So I take a look at
"Suzy Badaracco".... who was quoted last in that article...
QUOTE
suzybadaracco 01:17 PM, 06/30/2008
I am a trends forecaster for the food industry tracking all food, flavor, health, consumer, research, technology and government trends. What I find interesting is that Americans tend to act individually and are a "me" culture yet they fall into pack mentality when it comes to eating and food. In Japan it is the reverse. They act more as a collective yet are not influenced by those around them when it comes to recognizing satiety signals. In other words, when Japanese are full, they stop eating regardless of whether others at the dinner table are continuing to eat. I think a big part of the obesity issue is not portion sizes but the inability to recognize or accept satiety signals. Suzy Badaracco Culinary Tides www.culinarytides.com
http://www.philly.com/philly/health_and_sc...r_Pressure.htmlFrom Suzy Badaracco's website Culinary Tides:
QUOTE
Suzy Badaracco is a toxicologist, certified chef, and registered dietitian. She holds a Bachelors of Science degree in Criminalistics, an Associates degree in Culinary Arts, and a Masters of Science degree in Human Nutrition. Suzy has worked as an analytical chemist, corporate chef, nutrition specialist, trainer, and knowledge manager for organizations including Mintel, USDA, Nestle, T. Marzetti, and Ajinomoto inc. since 1992. Suzy has been trained in business intelligence and predictive analysis techniques used by both corporate and government bodies. Using these techniques she has been able to successfully predict and profile food trends in the United States from health and ingredient trends to restaurants, consumers, fast food and fast casual restaurants, grocery stores, and manufacturing trends.
Additionally she uses her skills to track food safety and defense for the food industry which entails monitoring all government movement including USDA, FDA, import/export laws, labeling legislation and others. Responses by consumers, industry partners, lobby groups, and manufacturers are also monitored.
~~~~~~~~~~~ more from the culinary tides site:
Forecasting vs. Trends analysis
Forecasting focuses on the birth and death of trends, not the statistics generated once a trend hits an industry. The birth helps to tell how weak or strong an influence it may have on an industry while it’s death can be used to predict how it may influence an upcoming trend’s birth or lifecycle. Profiling of a trend is used to map its lifecycle.
Akin to a Meteorologist
A forecaster acts as a meteorologist for an industry. For example, someone may look out the window and say “boy, it looks like rain”. But, a meteorologist is looking from a satellite point of view so he may say “not only is it going to rain, it will begin about 5pm, continue to early morning, and dump ¼ inch of rainfall so don’t water your lawns today”. He isn’t guessing - he just has a different vantage point.
Forecasting
Trends forecasting is a critical element for strategic planning groups inside corporate America. It allows for successful entrance and exit strategies and predicts the stability of a company. The effort of a company to participate in a trend relies largely upon having an appropriate response to the trend. If a trend is to be short lived a company may decide to limit resources and exposure or not participate at all. Another strategy may be to participate fully but have a fast acting exit strategy.
Culinary Tides tracks the movement of 23 industries to forecast upcoming influences on food, flavor, and health trends. Local, national, and global influences including lifestyle factors, social, technological, economical, environmental, and political factors are examined to aid companies with entrance, exit, and navigation strategies to a trend.
Many times food, flavor and health trends are born outside the food industry and also find their opponents and death there as well. So to only look at restaurants, food magazines, casual dining, and manufacturers you can easily miss a trends birth or worse, miscalculate its impact or time of death. Trends forecasting, if done well, is neither opinion nor guess work. Done correctly it is based on predictive analysis and allows forecasting to move from art to science.
This is the person who made the really dumb comment at the end of the article about how if you Google the silly thing right now there's all sorts of persons (like dieticians and medical professionals) against it (a gluten free diet) , and they're just not organized yet to band together and say
"you know what? This is ridiculous."
Is there anything worse than a statistician working for the food manufacturing industry as they try to outwit the already lax enforcement of the Food and Drug administration and the United States Dept. of Agriculture?
As soon as I read that comment I thought, that's either a lobbyist or somebody who works for the government as a contractor.
