banking.economics.sustainability and other shiny stuff
11-year-old Birke Baehr presents his take on a major source of our food — far-away and less-than-picturesque industrial farms. Keeping farms out of sight promotes a rosy, unreal picture of big-box agriculture, he argues, as he outlines the case to green and localize food production.
I believe that individuals, neither groups of any kind nor states, are the masters of the self and that governments should neither posses greater nor lesser power than the individual. The individual "must exist for his own sake," Ayn Rand wrote in 1962, "neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself."
For these reasons, I seek out in any way possible where I might be able to change the fabric of the misinformed through collective reason and the voice of the individual. I firmly believe that it is only through reason and logic thought that one can acquire knowledge and mend, shape his surroundings.
Based on this notion, the idea of a platform where one can freely contribute and empirically elucidate the concepts and methods of all agricultural processes is essential and of a pressing matter. Proof of departure from and violation of the loosely established policies is known and rampant. With respect to aggressive lobbyism, it remains a known yet ignored fact that progress and reforms within the political spectrum is futile and knowledge of this, though known by many, remains unacted upon.
My purpose behind Diplomatic Goods, which are the results of Diplomatic Standards, is to educate, show and protect the nature and our ideal view of our food and agricultural systems through objective reasoning instead of mindlessly delegating this undertaking to the governments or private enterprises.
It is known that any form of centralization weakens the bargaining power of the individual and thus your liberty within the societal framework. Thus, an unaffiliated platform is vital in forming a decentralized collective group of individuals of every circumstance and privilege who seek to deem empirically and reasonably for themselves what is of nutritional value to them or not - what is of sustainability to them and to the planet or not.We are to collectively form an intelligent group of members who can freely partake in Discourses to form a global consensus on agricultural methods and processes.
With Diplomatic Standards, I hope to issue a call to volition on each of everyone's part to partake in an endevour that's here to establish a new policy and a new guideline that will ultimately reflect us and the intended quality of all our foods. It is a stepping stone at transforming and democratizing an active, centrally controlled piece of a policy that almost all have deemed to be insufficient and full of biases.
It is one of many solutions that I know we owe to the planet in regard to our environmental concerns and to ourselves - after all, we all do eat. Therefore, Sustainability and Transparency are the two main core concept and principles with which I hope to guide the ideas of the Diplomatic Standards Community in working to form collectively defined standards for organic goods.
High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) has, over the past few decades, gradually displaced cane and beet sugar as the sweetener of choice for soft drinks, candy and prepared foods. In recent years, there have been a growing number claims that HFCS is a significant health risk to consumers, responsible for obesity, diabetes, heart disease and a wide variety of other illnesses.
In fact, there are large amounts of experimental data supporting the claims that high levels of fructose in the diet can cause hyperlipidemia (high levels of fats — triglycerides primarily — in the blood), obesity and insulin resistance and may lead to cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes (for a good recent review, see here). A high-fructose diet is thought to cause hyperlipidemia (and probably visceral obesity) because fructose is preferentially “sent” to fatty acid synthesis and it also reduces the activity of lipoprotein lipase (for a good review, see here). The mechanisms by which fructose causes insulin resistance and cardiovascular disease are less clear (see, for example here, here and here), but there is no shortage of hypotheses. Despite the fact that some of the underlying mechanisms are not clear, the evidence seems pretty solid that there are real risks to high fructose consumption.
However, the question remains — is HFCS more of a health risk than other sweeteners? Many of the sources that demonize HFCS list alternative sweeteners — cane sugar, honey, agave syrup, etc. — that they claim are healthier than HFCS, but those claims usually rest primarily on the fact that these alternatives to HFCS are “natural” rather than any actual data showing that they are safer than HFCS.
Sugar 101:
Before we can properly analyze these claims, we need to understand a bit about sugar. To begin with, what is sugar? To most people, sugar is the white granulated solid that they find in the sugar bowl. In reality, sugar is a much broader term. There are two general classes of sugars — aldose and ketose — and over twenty individual sugars (monosaccharides), if you limit yourself to only those found in nature. Of these, only a few play any significant role in human nutrition, primarily glucose, fructose and galactose (ribose, a sugar that forms the backbone of DNA and RNA, also plays a minor nutritional role).
Further complicating the issue, there are also sugars — disaccharides — that are compounds made of two monosaccharides covalently bound together. The most common of these is sucrose, a compound made by joining one molecule of glucose to one molecule of fructose. Sucrose is the sugar in the average sugar bowl. It is also the sugar in brown sugar, molasses, cane sugar, beet sugar and is the major component of maple syrup (and maple sugar). Another common disaccharide is lactose (milk sugar), which is a combination of glucose and galactose. Less commonly encountered is maltose, a combination of two molecules of glucose.
