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The misleading information in one of America’s most popular podcasts

Andrew Huberman, a neurobiology professor and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, attending INBOUND 2023 in Boston, Mass. | Photo by Chance Yeh/Getty Images for HubSpot The Huberman Lab has credentials and millions of fans, but it sometimes oversteps medical fact. Sometimes, misleading information is easy to spot, traveling in the same conspiracy-theory-slicked grooves it has for decades. The same ideas that undermined belief in the safety of Covid-19 vaccines have been around for more than a century, adapting the same message to suit new media formats, new epidemics, and new influential endorsements. In a way, George Bernard Shaw’s outspoken opposition to the smallpox vaccine in the first half of the 20th century is not unlike that of, say, Aaron Rodgers’s misleading statements about the Covid-19 vaccines. Such misleading information is relatively easy to see. But spotting other kinds of misleading information is more like identifying planets in other star systems. It’s difficult to find such a planet by just taking a direct image; the radiation from the star the planet orbits can obscure it. Instead, you might look for the shadow in front of the star or the “wobble” of a star caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. You find it by looking around it. Over time, with this kind of misleading information, you learn to spot the wobble, the tells that something might not be right. This is what happened for me when I began to listen to Huberman Lab last fall. Huberman Lab is one of the most popular podcasts in the country, led by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. His most ardent fans — and there are millions — tend to be fitness enthusiasts, self-optimizers, and crossover listeners who heard about his podcast from other influencers in the Joe Rogan Extended Universe. Huberman looms large in the minds of his biggest fans. If you’re outside of that circle, perhaps you heard of his work after a New York magazine profile earlier this year detailed his personal conduct. The podcast’s premise is simple: presenting science-based overviews and conversations on a broad range of topics, from longevity to mental health to nutrition. A fawning profile in Time magazine last summer credited Huberman with getting America to care about science again. More than anything, though, the episodes I listened to conveyed a promise: If you want to optimize your body and mind, science has the answers, and all we need to do is listen. It’s a riveting promise, one that Huberman is not alone in making. Silicon Valley, in particular, is filled with wellness guides and well-funded laboratories seeking the secret to living the best and longest life. There are other well-credentialed promises of cures and solutions circulating, especially on podcasts, a format that seems to lend itself to this slippage between the reputable and the freewheeling. Huberman’s rise to popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic should have been a win for information: Huberman, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford with an active lab, it seemed, was a respected researcher in his field of visual neuroscience, and he filled his multi-hour podcast episodes with citations and caution. Popular science communication isn’t always the best science communication. The implicit pact that Huberman’s podcast makes with its audience — that it will, if you listen and follow, help you optimize your life — has turned the podcast into a powerful force that shapes how his audience of millions understands science. But listeners of Huberman Lab may be, at times, hearing what some call an illusion. When good communication goes bad In late March, New York magazine reported that Huberman’s Stanford laboratory “barely exists” and that, according to multiple women who dated him during his rise to fame, Huberman had manipulated and lied to his partners (Huberman’s spokesperson denied both of these allegations to the magazine, which shares a corporate owner with Vox). The profile was one tell — obscuring aspects of his personal and professional lives. But even before it came out, the same subject experts on the topics Huberman covered had been questioning some of the science of the podcast itself. This liminality, or in-betweenness, of Huberman Lab is key to its success. When speaking about vaccines, Huberman is no Alex Jones or Aaron Rodgers. He’s a real scientist who cites real studies. He approaches topics that might end up drawing scrutiny with a great deal of caution. For example, Huberman never tells his audience to avoid the flu vaccine. All he’s saying is that he doesn’t take it himself. And yet, the subtext is there. “Now, personally, I don’t typically get the flu shot. And the reason for that is that I don’t tend to go into environments where I am particularly susceptible to getting the flu,” Huberman said in an episode earlier this year on avoiding and treating the cold and flu. He went on: “When you take the flu shot, you’re really hedging a bet. You’re hedging a bet against the fact that you will be or not be exposed to that particular strain of flu virus that’s most abundant that season, or strains of flu virus that are most abundant that season, and that the flu shot that you’re taking is directed at those particular strains.” Make the choice that’s right for you, Huberman says. Talk to your doctor. “He’s