I don't know quite what to call it. "Food addiction" is a little off, because we are compelled to eat several times a day and the obsessive component of most addictions is often absent. Dr. David Kessler, the former FDA commissioner, borrows from the language of behavioral science. We aren't addicted, he says. We're conditioned. We respond to the most salient stimuli. And food industry, from the growers of corn to the chemists who invented molecular gastronomy, to the food stylists who know how to enhance the physical attractiveness of a hamburger, is the one doing the conditioning. Kessler accuses the food industry of figuring out how to make bad, cheap food addictive.
I was thinking about Kessler's book, which is currently the talk of the weight-loss crowd, on the morning that Centers for Disease Control hosts its first ever Weight of the Nation Conference on obesity. I'll be blogging from that conference over of the next few days as I gather final string for a magazine article about the politics of weight and obesity.
Kessler isn't speaking -- I think he's in Aspen, speaking to
intellectuals gathered there for another food conference -- and I'll be
interested to see if his ideas are well represented. Kessler represents
the wing of the anti-obesity movement that favors confrontation and
believes that only if the public gets angry about this manipulation of
their diet can they -- we -- possibly begin to combat the obesity
plague. Many obesity researchers I've spoken with over the past
several months are afraid of confrontation, even though the physical
and social science evidence is pretty compelling: we aren't what we
eat; we are what the food companies want us to be.
I'm still not sure that, on balance, one can demonize
the food industry for lowering their prices, making the food supply
safer than it ever was, and feeding more people. Our policy incentives
are misaligned; we spend billions on subsidies for the cheap raw
foodstuffs that line the aisles of our drug stores. By one estimate,
even if you could wave a magic wand and change the diet preferences of
Americans overnight, you'd need to roughly double the production of
fruits and vegetables to keep up with demand.
Companies do respond to public pressure. Even though McDonald's denied
that Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me" movie led to the removal of that
category from the store's menus, a former company official admitted to
me that the movie did exactly that. A few years ago, the Kraft
corporation admirably reviewed all of its advertising aimed and
children and seems to be leading the industry out of its profit-based
blindness when it comes to the moral effects of marketing. The
restuarant industry has relaxed its opposition to menu labeling,
although this move is mostly strategic and probably won't lead to
better health outcomes.
I'm still not sure that, on balance, one can demonize the food industry for lowering their prices,..
No, one cannot and should not. But I sincerely hope that one can demonize the government, right and left, for subsidzing only the most unhealthy and least nutritous foods like saturated fats and sugars? Those that kill us. All while giving virtually nothing to foods that we know are good for us.
The myth that meat has important nutrients... it does not. Mostly saturated fat that makes us slow and causes preventable heart disease. More preventable deads every year from saturated fats than from all other causes (smoking and accidents) combined.
Everybody in the US, left and right, politicians, producer or consumer knows what should be the first step. And yet. Sufficient to say - we do not want the government to change into a responsible, free market entity because... "it tastes soo good and I´m lovin it". You are right. Conditoning.
The notion that meat is nutritionally empty is the real myth, as is the notion that saturated fat is the Big Boogeyman of Heart Disease. These are both notions put forward by the veggi-maniacs, so we'll quit eating animals. You want facts? Here's a quote from the Institute of Medicine Food and Nutrition Board: “Compared to higher fat diets, low fat, high carbohydrate diets may modify the metabolic profile in ways that are considered to be unfavorable with respect to chronic diseases such as coronary heart disease (CHD) and diabetes.” (2005 DRI, Ch. 8, 437).
Now does that mean you have to eat animal products to have a healthy diet? Absolutely not (although an adequate complete protein supply and the B12 issue may still be of concern).
Dietary fat and body fat do not have the direct correlation that people think they do. Dietary fat does not cause obesity, heart disease, or diabetes. Fat storage makes people fat (and the fat storage process plays a starring role in heart disease and diabetes as well). Instead of telling people to avoid foods that contain fat, let’s tell people how to avoid foods that promote fat storage—these are not the same thing.
Please go to the American Heart Association and browse for their advice on a healthy diet - you will find saturated fats and sugars there. If you want facts that is.
To be fair – I might have come across as talking in absolutes. That was not the intention. There are some nutrients in meat – we know it is high in protein for example. But it does not have a lot vitamins and minerals and absolutely no fibre. There is a dangerous B12 assumption associated with meat for example.
