The Occupy Big Food rally at Zuccotti Park on Saturday.

NYU professor of Nutrition and Food Studies Marion Nestle was the event’s featured speaker. Although Nestle was intimidated at the prospect of using the human microphone for the first time, she picked up the unusual speaking technique quickly. “I’m an academic who studies social movements,” she told the crowd. “Occupy Wall Street is a social movement. Occupy Big Food is a social movement.”

Occupy Big Food has three main goals: To raise public consciousness, to put pressure on food corporations to change their destructive practices, and to organize and unify Americans in an alternative food system. As I told the audience that day: We have two choices. We can create our own food system now, or we can watch as corporations continue their destruction of our food, our environment, our health, and our economy.

As we have seen at Occupy Wall Street, collective action is crucial. We were there with the hope that the food movement can follow Occupy Wall Street’s model to unify individual voices into one collective roar.  

For social and political movements to make real change they must reach across social boundaries, especially race or class-based ones. Bill Granfield, president of the Unite Here Local 100 food service workers union, came to the rally with local 100 members who work in the cafeterias and executive dining rooms of Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, and JP Morgan Chase. These companies are under contract with some of the largest food distributors in the world, such as Sodexo, Compass, and Aramark. Granfield describes the workers as “New York’s working people of Wall Street.”

“If we are going to have a real food movement it has to include real, sustainable jobs for workers,” he said in a recent interview. 

Justice and equality was also at the heart of Ryan Ehrhart’s speech on Saturday. Ehrhart is a PhD candidate at CUNY, who focuses on food sovereignty. He began by addressing a recent write-up about Occupy Big Food on the National Public Radio website which used the term “foodies.” The word, he says, “has connotations of elite consumption.” “This is a food justice movement. This movement is about getting a food system that prioritizes healthy food for all people, regardless of income.”

Chef Erica Wides, host of Let’s Get Real: The Cooking Show About Finding, Preparing and Eating Food on the Heritage Radio Network, has her own word to describe what takes place in the industrial food system. At the rally, she suggested a new term entirely. “Big Food isn’t feeding us food. They’re feeding us something else,” Wides said. “I call it ‘foodiness.’ Like Stephen Colbert’s ‘truthiness,’ which isn’t about truth, foodiness is not food. Like veggie puffs with no vegetables; fruit bars with no fruit; taco meat with no meat. The way to make Big Foodiness change is to do so from the ground up: Eat vegetables, not veggie puffs. Eat fruit, not fruit bars.”

Those of us who went down to Zuccotti Park on Saturday believe that healthy food is at the root of a healthy democracy. And we are not the first to say so. In 1937, Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “A nation that destroys its soil, destroys itself.” I believe that we are in the final hours, and we must prevent this from becoming true.

In her closing remarks, my co-organizer Erika Lade summed up the sentiment at the rally when she said, “It’s time for the food movement to stop being nice, stop being elitist, and start being radical.” 

Photo: Travis S.

But is the milk Americans are drinking today the same milk our ancestors drank thousands of years ago? Is it even the same milk our great-grandparents were drinking a hundred years ago? By and large, the answer is no.

Like many other modern foods, most of the milk sold today has been altered, stripped, and reconstituted. Once minimally processed, milk now undergoes a complicated and energy-intensive process before it ends up bottled and shipped to grocery store shelves. There are so many additives and processes involved that buying a gallon of milk or a cup of yogurt at your grocery store essentially guarantees that you’ll get a mixture of substances from all over the country — and possibly the world. But that’s not where it ends; milk by-products also now appear in a wide variety of other processed foods.

Lloyd Metzger, director of the Midwest Dairy Foods Research Center and Alfred Chair of the Dairy Department at South Dakota State, outlined the process: Milk is received at the processing facilities and is tested for off-flavors and antibiotics. Several tanker trunks worth (from multiple different farms) get combined and placed in holding silos. Then the milk goes through a cream separator to create two products: cream and skim milk. At this point, various percentages of cream are added back into the skim milk in order to create whole and low fat milk. Milk is then homogenized, which is the process of passing it at high speeds through very small holes to create a uniform texture and prevent the cream from separating and rising to the top. It’s then pasteurized, or heated to at least 145 degrees. In some states, non-fat milk solids are added to the milk in order to thicken it and give it a better mouth feel. Then synthetic vitamins A and D are added.