a good communicator, right? That’s why he’s a star,” Tim Caulfield, a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta, told me in late 2023. Huberman often does a “very good job” talking about the science behind a topic he’s exploring in an episode, Caulfield added, but “in the end, the overall takeaway, I think, is less supported by the science than the impression you’re given listening to the episode.” Instead of recommending a flu shot, Huberman introduces his listeners to a series of other ideas. Andrea Love, a microbiologist, immunologist, and science communicator herself, wrote a four-part newsletter series addressing Huberman’s claims in greater detail. She says he promoted possibly using a sauna to improve immune function, citing a study that had just 20 participants and did not directly measure immune function. She says he promoted the potential use of unproven supplements, including those sold by AG1, a company that partners with Huberman and sponsors his podcast. Huberman and his spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Love’s characterization of this episode. For Love, it was easy to see Huberman Lab as sleight of hand even before the New York magazine story was published. The ingredients were there: Huberman is a magnetic personality capable of capturing attention with implied promises of the secrets to longevity, a perfect body, a perfect mind, even perfect sleep — much of which he says can be achieved with the help of the supplements that he himself advertises. Love was part of a cohort of scientists and public health communicators who raised concerns about Huberman’s wildly popular podcast over several months. When Huberman had Robert Lustig on as a guest, those concerns grew louder. Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), but he’s perhaps best known for arguing that sugar, particularly fructose, is a “toxin.” Love, who said that Lustig’s claims about the uniquely causal relationship between fructose and childhood obesity remain unproven, listened to the conversation between the two scientists. (Disclosure: I recently accepted a contract for non-editorial freelance work at UCSF Health.) “I was floored with how many different types of misinformation he was able to shove into a single episode,” Love said earlier this year, after listening to the majority of Huberman’s 3-hour interview with Lustig. Like many of Huberman’s lengthy episodes, this one racked up millions of views on YouTube alone. In 2023, Huberman Lab was the eighth most listened to podcast on Apple Podcasts, and the third most popular on Spotify. As she listened, she took notes, marking moments where she felt the podcast omitted important facts, misinterpreted the progression of disease, or provided confusing information to listeners. At one point, Lustig cited a study that he said “showed” ultra-processed foods inhibit bone growth — one that, according to Huberman’s exchange with Lustig, used human subjects in Israel to test its claims. Love tracked down the 2021 paper easily. “This was in vivo - IN RODENTS,” she wrote in her notes. In her view, the podcast was “outright LYING to listeners.” A spokesperson for Andrew Huberman responded to a request for comment by noting that the podcast team “review studies mentioned on the podcast by guests, however the conclusions drawn by guests are their own and our guests are the foremost experts in their fields.” The show links to referenced studies in the show notes for each episode. Misleading information can be hard to see Nailing down Huberman’s beliefs is, likewise, tricky, straddling the line between endorsement and implication. In October, Huberman commented on an Instagram post by his friend Joe Rogan promoting an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the presidential candidate who was once a respected environmental lawyer but is now perhaps best known for promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines, including those for Covid-19. “I’m eager to listen to this and to learn more about Robert’s stance on a number of issues. Whenever I run into him at the gym, he is extremely gracious and asks lots of questions about science and, by my observation, trains hard too!” Huberman’s verified Instagram account posted. When I told Caulfield about this post, he described it as “infuriating.” Huberman and his spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on his post about Kennedy. “Any kind of legitimization and normalization of that rhetoric, especially by someone who professes to be informed by science and has the credentials of a renowned institution behind him should be ashamed of doing that,” he said. Huberman’s relationship to the information in his podcast can be viewed through a series of glancing blows; through the subtext of deciding not to take the flu vaccine himself and telling that to his audience; through serious questions about how he handles himself in romantic relationships; and through the selection of his guests, the framing of his episodes, and his friends. Although Huberman has not directly responded to the New York magazine piece after its publication, his friends in the podcasting world, along with several more right-leaning media personalities, have called it a hit piece, and dismissed criticism of Huberman as either sloppy or mean-spirited. “Andrew should be celebrated. Period,” wrote Lex Fridman, a computer scientist and podcaster who has long been one of Huberman’s friends. And it appears his podcast viewers are still tuning in.

