(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally's Kerry Trueman, aka kat, corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Feed Your Pet Right, Pet Food Politics, What to Eat, Food Politics, and Safe Food):
KT: Sunday's New York Times has a disturbing exposé by Michael Moss about the USDA's efforts to aid the dairy industry by encouraging excessive cheese consumption. Can the USDA ever reconcile its two mandates? On the one hand, the USDA has the task of tackling the obesity epidemic by encouraging healthier eating habits. Yet it must also promote the interests of U.S. agriculture. As Moss documents so well, these two missions are in total conflict.
Dr. Nestle: And so they are, have been, and will be until public outrage causes some changes in Washington. In two of my books, Food Politics and What to Eat, I wrote about how dairy lobbying groups, aided and abetted by the USDA, convinced nutritionists that dairy foods were equivalent to essential nutrients and the only reliable source of dietary calcium, when they are really just another food group and one high in saturated fat, at that.
The USDA is still at it. As Michael Moss notes:
So let's talk about "moderation," a word that I find hard to use without irony. The pizza illustrated in Michael Moss's article is described as a "thin-crust medium pie." The diameter is not given, but one-fourth of the pie contains 430 calories, 12 grams of saturated fat (20 is the daily recommended upper limit), and 990 mg sodium (the upper limit is 2,300).
Who eats one-quarter of a pizza? Not anyone I know. So double all this if you share it with a friend. If you eat the whole thing--and why do I think that plenty of Domino Pizza customers do?--you are consuming more than 1700 calories, nearly 4,000 mg sodium (that's 10 grams of salt, by the way), and 48 grams of saturated fat. This is enough to make any nutritionist run screaming from the room.
So why is USDA in bed with dairy lobbying groups? That's its job. From its beginnings in the 1860s, USDA's role was to promote U.S. agricultural production and sales, with the full support of what was then a largely agricultural Congress. Only in the 1970s, did USDA pick up all those pesky food assistance programs and capture the "lead federal agency" role in providing dietary advice to the public.
Much of Food Politics is devoted to describing the USDA's severe conflict of interest in developing dietary advice to "eat less" of basic agricultural commodities. As Times reporter Marian Burros put it in one of her articles about the fights over the 1992 Pyramid, which visually suggested eating less meat and dairy, "the foxes are
guarding the henhouse."
This is what Mrs. Obama is up against in her efforts to reduce childhood obesity and bring healthier foods into America's inner cities.
How to change this system? One possibility might be to move dietary guidance into a more independent federal agency, NIH or CDC for example. Another might be to recognize the ways in which corporate lobbyists corrupt our food system and do something about election campaign laws.
A pipe dream? Maybe, but I never thought I'd live to see the editors of the New York Times consider an article about USDA checkoff programs to be front-page news, and in the right-hand column yet, marking it as the most important news story of the day.
Follow Kerry Trueman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/kerrytrueman
(sorry, my sarcastic side is out today and won't stop).
Tasking one federal agency with providing dietary guidance without regard to our nation's agricultural systems, while tasking another with promoting agriculture without regard to our nation's health is the worst idea I've heard all day. Promoting agriculture AND health used to go hand in hand-- people used to be sick and dying from malnutrition and good old American made food cured what ailed them. Win win! The landscape of health and malnutrition has changed dramatically and quickly so that obesity is now the major health threat to our health. It may seem as if people have been fat forever, but this is a fairly new phenomenon. Certainly newer than our young government. Agencies- USDA included- must grow and adapt to the new challenges that face it- in both food production and health. But government is a slow moving ship. My "pipe dream" is that USDA will continue efforts to promote health AND agriculture, but look for ways to do it that are mutually beneficial and not in direct conflict with each other.
Here's an expose: Produce for Better Health Foundation! Government is also "in bed" with fruits and veggie interests! Shock! Awe!
The obesity problem is caused by an overconsumption of carbs, sugar and artificial polyunsaturated fats (like rapeseed, I mean canola oil) not real food --meat and cheese--that humans have been consuming for thousands of years before our current obesity "epidemic".
So there are coalitions of folks who want to turn us against meat and cheese and turn us into sugar, carb, vegetable oil consuming vegetarians. Meanwhile we are getting fatter and sicker.
One day millions of people will be on zero fat diets and they will be the sickest of all and when they all die off, that will leave us meat and cheese eaters to live our lives in peace.
No. The obesity problem is caused by an overconsumption of calories. It does not matter where the calories come from. A calorie is a calorie when it comes to weight gain and weight loss.
So there are coalitions of folks who want to turn us against meat and cheese and turn us into sugar, carb, vegetable oil consuming vegetarians. Meanwhile we are getting fatter and sicker.
There may be some out there who want everyone to eat like them, but on the whole those in the know (dietitians and other credentialed nutrition professionals) will tell you that a balanced diet is best for everyone. A balanced diet is foods from all food groups eaten in moderation.
One day millions of people will be on zero fat diets and they will be the sickest of all and when they all die off, that will leave us meat and cheese eaters to live our lives in peace.
No one is advocating a fat free diet. Our bodies need fat to absorb and metabolize fat soluble vitamins, to protect the mylein sheath, and for energy. Again the problem is too much fat.
Just don't eat a pound a day.
I see a bit of "Food Calvinism" coming into play here. Just like in religion where I can try to impose my will on everyone else, the Food Calvinists are here trying to impose their rather unappetizing view on foods on everyone else. Frankly, I love cheese and Pizzas, I am not going to eat one every night, but in moderation (like drinking alcohol) there is nothing wrong with cheese. Look, if you have a cholesterol problem or obesity, than stay away and eat your rabbit food in peace and let the rest of us enjoy life.
Get the government out of this and it would be, as you say, just a matter of personal choice. But as it stands, I'm still a paying "customer" of Domino's even if I never ate there again.
As to your issues about subsidies or "bailouts" there are lot of things that the government subsidizes that I don't like, e.g., AfPak wars, tobacco, and far more. In a society of 350 million people, you are never going to have complete agreement on anything in terms of government policies. Get over it.
At the end of the day, if you don't like what Domino's is doing, don't go there. I don't like that tobacco is subsidized and don't like smoking, so I don't smoke and don't buy cigarettes. My choice. While I think smoking is not a good idea from a health standpoint, that is up to the individual to decide for themselves. The government can put out the information and all people are free to chose what they want to do.
http://winningtheobesitybattle.wordpress.com