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True for silverware, but not for measuring spoons.
Nashville, Tennessee
1 public comment
WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration is reversing a 2003 decision that put a stringent warning on hormone therapy products for menopausal women, saying that the treatments offer heart, brain, and bone health benefits.
Commissioner Marty Makary wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on Monday that the FDA is removing black box warning labels from all-combined estrogen-progestogen, estrogen-only, other estrogen-containing, and progestogen-only products used for hormone therapy. The agency said it’s asking companies to remove the warnings from their products, specifically mentions of cardiovascular, dementia, and breast cancer risk.
Long overdue. My late-70s mom wouldn't use the (badly needed) estrogen cream her doctor prescribed a couple years ago exactly because of the stupid black box warning about it causing DEMENTIA.
(Yes, I tried explaining correlation and the population most using it being those 50+, as well as more recent research showing the quality of life benefits and no increased risks; but after seeing her mother go down with Alzheimer's, I was outgunned.)
(Yes, I tried explaining correlation and the population most using it being those 50+, as well as more recent research showing the quality of life benefits and no increased risks; but after seeing her mother go down with Alzheimer's, I was outgunned.)
FRA again
As U.N. talks get underway, China is emerging as a key leader in international climate efforts. It is empowering the global energy transition, and along with India and Brazil, is becoming the driving force in climate diplomacy and filling a vacuum left by the world’s rich nations.
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Canada has lost its measles elimination status, meaning the highly infectious virus is considered endemic once again in the country, The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) announced Monday.
The determination was made by a committee of PAHO experts, who spent last week poring over disease data to assess the measles status of countries across the entire region. The fact that Canada has lost its elimination status means that the region of the Americas overall has also lost the status, which it achieved in 2016. Of the 35 countries and territories in the region—a health region designated by the World Health Organization—Canada is currently the only country where measles is considered to be spreading endemically, though other countries, namely the US and Mexico, are headed in the same direction.
Measles is considered eliminated when a country can go 12 months without continuous local spread. Sporadic cases brought in from international travel can continue to occur, potentially causing limited outbreaks. But elimination is lost and endemicity is declared only when transmission is sustained over the course of a year.
Canada achieved elimination in 1998. The US did the same in 2000. Elimination was achieved through hard-fought vaccination campaigns, as two doses of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine is 97 percent protective against the virus, and that protection is considered lifelong. But, since that time, vaccine misinformation and potent rhetoric from anti-vaccine activists—including current US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—have taken hold, driving vaccination rates down on a population level. While the vast majority of American and Canadian parents continue to vaccinate their children, certain pockets and close-knit communities have become dramatically undervaccinated, providing potential footholds for the virus.
That is the case in Canada, where a massive outbreak began in October 2024. It started in Canada’s province of New Brunswick, and cases linked to the outbreak have since been detected across the country. As of November 1, the Government of Canada has tallied 5,162 measles cases since the start of the year. In the PAHO meeting last week, experts evaluated genetic data from the cases and determined that the same strain that sparked the outbreak last October has continued to spread, surpassing the 12-month threshold. Although transmission has slowed, the virus is still spreading. There were 23 cases identified in the week of October 26 to November 1.
“This loss represents a setback, of course, but it is also reversible,” Jarbas Barbosa, director of PAHO, said in a press briefing Monday.
Call to action
Barbosa was optimistic that Canada could regain its elimination status. He highlighted that such setbacks have happened before. “In 2018 and 2019, Venezuela and Brazil temporarily lost their elimination status following large outbreaks,” Barbosa noted. “Thanks to coordinated action by governments, civil society, and regional cooperation, those outbreaks were contained, and the Region of the Americas regained its measles-free status in 2024.”
On Monday, the Public Health Agency of Canada released a statement confirming that it received notification from PAHO that it had lost its measles elimination status, while reporting that it is already getting to work on earning it back. “PHAC is collaborating with the PAHO and working with federal, provincial, territorial, and community partners to implement coordinated actions—focused on improving vaccination coverage, strengthening data sharing, enabling better overall surveillance efforts, and providing evidence-based guidance,” the agency said.
