Convenience is not the only reason why the MAD dominates our eating habits. We are also manipulated by research and bombarded with marketing messages that encourage this unhealthy way of eating.
Indeed, large corporations spend millions of dollars on research annually, calculating the precise amount of fat, sugar, and salt that will satisfy our taste buds and keep us coming back for more, regardless of the health consequences. For example, one of the leading centers of food research in the United States, Monell Chemical Senses Center, has performed experiments on young children, feeding them various sugary foods to calculate their “bliss point,” the level at which their desire for sugar is at its climax. This data is subsequently used to formulate products that can be marketed throughout the globe.1
Is the Health of Our Children for Sale?
Shockingly, children in particular are targeted by the food industry, as the example above indicates. Many youngsters have what corporations call “pester power” over their parents, or the ability to keep demanding certain products until the parents or guardians give in. Since children and adolescents have more and more purchasing power in today’s economy, “pestering” is an important source of income for food corporations, which is why they are willing to spend an estimated $1.8 billion annually on marketing to these age groups. Targeting children when they are young is in fact a significant way to establish lasting brand loyalty.2
The Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity rightly calls this concentrated marketing to children a “crisis in the marketplace.”3 Although the US Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI) was established in 2006 to restrict the advertising of processed foods high in sugar, salt, and fats to children under the age of eleven, these self-regulating efforts have largely proved inadequate. An estimated 86 percent of the food products marketed by CFBAI members to children are still alarmingly high in processed and refined sugars, salt, and fat, while marketing to youth over the age of eleven has increased. Similarly, food corporations have continued to advertise their processed food products through other channels, such as social media, which has led to a 23 percent increase in exposure to children.4 With the obesity rates among children increasing exponentially, alongside diet-related illnesses such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease, the promotion of these unhealthy food products for the sake of corporate profit is deplorable.5
Gimme, Gimme, Gimme: The Industry Message of “Eat More”
Our current industrial food system has created an environment that essentially floods our senses, adults and children alike, with the message of “eat more” unhealthy, processed foods. Indeed, an estimated 70 percent of all food-related advertising is for highly processed foods and drinks high in sugar, salt, and fat.6 Children are even exposed to this message at school, where vending machines, snack shops, and lunch bars are often filled with foods high in sugar, salt, and fat.
In a recent visit to a children’s hospital in Texas, I found a popular fast-food restaurant on the ground floor, alongside multiple vending machines with sodas, chips, and candy. I watched in horror as “food-like substances,” including soda, packaged cookies, and packaged desserts, were served to sick children. I was stunned at the number of obese children and adults walking the floors and sitting in the waiting rooms consuming junk food from the vending machines. And when the doctors and nurses were eating the same things, I had to sit down in shock. In many cases, food corporations make the sale of their products in schools, hospitals, and other institutions attractive by offering financial benefits in exchange for the chance to sell their foodstuffs.7 It is a tragic state of affairs when dollars can override health—particularly in an institution dedicated to health!
Do You Want Vitamin C with That?
Some may argue that many of these industrially produced foods are in fact “healthy.” Cereals, snacks, and breads are “fortified” with vitamins and minerals, and meat and dairy products have reduced fat content, for instance. Indeed, we are bombarded with phrases like “high in Vitamin C,” “full of great antioxidants,” “low fat,” and a “great source of omega fatty acids,” but these are largely marketing devices supported by unhealthy scientific reductionism.8
For example, milk in its whole, natural form is full of essential proteins and other nutrients such as vitamins A and E, which are fat-soluble. When we remove the fat from the milk, we lose these fat-soluble nutrients, while the pasteurization process destroys many of the beneficial proteins. The milk, now less nutritious and less flavorful, needs added vitamins and flavor-enhancing ingredients like sugar and even chocolate. Moreover, the sugars in the milk are quickly absorbed into the bloodstream, causing our insulin levels to rise, since there is no longer fat in the milk to slow down the digestion process, while the milk is less filling, possibly leading us to drink more than we ought to.9 A small glass of real, whole, organically produced milk within the context of a balanced lifestyle is therefore a far superior option than a conventional glass of “low fat” milk with “added vitamins,” since real milk is designed the way God intended it to be consumed—in its whole form.10
Reduce Your Fat Intake or Your Sauces? The Rise of the Nutritionist Paradox
Nutrition is an incredibly problematic subject. We do not eat carbohydrates, fats, and proteins in a vacuum, for instance. We eat in the complex framework of daily life. How much, when, and why we eat these foods are equally important considerations to take into account. How do they interact with other foods that contain carbohydrates, fats, and proteins? How were these foods grown and prepared? How fresh were the foods? Were we stressed or relaxed when we ate the food? These important considerations will lead to whether we eat real foods that will nourish us or food-like products that can make us ill.11
As Pollan notes, subscribing to reductionist science, whereby we focus on individual nutrients at the cost of the bigger diet picture, is like losing our keys in a parking lot at night and only searching for them under the streetlight. We know they could be anywhere in that parking lot, but we only look where we are able to see easily. In fact, nutrition science is certainly not at the point where we understand every element of every food, nor what happens to each element when they are separated or isolated.12 Our vision is incredibly limited, despite all our advances in the science of food. For example, coffee beans have over a thousand phytonutrients (that fight diseases), only a small percentage of which have been identified. The complex yet beneficial interaction between just these hundred phytonutrients we can identify, let alone the other nine hundred or so, is also little understood.13 Fresh thyme, one of my favorite herbs, has a complex array of antioxidants—from alanine to vanillic acid, the list is as long as it is remarkable.14 And these are only the antioxidants we have discovered so far, all in a small green sprig! What a wonderful, insightful, and proactive God we serve, indeed.