Higher levels of omega-6 fatty acids could reduce the risk of bipolar disorder, new study finds

Researchers at the University of South Australia discovered a link between one omega-6 fatty acid and the disorder

A world-first study from the University of South Australia recently discovered a link between omega-6 fatty acids and bipolar disorder. Researchers found that higher levels of arachidonic acid, a polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid obtained from foods like poultry, seafood and eggs, led to a lower risk of bipolar disorder. Conversely, lower levels of arachidonic acid led to a higher risk of bipolar disorder.     The study tested a total of 913 metabolites across 14,296 European patients using a mass spectrometry-based platform. Thirty-three metabolites were identified and associated with the risk of bipolar disorder. Most of them were lipids, including arachidonic acid and other complex lipids containing either an arachidonic or a linoleic fatty acid side chain, the study specified. The causal associations only concerned bipolar disorder, the study added, and didn’t account for other closely related psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia or depression. “There’s growing evidence to suggest that metabolites play a key role in bipolar and other psychiatric disorders,” said chief investigator Dr. David Stacey, per the university’s official website. “This is extremely encouraging, because if we can find factors that connect certain health conditions, we can identify ways to negate these through potential lifestyle or dietary interventions.” Arachidonic acid can be sourced “directly from meat and seafood products or [synthesized] from dietary linoleic acid (such as nuts, seeds, and oils),” he continued. The omega-6 fatty acid is also found in human milk, making it an essential nutrient for infant brain development. “In fact, in many countries, arachidonic acid is added to infant formula to ensure a child gets the best start to life,” Stacey said. “So, there is certainly potential to boost this through supplements for people at greater risk of bipolar disorder.” Researchers know that arachidonic acid plays a key role in early brain development. But the challenge, they said, is determining whether arachidonic acid supplementation for bipolar disorder should occur “perinatally, during early life, or even whether it would benefit those already diagnosed.”      Professor Elina Hyppönen, who co-authored the study, said both preclinical studies and randomized controlled trials are necessary in order to determine how beneficial supplementation would be. Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food's newsletter, The Bite. “We need further studies to rigorously assess the potential for arachidonic acid supplementation in bipolar disorder prevention and treatment, particularly in people who carry genetic risks,” Hyppönen said, adding that it’s important to determine “how, why and when” people respond to arachidonic acid supplementation in order to determine further solutions. Bipolar disorder is a serious mental illness associated with episodes of mood swings ranging from emotional highs (mania or hypomania) to lows (depression). The exact cause of bipolar disorder still remains unknown, although research suggests that a contribution of genetic and environmental factors may contribute to the illness. An estimated 2.8% of U.S. adults had bipolar disorder in the past year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Approximately 4.4% of U.S. adults experience bipolar disorder at some time in their lives. Read more about bipolar disorder:

Epigenomic analysis sheds light on risk factors for ALS

In a study of cells from nearly 400 ALS patients, researchers identified genomic regions with chemical modifications linked to disease progression.

For most patients, it’s unknown exactly what causes amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a disease characterized by degeneration of motor neurons that impairs muscle control and eventually leads to death.Studies have identified certain genes that confer a higher risk of the disease, but scientists believe there are many more genetic risk factors that have yet to be discovered. One reason why these drivers have been hard to find is that some are found in very few patients, making it hard to pick them out without a very large sample of patients. Additionally, some of the risk may be driven by epigenomic factors, rather than mutations in protein-coding genes.Working with the Answer ALS consortium, a team of MIT researchers has analyzed epigenetic modifications — tags that determine which genes are turned on in a cell — in motor neurons derived from induced pluripotent stem (IPS) cells from 380 ALS patients.This analysis revealed a strong differential signal associated with a known subtype of ALS, and about 30 locations with modifications that appear to be linked to rates of disease progression in ALS patients. The findings may help scientists develop new treatments that are targeted to patients with certain genetic risk factors.“If the root causes are different for all these different versions of the disease, the drugs will be very different and the signals in IPS cells will be very different,” says Ernest Fraenkel, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering and the senior author of the study. “We may get to a point in a decade or so where we don’t even think of ALS as one disease, where there are drugs that are treating specific types of ALS that only work for one group of patients and not for another.”MIT postdoc Stanislav Tsitkov is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications.Finding risk factorsALS is a rare disease that is estimated to affect about 30,000 people in the United States. One of the challenges in studying the disease is that while genetic variants are believed to account for about 50 percent of ALS risk (with environmental factors making up the rest), most of the variants that contribute to that risk have not been identified.Similar to Alzheimer’s disease, there may be a large number of genetic variants that can confer risk, but each individual patient may carry only a small number of those. This makes it difficult to identify the risk factors unless scientists have a very large population of patients to analyze.