However, Canada isn’t the only country facing an uphill battle against measles—the most infectious virus known to humankind. Outbreaks and sustained spread are also active in the US and Mexico. To date, the US has documented at least 1,618 measles cases since the start of the year, while Mexico has tallied at least 5,185. Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Belize also have ongoing outbreaks, PAHO reported.
As of November 7, PAHO has collected reports of 12,593 confirmed measles cases from 10 countries, but approximately 95 percent of them are in Canada, Mexico, and the US. That total is a 30-fold increase compared to 2024, PAHO notes, and the rise has led to at least 28 deaths: 23 in Mexico, three in the United States, and two in Canada.
The PAHO used Canada’s loss as a call to action not just in the northern country, but the rest of the region. “Every case we prevent, every outbreak we stop saves lives, protects families, and makes communities healthier,” Barbosa said. “Today, rather than lamenting the loss of a regional status, we call on all countries to redouble their efforts to strengthen vaccination rates, surveillance, and timely response to suspected cases—reaching every corner of the Americas. As a Region, we have eliminated measles twice. We can do it a third time.”
Every last one of them should be charged with child endangerment, but we're trending the wrong way for that currently.
Washington, DC
The Trump administration is proposing to loosen requirements for companies to report on their uses of “forever chemicals.”
These chemicals, many of which are toxic, have been used in a wide array of consumer and other applications, including to make items that are nonstick, waterproof and stain resistant.
While formally called perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, they have become known as “forever chemicals” because they can take hundreds or thousands of years to break down in the environment.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced Monday that it is moving to exempt some companies that make or import these chemicals from requirements to report them.
Specifically, if PFAS make up 0.1 percent or less of an item or mixture, the company that makes it would be exempt from the reporting requirement.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin argued in a written statement that the change his agency is proposing would reduce costs for industry.
“This Biden-era rule would have imposed crushing regulatory burdens and nearly $1 billion in implementation costs on American businesses,” Zeldin said.
“Today’s proposal is grounded in commonsense and the law, allowing us to collect the information we need to help combat PFAS contamination without placing ridiculous requirements on manufacturers, especially the small businesses that drive our country’s economy,” he added.
The Biden administration imposed strict forever chemical reporting rules in 2023, arguing that the public deserves to know if they might be exposed to these toxic substances.
PFAS can be harmful even in tiny quantities. For example, the nation’s drinking water standards are set to outlaw PFAS at levels as low as four parts per trillion, the equivalent of a few drops in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Exposure to these substances has been linked to kidney, prostate and testicular cancer, as well as fertility and immune system issues.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Roughly 10 minutes later, Trump posted the image to Truth Social, according to one of the people familiar, who was with the president at the time.
Almost immediately, aides were fielding angry phone calls from those who thought the idea – which would endorse a 50 year payback period for a mortgage – was both bad politics and bad policy, a move that could raise housing costs in the long run, the person said.
“He just sold POTUS a bill of goods that wasn’t necessarily accurate,” the person said. “He said ‘FDR did it, you can do it, it’s gonna be a big thing.’ But he didn’t tell him about all the unintended consequences.”
The episode underscores the haphazard ways consequential policies are sometimes brought before the president, and how Trump’s govern-by-whim nature can backfire.
“Anything that goes before POTUS needs to be vetted,” said the person present for Pulte’s poster presentation. “And a lot of times with Pulte they’re not. He just goes straight up to POTUS.”
One of the two people familiar said there is more fallout from this idea than almost any other policy proposal of the second term, including from the MAGA base.
Conservative influencers, including Laura Loomer, Mike Cernovich, Christopher Rufo, Sean Davis of the Federalist, and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) blasted the idea on social media.
“The thing that became clear from this latest episode — if it wasn’t already clear — is that Bill Pulte doesn’t know the first fucking thing about how the mortgage markets operate,” one of the two people said. “After publicly humiliating the president with his moronic 50 year mortgage plan it’s safe to assume that his days are numbered.”
A slew of experts also panned the idea.