Starches, such as corn starch, are also sugar. They are made up of long interlinked chains (polymers, also known as polysaccharides) of individual sugars (usually glucose). Cellulose, the major component of paper and wood, is also a polymer of glucose (with different bond geometries). Insect and crustacean shells are made of a sugar polymer known as chitin (also a major component of fungal cell walls). We literally live in a world of sugar.
One final note about sugars — humans only absorb monosaccharides; no matter what form the sugar enters the digestive tract, it is only absorbed after it is broken down to its component monosaccharides (there are, as usual in biology, a few minor exceptions to this rule). There are a variety of enzymes — amylases, disaccharidases, etc. — that perform this function. Any disaccharide or polysaccharide that isn’t broken down (such as the raffinose and stachyose in beans and many other gas-causing foods) remains inside the gut, providing food for our gut bacteria.
“Natural” Sweeteners:
Now, let’s take a look at some of the sugar-based sweeteners in common use today. Honey was probably the first sweetener — at least in the part of the world where honey bees are native. Honey is about 82% sugar, with almost all the remainder being water. The sugar in honey is 43% glucose, 50% fructose, 4% galactose, 2% maltose, 1% sucrose and trace amounts of other sugars. As mentioned earlier, it is considered by many to be a natural sweetener that is a healthy alternative to HFCS.
Another sweetener used in ancient times — especially in regions where honey bees were not native — is tree sap. The most famous of these is the sap of sugar maple trees, used to make maple syrup and, when crystallized, maple sugar. Natural maple syrup is 60% sugar, with that sugar being 95% sucrose, 4% glucose and 1% fructose.
Fruit juices also have an ancient history of use as sweetening agents and — not surprisingly — are often cited as natural and healthy alternatives to HFCS. The sugar content of fruits varies with the type of fruit and even with the variety. Apples, for instance, are a bit over 10% sugar by weight, with that sugar being 57% fructose, 23% glucose and 20% sucrose. Peaches, in contrast, are 8.4% sugar by weight with that sugar being 57% sucrose, 23% glucose and 18% fructose. Pears – the most common fruit juice used in sweetening – are 9.8% sugar, with that sugar being 64% fructose, 28% glucose and 8% sucrose. Table grapes are about 15% sugar, with the sugars being 53% fructose and 47% glucose.
Sucrose, the disaccharide in common table sugar, was originally obtained in ralatively pure form from sugar cane, which can only grow in the tropics. The high cost of cane suger led to a search for alternative sources. As early as the 1700’s, sucrose was being extracted from sugar beets, but it took both selective breeding of sugar beets to increase their sucrose content and improvements in the extraction process to make beet sugar economically viable. By the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, sucrose from sugar beets had outstripped cane sugar in Europe and the U.S. Sugar beets have the advantage of growing throughout the temperate zone, closer to the demand. Just to be clear, beet sugar and case sugar are indistinguishable — they are exactly the same chemical compound (sucrose).
The rise of HFCS:
So, with all of these sugar-based sweeteners available, what prompted the development of HFCS?
Corn syrup is a relatively recent arrival as a sweetener; it had to wait until food processors discovered how to take corn starch (which, like most starches, is a polymer composed of long interlinked chains of glucose molecules) and break it down into isolated glucose molecules using the enzymes amylase and maltase. Commercial amounts of corn syrup were available by the middle of the 20th century. Corn syrup was so much cheaper than sucrose that it saw extensive use as a sucrose substitute for thickening foods and to help retain moisture. It wasn’t much used solely as a sweetener because it isn’t as sweet as sucrose.
The fact is that not all sugars are equally sweet. If we assign sucrose (table sugar) a sweetness of 100%, glucose has a sweetness of 60 – 75% (on a gram-per-gram basis) and fructose has a sweetness of 140 – 170%. (Note: the sweetness of fructose varies with its conformation, and so will differ under different circumstances) Candy and soft drink manufacturers exploited the greater sweetness of fructose even before HFCS was available by using what is called “invert sugar”. Invert sugar is sucrose that has been treated with a weak acid solution and then recrystallized (to get rid of the acid). This treatment causes a portion of the sucrose to break apart into fructose and glucose. Although the glucose part is less sweet than sucrose, the fructose is so much sweeter that the overall effect is to get more sweetness with less sugar. This allowed the manufacturers to use less sugar and thereby save money, even though invert sugar was more expensive than plain sucrose.