Yet increasingly, man-made foods have displaced the knowledge of natural cuisine that traditionally originated in our homes and larger cultural heritage, necessitating the advice of nutritionists as we learn to navigate the modern food system. This flood of complex, conflicting, ambiguous, and constantly changing (over time and between different nutritional experts, who cannot seem to agree) nutritional information is now available to us on a daily, even hourly, basis.15 Many of us cannot decide what oil or fat we should cook with, let alone what in the world we should cook. In fact, we cannot even take the word of nutritional professionals at face value. A number of dietitians, for instance, are “sponsored” by Coca-Cola to recommend the soda as part of a balanced diet.16 How unbiased is their health advice going to be? Since when did something as fundamental as eating become so utterly confusing?
During my travels, countless individuals continue to ask me what they should eat for a healthy mind and body, as if I can, hopefully, solve their “omnivore’s dilemma.”17 To use Pollan’s popular saying, you should “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”—just as your mother and grandmother would have told you in the past.18 Unfortunately, real foods are increasingly hard to come by for many of us and impossible for millions on the lowest rungs of the economic scale, while these “techno foods” befuddle us with their many health claims and odd-sounding ingredients.19
Supplement without Supplements
It is precisely this reductionism that also makes supplements potentially unsafe or ineffective. As professor of nutrition and sustainable food activist Marion Nestle explains in Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA) deregulated the supplement industry and now permits supplement producers to claim health benefits for their products without the oversight of official standards or independent studies. Even when negative health effects of certain supplements are published, the companies that produce these “natural” alternatives do not need to withdraw their products, since the FDA does not regulate the production of these supplements. Unless you habitually read medical journals as a hobby, how will you know what can harm you?20
Indeed, who even knows what goes into those capsules, liquids, and powders? The recent herbal remedy scandal involving Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Target, and GNC in the United States should serve as an urgent reminder. According to official court documents, only 4 to 41 percent of the supplements examined actually contained what was written on the labels.21 Despite the fact that government drug regulations are not perfect (which I will discuss in greater detail in my upcoming book on mental health and wellbeing), allowing the supplement industry to police itself poses an equal threat to public health, particularly when large amounts of profit are involved.22 The supplement industry, which is often just another arm of the pharmaceutical industry, is worth an estimated 55 billion dollars.23 Of these billions of dollars, it is difficult to tell what percentage is actually spent on supplements that benefit the consumer.
Medicine is ultimately medicine, whether it is man-made or found in nature, and there are many things in nature that can harm us, such as poisonous plants and fungi. A growing body of research continues to show how even “safe” vitamins can cause damage in excess or out of the context of the foods that naturally contain them.24 Vitamin C, for example, is an essential cancer-fighting nutrient found in many fresh fruits and vegetables. Studies have shown, however, that vitamin C in its supplement form does not reduce the risk of developing cancer, while recent research has indicated that it can in fact increase the risk of developing cancer.25 Demographic groups who use supplements are generally more educated, have higher incomes, eat better, and exercise more, and thus we cannot say that supplements work and are safe because people who take them are healthier—science is quite a bit more complicated than that.26 Indeed, official public health organizations will not recommend general supplementation because of the dangers associated with overdosing. Unless supplements are part of a prescribed medical regimen, many of us would be far better off using our income on real, whole foods.27
Exercise: The Magic Moving Bullet?
If supplements aren’t the solution, what about exercise? According to the WHO, one in three people partake in little or no exercise across the globe, resulting in an estimated 3.2 million deaths annually, which makes physical inactivity one of the leading causes of mortality today.28 Exercise, however, can never replace an unhealthy diet; it is not a magic bullet that will allow you to eat whatever you feel like without any consequences. Both physical activity and a way of eating that is predominantly characterized by real, whole foods are essential for a healthy spirit, mind, and body. The food industry’s myopic focus on exercise is in fact a subtle way for corporations to shift attention away from their processed food products, since encouraging people to eat less of their processed food products directly impacts a corporation’s revenue—bottom-dollar logic once again.29
During the latest Bush administration, for instance, food industry leaders and government officials began a campaign (with Shrek as a figurehead) for healthier lifestyles that focused on physical activity rather than the products these companies sold. It is a sad fact that, around the time of this campaign, Shrek also started appearing on processed food packages such as Oreo cookies, which further contributed to the food industry’s confusion of exercise and diet.30
With their billions of dollars devoted to research and marketing that harness and shape our food preferences, large food corporations effectively swindle our taste buds. But they do more than that. Through their economic clout and their government connections, they hijack the whole agriculture industry, including farmers. Let’s look next at the effect their economic and political clout has on the food that reaches the public.