“It would lead to buyers building equity in their homes more slowly. At the beginning of the mortgage, more of those payments tend to be interest,” Gennadiy Goldberg, head of US rates strategy at TD Securities. “This is more of a stopgap bandaid to address affordability.”
This morning, Pulte seemed to acknowledge the criticism, posting that a 50 year mortgage is just one piece of “a WIDE arsenal of solutions” that the Trump administration is developing. He also mentioned other ideas including portable mortgages, which can transfer to a new property, and assumable mortgages, which can be transferred to a property’s new buyer.
White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said Trump is “committed to making it easier and more affordable to achieve the American Dream of homeownership by eliminating unnecessary red tape, increasing supply, and lowering costs.”
“The White House and the entire Trump administration are appreciative of Mr. Pulte’s efforts, and everyone is working together to implement the President’s policies,” Ingle said.
An FHFA spokesperson told POLITICO that the inflation under former President Joe Biden destroyed the housing market. “As a result, we are studying a myriad of options to combat the damage it’s done,” the spokesperson said.
This is not the first time Pulte’s policy proposals have caused headaches. He was also behind the idea Trump floated earlier this year to take Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac out of government conservatorship, which also resulted in significant pushback from industry.
It was also Pulte who first lodged mortgage fraud allegations against Fed Gov. Lisa Cook that Trump later used to fire her. Cook’s firing has been blocked in the courts and the case is pending before the Supreme Court.
POLITICO has also recently reported that Republicans in Congress are also growing increasingly frustrated with him.
Now, senior administration officials are increasingly getting fed up with Pulte’s approach. Yet Pulte remains close with the President and has direct access that aides have not been able to control.
“Trump isn’t just Pulte’s biggest ally in the admin, he is perhaps his only friend,” said one person familiar with their dynamic. “During Trump 2.0, the last time anything got as much pushback as this was over the ‘Epstein Files.’ MAGA is furious.”
In theory, 50-year mortgages would mean lower monthly payments for borrowers, but it also comes at a cost to homebuyers, who would build equity much more slowly.
In a statement warning that 50-year mortgages would “not address the true cause of today’s affordability challenges,” the National Association of Realtor’s chief economist Lawrence Yun said that homeowners could still gain some equity “as long as these mortgages are soundly underwritten.”
Aiden Reiter and Cassandra Dumay contributed to this report.
It was a brownie in Amsterdam that opened my mind to the future.
No, I wasn’t lounging in one of the city’s famous coffee shops. I was in the pristine pastel-toned laboratories of ofi, a food-ingredients business that’s leading the charge to use less cocoa when making chocolate. If the brownie is anything to go by, their stuff doesn’t just cost less. It tastes better, too, to my palate anyway.
I was being shown around by two employees, Talia Profet and Pilar Darre, who proudly ushered me through a series of rooms, including a baking area, a confectionery room and a sensory and analytics lab. There, gadgets and gizmos measure everything from the color to the particle size of cocoa powder. Machines temper chocolate, and there’s even a device that gently jiggles the molds to eliminate air bubbles.
If you think being around confectionary every day would make you sick of it, ofi’s European head chef Profet demurs. When running through the flavors and ingredients of various fine chocolates — a chai-spiced thin of vegan white chocolate, a tea-flavored bonbon colored gunmetal grey — her eyes light up like Charlie Bucket, even if she’s more Willy Wonka.
Profet isn’t alone in loving the sweet stuff. Europeans like me are committed chocoholics. The continent leads in both production and consumption. The Swiss and Danish reportedly devour about 10.5 kilograms (23 pounds!) per capita annually. But, as the world discovered earlier this year, when this voracious appetite meets a supply crunch, trouble ensues.
After hovering mostly between $1,000 and $3,000 per metric ton for decades, cocoa prices rocketed to about $12,500 at the end of last year. Bad weather, blight and aging trees combined to cause massive crop failures in West Africa, where roughly 70% of the world’s cocoa is grown. Illegal mining, driven by soaring gold prices, has also ravaged small-scale farms in Ghana.
