“Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.”
—Frank Zappa
In the preceding chapters, I have attempted to link the science of the obesity pandemic to existing policy. In the process, I hope I have provided a new thought process and a new direction, by looking backward. What is clear is that the few are profiting by playing the politics of obesity to their advantage, at the expense of the many. We’ve seen this movie before. We saw it with tobacco. The science was subverted for years before the tobacco documents laid bare the corruption of the industry. Not only did the industry consistently hide its findings, but as my UCSF colleagues Marcia Wertz and Stanton Glantz found, the industry’s malfeasance even encompassed fabricating and doctoring data,1 which, in the scientific world, is the greatest of crimes. Time for the trial.
How does a district attorney ascribe culpability? There are three components to successful prosecution. The first is association, the second is motive, and the slam-dunk is the smoking gun. Recall the fight with Big Tobacco. The association between smoking and lung cancer dates to 1964, with the first surgeon general’s report. The motive became clear in the 1980s, when research documented the action of nicotine on the brain’s addiction center. But it wasn’t until a whistleblower pointed the way to the now-famous smoking gun documents that Big Tobacco’s callous disregard for its own customers was exposed.
Does this analogy work for Big Food? The association of our food environment with obesity and metabolic syndrome is incontrovertible. We even have causation. Motive is also a no-brainer. The American food industry produces 3,900 calories per person per day, with about 29 percent wastage, but we should rationally eat 1,800–2,000. Who eats the difference? We do! Throughout evolution, humans could eat only a fixed amount, but today that amount is limitless. Because, as this book has shown, the high-sugar, low-fiber industrial global diet actually makes us hungrier! What about the smoking gun? Big Food is Big Tobacco (Philip Morris = Altria = Kraft, General Foods, Jell-O, and Post; RJR = Nabisco). Does the food industry know what it’s doing? Does it know it has hijacked our evolutionary biochemistry, for its benefit and to our detriment? We’ll probably never find the smoking gun for obesity, as the industry has learned its lesson about leaving stray documents around. But we’ve already lost one generation of kids. It’s time to hold Big Food’s feet to the fire, to compel it to undo what it has done to our diet in the name of “progress” and “profit.” Given what it (and we) know now, if it doesn’t change, that will be the smoking gun.
But there will be no prosecutions. Big Tobacco was convicted by a federal judge of RICO racketeering, and tobacco executives lost their jobs for lying to Congress. They were investigated for perjury, but none went to jail, nor were any forced to pay penalties. Huge civil settlements generated windfalls for state governments, but nothing for you. Still not convinced? Let’s take another example, the economic collapse of 2008. The corporate CEOs were guilty as hell, but not one went to jail. The government financed $777 billion for corporate bailouts, but none for you. Likewise, there’s no chance that any food company executive will ever be held liable. Hell, what they’re doing is legal!
Worse yet, the executive and legislative branches of our government are clearly lined up behind the food industry. The Farm Bill subsidizes the commodity crops that are killing us, and the USDA continues to promote the U.S. food industry both here and abroad. And the judicial branch hasn’t acted yet, in part because the public hasn’t mobilized, as they still believe “a calorie remains a calorie”—for now.
No, my friends, this won’t be solved from the top-down. This will have to be a bottom-up movement. You can’t expect government to do the right thing. You have to coerce it into doing the right thing. When there are more votes at stake than dollars, that’s when legislators will come around. But that’s not a reason to be daunted. In a democracy, the public has power. A good example is seat belts. Today you’d never consider getting behind the wheel without fastening your seat belt, but this notion is relatively new. Although the U.S. federal mandate to fit cars with seat belts was passed in 1968, there was no federal mandate to use them. The first mandatory seat belt law was enacted in Australia in 1970. Did Australia know that wearing seat belts would save lives? No. It hadn’t been done before. It just seemed like a good public health measure. The Big Three fought seat belt laws for years, and U.S. passengers continued to die. It wasn’t until Mothers Against Drunk Driving made such a stink in every statehouse that mandatory seat belt laws started appearing from 1984 through 1993. To this day, seat belt legislation consists of fifty state mandates, with nothing at the federal level. A bottom-up movement that worked. And there are many more examples—smoking bans in public places, toxic waste cleanups, narcotics enforcement.
Public outcry is a powerful force for change. And it can work in obesity. I am proud to be part of an advocacy group in Walnut Creek, California, called the Wellness City Challenge (www.wellnesscitychallenge.com), led by chef Cindy Gershen. This woman is a true force of nature. Espousing real food to combat disease and promote happiness, she has almost singlehandedly mobilized the Mayor’s Office, the Chamber of Commerce, the Board of Education, Kaiser Permanente and other hospitals, the Restaurant Association, the local Safeway supermarkets, and SYSCO (the food procurement company) to completely retool every public food venue in the cities of Martinez and Concord for one year. The vending machines have been restocked with apples and oranges, and there’s nary a soda to be found. As part of the intervention, students at Mount Diablo High School are learning to cook by serving real food for the teachers at breakfast. The kids can’t believe the teachers are losing weight and happy to come to work and teach; and now they themselves want the real food instead of the stuff from their traditional fast food concessions. This demonstration project has many supporters, including the American Heart Association, and has caught the eye of many benefactors, who see the power in the message.
Hopefully you do, too. While this book is about the dispassionate science and logic of obesity and how it can help individuals and society, I’m a human being as well. I get sick when I think of what’s happened to us, our country, and our planet. This book is my outcry for a better world for our children. Time to cry out—and just maybe our children will Inherit the Earth.