For more information on B12 - please visit the USDA Web site. A quoate from the USDA:
Also – I did not mean to imply that sugars are not beneficial as well. Corny syrup, just like meat, provides a lot of calories.
But I hope that we can all agree that most vegetables and fruits are better health wise for apes that we are, no matter what cultural path we have taken, than meat and sugars. I therefore hope that we can agree that given our obesity and diabetes epidemic – we should end subsidising saturated fats and sugars.
I would be very cautious about getting my nutrition advice from the same entity that writes the Farm Bill that subsidizes the corn (that's what those fortified cereals are after all) and dairy that they are advising you to consume.
There are many reasons for the malabsorption of Vitamin B12--inflammation caused by bacterial overgrowth from consuming too many poorly-digested carbohydrates is one of them, as is the use of anti-reflux medications (another condition that can have its roots in excess carbohydrate consumption). Don't make the mistake of thinking that the manufactured B12 that is found in supplements and "fortified" (not to mention highly processed) products is the same B12 you get from real food. B12 is a pretty complicated molecule, not all forms of it are exactly alike. Here's a quote from my nutrition textbook (which is, btw, largely pro-vegetarian):
“Several large studies that compared vitamin supplements [of B12] with placebo treatments found that the supplements did not prevent heart disease, even though homocysteine levels declined. In addition, it appears that supplements of vitamin B12, B6, and folate do not improve cognitive function.”
Note: High levels of homocysteine are associated with increased risk of heart attack and stroke, cognitive dysfunction, and osteoporotic factures. One of the jobs of B12 is to help clear homocysteine from the blood. B12—in sufficient, absorbable amounts—only occurs naturally in animal foods.
I’m a little confused as to why you would consider information from the USDA and AHA “facts,” while rejecting as fact the information from the Institute of Medicine. As far as I’m aware, the whole point of the IOM is to provide an independent entity that can comment on scientific and medical issues. The USDA and AHA both have vested interests in the diets and health outcomes of Americans (see: http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3053329)
I deeply respect the moral choices that people make when it comes to choosing food (or other products) they hope lessens the suffering of other forms of life. Is our way of raising food in America inhumane? In many ways, and not just to animals, but to people and the planet. But let’s not confuse moral imperatives with physiological ones.
What Kessler gets right:
•Food industry is all about selling food, not health
•People like food with sugar, fat, and salt.
•Absolutely, we have created, and the food industry enables, a culture of overeating.
•Dietary changes involve cognitive and behavior changes (and there are many ways to skin that particular cat).
What Kessler gets wrong:
•Food is not tobacco. We can’t “quit” food.
•Lumps sugar, fat & salt altogether as if they exist as equals in nutritional physiology, human biochemistry, and human history. They do not. Salt and fat are a necessary part of human nutrition; simply put, dietary sugar and starches (which quickly break down to sugar in the body) are not. Salt and fat have been a part of the human diet since the time man began walking upright. Sugars and starches in the amounts consumed by Americans have not.
•Over-simplifies the biochemistry of nutrition (and frankly, it’s not really all that complicated). All macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and fat) provide *both* energy and “signaling functions” in the body. So a calorie is *never, ever* just a calorie. You have to ask “What does that calorie tell the body to do?” Protein (simply a pool of amino acids) tells the body to create enzymes, hormones, muscle, etc. (i.e. protein synthesis) and, when there’s enough of it, tells the body to stop eating. Carbohydrates tell the body to store energy (in the form of fat and glycogen). Fat sends rapid hormonal signals to the brain to signal fullness.
I’m afraid the politics of food has been complicated by the politics of nutrition. The obesity epidemic began in the 1980s. What happened then? Yes, we got high fructose corn syrup, but we also got the low-fat/high-carb Food Pyramid. We got agribusiness, but we also got vegetarianism. Who are the “diet experts” who gets to testify to Congress? Dean Ornish and his low-fat buddies. Unfortunately, Ornish doesn’t care anymore about the health of Americans than the food industry (sorry, Dean, it’s true.) He’s primarily interested in animal rights, not human health. The food industry is delighted that Americans want to avoid fat and don’t care about protein—carbs have a much higher profit margin.