When all is said and done, the product is a far cry from the milk that actually comes out of a cow. And, depending on whom you ask, each step along the way might carry its own risks.

Homogenization

“Homogenization is not good,” says John Bunting, a dairy farmer who researches and writes about dairy for The Milkweed. “The milk is pumped under high pressure which smashes the milk molecules so hard. Homogenization splits and exposes the molecules.” The hard science goes like this: A raw milk molecule is surrounded by a membrane, which protects it from oxygen. Homogenization decreases the average diameter of each fat globule and significantly increases the surface area. Because there’s now not enough membrane to cover all of this new surface area, the molecules are easily exposed to oxygen, and the fats become oxidized.

Milk solids

Critics believe that milk solids, which are sometimes added back into the milk, contain oxidized, or damaged, forms of fat and cholesterol. Nonfat milk solids are created through a process of evaporation and high heat drying which removes the moisture from skim milk. Exposure to high heat and oxygen causes fats to oxidize. And oxidized cholesterol has been shown in numerous studies to lead to atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, and to raise LDL, aka “bad” cholesterol. One study from 2004 found that oxidized dietary fats are a “major cause” in the development of atherosclerosis.

This phenomenon worries Nina Planck, author of Real Food. “This damaged cholesterol is much different than what I call “fresh cholesterol,” which is found in egg yolks, whole milk, and butter,” she said. “We know that fresh cholesterol has one main effect and that is to raise HDL [or ‘good' cholesterol]. On the other hand, oxidized cholesterol raises LDL.”

What’s more, Planck says that the law does not require manufacturers to tell consumers when milk solids are in food or milk. “It’s a [potential] scandal because it’s unlabeled,” she says. Michael Pollan writes about this as well in In Defense of Food: “In the case of low-fat or skim milk, that usually means adding powdered milk. But powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol which scientists believe is much worse for your arteries than ordinary cholesterol.”

In California, where the industry reports the ingredients on its website, all industrially produced milk contains nonfat milk solids. Even “whole milk” is a product of reconstitution; it contains at least 3.5 percent milk fat and 8.7 percent nonfat milk solids. This is also true for (industrially produced) organic milk.  

Nonfat milk solids are also found in low-fat and fat-free yogurt and cheese, infant formula, baked goods, cocoa mix, and candy bars.

Are these milk solids really as big of a problem as Planck and others in her camp believe them to be? Lloyd Metzger is doubtful. He says there’s virtually no fat left in the milk to oxidize. Bunting agrees, “If it’s skim milk, there might be small amounts — but that’s not a real concern. If you’re worried about oxidized fat, it’s homogenization that is the real culprit.”

Has Bunting seen evidence of the health impacts associated with oxidized fats in milk? “No,” he says. “But who’s going to fund it? The USDA is the largest funder of dairy research in this country and they’re not going to fund a study they don’t want to hear about.” 

Regardless, says Plank, “[Industrial] milk is transformed by heat. Why would you consume an adulterated product?”

Unhealthy food is gross, but the food industry thinks regulation is grosser.Photo: Steven Depolo

Food corporations enjoy carte blanche on what they can say about their foods, how and to whom they advertise, and even (to a large degree) the ingredients they choose to put in their foods. But when the Obama administration recently proposed voluntary guidelines [PDF] for the types of food advertised to children, industry giants decided to preempt these guidelines and create their own.

Since the government released its new guidelines, two powerful industry groups have reared up. One is the Sensible Food Policy Coalition, headed by former Obama Press Secretary Anita Dunn, and led by PepsiCo, Viacom, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Time Warner, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Association of National Advertisers. This group was quickly created in response to the government’s new guidelines, and its sole purpose is to prevent them from going into effect.

The second industry group making noise is the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), led by ConAgra, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, and Kellogg’s. The members of CFBAI sell thousands of food and beverage products around the world and thus share joint interests when it comes to advertising policies.