In 1957, a process was developed to convert some of the glucose in corn syrup to fructose, yielding a product that was 42% fructose and 58% glucose. This dramatically increased its sweetness, making a product that was a commercially viable competitor to sucrose as a sweetener. This was HFCS 42, which has a sweetness — gram-per-gram — slightly greater than sucrose (110%).
The primary advantage of HFCS 42 to food manufacturers was its low cost — much lower than the cost of sucrose. Secondary advantages were that it retained moisture better than sucrose (twice as many molecules), was slightly sweeter than sucrose (so less was needed), was in a liquid form and didn’t caramelize as readily as sucrose (this last one could be an advantage or a disadvantage, depending on the use).
Later, HFCS manufacturers began putting some of their HFCS 42 through separation columns to produce syrup that was 90% fructose (HFCS 90). Today, the bulk of the HFCS 90 production is used to make corn syrup with 55% fructose, known as HFCS 55, although a very small amount is used in some reduced-calorie confections (HFCS 90 is about 60% sweeter per gram than sucrose, which allows a 35% reduction in the amount of sugar used).
With the introduction of HFCS 55, which is 25% sweeter than sucrose, food manufacturers found that the slightly increased price (which was still less than sucrose) was more than offset by the fact that they needed less of it to get the same level of sweetness.
That’s right, HFCS allowed food manufacturers to use less sugar — and thus fewer sugar calories — in their products without compromising sweetness. Using sucrose — cane or beet sugar — would require 20% more sugar (and 20% more sugar calories) than using HFCS 55.
How safe are other sweeteners compared to HFCS?:
Still, none of this alters the fact that a diet high in fructose has been shown to cause — or at least contribute to — hyperlipidemia, obesity, insulin resistance and cardiac disease. However, those who have been paying attention will have noticed that HFCS is not the ONLY sweetener that contains significant amounts of fructose.
In fact, sucrose — even “natural” cane sugar — is 50% fructose once it is digested and absorbed. While this is 20% less than the fructose content of HFCS 55, food manufacturers need to use less (about 20% less) HFCS 55 to get the same sweetness, so it’s a wash as far as fructose content.
Honey, long touted as a “healthy” and “natural” alternative to evil HFCS, is also 50% fructose. Agave syrup (also called agave nectar), often promoted as a healthy alternative to HFCS (especially in diabetics), is very high in fructose, although there is some disagreement over how much fructose it contains. According to the USDA, the sugar in cooked agave is 87% fructose (due to breakdown of fructans — a starch-like polymer of fructose — in the plant when it is cooked). A wholesale supplier of agave syrup, however, lists the fructose as 70 — 75% of the total sugar in their syrup. Either way, agave syrup is higher in fructose than any other natural sweetener (and any form of HFCS except HFCS 90).
Even fruit juices (and what could be more natural and healthy than fruit juice?) are 40 — 70% fructose, if you count the fructose in sucrose. And for those who argue that ingesting sucrose delays the absorption of fructose, Monsivais et al (2007) showed that sucrose breaks down spontaneously in carbonated beverages (and, presumably, all acid solutions), with 50% of the sucrose being hydrolyzed to fructose and glucose within the first 30 days after bottling.
Finally, a study that directly compared the short-term effects of fructose, HFCS and sucrose showed that they are indistinguishable.
What does all this mean?:
So, what are the take-home messages from all of this?
HFCS 42 and HFCS 55 have essentially the same amount of fructose, as a fraction of their total sugar, as honey, sucrose (cane or beet sugar) or maple syrup/sugar (to be agonizingly precise, HFCS has slightly less, and HCFS 55 has slightly more).
HFCS 42 and HFCS 55 have an equal or smaller amount of fructose, as a fraction of their total sugar, as many commonly consumed fruits.
Agave syrup has higher fructose content than any type of HFCS except HFCS 90.
For people who are worried about their health or their children’s health — and who isn’t, these days — the data suggest that the best choice is to reduce intake of all sweeteners containing fructose. That includes not only the evil HFCS, but also natural cane sugar, molasses (which is just impure cane sugar), brown sugar (ditto) and honey. Even “unsweetened” (no added sugar) fruit juices need to be considered when limiting your family’s fructose intake.
Finally, the best nutritional advice is to eat everything in moderation — and that includes sweets. While a diet high in fructose may increase your risk of obesity, diabetes and heart disease — maybe — a fructose-free diet is not guaranteed to prevent those diseases. Eat a variety of foods, including a small amount of sweets, get enough exercise, watch your (and your children’s) weight and see your doctor for regular health check-ups.