But what do I know? You really want to hear about the politics of nutrition that lie behind the politics of food? Here’s who you need to talk to: Dr. Richard Feinman (rfeinman@downstate.edu), a biochemist who has been pushing for reform in this area for a decade (see www.nmsociety.org for more info); Dr. Eric Westman (ewestman@duke.edu), a research and clinical physician who has been working with the issues of obesity and diabetes during the same period. Both of these guys (and they can give you more names) have been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to get funding to study the nutritional aspects of the obesity and diabetes epidemic for years now. They don’t write diet books, so nobody’s heard of them, but if you want to know how to reverse—i.e. all but cure—diabetes, high blood pressure, reflux, depression, erectile dysfunction, and even heart disease, they know how to do it. That means getting people off of a vast array of expensive meds and postponing or avoiding expensive test and procedures, not to mention the deterioration in quality of life, that accompany these conditions. Do they have the science? You’d be surprised. Shoot, even the DRIs (see: http://fnic.nal.usda.gov/nal_display/index.php?info_center=4&tax_level=4&tax_subject=256&topic_id=1342&level3_id=5141&level4_id=10588) have the science in there. (The DRIs look intimidating, but they’re not that difficult to get through; if you need a hand, I’ll send you guide.)
Reforming the food industry will be a crazy uphill battle, as will changing the health care industry. But if Americans want to know how to take matters in their own hands, change their own health outcomes, even working within the crappy food and health care systems, these are the guys to lead the way.
If you are a certain age, you can see that one thing the food industry has done is shatter a variety of food taboos with which any one over the age of about forty-five grew up. Currently sitting on my desk is a twenty ounce bottle of soda. It is there. I am hungry and thirsty. I will drink it. It's my vice. I can remember when soda was sold in eight to ten ounce paper cups.
Down at our local convenience store, the smallest size soda one can purchase unless one refuses to fill the container is 20oz. The next size up that goes on sale is 32oz. I refuse to buy this or buy a full container of this. I tell the sales person "That's a whole quart." I get strange stares. Sometimes if I really am feeling nostalgic I tell the story of how restaurants and vending machines used to sell soda.
The Subway (not to pick on them. Quiznos, Jersey Mike's, and a few other chains all do the same thing) hands you a 20oz cup for soda and lets you have all you can guzzle. I've done the 40oz of sweet, caffeinated goodness. Soda is my weakness.
Destruction of the portion size taboo is only one half of the strategy, the second is to convince people that restaurant food is every day fare and not a treat. This bit of social engineering that convinced people that cooking was impossibly hard. A few years of this, about a generation, and the population forgets how to cook anything from scratch and loses the knowledge base that goes with it and the language that describes it.
You can't convince people to forsake "grab it and go" and "just slop it down" unless they have the tools to say "no" and a knowledge of the immediate benefits of the other choice, and they're not just nutritional. Nutrition to me is a long run benefit and not something that competes well with immediate gratification.
I do a lot of cooking from scratch (Soda is pretty much my only food vice.) but I do almost none of it for "health reasons." I cook from scratch because I get control of my menu and can have custom made food for dinner every night. I cook from scratch because it is fun and a great change after a day in an office. I cook from scratch because I get to take advantage of seasonal ingredients and foods that one doesn't see in prepared or restaurant dishes. I cook from scratch beause I have mastered the organizational skills necessary to do it when one works full time (These are not that hard.) I cook from scratch to save money. Think champagne food on a beer budget.
I guess you can say we have a lot of reeducation ahead of us, and warning people about nutrition is the least of it.
One possible explanation for the epidemic of obesity can be found at:
The insulin resistance and obesity controversy at:
http://www.hypoglycemia.asn.au/articles/silentdiseases.html#Insulin
I wonder if Americans travelled more, eating locally along the way, they would discover the stuff they think is great is not so great. Like food, for instance. Changing your diet involves changing your geography. Discovering what other people eat. Normal people. Discovering you love it. And it's oh so good for you. It's you yourselves that are killing yourselves. Not the food manipulators. Why don't you exercise some will power? Some self-discipline? Do you need a nanny to feed you? To tell you what is good for you? Some authority, some parent figure, some Jesus maybe to save you from yourself? Take responsibility! Take action! Grow up! Save yourself! Jesus help me.
Concern is rapidly growing about obesity rates in the United States. This paper analyzes the political consequences. Despite myths about individualism and self-reliance, the U.S. government has a long tradition of regulating ostensibly private behavior. We draw on the historical experience in four other private realms (alcohol, illegal drugs, tobacco, and sexuality) to identify seven "triggers" cheap hosting that prompt government to intervene in citizens’ private habits. We suggest which of those triggers have been tripped—or are in play—in the case of obesity and food consumption. Finally,domain name registration we review what government now does in this field and what it might do in the future.