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Sept. 15, 2022 – Many brands of fruit leathers, a popular children’s snack, have detectable levels of pesticides, according to a new report from the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization aiming to improve human health and the environment. Many dried fruit snacks also have detectable pesticide levels.

It released the results today in a report, “Fruit leather: A snack sometimes chock full of pesticides and sugar.”

The Environmental Working Group’s bottom line: “Fresh fruit is always going to be better,” says Sydney Evans, a science analyst for the group and a report co-author. To minimize pesticide exposure, dried fruit snacks are better than fruit leathers, she says, and organic is better than non-organic or conventional products.

But others blasted the report. “This fear mongering needs to stop,” says Teresa Thorne, executive director of the Alliance for Food and Farming, a nonprofit organization representing organic and conventional farmers growing fruits and vegetables. The levels found, she says, are well below the standards set as acceptable.

Report Details

The Environmental Working Group asked an independent lab to test 37 samples of organic and non-organic fruit leathers from 10 brands, as well as 30 samples of dried fruits, another popular take-along snack, from 16 brands. (Fruit leathers are made by dehydrating fruit puree into a sheet that’s shiny with a leather-like texture.)

None of the samples tested were above federally set tolerance levels for pesticides, Evans says. But the group believes those tolerance levels are too high.

Detectable levels of pesticides were found in all 26 samples of the non-organic (conventional) fruit leathers tested and in half of the non-organic samples of dried fruit, according to the Environmental Working Group, whose funding sources include organic food companies.

But some of the organic products evaluated also had pesticide levels similar to or higher than those found in conventional products. For instance, Trader Joe’s Organic Apple Strawberry Fruit Wrap had 247 parts per billion (ppb) of pesticide concentration, while Bob Snail Apple-Strawberry Stripe, a conventional product, had 106 ppb.

One sample of Stretch Island Raspberry Fruit Leather contained 17 pesticides, the most of all the leathers tested. When the researchers looked at the total amount of pesticides, also known as total pesticide concentration, samples from That’s It, Stretch Island, and Trader Joe’s had the highest total concentration, on average.

The most commonly found pesticides were fungicides pyrimethanil, fludioxonil, and thiabendazole, and the insecticide acetamiprid. Exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, hormone disruption, reproductive and nervous system effects, and birth defects, among other problems.

“For me, the takeaway is [that] fresh fruit is always going to be better” if given a choice between that, the fruit leathers, and dried fruit, Evans says. If that’s not an option, she recommends choosing dried fruit snacks over the fruit leathers. The Environmental Working Group evaluation of 30 dried fruit products found conventionally grown dried cranberries, dates, figs, mangoes, and prunes had non-detectable levels of pesticides, while the highest levels were found on raisins and dried strawberries, cherries, and apples.

Fruit strips with the highest levels of pesticides often had apples as the first ingredient, Evans says. Apples are No. 5 on the 2022 “Dirty Dozen” list, the annual ranking of fruits and vegetables with the most pesticides produced by the group.

The process of dehydrating fruit to make the fruit leathers also “drastically increases the concentration of natural sugar the snack contains,” the group says, resulting in far more sugar than a similar-size serving of fresh fruit would have. It also recommends avoiding fruit leathers and dried fruit with added sugar and additives such as flavor enhancers, food coloring, and corn syrup.

Federal Regulations

The Environmental Protection Agency sets tolerance levels for pesticide residues on foods. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pesticide Data Program is a national pesticide residue monitoring program.

Other Perspectives

“Nothing they found is surprising,” says Kaci Buhl, an associate professor and director of the Pesticide Safety Education Program at Oregon State University Extension, Corvallis, who reviewed the report for WebMD.

The findings also don’t support advice to avoid the fruit leathers altogether, she says.

“Parents should not be concerned as long as fruit leathers are consumed in moderation as part of a varied and balanced diet,” Buhl says. (Organic produce is also grown with pesticides, she notes.)

Others pointed out what they saw as discrepancies in the calculations. For instance, a That’s It Blueberry Fruit Bar, which is 35 grams (1.2 ounces), was found to have a total pesticide concentration of 3,541 ppb, while its Mini Blueberry Fruit Bar, at 20 grams (0.7 ounces), with the same ingredients, had a total pesticide concentration of 89.

The fruit leather and dried fruit snacks are especially handy when those who live a distance from a food market run out of fresh fruit, Buhl says.

“We need to stop scaring people away from the foods they enjoy, especially when they are healthy foods like fruits and vegetables,” Thorne says.

On the alliance’s consumer information site, its pesticide calculator estimates that a child could eat 340 servings a day of apple with no ill effects of pesticides “even if the apple has the highest pesticide residue recorded for apple by the USDA.”

WebMD reached out to companies for comment. Stretch Island did not respond, and That’s It declined to comment on the findings.