The government’s guidelines evolved as part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign, and are intended to protect children from the onslaught of advertising for highly processed, nutritionally void foods. The guidelines propose that by 2016, all food products most heavily marketed to children and adolescents ages 2 to 17 must meet the following two nutrition principles: They must “provide a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet,” and “should minimize the content of nutrients that could have a negative impact on health or weight.”

This translates as quite modest caps on added fat, sugar, and sodium: one gram or less of saturated fat, zero grams trans fat, no more than 13 grams of added sugars, and no more than 210 grams of sodium per serving. The trouble is, many processed foods already meet this criteria: Trix cereal, which is heavily marketed to children across various social media platforms, as well on TV and in print, contains 10 grams of sugar per serving, zero grams saturated fat and trans fat, and 180 mg of sodium, which puts it right up there with some of the worst foods our nation’s children are eating. Trix is chock full of sugar, additives, food dyes, and preservatives that have been to shown to have myriad ill effects.

The food industry members of the CFBAI called the voluntary guidelines “unworkable and unrealistic” and then proposed their own guidelines — guidelines that would require no modifications to two-thirds of their food products. Meanwhile, the CFBAI is trying to paint this as a groundbreaking progress, and even the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) agrees. “The industry’s uniform standards are a significant advance and exactly the type of initiative the commission had in mind when we started pushing for self-regulation more than five years ago,” Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC, said in a statement about the advertising initiative.

It’s unclear how creating regulations that allow for two-thirds of the processed food products to remain unchanged is “significant progress.” What is clear is that the industrial food giants want no part in creating healthier foods for children. They claim the modest guidelines will cause job loss in an already troubled economy, appealing to the conservative base that scoffs at any government regulation and cries “nanny state” when the government attempts to intervene in our health crisis.

And while the right wing makes claims of socialism and ridicules Michelle Obama for trying to regulate food corporations on the grounds that the few should not control the many, the truth is, the few are indeed controlling the many. Large food conglomerates like General Mills, Kellogg’s, Con-Agra, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola are the epitome of this scenario. These corporations effectively control what most middle- and low-income people eat in this country. If you are born into a poor family, with relative food insecurity, then it makes economic sense to eat the most calorically rich (usually nutrient-void) foods for the least amount of money. Not coincidentally, this is what the large food corporations excel at producing.

It comes as no surprise, then, that the most recent research examining obesity found that poor, African American women make up the largest population of obese Americans, with Latino women following close behind. In fact, poor women of all races were the most likely to be obese, and the research shows troubling links between poverty, government assistance, and health problems in the United States.

Findings from a Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity study released last November indicate a similar trend. The study found that the industry specifically targets teens and minority youth more often and with less healthy items. African American youth saw at least 50 percent more fast food ads on TV in 2009 than their white peers.

Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center, said this is particularly alarming since these are the populations most at-risk for obesity and diabetes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of obesity for African Americans is 51 percent higher than for white Americans, and the prevalence of obesity among the nation’s Hispanic population is 21 percent higher than it is for their white peers.

The Obama administration is on the right track by creating guidelines to regulate a food system that functions completely unchecked, but it shouldn’t cave to industry pressure by allowing food corporations to regulate themselves — isn’t that exactly what they’ve been doing for the past 60 years?

A good pinch of this won’t do you any harm.

Historically, though, salt was prized. Its reputation can be found in phrases like, “Worth one’s salt,” meaning, “Worth one’s pay,” since people were often paid in salt and the word itself is derived from the Latin salarium, or salary.

Those days are long over. Doctors and dietitians, along with the USDA dietary guidelines, recommend eating a diet low in sodium to prevent high blood pressure, risk of cardiovascular disease, and stroke; and doctors have been putting their patients on low-salt diets since the 1970s. But a new study, published in the May 4 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), found that low-salt diets actually increase the risk of death from heart attack and stroke — and in fact don’t prevent high blood pressure.

The study’s findings inspired much criticism and controversy — as research that challenges conventional dietary wisdom often does. When The New York Times briefly reported on it, even the title conveyed the controversy: “Low-Salt Diet Ineffective, Study Finds. Disagreement Abounds.” The Times reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “felt so strongly that the study was flawed that they criticized it in an interview, something they normally do not do.” According to the Times, Peter Briss, a medical director at the Centers, said that the study was small, that its subjects were young, and that they had few cardiovascular events — making it hard to draw conclusions.

