{"id":637885,"date":"2026-10-06T08:44:08","date_gmt":"2026-10-06T08:44:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/637885\/"},"modified":"2026-10-06T08:44:08","modified_gmt":"2026-10-06T08:44:08","slug":"letter-to-the-editor-broadline-distributors-are-not-responsible-for-declining-nutrition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/637885\/","title":{"rendered":"Letter to the Editor: Broadline distributors are not responsible for declining nutrition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The following is a letter to the editor and reflects the authors\u2019 views alone. For information on how to submit a piece to the Opinion section, click\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailyprincetonian.com\/page\/contact\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Angela Bahna\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailyprincetonian.com\/article\/2026\/10\/princeton-opinion-column-food-distributors-transparency-sysco-campus-dining\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Thursday column,<\/a> \u201cStudents need to know where their food comes from,\u201d asserts that the market dominance of broadline distributors like Sysco has \u201clikely contributed\u201d to a decline in food nutrition. That claim is unsupported, and it misinforms readers about what the research she cites actually shows.<\/p>\n<p>The column offers no evidence that distributors play any role in declining food nutrition. Its source, a 2024 <a href=\"https:\/\/pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov\/articles\/PMC10969708\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">review<\/a> in the journal Foods, rather attributes this decline mainly to how crops are grown and bred. It never mentions distributors, food service, or market concentration. Bahna also does not provide a well-substantiated mechanism by which such an effect would be observed in the first place.<\/p>\n<p>Also, the column\u2019s main example of a product from Sysco \u2014 pre-made scrambled eggs \u2014 does not support the author\u2019s claim.<\/p>\n<p>According to the product\u2019s label and <a href=\"https:\/\/fdc.nal.usda.gov\/food-details\/172187\/nutrients\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">USDA reference data<\/a>, Sysco\u2019s pre-made scrambled eggs have nearly the same calories, protein, fat, and minerals as ordinary scrambled eggs. Further, the author criticizes the \u201cseven additional ingredients\u201d in Sysco\u2019s eggs. However, a longer ingredients list doesn\u2019t necessarily mean that a food is bad. The only meaningful difference is added sodium. Considering the list of added ingredients, that appears to come from added salt, roughly at the amount you\u2019d use when cooking eggs at home.<\/p>\n<p>While food nutrition is indeed declining, broadline distributors are not the primary culprit \u2014 and we should make sure to be honest about that fact.<\/p>\n<p>Benjamin Garcia de Figueirdo is a Ph.D. candidate in biophysics. He can be reached at bg0729[at]princeton.edu.<\/p>\n<p>Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The following is a letter to the editor and reflects the authors\u2019 views alone. For information on how&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637886,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[163,85,46,543],"class_list":["post-637885","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nutrition","tag-health","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-nutrition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637885","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637885"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637885\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637886"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637885"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637885"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637885"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}