“Because we expect the disease to be heterogeneous, you need to have large numbers of patients before you can pick up on signals like this. To really be able to classify the subtypes of disease, we’re going to need to look at a lot of people,” Fraenkel says.About 10 years ago, the Answer ALS consortium began to collect large numbers of patient samples, which could allow for larger-scale studies that might reveal some of the genetic drivers of the disease. From blood samples, researchers can create induced pluripotent stem cells and then induce them to differentiate into motor neurons, the cells most affected by ALS.“We don’t think all ALS patients are going to be the same, just like all cancers are not the same. And the goal is being able to find drivers of the disease that could be therapeutic targets,” Fraenkel says.In this study, Fraenkel and his colleagues wanted to see if patient-derived cells could offer any information about molecular differences that are relevant to ALS. They focused on epigenomic modifications, using a method called ATAC-seq to measure chromatin density across the genome of each cell. Chromatin is a complex of DNA and proteins that determines which genes are accessible to be transcribed by the cell, depending on how densely packed the chromatin is.In data that were collected and analyzed over several years, the researchers did not find any global signal that clearly differentiated the 380 ALS patients in their study from 80 healthy control subjects. However, they did find a strong differential signal associated with a subtype of ALS, characterized by a genetic mutation in the C9orf72 gene.Additionally, they identified about 30 regions that were associated with slower rates of disease progression in ALS patients. Many of these regions are located near genes related to the cellular inflammatory response; interestingly, several of the identified genes have also been implicated in other neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson’s disease.“You can use a small number of these epigenomic regions and look at the intensity of the signal there, and predict how quickly someone’s disease will progress. That really validates the hypothesis that the epigenomics can be used as a filter to better understand the contribution of the person’s genome,” Fraenkel says.“By harnessing the very large number of participant samples and extensive data collected by the Answer ALS Consortium, these studies were able to rigorously test whether the observed changes might be artifacts related to the techniques of sample collection, storage, processing, and analysis, or truly reflective of important biology,” says Lyle Ostrow, an associate professor of neurology at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University, who was not involved in the study. “They developed standard ways to control for these variables, to make sure the results can be accurately compared. Such studies are incredibly important for accelerating ALS therapy development, as they will enable data and samples collected from different studies to be analyzed together.”Targeted drugsThe researchers now hope to further investigate these genomic regions and see how they might drive different aspects of ALS progression in different subsets of patients. This could help scientists develop drugs that might work in different groups of patients, and help them identify which patients should be chosen for clinical trials of those drugs, based on genetic or epigenetic markers.Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a drug called tofersen, which can be used in ALS patients with a mutation in a gene called SOD1. This drug is very effective for those patients, who make up about 1 percent of the total population of people with ALS. Fraenkel’s hope is that more drugs can be developed for, and tested in, people with other genetic drivers of ALS.“If you had a drug like tofersen that works for 1 percent of patients and you just gave it to a typical phase two clinical trial, you probably wouldn’t have anybody with that mutation in the trial, and it would’ve failed. And so that drug, which is a lifesaver for people, would never have gotten through,” Fraenkel says.The MIT team is now using an approach called quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis to try to identify subgroups of ALS patients whose disease is driven by specific genomic variants.“We can integrate the genomics, the transcriptomics, and the epigenomics, as a way to find subgroups of ALS patients who have distinct phenotypic signatures from other ALS patients and healthy controls,” Tsitkov says. “We have already found a few potential hits in that direction.”The research was funded by the Answer ALS program, which is supported by the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research at Johns Hopkins University, Travelers Insurance, ALS Finding a Cure Foundation, Stay Strong Vs. ALS, Answer ALS Foundation, Microsoft, Caterpillar Foundation, American Airlines, Team Gleason, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Fishman Family Foundation, Aviators Against ALS, AbbVie Foundation, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, ALS Association, National Football League, F. Prime, M. Armstrong, Bruce Edwards Foundation, the Judith and Jean Pape Adams Charitable Foundation, Muscular Dystrophy Association, Les Turner ALS Foundation, PGA Tour, Gates Ventures, and Bari Lipp Foundation. This work was also supported, in part, by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the MIT-GSK Gertrude B. Elion Research Fellowship Program for Drug Discovery and Disease.

Revealed: Tyson Foods dumps millions of pounds of toxic pollutants into US rivers and lakes

Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide among the 371m lb of pollutants released by just 41 plants in five yearsTyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals.Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide were among the 371m lb of pollutants released into waterways by just 41 Tyson slaughterhouses and mega processing plants between 2018 and 2022. Continue reading...

