Month: November 2017

Pick up any packaged, processed food, and there’s a decent chance that one of its listed ingredients will be “natural flavor.” The ingredient sounds good, particularly in contrast to another common and mysterious ingredient, “artificial flavor.” But what exactly does natural flavor mean? When a reader posed the question, I contacted nutritionists and flavorists — yes, that’s a profession — to find out.

“Basically, if something is a natural flavor, it’s derived from some natural source,” explains Charles Platkin, director of the New York City Food Policy Center at Hunter College.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration defines “natural flavor” as oils, resins or other extracts derived from natural sources like plants, meat or seafood. Processes like heating or fermentation are used to extract the flavor. The function of these products is flavoring, not to add any nutritional content.

“We do a lot of this in cooking,” says Chef Bruce Mattel, senior associate dean of culinary arts at The Culinary Institute of America. “Let’s say I poach shrimp in water. Then I take that big pot and reduce it all the way down to a teaspoon of shrimp essence.” That essence could then be added to a different dish. The food industry does this on a massive scale — scientists find the chemical responsible for a specific flavor in nature, extract it, and then add it to candy, beverages and throngs of other processed products.

When consumers see “natural flavor” on a beverage label, they shouldn’t assume that someone is zesting oranges into their bottle, says Mattel. Even though natural flavor must come from natural sources, it need not all come from the plant or meat whose flavor is being mimicked. For example, orange flavor might contain not only orange extract, but also extracts from bark and grass.

So if companies are trying to approximate flavors like orange, why not just use oranges? The answer comes down to availability, cost and flexibility, according to flavor chemist Gary Reineccius, of the University of Minnesota. “At one time, there were 10 times more grape-flavored products than grapes grown,” Reineccius says. “If you’re going to use all your grapes on grape soda, you don’t have any for wine. It would be exceedingly expensive. Then what do you do with the byproduct you create after you’ve sucked all the juice out of the grape?”

Flavor chemists might also want a particular kind of grape taste, he explains, and mixing the grape flavor in the lab allows them the flexibility to create exactly the flavor they want, rather than relying on farmers’ produce.

All three experts say that ultimately, natural and artificial flavors are not that different. While chemists make natural flavors by extracting chemicals from natural ingredients, artificial flavors are made by creating the same chemicals synthetically.

Platkin says the reason companies bother to use natural flavors rather than artificial flavors is simple: marketing.

“Many of these products have health halos, and that’s what concerns me typically,” says Platkin. Consumers may believe products with natural flavors are healthier, though they’re nutritionally no different from those with artificial flavors.

Nor are ingredients extracted from nature necessarily safer than something artificially made. Reineccius points out that many deadly toxins are produced in nature. What’s more, in some cases, natural flavors may have more detrimental environmental consequences than artificial flavors. Mattel explains that because natural flavors must come from resources in nature, they may involve more forest clear-cutting and carbon emissions from transport than flavors created from scratch in the lab.

Platkin suggests consumers lobby their congressional representatives to get more transparent labeling on packaging that describe exactly what the natural or artificial flavors are, so consumers are not hoodwinked into buying one product over another because of “natural flavors.”

Reineccius also offers some simple guidance: “If you like something, and it gives you the flavoring you want, you should buy it. Don’t buy it because it says ‘natural flavor.’ Buy it because you like it.”

House Republicans say the tax bill they introduced Thursday will grow the economy, create jobs and simplify tax returns, in part by eliminating tax deductions.

“Over 90 percent of Americans will be able to fill out their taxes on a postcard. That’s what simplicity means,” House Majority Whip Steve Scalise said.

But charities and nonprofit groups say that simplicity comes with a price. Even though Republicans promise to preserve the deduction for charitable donations, these groups say other proposed changes in the bill will discourage giving.

Steve Taylor, senior vice president and counsel for public policy at United Way Worldwide, notes that about a third of taxpayers currently itemize their deductions, including for charitable donations.

“Under this new proposal, only about 5 percent of people will itemize their taxes,” he says. “What that means is effectively millions of Americans that currently claim the charitable deduction will lose it.”

The Republican plan would double the standard deduction that taxpayers get in lieu of itemizing to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for couples, making it much more attractive not to itemize.

Una Osili, of the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University, estimates that change would lead to a reduction of up to $13 billion a year in charitable giving, and 28 million fewer Americans itemizing their returns. She says it doesn’t mean these people would stop giving, just that they’re likely to give less.

And, she adds, “it could disproportionately affect certain kinds of charities that draw more on the average American family,” such as churches and smaller community groups.

Tim Delaney, president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, says a drop in donations is worrisome at a time when Congress is also trying to cut spending on domestic programs. His group represents 28,000 charities across the nation.

“That will lead to more people having more needs,” he says, noting that charities will be expected to pick up the slack. “We’re just concerned that this is going to overwhelm the nonprofit community.”