Gluten intolerance is mostly UN diagonosed in this country because the diseases can be latent, take decades to become intolerable, and most physicians (based on what I have read here and experienced first hand attempting to get them to acknowlege my former symptoms and other auto immune problems were caused by it ) do not know how to diagnose it or do not recognize the symptoms. One in 130 people is estimated to have this condition. This is not a silly thing or a "trend." This is a hidden health crisis that could be helped TREMENDOUSLY by better communication between people who are successfully eating gluten free because it makes them feel better, and the rest of the gluten intolerant who don't know it and are suffering.
I am so happy to see this renewed proof of the venality and idiocity of the current government's administration, because it is a teachable moment.
Because of the current problems on this planet with drought in some places that grow grain for export, plus other natural disasters, and severe weather causing massive flooding in America's midwestern breadbasket, PLUS the US military switching over to grain fermented biofuel alcohol as a major fuel to replace petro fuels, which will take a lot of feed corn used for people and farm livestock, there is already a shockingly short amount ( a few month's worth) of wheat and other grains held in reserve until this year's harvest, which will also be short in some places.
So yes there is enough of a global "food insecurity" crisis that there have been international food conferences where the mucky mucks get together and so far wring their hands and point to each other as causing it. Yes, our government does "monitor" these things, but who knows what they will do with the information because they don't like to upset people too much with their usual lack of iintelligent response to a problem.
This is going to mean that there will be increased pressure on food and drug manufacturers to use whatever they can get ahold of in terms of grain byproducts they need to use as starches and binders in most manufactured things we tend to avoid here.
So I would imagine some of the manufacturers are going to be resistant to the idea of being really careful about calling out just what they used as a starch/grain protein, and where it came from.
Because of the economic situation in our world, a lot of companies will be facing bankrupcy or takeovers as larger companies buy them out.... they would want to know what "trends" have staying power for the marketplace, obviously.
This also means that our government will be thinking about just which countries they want to give food aid to, and how much.
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Now back to the first quote I pulled up. This woman is either clueless on what causes obesity (doubtfull) or she is putting her client's version of a spin cycle out there for the media to pick up. The Japanese diet is nothing like the American diet. Re restaurant foods.... NOTHING. Our portions here in this country are larger, more calories, more fat, but people who eat certain proportions of different nutrients CRAVE different amounts of food. It is well known that sugary sodas and lots of processed white grain carbs cause spikes and dips in blood sugars that cause more food cravings and less feeling of being full.
The food manufacturer's have been taking a beating lately because of people who write about
the actual ingredients of what goes into the food we eat, and how much of it we eat at one time. The last thing they want to see is people who actually UNDERSTAND in detail what is in a manufactured food item, because then they can't put gluten **** in it , massive amounts of starch in it, saturated fat combined with starch, or high fructose corn sweetener in it or malt syrup in it or aspertame in it or (my list goes on, you get the idea) willy nilly and have people keep buying it.
Foreign countries are also full of discerning consumers who will NOT eat certain American food products, bless them, because of safety concerns about Genetically Modified grains or legumes, or about Mad Cow Disease. (see the recent South Korean food riots over importing US beef again, where the government apologized for not taking them seriously.) Japanese people will not eat Gen. Mod. rice. Europeans don't want Gen. Modified soybeans. Yet in this country we have Monsanto and other companies still constantly trying to push the Frankenfood seeds on to farmers to use to grow things that their markets don't want.
A gluten free diet is the opposite of what standard food manufacturers would want you, the consumer, to eat.
What is it we tell new people again and again ? Shop around the outer edges of the grocery. Buy fresh produce. Eat more vegetables. Bake your own. Cut out processed carbohydrates. Lean meat protein is good for you.
She claims trend forecasting moves from "art" to "science", but let me remind you all of one more thing.... there are media "scientists" out there who know how to get a quote criticising an opponent's viewpoint out there in the Mass Media, so it shows up again and again on search engines. These media waves are not driven by medical research or reality, but by the Google algorythm (math formula) which weights what stories show up first in searches.
In other words, some of us are on to people like this, and they don't have our health interests as a priority.