A Healthy Look at the Food Industry’s Effects on Nutrition
FOOD POLITICS
How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health
By Marion Nestle
University of California Press
480 pages; $29.95
Some foods are better for us than others. For optimum health, it’s important to avoid foods high in fat, salt and sugar. A diet rich in plant-based foods is better than a diet heavy with animal products or processed foods. To maintain ideal weight, many of us need to eat less food than we do.
If these statements sound like common sense, they are. In fact, they’ve been preached for decades by nutritionists. And yet, Americans are in a state of nutritional crisis, according to Marion Nestle, a respected nutritionist and editor of the 1988 Surgeon General’s Report on Nutrition and Health. In “Food Politics,” she takes a comprehensive look at how the food industry, particularly in the last 30 years, has distorted Americans’ eating patterns.
Between the late 1970s and the early ‘90s, she reports, the proportion of overweight adults rose from 25% to 35%. “Just between 1991 and 1998, the rate of adult obesity increased from 12% to nearly 18%.” Childhood dietary choices, which often set patterns for lifetime eating, are appalling: “Rates of obesity are now so high among American children that many exhibit metabolic abnormalities formerly seen only in adults” including adult-onset diabetes, high blood cholesterol and high blood pressure, constituting “a national health scandal.”
This disgrace is the result, in part, of the abundant American lifestyle. “The food industry has given us a food supply so plentiful, so varied, so inexpensive ... that all but the very poorest Americans” can meet their biological needs. There is enough food, in fact, to feed everyone nearly twice over.
Such oversupply, though, means competition in the marketplace, which in turn impels food companies to make unsubstantiated health claims, to rally the consumers’ desire for unhealthy products under the guise of “personal choice” and to skew health ideals to strengthen their bottom line.
In this readable, if dense, and thought-provoking narrative, Nestle demonstrates how lobbying, public relations, political maneuvering and advertising by the food industry work against public health goals and have helped create a population that’s eating itself sick.
Nestle is an insider when it comes to food policy: She served as a nutrition policy advisor to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and as a member of the nutrition and science advisory committees to the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. She doesn’t suggest radical changes in eating patterns but, rather, that we take a hard look at what we eat and why.
As a nation, we need to eat less than we do, and yet we’re constantly bombarded with messages to eat more. Larger servings are the norm--”supersize” your meal and you get more food for your dollar--as is relying on processed foods far removed from their natural states.
Meanwhile, public school districts sell exclusive “pouring rights” for their campuses to soft-drink companies for millions of dollars, pushing children to consume empty calories and sugar to improve the school districts’ economic outlook. (The more soda sold on campus, the larger the school district’s bonus in the deal.)
Appealing to Americans’ knowledge that we should eat better, the food industry regularly introduces new products designed to convince us that foods we know have little nutritional value are suddenly healthful. Nutrient-fortified Gummi Bears, vitamin-enriched Count Chocula, low-fat cookies, calcium-added fruit punch: Such products lull us into a false sense of dietary security, Nestle explains. The food industry introduces junk food with fewer harmful effects so that people will eat more.
And we do.
“I love Olestra,” one person said about an oil that is neither digested nor absorbed by the human body and therefore yields no calories. “It means I get to eat potato chips--the whole bag.” That fortified junk food is still junk food is a distinction that food marketers would prefer you not make.
Moreover, industry groups such as the National Dairy Council, the American Egg Board and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Assn. spend millions of dollars to influence nutritional advice given by the government in the form of the Food Pyramid and dietary guidelines issued by the USDA and the Department of Health and Human Services. “Eat more” is the message proclaimed by these groups, and no expense is spared to get across that message.
In her exhaustive account, Nestle also examines dietary supplements--vitamins, botanicals and other products on health-food shelves--looking at how little that industry is regulated.
Knowing how you’re being manipulated can reduce the effects, and Nestle makes simple suggestions for how we might reverse some of these trends. Most important, she makes clear the need for better nutritional education among consumers. “Voting with [our] forks” for a healthier society, Nestle shows us, is within our power.