But most of all, Briss and others criticized the study because it challenges dietary dogma on sodium intake. These experts claim that a body of evidence establishes sodium consumption as a serious driver of cardiovascular disease. But if you take a careful look at the evidence, you’ll see that the case against sodium crumbles under the weight of its contradictions. Gary Taubes wrote about the controversy on the benefits of salt reduction more than 10 years ago in a piece for Science called “The (Political) Science of Salt.” He portrayed a clash between the desire for immediate and simple answers and the requirements of good science. “This is the conflict that fuels many of today’s public health controversies,” Taubes asserted.

The JAMA study published early this month is not the first to find that a low-salt diet may be detrimental. In 2006, data from the NHANES II study showed that death from heart disease and all causes rose with lower salt consumption. Published in the American Journal of Medicine, the report found:

Lower sodium has been associated with stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system, that, in turn, has been associated with adverse [cardiovascular disease] and mortality outcomes. Sodium restriction may also influence insulin resistance.

The insulin resistance association is compelling since so many Americans are exhibiting signs of insulin resistance, the precursor to diabetes. Michael Alderman, a blood-pressure researcher at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and editor of the American Journal of Hypertension, said in an email, “The problem with reducing sodium enough to change blood pressure [is that it] has other effects — including increasing insulin resistance, increasing sympathetic nerve activity, and activating the renin-angiotensin system and increasing aldosterone secretion. All bad things for the cardiovascular system.”

There are those who will argue that any study claiming that sodium is not as harmful as previously believed are connected to the salt lobby, but this is untrue. The most recent JAMA study has no such connection and many real-food advocates, myself included, believe that salt is an essential part of a healthy diet. Alderman was once an unpaid consultant for the Salt Institute but no longer is, according to the Times article.

There is also a strange psychological component to this debate as is often seen in the nutrition world: When a message has been hammered in and repeated millions of times over the course of decades, whether or not that message is actually true becomes irrelevant — and the people invested in presenting that message, whether for monetary gain or not, are especially resistant to any evidence that might be contrary. When asked about this phenomenon and the standard recommendations on salt, Alderman said, “They are based upon the hope that the blood pressure effect of lowering sodium would translate into a benefit in health. Opposition to these findings — which only adds to a substantial body of similar information — is that these folks have long held the faith that lowering sodium was a good idea. They have opposed randomized trials with the bogus argument that a randomized controlled trial would be too tough and expensive. Not so. They choose faith over science, but it’s not a theological issue.”

Witness the low-fat campaign that has raged on for decades despite research that now shows the low-fat campaign was actually based on little scientific evidence. When it comes to the fat debate, the crucial issue is determining which fats are healthy and which fats are not: Real, whole-food sources of fats, like butter and eggs, are healthy while industrially produced sources of fats, like partially hydrogenated oils or trans-fats, are not. Real fats and industrial fats cannot be lumped into the same category, and when they are, as is often the case in scientific research, the results are muddled. This was the case with studies on coconut oil, which used partially hydrogenated versions to determine that coconut oil was unhealthy, tarnishing it with a reputation as one of the worst fats. Meanwhile, recent research using unprocessed coconut oil shows that it is actually a healthy fat with a host of health benefits.

As for salt, the same logic can be applied. There are no studies based on a diet that draws its sodium from unrefined salt and from foods containing naturally occurring salt (like zucchini, celery, seaweed, oysters, shrimp, beets, spinach, fish, olives, eggs, red meat, and garbanzo beans). Clearer answers would surely emerge with a study like this.

The differences between refined and unrefined salt are significant. (Make sure you use unrefined sea salt, as other sea salts can be just as processed as ordinary table salt.) Unrefined sea salt contains about 82 percent sodium chloride and the rest is comprised of essential minerals including magnesium and calcium; and trace elements, like iodine, potassium, and selenium. Not coincidentally, they help with maintaining fluid balance and replenishing electrolytes.