Although prices have moderated, I don’t believe this crisis is at an end. Cocoa remains much more expensive in nominal terms than ever before in recorded history. Unless there are profound changes in how and where it’s grown, there’s no reason to expect a return to steady, lower prices. No wonder the confectionary industry is rushing to limit its exposure.
And the efforts of companies like ofi are genuinely impressive: Its miracle brownie contained one-fifth less cocoa than a normal one and tasted infinitely more chocolate. Other companies are taking things even further. Two staples of British kids’ lunchboxes, the Club and Penguin biscuits, must now be described as “chocolate-flavored,” since they contain more palm and shea oil than cocoa. All in all, the cocoa in many of our favorite treats is shrinking fast.
And yet, there are larger issues at play here than reducing input costs for big food companies or catering to fussy Western palates.
Like other important parts of global agriculture, cacao farmers have been struggling for years with problems running from biodiversity loss to personal poverty. Now, they can add frequent extreme weather and the spread of disease and pests to the list. “Climate change just makes things even worse,” Tonya Lander of the University of Oxford’s biology department told me.
West Africa experienced extreme rainfall in 2023 that was more than double the 30-year average. That led to an outbreak of black-pod disease, a fungal infection that loves humidity and makes rotten mush of rugby ball-sized cacao fruits. Then, there was extreme humid heat in 2024, an event 10 times more likely in today’s warmer world, according to a World Weather Attribution study.
The food industry’s hunt for alternatives is a rational response to all of this. But with China and India both succumbing to chocolate’s charms, it’s unlikely the efforts will be anywhere near enough to feed the ravenous demand. What’s also essential is a plan to help already beleaguered cocoa farmers mitigate the worst effects of climate change — and make enough money to live on.
As chocolate prices have changed, makers have adapted in two main ways: either “shrinkflation,” where the bars get smaller for the same price, or mixing up the recipe. As a leading cocoa trader and processor — and supplier of the ingredients ultimately used by the confectionary brands — ofi has had a surge of interest in the latter approach. Its chief innovation and quality officer, Kamesh Ellajosyula, told me its customers want recipes that “maximize the cocoa” available.
For some products, ofi offers different coatings to deliver the same taste hit without loading the treats with cocoa. Using “fillers” like nuts or flavorings is another option. Vegetable oils are taking the place of cocoa butter.
As well as the brownie, I did a blind taste test of two chocolate ice creams. One had 30% less cocoa powder in it than the other, but the difference in color, taste and texture was almost imperceptible. The only subtle variation I could pick out was that the adulterated one packed more of an upfront cocoa hit, and the other had a richer, longer finish.
The former gets its punch from using more heavily “dutched,” or alkalized, cocoa. It’s also what made that magical brownie taste so chocolatey.
Dutching was invented by a Dutch chemist, Coenraad J. Van Houten, who found treating cocoa with alkalizing agents such as potassium carbonate made it easier to dissolve in water. It also darkens the color and smooths out the bright, acidic taste of natural powder. Take it to the extreme and you get ultra-processed black cocoa, which you’ll recognize in Oreos with their almost earthy flavor and nearly black hue.
There’s a limit, though, on how alkaline cocoa can be. As well as potentially losing desirable flavor notes, brands have to label the agent on their ingredients once a certain alkalization level is hit. That’s unappealing in an era when consumers are shunning ultra-processed food. Plus, dutching kills off many of the healthy antioxidants found in cocoa.
Other confectionary giants are more interested in going cocoa-free. Mondelez International Inc. has helped fund Israeli food startup Celleste Bio, which wants to produce lab-grown cocoa. London-based Win-Win has raised money to scale up its barley, rice and carob-based chocolate alternatives. (The last is a seed pod from a tree grown mainly in the Mediterranean.) The company has a distribution deal with German bakery supplier Martin Braun.
Munich’s Planet A Foods is one of the more developed alt-chocolate startups, raising $30 million in December to produce more of its ChoViva, a sunflower-seed based alternative chocolate. It processes the seeds in a similar way to cocoa beans, fermenting and roasting them to get a comparable flavor.