Tyson Foods dumped millions of pounds of toxic pollutants directly into American rivers and lakes over the last five years, threatening critical ecosystems, endangering wildlife and human health, a new investigation reveals.Nitrogen, phosphorus, chloride, oil and cyanide were among the 371m lb of pollutants released into waterways by just 41 Tyson slaughterhouses and mega processing plants between 2018 and 2022.According to research by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), the contaminants were dispersed in 87bn gallons of wastewater – which also contains blood, bacteria and animal feces – and released directly into streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands relied on for drinking water, fishing and recreation. The UCS analysis, shared exclusively with the Guardian, is based on the most recent publicly available water pollution data Tyson is required to report under current regulations.The wastewater was enough to fill about 132,000 Olympic-size pools, according to a Guardian analysis.The water pollution from Tyson, a Fortune 100 company and the world’s second largest meat producer, was spread across 17 states but about half the contaminants were dumped into streams, rivers, lakes and wetlands in Nebraska, Illinois and Missouri.The midwest is already saturated with nitrogen and phosphorus from industrial agriculture – factory farms and synthetics fertilizers – contributing to algal blooms that clog critical water infrastructure, exacerbate respiratory conditions like asthma, and deplete oxygen levels in the sea causing marine life to suffocate and die.Yet the UCS research is only the tip of iceberg, including water pollution from only one in three of the corporation’s slaughterhouses and processing plants, and only 2% of the total nationwide.The current federal regulations set no limit for phosphorus, and the vast majority of meat processing plants in the US are exempt from existing water regulations – with no way of tracking how many toxins are being dumped into waterways.“There are over 5,000 meat and poultry processing plants in the United States, but only a fraction are required to report pollution and abide by limits. As one of the largest processors in the game, with a near-monopoly in some states, Tyson is in a unique position to treat even hefty fines and penalties for polluting as simply the cost of doing business. This has to change,” said the UCS co-author Omanjana Goswami.The findings come as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) must decide between robust new regulations that experts say would better protect waterways, critical habitat and downstream communities from polluting plants – or opt for weaker standards preferred by the powerful meat-processing industry.The EPA should listen to communities whose wells, lakes, rivers and streams have been contaminated and put people over corporate profitsA 2017 lawsuit by environmental groups has forced the EPA to update its two-decade-old pollution standards for slaughterhouses and animal rendering facilities, and the new rule is expected by September 2025. The agency has said that it is leaning towards the weakest option on the table, which critics say will enable huge amounts of nitrates, phosphorus and other contaminants to keep pouring into waterways.“The current rule is out of date, inadequate and catastrophic for American waterways, and highlights the way American lawmaking is subject to industry capture,” said Dani Replogle, an attorney at Food and Water Watch. “The nutrient problem in the US is at catastrophic levels … it would be such a shame if the EPA caves in to industry influence.”The meat-processing industry spent $4.3m on lobbying in Washington in 2023, of which Tyson accounted for almost half ($2.1m), according to political finance watchdog Open Secrets. The industry has made $6.6m in campaign donations since 2020, mostly to Republicans, with Tyson the biggest corporate spender.“We can be sure Tyson and other big ag players will object to efforts to update pollution regulations, but the EPA should listen to communities whose wells, lakes, rivers and streams have been contaminated and put people over corporate profits,” said Goswami.“Meat and poultry companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to comply with EPA’s effluent limitations guidelines,” said Sarah Little from the North American Meat Institute, a trade association representing large processors like Tyson. “EPA’s new proposed guidelines will cost over $1bn and will eliminate 100,000 jobs in rural communities.”Tyson did not respond to repeated requests for comment.The American Association of Meat Processors said the EPA’s one-size-fits-all approach could put its small, family-owned members out of business.Nebraska is a sparsely populated rural state dominated by agriculture – an increasingly consolidated corporate industry which wields substantial control over the economy and politics, as well as land and water use.Millions of acres in Nebraska are dedicated to factory farming, with massive methane-emitting concentrated animal feeding operations (Cafos) scattered among fields of monocropped soybean, corn and wheat – grown predominantly for animal feed and ethanol. Only a tiny fraction of arable land is dedicated to sustainable agriculture or used to grow vegetables or fruits.Tyson’s five largest plants in Nebraska dumped more than 111m lb of pollutants into waterways between 2018 and 2022, accounting for a third of the nationwide total. This included 4m lb of nitrates – a chemical that can contaminate drinking water, cause blood disorders and neurological defects in infants, as well as cancers and thyroid disease in adults.Tyson’s largest plant is located in Dakota City on the Missouri river – America’s longest waterway which stretches 2,300 miles across eight states before joining the Mississippi. It’s a sprawling beef facility, which generates a nauseating stench that wafts over neighboring South Sioux city, known