it will literally stick to our ribs. The modified starch used in glue, namely a “carboxymethylated” version, is not the same as used in food, but even if it were, so what? Just because water can be used to clean garage floors and is found in tumours doesn’t mean we can’t drink it. Talking about washing garage floors, Cheerios also contains tripotassium phosphate, a powerful cleaning agent. It is added in small amounts to adjust the acidity of the mix used to formulate the cereal. This too has raised the ire of some ill-informed activists who do not realize that we consume all sorts of naturally occurring phosphates regularly in our diet. Quacking about the dangers of tripotassium phosphate in Cheerios makes about as much sense as hyping Cheerios that are “Not Made With Genetically Modified Ingredients.”

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Joe Schwarcz, Ph.D., is the Director of McGill University’s Office for Science and Society and teaches a variety of courses in McGill’s Chemistry Department and in the Faculty of Medicine with emphasis on health issues, including aspects of “Alternative Medicine”.  He is well known for his informative and entertaining public lectures on topics ranging from the chemistry of love to the science of aging.  Using stage magic to make scientific points is one of his specialties.

Unintended Consequences: Penalizing Insurers Kills Employer-Based Wellness Programs

August 3rd, 2009 by EvanFalchukJD in Better Health Network, Health Policy
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I thought everyone knew the major goal of health care reform is to control spending.

Then why are Democratic leaders proposing changes that would outlaw some of the most successful cost-savings programs in the country?

Today’s The Hill reports on the new strategy to attack insurance companies as “villains.”  No doubt, health insurers have a bad reputation and have done plenty to earn it.  As the Hill reports, the message is going to be that the reform plan will lead to “capping what [insurers] can force you to pay in out-of-pocket expenses, co-pays and deductibles.”

But for at least half of Americans – those who work for large and mid-sized companies and their families – their “insurer” is actually their employer.  And many of these employers have been using out-of-pocket expenses, co-pays and deductibles to improve employee health, and reduce the cost of care.  They are creating strong wellness programs and creating financial rewards and penalties, all based on employee participation.

As I wrote in April:

Companies like Safeway, Wal-Mart, Michelin, General Mills, Marriott and so many others have implemented programs to create a “culture” of wellness among their employees and their families.  Leaders at these companies constantly talk about living healthy lifestyles, and are paying to make it happen.  At Michelin, employees get a cash reward for getting a biometric screening and for participating in company-sponsored health improvement programs.  It even started work-site exercise programs, including yoga (although it found that with a workforce that was 82% male it had to call its yoga classes “strengthening and conditioning”).

General Mills published wellness statistics about its different plants and found that the workers in each one competed with the others to get the best scores for BMI and other important health metrics.  Marriott found that by eliminating co-pays on drugs for certain chronic diseases, more employees followed doctors’ orders to take them, and although Mariott’s drug costs went up, overall health expenses went down.  Abbott Labs brings in motivational speakers and set up weigh-in kiosks in its offices that took pictures of employees as they got healthier so they could see the difference.  All of these companies reported on enthusiastic participation, and a sense among employees that their company cared about their well-being.

Safeway has taken this idea even further, and redesigned its entire benefits plan around this concept.  Employees who live unhealthy lifestyles and refuse to participate in wellness programs pay more for their health insurance — just like a bad driver pays more for  auto insurance.  Safeway did this in a highly positive and motivational way, making available a wide array of free services to help employees be more healthy and enjoy lower health premiums.  The results have been dramatic:  Steve Burd, Safeway’s CEO reported at the WHCC that Safeway’s health costs have been flat since 2005.

This Safeway model – creating both soft and hard incentives for employee health – is one of the fastest growing trends in plan design.  The idea is to give employees control over their own health care, including financial  responsibility.  When this happens, employees live healthier, look for value in their health care spending, and overall costs are lower.

And yet the statements from the Congressional leadership suggest they want to severely limit these kinds of innovations.

It may be good politics to demonize the insurers, but we should realize that “insurers” aren’t exactly who we think they are.   Health reform that stifles the innovation that’s working at America’s best companies is no reform at all.

*This blog post was originally published at See First Blog*