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.