As a result, nonprofits are pushing Republicans to include something else in their tax plan that they say would increase charitable donations, but keep taxes simple: They want something called a universal charitable deduction, which taxpayers would get on top of the standard deduction. One proposal, by North Carolina Republican Mark Walker, would set the deduction at about $2,100 for individuals and $4,200 for couples.

One potential stumbling block is that the change could cost the Treasury several billion dollars a year, but nonprofits plan to pull out the stops in the coming weeks to make their case.

“There’s 1,150 United Ways in the United States,” says Taylor. “That means there’s at least one United Way in every single congressional district. And so over the next couple of days and into next week, those United Ways are going to be reaching out to their members of Congress.” As will tens of thousands of other nonprofits around the country.

Taylor admits they are up against a lot of other powerful interests — such as homebuilders — that will be lobbying Congress to preserve tax breaks that are important to them.

Dan Cardinali, president and CEO of Independent Sector, which represents 1.6 million nonprofits, has another concern. He notes that the Republican bill would also eventually eliminate the estate tax. Cardinali says that would discourage billions of dollars in donations from wealthy individuals who want to avoid subjecting their heirs to the tax.

Republican Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito of Massachusetts signed a bill Friday, approved one day earlier by the state’s Democratic legislature, outlawing so-called bump stocks, accessories that allow semi-automatic firearms to mimic the rapid firing action of machine guns.

The bill’s passage makes Massachusetts the first state to enact a ban on bump stocks in the wake of last month’s shooting in Las Vegas, the deadliest in modern American history.

Authorities say the gunman responsible for the massacre, which left 58 people dead and hundreds wounded, used bump stocks to allow his semi-automatic weapons to rain down considerably more bullets on the unsuspecting crowd during the attack.

Bump stocks attach to semi-automatic weapons and enable sustained firing by using the force of the weapon’s kickback to bounce the firearm against the shooter’s trigger finger over and over.

The newly approved Mass. ban provides a 90-day grace period for bump stock owners to discard their devices.

The ban was approved with relative ease and little fanfare Friday, when Polito, acting in place of Gov. Charlie Baker who was away on vacation, signed an appropriations bill to which the bump stock ban had been added. The state legislature had passed the amended spending measure on Thursday.

In the days after the Las Vegas shooting, Baker, who is a Republican, had made clear he would support outlawing bump stocks, saying “if that were to pass tomorrow we would sign it.”

The Gun Owners’ Action League of Massachusetts, which is affiliated with the National Rifle Association and appeared to be the most vocal opponent of the new ban, spent Friday beseeching its members to call the governor’s office in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to have the bump stock provision vetoed.

The Giffords Law Center To Prevent Gun Violence, an organization founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who was shot and wounded at a public event in Arizona in 2011, celebrated the ban’s approval on Friday, saying in a statement they hoped other states would “follow Massachusetts’ lead.”

Massachusetts is, however, not the first state with a bump stock ban on the books. Longstanding gun regulations in California already include punishments aimed at any device that “allows the firearm to discharge two or more shots in a burst by activating the device.”

Following the tragedy in Las Vegas, in what appeared to be an unusual display of bipartisanship, Democrats, Republicans and even the NRA expressed support for some kind of regulation for bump stocks.

Multiple bills were introduced in Congress, with one in the House garnering more than two dozen signatures. But legislative momentum has stalled, as NPR’s Geoff Bennett reported in October:

“The NRA is calling for a regulatory fix for bump stocks rather than legislation. And House Speaker Paul Ryan, who first signaled an openness to considering congressional action, is now siding with the NRA. Ryan and the NRA say the best approach is for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or the ATF, to regulate the devices.”

But — complicating matters further — regulating bump stocks is something many view as outside of the purview of the ATF. As NPR’s Ryan Lucas explained, U.S. law gives the ATF authority to regulate machine guns, which are defined as any weapon that can shoot more than one bullet “by single function of the trigger.”

“It is that last phrase — “by a single function of the trigger” — that is key to understanding ATF decisions, said Rick Vasquez, a firearm consultant and former acting chief of the ATF’s firearms technology branch, which conducts classification reviews.

“If a gun fires more than one bullet with a single pull of the trigger, then by law it is considered a machine gun. If, however, a gun fires only one bullet for each pull of the trigger, it is not.

“Bump stocks, Vasquez said, enable an accelerated shooting rate, but the way they are designed ensures that each pull of the trigger only unleashes one bullet. That means, he said, that they don’t qualify as machine guns under current law.”

A recent poll conducted by NPR showed “88 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Republicans, and 82 percent of independents favor banning bump stocks. But while three-quarters of Democrats ‘strongly favor’ this kind of ban, only around half of Republicans and independents do.”