THURSDAY, Sept. 15, 2022 (HealthDay News) — While there’s no cure for lupus and treatments don’t work for many of the 1.5 million people who live with the disease in the United States, a new study shows a cancer therapy may kick hard-to-treat lupus into remission.

Lupus is an autoimmune disease that occurs when the body’s immune system engages in friendly fire against its own skin, joints, bones, kidneys and heart, triggering a host of symptoms.

Enter CAR-T therapy.

Used to treat certain types of cancer, the therapy takes your body’s own T-cells, trains them in the lab to recognize very specific cells, and then infuses them back into the body to do their job. In lupus, the therapy targets CD19, a protein on B cells.

The small study included five people with severe lupus involving multiple organs — such as the kidneys, heart, lungs and joints — who hadn’t responded to standard therapy.

After about three months after one treatment, patients showed improvements in symptoms, including a remission of organ involvement and the disappearance of disease-related autoantibodies. What’s more, they didn’t need any additional treatments. Similar results in one person with lupus were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021.

“Severe [lupus] is very sensitive to CAR-T cell treatment, and [people] can go into longstanding drug-free remission,” said study author Dr. Georg Schett. He is vice president of research and chair of the department of internal medicine at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany.

Side effects in the new study were mild, he said. In cancer studies, this type of therapy has caused high fever and chills, trouble breathing, and cytokine release syndrome, which can happen as CAR-T cells multiply and release large amounts of inflammatory cytokines into the bloodstream.

Now, researchers plan to find out if the immune system has really undergone a deep reset and behaves normally going forward.

“Longer monitoring of patients will be important to test whether they enjoy long-term disease-free remission and are eventually cured from [lupus],” Schett said.

This treatment may be available sooner rather than later, he said. “CAR-T cell therapy is already established in cancer medicine, particularly to treat lymphoma and leukemia,” Schett noted.

The study was published Sept. 15 in the journal Nature Medicine .

Lupus experts said they were excited about the new findings.

“This is a very, very big deal,” said Hoang Nguyen, senior scientific program manager at the Lupus Research Alliance. Her organization supported the initial studies looking at CAR-T therapy in a mouse model of lupus.

“There is no real cure for lupus, and the effectiveness of current therapies is limited,” said Nguyen. “This is the first time that a treatment eliminated lupus symptoms in all treated subjects in a 100-day study.”

Still, she cautioned, there were only five people in the trial and there’s not enough information on the long-term effects yet.

Dr. Jill Buyon is director of the Lupus Center at NYU Langone in New York City. “Patients got better with regard to multiple symptoms and didn’t require other therapies, including steroids. More studies in larger numbers of people with lupus who are followed for longer are needed, but this is very exciting,” she said.

And according to Dr. Ruth Fernandez Ruiz, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, “[Lupus] patients had striking clinical improvement after CAR-T cell therapy and experienced clinical remission while off… [the] drugs for the duration of follow-up after CAR-T cell therapy. Despite the limited sample size, it is likely that there will be a role in implementing CAR-T cell therapy in [lupus], particularly for patients with severe disease that is refractory [resistant] to standard-of-care treatments.”

More information

The Lupus Foundation of America has more on lupus treatments.

Sept. 15, 2022 – It should have been the start of new insight into a debilitating illness. In May 2017, I was patient No. 4 in a group of 20 taking part in a deep and intense study at the National Institutes of Health aimed at getting to the root causes of myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, a disease that causes extreme exhaustion, sleep issues, and pain, among other symptoms.

What the researchers found as they took our blood, harvested our stem cells, ran tests to check our brain function, put us through magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), strapped us to tilt tables, ran tests on our heart and lungs, and more could have helped prepare doctors everywhere for the avalanche of long COVID cases that’s come alongside the pandemic.

Instead, we are all still waiting for answers.

In 2012, I was hit by a sudden fever and dizziness. The fever got better, but over the next 6 months, my health declined, and by December I was almost completely bedbound. The many symptoms were overwhelming: muscle weakness, almost paralyzing fatigue, and brain dysfunction so severe, I had trouble remembering a four-digit PIN for 10 seconds. Electric shock-like sensations ran up and down my legs. At one point, as I tried to work, letters on my computer monitor began swirling around, a terrifying experience that only years later I learned was called oscillopsia. My heart rate soared when I stood, making it difficult to remain upright.

I learned I had post-infectious myalgic encephalomyelitis, also given the unfortunate name chronic fatigue syndrome by the CDC (now commonly known as ME/CFS). The illness ended my career as a newspaper science and medical reporter and left me 95% bedbound for more than 2 years. As I read about ME/CFS, I discovered a history of an illness not only neglected, but also denied. It left me in despair.