And stop worrying that HFCS is poisoning you and your children.
Diplomatic Standards is an attempt at organizing the chaos of the current organic industry on a global scale and openly. We are an active community that believes that you should understand the importance of having an unclouded source of sustenance. You and I, together with anyone that believes in the quality of the food they eat, now have the opportunity to ensure that outcome.
We would like to issue a call out to anyone and any organization to come and actively participate and collaboratively work to implement a new global standard and enforcement apparatus that can ensure safety and compliance. Diplomatic Standard is a direct response to a current global organic industry that is full of ambiguity, fraud, turmoil and that maintains a closed system.
Where Diplomatic Standards fits
It is of no secret that current national standards were created as deliberate pure marketing efforts to expose the organic concept to consumers. Pressured by the major firms in the agricultural industry, many governments had since setup numerous apparatus towards the effort of promoting organic goods to farmers and consumers alike. It was also within the judgment of the consumer that these governmental frameworks would protect, enforce and uphold the true idea behind the term organic as it was understood and believed to be.
Regrettably, during the course of this remarkable growth of the industry globally, the organic image has unnecessarily immensely deteriorate and has prompted a need for a new approach. The idea of Diplomatic Standards is to use current technology to form a global, bottom-up, open standard where all parties can truly collaborate in reaching consensus and whose primary mission is for transparency and decentralization. Diplomatic Standards is positioned to place itself as the third choice within a two system framework that is currently composed of either conventional or organic foods.
Where within any system, the fundamental conflict exists where vendors by nature compete to capture the largest market share possible whereby raising costs vs. the market at large which seeks lower costs and freedom, Diplomatic Standards’ goal is to remove this conflict by empowering the individual with universal access to the standard’s process – made possible through modern technology.
Illustration: Darwinbell
This video deftly skewers the food industry's current fixations, including This-Is-Why-You're-Fat-grade hamburgers, fancy TV dinners, and junk food masquerading as wholesome:
We take the finest ingredients and put them in a bowl with salt and butter.
And "hide your salad" describes my salad dressing technique perfectly...it ends up more like ranch soup, really.
Nestlé has just announced that KitKat – Britain's biggest-selling chocolate bar – will carry the Fairtrade logo from next month. But how much do consumers really know about the Fairtrade movement? Is it, as some say, an essential safety net that helps poor farmers earn a better living or, as others say, an example of western feel-good tokenism that holds back modernisation and entrenches agrarian poverty?
We might think of sub-Saharan subsistence economies when we think of Fairtrade, but the biggest recipient of Fairtrade subsidy is actually Mexico. Mexico is the biggest producer of Fairtrade coffee with about 23% market share. Indeed, as of 2002, 181 of the 300 Fairtrade coffee producers were located in South America and the Caribbean. As Marc Sidwell points out, while Mexico has 51 Fairtrade producers, Burundi has none, Ethiopia four and Rwanda just 10 – meaning that "Fairtrade pays to support relatively wealthy Mexican coffee farmers at the expense of poorer nations".
The article additionally points out:
Another criticism is over institutional inefficiencies. The vast majority of the money from Fairtrade sales remains in the west – with only about 5% of the Fairtrade sale price actually making it back to the farmers. As Philip Oppenheim says, "any intelligent person will ask why I should pay 80p more for my bananas when only 5p will end up with the producer". Fundamental to the failure of wealth transfer are issues such as the fact that while 90% of the world's cocoa is produced in the developing world, only 4% of the chocolate is produced there. Developing countries remain locked in the primary sector commodities market, while the west cashes in on their value-added conversion.
Roughly speaking, that's the issue in the EC - Measures Affecting Poultry Meat WTO dispute (DS389), for which the U.S. recently announced it will request a panel. The panel request describes the issue as follows:
The EC prohibits the import of poultry treated with any substance other than water unless that substance has been approved by the EC. The EC has not approved any other substance. Consequently, the EC prohibits the import of poultry that has been processed with chemical treatments ("pathogen reduction treatments" or "PRTs") designed to reduce the amount of microbes on the meat, effectively prohibiting the shipment of virtually all US poultry to the EC. The EC has not published or otherwise made available the process for approving a substance. The EC also maintains a measure regarding the marketing standards for poultry meat, which defines "poultrymeat" as only "poultrymeat suitable for human consumption, which has not undergone any treatment other than cold treatment."