locally as sewer city, where many plant workers live. (Another beef processing plant is located next to Tyson.)Earlier this month, the Guardian saw multiple trucks waiting to offload cattle for slaughter – after which the carcasses are rendered, processed and packaged in different parts of the facility. The plant produces vast quantities of wastewater which is stored (and treated) in lagoons on the riverbank, before being released into the Missouri river which provides drinking water for millions of people.The Dakota City plant is a major local employer and Tyson’s single largest polluter, dumping 60m lb of contaminants into waterways between 2018 and 2022, according to UCS analysis.Every year in November around 30,000 Sandhill Cranes begin their annual migration from the North Platte River in Nebraska to Southern Arizona. Photograph: Christopher Brown/Zuma Press Wire/Rex/Shutterstock“This Tyson plant helped put me through college and supports a lot of migrant workers, but there’s a dark side like the water and air pollution that most people don’t pay attention to because they’re just trying to survive,” said Rogelio Rodriguez, a grassroots organizer with Conservation Nebraska, which is part of a coalition pushing for stronger state protections for meat processing plant workers.“If regulations are lax, corporations have a tendency to push limits to maximize profits, we learnt that during Covid,” said Rodriguez, whose family works at the plant. A deadly Covid outbreak at the Dakota City plant in April 2020 sickened 15% of the workforce and led to substantial community spread.A few miles south of the Dakota City Tyson plant, the Winnebago tribe is slowly recuperating and reforesting their land, as well as transitioning to organic farming.“We’re investing a lot of money to look after the water and soil on our lands because it’s the right thing to do, yet a few miles north the Tyson plant lets all this pollution go into the river. Water is our most important resource, and the Missouri river is very important to our culture and people,” said Aaron LaPointe, a Winnebago tribe member who runs Ho-Chunk Farms.The water problem – and lack of accountability – goes beyond Tyson.Last year Governor Jim Pillen, whose family owns one of America’s largest pork companies, was widely criticized for calling a Chinese-born journalist at Flatwater Free Press a “communist” after she exposed serious water quality violations at his hog farms. Earlier this month, the Nebraska supreme court ruled that the state environmental agency could charge the same investigative news outlet tens of thousands of dollars for a public records request about nitrates.Big ag’s influence on state politics is “endemic”, according to Gavin Geis from Common Cause Nebraska, a non-partisan elections watchdog.“The big money spent on lobbying and campaigns by corporate agriculture has played a major role in resisting stronger regulation – despite clear signals such as high levels of nitrates in our groundwater and cancers in rural communities that we need more oversight for farmers across the board,” said Geis.“We’ve created a system with no accountability that doesn’t protect our ecosystem – which includes the land, water and people of Nebraska,” said Graham Christensen, a regenerative farmer and founder of GC Resolve, a communication and consulting firm. “The political capture is harming our rural communities, we’re in the belly of the beast and need help from federal regulators.”Indigenous Americans lived and farmed sustainably along the Missouri River until white colonial settlers forcibly displaced tribes, and eventually dammed the entire river system – mostly for energy and industrial agriculture. Today, major river systems like the Missouri River – and its communities – face multiple, overlapping threats from dams, the climate crisis, overuse and pollution.Oxygen depleting contaminants like nitrogen and phosphorus from Tyson plants in the midwest have been shown to travel along river-to-river pathways, causing fish kills and contributing to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. When the river is drier due to drought or high temperatures, pollutants become more concentrated and can form sediments – which are then dislodged during floods and taken miles downstream.Global heating is making extreme weather increasingly common, and as droughts dry up underground aquifers, tribes will probably need to turn to the Missouri for drinking water, according to Tim Grant, director of environmental protection for the Omaha tribe. “We’re very concerned about what’s in the river, it’s an important part of our culture and traditions,” said Grant, who has started testing the fish for toxins.The UCS research also found Tyson plants located close to critical habitats for endangered or threatened species – including the whooping crane, the tallest and among the rarest birds in North America.There are currently only 500 or so wild whooping cranes – up from 20 birds in the 1940s – which stop to feed and rest along a shallow stretch of the Platte River, a tributary of the Missouri in central Nebraska, as they migrate between the Texas Gulf coast and Canada. The majestic white birds feed in the cornfields that surround the Platte River, outnumbered by the slate gray sandhill cranes that also migrate through Nebraska each spring.Tyson’s sprawling Lexington slaughterhouse and beef processing plant is situated less than two miles from the Platte River – among four federally designated critical habitats considered essential to conservation of the whooping crane.“The cumulative effects of exposure to these industrial toxins could pose a long-term threat to the cranes’ food sources, reproductive success and resilience as a species,” said George Cunningham, a retired aquatic ecologist and Missouri River expert at Sierra Club Nebraska.“Poor environmental regulation is down to the stranglehold industrial agriculture has on politics – at every level. It’s about political capture.”