In 2015, I wrote to then-NIH director Francis Collins, MD, and asked him to reverse decades of inattention from the National Institutes of Health. To his credit, he did. He moved responsibility for ME/CFS from the small Office of Women’s Health to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and asked that institute’s head of clinical neurology, neurovirologist Avindra Nath, MD, to design a study exploring the biology of the disorder.

But the coronavirus pandemic interrupted the study, and Nath gave his energy to autopsies and other investigations of COVID-19. While he is devoted and empathetic, the reality is that the NIH’s investment in ME/CFS is tiny. Nath divides his time among many projects. In August, he said he hoped to submit the study’s main paper for publication “within a few months.”

In the spring of 2020, I and other patient advocates warned that a wave of disability would follow the novel coronavirus. The National Academy of Medicine estimates that between 800,000 and 2.5 million Americans had ME/CFS before the pandemic. Now, with billions of people worldwide having been infected by SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVD-19, the ranks of people whose lives have been upended by post-viral illness has swelled into nearly uncountable millions.

Back in July 2020, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci, MD, said that long COVID is “strikingly similar” to ME/CFS.

It was, and is, a preventable tragedy.

Along with many other patient advocates, I’ve watched in despair as friend after friend, person after person on social media, describe the symptoms of ME/CFS after COVID-19: “I got mildly sick”; “I thought I was fine – then came overwhelming bouts of fatigue and muscle pain”; “my extremities tingle”; “my vision is blurry”; ”I feel like a have a never-ending hangover”; “my brain stopped working”; “I can’t make decisions or complete daily tasks”; “I had to stop exercising after short sessions flattened me.”

What’s more, many doctors deny long COVID exists, just as many have denied ME/CFS exists.

And it is true that some, or maybe even many, people with brain fog and fatigue after a mild case of COVID will recover. This happens after many infections; it’s called post-viral fatigue syndrome. But patients and a growing number of doctors now understand that many long COVID patients could and should be diagnosed with ME/CFS, which is lifelong and incurable. Growing evidence shows their immune systems are haywire; their nervous systems dysfunctional. They fit all of the published criteria for ME, which require 6 months of nonstop symptoms, most notably post-exertional malaise (PEM), the name for getting sicker after doing something, almost anything. Exercise is not advised for people with PEM, and increasingly, research shows many people who have long COVID also cannot tolerate exercise.

Several studies show that around half of all long COVID patients qualify for a diagnosis of ME/CFS. Half of a large number is a large number.

A researcher at the Brookings Institution estimated in a report published in August that 2 million to 4 million Americans can no longer work due to long COVID. That’s up to 2% of the nation’s workforce, a tsunami of disability. Many others work reduced hours. By letting a pandemic virus run free, we’ve created a sicker, less able society. We need better data, but the numbers that we have show that ME/CFS after COVID-19 is a large, and growing, problem. Each infection and re-infection represent a dice roll that a person may become terribly sick and disabled for months, years, a lifetime. Vaccines reduce the risk of long COVID, but it’s not entirely clear how well they do so.

We’ll never know if the NIH study I took part in could have helped prevent this pandemic-within-a-pandemic. And until they publish, we won’t know if the NIH has identified promising leads for treatments. Nath’s team is now using a protocol very similar to the ME/CFS study I took part in to investigate long COVID; they’ve already brought in seven patients.

There are no FDA-approved medicines for the core features of ME/CFS. And because ME/CFS is rarely taught to medical students, few frontline doctors understand that the best advice to give suspected patients is to stop, rest, and pace – meaning to slow down when symptoms get worse, to aggressively rest, and to do less than you feel you can.

And so, millions of long COVID patients stumble along, lives diminished, in a nightmare of being horribly sick with little help – a dire theme repeating itself over and over.

Over and over, we hear that long COVID is mysterious. But much of it isn’t. It’s a continuation of a long history of virally triggered illnesses. Properly identifying conditions related to long COVID removes a lot of the mystery. While patients will be taken aback to be diagnosed with a lifelong disorder, proper diagnosis can also be empowering, connecting patients to a large, active community. It also removes uncertainty and helps them understand what to expect.

One thing that’s given me and other ME/CFS patients hope is watching how long COVID patients have organized and become vocal advocates for better research and care. More and more researchers are finally listening, understanding that not only is there so much human suffering to tackle, but the opportunity to unravel a thorny but fascinating biological and scientific problem. Their findings in long COVID are replicating earlier findings in ME/CFS.

Research on post-viral illness, as a category, is moving faster. And we must hope answers and treatments will soon follow.

In “A Date with Your Family,” a 10-minute instructional film made in 1950, Mother knits while dinner cooks. She and Daughter change from their daytime wear to something more formal. Brother and Junior comb their hair and wash their hands in preparation. Father returns from the office and hangs his hat on a rack.