In 2002, the United States requested the European Commission ("Commission") to approve the use of four PRTs in the production of poultry intended for export to the EC: acidified sodium chlorite, trisodium phosphate, peroxyacids, and chlorine dioxide. However, after more than six years, including unexplained delays, the EC has not approved any of these four PRTs and instead has rejected the approval of their use.
The EC's failure to approve is despite the fact that various EC agencies have issued scientific reports regarding a number of different aspects related to the processing of poultry with these four PRTs. Those reports did not find any scientific basis for banning the use of these PRTs. To the contrary, the conclusion of these reports is that the importation and consumption of poultry processed with these four PRTs does not pose a risk to human health.
In a nutshell, the trade issue is the following: U.S. producers use chemicals to clean their poultry, but the EC does not allow the sale of poultry cleaned this way, so U.S. producers can't sell their poultry in the EC.
For SPS disputes, I'm always interested to see how the substance of the dispute is presented, in particular whether the claim is mainly about "discrimination," "necessity," or "science," or some combination of these three. Here, the parties seem to want to take different approaches to characterizing the dispute. From the USTR press release:
"The U.S. poultry subject to the EU ban is safe. There is no scientific evidence that the use of pathogen reduction treatments pose any health risk to consumers," said Nefeterius McPherson, a USTR spokeswoman.
By contrast, from the DG Trade press release: "we will defend our food safety legislation, which does not discriminate against imported products." So, in the battle of the press releases, it's about science for the U.S., whereas for the EC it's about discrimination (or lack thereof).
Of course, it's the panel request that really matters in this regard. Here are some of the key provisions the U.S. cited in the request and what they are mainly about:
SPS Agreement Article 2.2 - Necessity and Science
SPS Agreement Articles 5.1 and 5.2 - Science
GATT Article III:4 - Non-Discrimination
GATT Article XI:1 - Quotas and other Import Restrictions. (This one could be interesting if it explores the intersection between import restrictions and domestic regulations, given that the measure bans all such poultry, not just imports)
TBT Agreement Article 2.1 - Non-Discrimination
It's interesting that the U.S. press release does not mention discrimination, but the panel request cites some discrimination provisions. I'm not sure what to make of that. I would have thought it would be a good idea to sell the case as being about discrimination, at least in part.
It's also worth noting that in the consultations request, the U.S. left out explicit references to the non-discrimination provisions. There, the U.S. cited SPS Agreement Articles 2.2, 5, 8 and Annex C(1); GATT Articles X:1 and XI:1; Agriculture Agreement Article 4.2; and TBT Agreement Article 2 (without mentioning which sub-provisions).
The substance of the discrimination claims will also be worth following. From what I can tell, this will be a claim of de facto discrimination, as the measures apply to all products regardless of origin. It is these kinds of claims that often give the most insights into the scope of the non-discrimination standard.
"The first rule of BS is to expect it... If you want to detect BS, you have to swallow some cynicism and add some internal doubt to everything you hear... The first detection tool is a question: How do you know what you know?"
Two years ago today became the day when every trip I took to the grocery store started to be an agonizing, tormenting episode. That day, I came relentlessly to the conclusion that the organic world was entirely filled with bullshit, lies and irrefutable illusions. The story begun right at the moment I heard of this fad. As soon as that happened, I knew I had to question it. It amounted to feel like I was surrounded with friends and acquaintances who were all in a state of helplessness and had acquired a sort of blind faith in the Utopian idea of the mass marketed promises of organic goods.
The gullibility and callowness of the quite numerous shoppers of 'organic' food started to inflect a sort of nauseating drama in my thoughts that I realized I really needed to do something against that fact and inform my friends of this fantastic sham. An empiricist at heart, what had started out to be a skeptical inquiry became a hobby then pure obsession which ultimately lead to Diplomatic Goods; the world's first open standard for organic goods. An endeavour which we hope will fulfil the expectations of this deficient industry and address the misfortunes of the well intended organic idea.
While reading a study commissioned by the EU with the objective of determining "to what extent the European standardization system in its present form can guarantee appropriate access to all interested parties" along with accompanying recommendations for "avenues of exploration", I came across this paragraph:
"The participation of SMEs and societal stakeholders can be hampered by a lack of resources and technical expertise. This can, in turn, affect the consensus reaching process and therefore cause delays in standards development. The Commission is therefore providing financial support to European organizations and associations representing SMEs and societal stakeholder interests."
The Commission pays these guys in order to gain 'consensus' and the 'participation' of stakeholders - so called 'private organizations' - during the standardization process. I really would like to know, how does that work?
