Food industry dictates nutrition policy
By Jonathan Safran Foer, Special to CNN
October 30, 2009
New York (CNN) -- Beyond the unhealthy influence that our demand for
factory-farmed meat has in the area of food-borne illness and communicable
diseases, we could cite many other influences on public health, most obviously
the now-widely recognized relationship between the nation's major killers --
heart disease, No. 1; cancer, No. 2; and stroke, No. 3 -- and meat
consumption.
Or, much less obviously, the distorting influence of the meat industry on the
information about nutrition we receive from the government and medical
professionals.
In 1917, while World War I devastated Europe and just before the Spanish
flu devastated the world, a group of women, in part motivated to make
maximal use of America's food resources during wartime, founded what is
now the nation's premier group of food and nutrition professionals, the
American Dietetic Association.
Since the 1990s, the group has issued what has become the standard we-
definitely-know-this-much summary of the healthfulness of a vegetarian diet.
The association takes a conservative stand, leaving out many well-documented
health benefits attributable to reducing the consumption of animal products.
Here are the three key sentences from the summary of the relevant scientific
literature.
One: Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for all individuals during
all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood
and adolescence, and for athletes.
Two: Vegetarian diets tend to be lower in saturated fat and cholesterol, and
have higher levels of dietary fiber, magnesium and potassium, vitamins C and E,
folate, carotenoids, flavonoids and other phytochemicals.
Three: Vegetarians and vegans, including those who are athletes, "meet and
exceed requirements" for protein, the paper notes elsewhere.
And, to render the whole we-should-worry-about-getting-enough-protein-and
-therefore-eat-meat idea even more useless, other data suggest that excess
animal protein intake is linked with osteoporosis, kidney disease, calcium stones
in the urinary tract and some cancers. Despite some persistent confusion, it is
clear that vegetarians and vegans tend to have more optimal protein consumption
than omnivores.
Finally, we have the really important news, based not on speculation, however
well-grounded in basic science such speculation might be, but on the definitive
gold standard of nutritional research: studies on actual human populations.
We are constantly lied to about nutrition.
--Jonathan Safran Foer"Vegetarian diets are often associated with a number
of health advantages, including lower blood cholesterol levels, lower risk of
heart disease" (which alone accounts for more than 25 percent of all annual
deaths in the nation), "lower blood pressure levels, and lower risk of
hypertension and type 2 diabetes. Vegetarians tend to have a lower body
mass index" (that is, they are not as fat) "and lower overall cancer rates"
(cancers account for nearly another 25 percent of all annual deaths in the
nation).
If it's sometimes hard to believe that eschewing animal products will make it
easier to eat healthfully, there is a reason: We are constantly lied to about
nutrition.
Let me be precise. When I say we are being lied to, I'm not impugning the
scientific literature but relying upon it. What the public learns of the scientific
data on nutrition and health, especially from the government's nutritional
guidelines, comes to us by way of many hands. From the start, those who
produce meat have made sure that they are among those who influence how
nutritional data will be presented to the likes of you and me.
Consider, for example, the National Dairy Council, a marketing arm of Dairy
Management Inc., an industry body whose sole purpose, according to its Web
site, is to "drive increased sales of and demand for U.S. dairy products."
The council promotes dairy consumption without regard for negative public-
health consequences and even markets dairy to communities incapable of
digesting the stuff. As it is a trade group, the dairy council's behavior is at least
understandable.
What is hard to comprehend is why educators and government have, since the
1950s, allowed the dairy council to become arguably the largest and most
important supplier of nutritional-education materials in the nation. Worse, our
present federal "nutritional" guidelines come to us from the U.S. Department of
Agriculture, the very same government department that has worked so hard to
make factory farming the norm in America.
The USDA has a monopoly on the most important advertising space in the nation,
those little nutritional boxes we find on virtually everything we eat. Founded the
same year that the American Dietetic Association opened its offices, the USDA
was charged with providing nutritional information to the nation and ultimately
with creating guidelines that would serve public health. At the same time, though,
the USDA was charged with promoting industry.
The conflict of interest is not subtle: Our nation gets its federally endorsed
nutritional information from an agency that must support the food industry,
which today means supporting factory farms. The details of misinformation that
dribble into our lives (like fears about "enough protein") follow naturally from
this fact and have been reflected upon in detail by writers like Marion Nestle.
As a public-health expert, Nestle has worked extensively with government --
on "The Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health," for one -- and has
had decades of interaction with the food industry. In many ways, her conclusions
confirm what we already expected, but the insider's perspective she brings has
lent a new clarity to the picture of just how much influence the food industry,
especially animal agriculture, has on national nutrition policy.
She argues that food companies, like cigarette companies, will say and do
whatever works to sell products. They will "lobby Congress to eliminate
regulations perceived as unfavorable; they press federal regulatory agencies
not to enforce such regulations; and when they don't like regulatory decisions,
they file lawsuits. Like cigarette companies, food companies co-opt food and
nutrition experts by supporting professional organizations and research, and
they expand sales by marketing directly to children."
Regarding U.S. government recommendations that tend to encourage dairy
consumption in the name of preventing osteoporosis, Nestle notes that in
parts of the world where milk is not a staple of the diet, people often have
less osteoporosis and fewer bone fractures than Americans do. The highest
rates of osteoporosis are seen in countries where people consume the most
dairy foods.
In a striking example of food industry influence, Nestle argues that the USDA
has an informal policy to avoid saying that we should "eat less" of any food,
no matter how damaging its health impact may be. Thus, instead of saying
"eat less meat," which might be helpful, it advises us to "keep fat intake to
less than 30 percent of total calories," which is obscure to say the least.
The institution we have put in charge of telling us when foods are dangerous
has a policy of not (directly) telling us when foods, especially if they are
animal products, are dangerous.
We have let the food industry craft our national nutrition policy, which
influences everything from what foods are stocked in the health-food aisle
at the local grocery store to what our children eat at school.
In the National School Lunch Program, for example, more than half a billion
of our tax dollars are given to the dairy, beef, egg and poultry industries to
provide animal products to children, despite the fact that nutritional data
would suggest we should reduce these foods in our diets.
Meanwhile, a modest $161 million is offered to buy fruits and vegetables
that even the USDA admits we should eat more of. Wouldn't it make more
sense and be more ethical for the National Institutes of Health, an
organization specializing in human health and having nothing to gain beyond
it, to have this responsibility?
The global implications of the growth of the factory farm, especially given
the problems of food-borne illness, antimicrobial resistance and potential
pandemics, are genuinely terrifying.
India's and China's poultry industries have grown somewhere between
5 and 13 percent annually since the 1980s. If India and China started to
eat poultry in the same quantities as Americans -- 27 to 28 birds annually
-- they alone would consume as many chickens as the entire world does
today.
If the world followed America's lead, it would consume more than 165 billion
chickens annually, even without an increase in population. And then what?
Two hundred billion? Five hundred? Will the cages stack higher or grow
smaller or both? On what date will we accept the loss of antibiotics as a tool
to prevent human suffering? How many days of the week will our grandchildren
be ill? Where does it end?
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Jonath
an Safran Foer.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/10/30/eating.meat.jonathan.foer/
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