“The dinner date has begun and they’re all happy about it,” the narrator says. “Napkins on the lap, the family awaits service. They converse pleasantly while Dad serves — I said ‘pleasantly,’ for that is the keynote at dinnertime. It is not only good manners but good sense. Pleasant, unemotional conversation helps good digestion.”

As he continues to explain dinnertime dos and don’ts, the narrator advises complimenting Mother on the food and avoiding speaking unkindly about your siblings.

“The dinner table is no place for discontent,” the narrator says. “This does not mean you should be stiff or formal – with your own family you can relax. Be yourself. Just be sure it’s your best self.”

This version of family dinner, if it ever really existed outside of TV shows, is long gone. But connecting over a shared meal is still a concept many families aspire to today. But how to make that happen? It’s a mix of loosening things up and not scrapping the whole idea.

Family Dinners: What Changed?

Just about everything has changed – starting with the family itself.

“The notion of having a mom at home cooking? That ship has sailed,” says Anne Fishel, PhD, executive director and co-founder of The Family Dinner Project.

“Around 50% of American families are either single-parent families or a blended family,” Fishel says. She also notes that if two parents are present, both might be moms or dads. And sometimes there’s a grandparent in the mix, too. Some people have expanded their definition of family to include their chosen family – the people in their inner circle who make them feel at home, even if they’re not relatives.

Dinner itself has also changed. For many people, it rarely means cooking from scratch. They may prefer other options, like subscription meal kits, frozen food, delivery, take-out fare, and restaurant dining.

“Family dinner doesn’t have to be dinner and it doesn’t have to be family,” Fishel says.

“I think it’s any two people,” she says. “It may be beyond the pale to get everybody together night after night. Some families I know have a rule that no one eats alone. In some families, kids have veggies with hummus at 5 p.m. because they’re really hungry and eat more of a meal with a parent later on.”

Family Dinners: The COVID-19 Effect

One of the few upsides of the early part of the pandemic, when many people stayed home as much as possible, was that hectic family commitments that involved going out were literally off the table. Eating dinner at home was more likely, whether you cooked or baked more than usual (sourdough bread, anyone?) or ordered in.

A little over a year into the pandemic, Fishel teamed up with Making Caring Common, a Harvard Graduate School of Education project, to survey more than 500 parents about family dinners.

“Over 60% said they were having family dinner more often,” Fishel says. And most of those parents – 80% – said they wanted to keep that up. “Parents even reported an improvement in the quality of their family dinners,” Fishel says. “They talked more about their days, laughed more, connected more, and talked about the news.”

As we’re settling into the “new normal,” what will it take to keep family dinners in the mix?

Family Dinners: It Becomes Tradition

If family dinner is important to you, it’s likely because they were part of your childhood.

If you grew up in the strict family dinner era, you might not have liked being told to eat everything on your plate or getting a nightly table manners lesson. But even so, you’re more likely to prioritize family dinners as an adult.

“Family meal traditions may encourage more frequent family meals across generations,” says Dianne Neumark-Sztainer, PhD, head of the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “Parents who ate six to seven family meals a week while growing up reported significantly more frequent family meals with their current family.”

Some even make a career of it.

“Family dinner is at the core of what we do,” says Caroline Galzin, who, with her husband, Tony, owns Nicky’s Coal Fired restaurant in Nashville, where Mondays are family night. “Everything’s inspired by Tony’s big Italian family and the atmosphere around mealtimes when he grew up,” Galzin says. “Everyone brought something different and lots of people gathered to share a meal.”

Family Dinner: The Benefits

Children who eat regular family dinners experience less depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, have bigger vocabularies, get better grades, have higher self-esteem, and eat more fruits and vegetables, says dietitian Maryann Jacobsen, author of The Family Dinner Solution.

“But we don’t need studies to know that gathering as a family in a positive atmosphere is good for us,” Jacobsen says. “It brings us together, promotes closeness, and shows kids that food matters.”

It also sets up eating patterns that can last a long time.

“Even when kids don’t eat everything we serve, we know from research that the food kids are exposed to most during childhood are the same foods they prefer in adulthood,” Jacobsen says.

The Challenges

The table can be a tricky place to navigate family dynamics. That is, if you can get there at all.

“When I talk to families across the country, being busy is the No. 1 obstacle of having a family meal together,” Fishel says. “Parents work different shifts or kids have extracurricular activities around the dinner hour.”

Other common issues include picky eating, conflict at the table, and tight budgets.

The key is to be flexible – and not give up, Jacobsen says. Make it something that works for your family – however you define it. Prize connection, not perfect attendance or a showstopping menu.

“I’m not going to lie: It takes commitment to plan and have family meals every week,” Jacobsen says. “But now that my kids are older, I can see that it’s worth it.”