Planet A’s chief technology officer, Sara Marquart, explained to me that sunflower seeds were chosen because there are vast quantities of them in Europe. Prices are also low and stable, and the nutrient load is similar to cocoa beans. Her product is already cheaper than the real stuff.
Does ChoViva do the job? Reviews are mixed. Some consumers say it “tastes exactly like chocolate,” others that it’s “nothing like” it. Its first applications were in products where chocolate wasn’t the main event, such as ice-cream coatings, biscuits and peanut-butter cups, but it has sold to brands that use it in alt-chocolate bars. Overall, some 80 consumer products in eight countries including the UK, Switzerland, Germany and Japan feature ChoViva. Enough people seem to enjoy it to keep demand up.
But one person’s pleasure can be another’s ruined livelihood. Thomas Cherico Wanger-Guerrero is an agro-ecologist at Agroscope, the Swiss agricultural researcher, and senior author of a 2025 study led by Oxford’s Lander which linked higher temperatures to lower cacao yields. He told me he worries what the impact of cocoa-free chocolate will be on the five-to-six million small-scale farmers who grow more than 90% of the world’s supply.
If the big brands embrace alternative or lab-grown chocolate varieties because they’re cheaper or supply is more stable, then how do growers make money? There will always be demand for posh artisanal chocolate, but it only accounts for 5% of global production.
Planet A’s Marquart insisted ChoViva isn’t trying to replace chocolate, rather that it wants to be a “second pillar to depressurize the supply chain.” India and China’s newfound fondness for the bean means shortages won’t be solved by alt-chocolate’s rise. China, always on the look out for secure supplies, has started growing cacao trees, but so far on a tiny scale that won’t satisfy potentially 2.8 billion Asian chocolate lovers.
Marquart’s argument is that the dire state of cacao producers long predates the creation of firms like hers, and there’s plenty of room for all varieties. “Before a solution like ours gets blamed for driving farmers out of business, we have to look at all the past decades of inefficient practices, price pressuring farmers and mankind ruining the climate,” she said.
That’s the crux of cocoa’s predicament. Growers have been underpaid, leading to huge structural challenges. With most growers in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire not earning a living income and almost 60% below the World Bank’s extreme poverty line, they simply can’t make the investments to shore up supply. Their trees are old, meaning yields are dropping, and they’re vulnerable to stress. A freshly planted cacao tree takes at least three years to begin bearing fruit. That’s an eternity for a small-scale farmer to go without income.
It’s up to governments and business to implement fixes. The Oxford study found multiple ways to improve yield, such as planting shade trees to reduce heat stress in cacao crops, maintaining leaf litter to nurture tiny pollinators and hand-pollinating. The problem is these things cost money. Ghana has raised the fixed price paid to farmers by more than 12% for the upcoming 2025-26 season. Sadly, this could decrease in future. Farmers need to be able to think beyond the short term.
Tony’s Chocolonely, a Dutch manufacturer set up to protest against child exploitation and slavery in the industry, has tried to solve the problem by paying a management fee to partner cooperatives of about $53 (€46) per metric ton and committing to five-year partnerships so coops can plan for longer. Belinda Borck, a policy official at Tony’s, said the benefits became clear in 2024: Co-ops that the company had been working with for more than five years suffered a much shallower yield decline than newer partnerships.
Ofi, in the meantime, has ambitions to give greater support to one million farmers and to get 200,000 households a living income by 2030. Its interventions are being tailored to local needs, helping growers plant shade trees in West Africa or investing in irrigation for cocoa in Sumatra.
These are admirable initiatives. Others in the industry must do their bit as well.
The nature of technological progress makes it inevitable that alt-chocolate is here to stay, in the same way that it’s become commonplace to gorge on a passable meat-free burger. But as the sweet-toothed legions of chocoholics spread East as well as West, we’ll need all the supplies we can get. The lure of luxury goods will always sustain the attractions of the genuine article.
And for the growers, of course, this is existential. To avoid the worst of all worlds, in which the production of real cocoa collapses altogether, the changes have to happen from the ground up.
Lara Williams is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change.
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