New School Meal Standards Could Put More Local Food on Students’ Lunch Trays

But another small tweak has big implications for the increasing number of schools working to get more fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats produced by nearby farmers onto students’ trays. Starting July 1, when districts put out a call for an unprocessed or minimally processed food—whether it’s tomatoes, taco meat, or tuna—they’ll be able to specify […] The post New School Meal Standards Could Put More Local Food on Students’ Lunch Trays appeared first on Civil Eats.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) finalized long-anticipated changes to the nutrition standards that regulate school meals. Among the changes that attracted the most attention were the first-ever limits on added sugar and a scaled-down plan to reduce salt. But another small tweak has big implications for the increasing number of schools working to get more fresh fruits, vegetables, and meats produced by nearby farmers onto students’ trays. Starting July 1, when districts put out a call for an unprocessed or minimally processed food—whether it’s tomatoes, taco meat, or tuna—they’ll be able to specify that they’d like it to be “locally grown, locally raised, or locally caught.” “We’re . . . freeing up schools to continue to look for ways in which they can partner with producers and with local and regional food systems,” agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack said during a press conference last week, “so that we create additional market opportunities for farmers and ranchers in the area, but also create a better connection between those who produce the food and those who consume it.” Two days later, Vilsack landed in Michigan, where his travel schedule attempted to trace that connection, with a first stop at a Detroit middle school followed by a visit to Williamston to talk about helping farmers access “new and better markets.” Karen Spangler, the policy director for the National Farm to School Network, said the change has long been a priority for the group because it often hears how the shift will simplify the process for school nutrition directors while also making it possible for more farmers to get involved in the first place. In addition to funding institutes and expanding farm-to-school efforts to early childcare centers, she sees as one piece of the USDA’s current focus on “integrating farm-to-school and local purchasing to a degree that hasn’t been seen before,” she said. From the start of the Biden administration, Vilsack announced a priority on nutrition security and building regional markets for farmers, and farm-to-school efforts happened to sit right at the nexus. Since the release of the latest Agricultural Census in February showed small- and mid-size farms continue to disappear as consolidation in agriculture accelerates, Vilsack has been beating the drum of saving smaller farms by supporting markets they can sell into even more intensely. In addition to the shift to local purchasing, the nutrition standards also strengthen the “Buy America” provision already in place for school meals. But forging a stronger connection between fields and cafeterias goes back to 2010, when Congress passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act championed by Michelle Obama. It was the first Child Nutrition Reauthorization to push nutrition to the forefront of school meal programs, and it included the first federal farm-to-school grants. Since then, the federal government has supported the efforts in additional ways, alongside numerous state incentives and grant programs as well as work done by nonprofit organizations. During the 2018–19 school year, about 77 percent of school food authorities (districts or individual schools) reported serving some local food, spending a total of $1.26 billion. However, that number is still a small sliver of total school meal spending, and buying local can be more complicated for districts and schools than just making up a funding gap. In addition to delivery, packaging, and labor challenges, school food procurement involves a complicated bid process with many rules attached. That’s where this change comes in. Spangler explained that right now, schools can list a “geographic preference” as one factor to be evaluated alongside others such as price, volume, and other criteria. For example, if a New York district wants to buy apples grown in-state today, they would have to evaluate bids from in-state orchards alongside bids from out-of-state distributors, many of which are likely to come in with a much lower price. “It discourages local producers from participating in the process because they can be drastically undercut,” Spangler said. With this change, if the district is confident that plenty of in-state orchards have enough Macintosh and Granny Smiths to satisfy their students’ appetites, it could specify up-front that it only wants bids from in-state orchards. Alongside the National Farm to School Network, groups including the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, National Farmers Union, and FoodCorps have been pushing for the change for years. In its summary of the new standards, USDA officials said the agency received close to 400 comments on the proposed change. “Commentors noted that expanding the geographic preference option to allow local as a specification will broaden opportunities for CNP [Child Nutrition Program] operators to purchase directly from local farmers, reinforce local food systems, and ease procurement challenges for operators interested in sourcing food from local producers,” they wrote. Previously, Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) attempted to go the Congressional route to make it happen, introducing the Kids Eat Local Act multiple times with bipartisan support. But the bill never went anywhere because the overall Child Nutrition Reauthorization process is now nine years overdue. Pingree celebrated the USDA for moving forward with the change in the meantime, and she plans to continue to reintroduce the bill so that it will eventually be set in law and therefore be more likely to stick. “Our children deserve healthy, nutritious school meals that are made with locally-sourced ingredients—not highly processed foods,” she said in a press release applauding the agency. At Morgan Hill Unified School District in California, Michael Jochner said he’s ready to make that happen. Jochner has been working to improve meal quality by forging relationships with organic farmers in his area and growing his own lettuces using hydroponic shipping container systems for several years. “As a district going out to bid across all food items for next school year, we’re very excited to have the flexibility to use ‘local’ as a bid specification,” he told Civil Eats. “We feel this will allow us to prioritize our local farmers, ranchers, and fisherman, and in turn help the local economy.” Read More: Inside New York’s Pursuit to Bring Local Food Into More Schools Farm-to-School Programs Are Finally Making Inroads on Capitol Hill California Farm-to-School Efforts Get a Big Influx of Cash Pandemic Disruptions Created an Opportunity for Organic School Meals in California Pesticide Ban Moves Forward. California legislators advanced a state bill proposed to ban the herbicide paraquat, sending it to another committee for consideration. Paraquat has been linked to Parkinson’s disease and is banned in dozens of other countries due to its health risks, including the United Kingdom, throughout the European Union, and in China. Over the past few months, the Environmental Working Group has been supporting the campaign to ban paraquat in California, releasing reports that show it is sprayed disproportionately in counties home to low-income communities of color and that the top users in the state include the Wonderful Company, which sprays it to produce pomegranates, pistachios, and almonds. The legislation comes at a time when the pesticide industry is fighting on several fronts to prevent states from passing laws that regulate farm chemicals. Read More: Paraquat, the Deadliest Chemical in American Agriculture, Goes on Trial Inside Bayer’s State-by-State Efforts to Stop Pesticide Lawsuits Confronting Poultry Problems. As avian influenza continues to spread in dairy cattle herds in nine states, the USDA announced it will now require mandatory reporting of infections in cattle and testing before moving cattle to other states. Some states, meanwhile, had already closed their borders to incoming cattle. And on Thursday, Colombia became the first country to restrict beef imports from the U.S. based on the situation. While beef cattle have not tested positive for the virus to date, retired dairy cows are generally processed into beef at the end of their lives. Prior to the crossover into cattle, the virus had been circulating in poultry since early 2022 and is still is, primarily affecting egg-laying hens and turkeys. One dairy worker, whose only symptoms were conjunctivitis, remains the only reported infection in humans, and while particles of the virus have been found in milk, officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) say the milk is still safe to drink, since pasteurization kills the virus. Meanwhile, the FDA also finalized a food safety rule that will allow the agency to enforce limits on Salmonella in some chicken products for the first time. The rule only applies to “frozen, breaded, and stuffed” chicken products, but in those products, if salmonella is found to exceed the limit, the products will be considered adulterated and will not be able to be sold. It’s a major change for the agency and is one piece of a larger plan to reduce illnesses from the common bacteria. Read More: A Deadly Bird Flu Resurfaces Will New Standards for Salmonella in Chicken Cut Down on Food Poisoning? Farmworker Rights. On Friday, the Department of Labor finalized new regulations intended to increase protections for workers employed on farms through the H-2A guestworker program. Under the new rules, workers have more tools to advocate for their rights and obtain legal assistance, foreign recruiters are required to provide new documentation to increase transparency, and new procedures are in place to kick out farms that break the rules. “With these new rules, the power of the federal government has sided with farm workers—both those who are born here and those from other countries—who for too long have been exploited, silenced, displaced, or harmed by the H-2A program,” United Farm Workers (UFW) President Teresa Romero said in a press release. The news came days after the UFW Foundation released a new documentary video series showcasing the impacts of climate change on farmworkers. As the effects of climate change worsen, workers in the field increasingly face and lack adequate protection from hazards including dangerous heat, flooding, and wildfire smoke. Read More: The H-2A Program Has Ballooned in Size; Both Farmers and Workers Want it Fixed As the Climate Emergency Grows, Farmworkers Lack Protection from Deadly Heat Farmworkers Are on the Frontlines of Climate Change. Can New Laws Protect Them? The post New School Meal Standards Could Put More Local Food on Students’ Lunch Trays appeared first on Civil Eats.