Refined, processed salt is actually an industrial leftover, according to Nina Planck’s book Real Food. Planck describes how the chemical industry removes the valuable trace elements found in salt and heats it 1,200 degrees F. What’s left is 100 percent sodium chloride, plus industrial additives including aluminum, anticaking agents, and dextrose, which stains the salt purple. To gain its pure-white sheen, the salt is then bleached. Thus refined salt is hardly a whole food; and consuming a jolt of sodium chloride upsets fluid balance and dehydrates cells, to say nothing of the harm the various additives and bleach residues may cause.

But what’s fascinating about this most recent study is that even in monitoring those on a largely industrial foods diet, consuming what’s considered high levels of salt, the results indicate that even this is better than a low-sodium diet.

Why might this be? Sodium is one of the two major electrolytes our bodies need to function properly, and like any other element, nutrient, vitamin, or mineral we put into our bodies, it does not exist or function in isolation. Sodium is important for maintaining blood volume, it works in concert with potassium, which is needed for vasodilatation or constriction, and it also interacts with calcium, which is needed for vascular smooth muscle tone. Sodium exists in all of the fluids in our body and is essential to water balance regulation, nerve stimulation, and proper function of the adrenal glands. It is also crucial to maintaining mental acuity — sodium is required to activate glial cells in the brain — these cells make up 90 percent of the brain and are what makes us think faster and make connections. This is part of the reason sodium deficiency (sunstroke, heat exhaustion) leads to confusion and lethargy as the human brain is extremely sensitive to changing sodium levels in the body.

Like fat, salt was prized by traditional cultures. Those groups that were landlocked often burned sodium-rich marsh grasses and added the ash to their foods to acquire healthy amounts of salt and they traded with peoples living near the ocean for fish and salt. The tendency of scientific studies to isolate parts of our foods and determine whether or not they are good or bad obfuscates a clear picture of the larger processes involved in eating and metabolizing in the human body. It also complicates something that shouldn’t be complicated: eating real, whole foods as they exist in nature. Isolating and demonizing certain aspects of real, whole foods — like fat and salt — only confuses the public.

A 1970s-era Monsanto ad.Photo: Christian Montone

Last month, the U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) held hearings on the safety of food dyes but failed to make a definitive ruling. The most recent study on Bisphenol-A (BPA) added to growing doubts about its safety; but the FDA’s stance on it remains ambiguous. Meanwhile, in 2010, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported [PDF] that the FDA is not ensuring the safety of many chemicals.

Yet while the FDA stalls and hedges on the safety of these substances, Americans are exposed to untested combinations of food additives, dyes, preservatives, and chemicals on a daily basis. Indeed, for the vast majority of Americans consuming industrial foods, a veritable chemical cocktail enters their bodies every day and according to the GAO report, “FDA is not systematically ensuring the continued safety of current GRAS substances.”

The term GRAS refers to “generally regarded as safe,” the moniker the FDA uses to regulate food additives, dyes, and preservatives. The trouble is, this system is not effective. Dr. Michael Hansen, a senior scientist at Consumers Union, said in an interview that many additives in our food supply are never even tested. That’s because the GRAS designation is a voluntary process — instead of being required to register food additives, companies can notify the FDA about their product, but only if they so choose. Hansen added that even for those additives considered GRAS, he didn’t have much faith in the designation.

So just how many of these largely untested and unregulated chemicals is the average American consuming every day? As of yet, no study has determined this number nor has looked at what the effects of the various combinations might be. But according to the Is It In Us? website, there are 80,000 chemicals in commerce and the site says that, “No one is ever exposed to a single chemical, but to a chemical soup, the ingredients of which may interact to cause unpredictable health effects.”

There are only a few studies that evaluate the combined effects of food additives. One 2006 study published in Toxicology Science concludes that the combination of several common additives appears to have a neurotoxic effect: “Although the use of single food additives at their regulated concentrations is believed to be relatively safe in terms of neuronal development, their combined effects remain unclear.” Of the four additives looked at, only one is now banned in the U.S., while the rest remain in the foods on our grocery store shelves. In a 2000 study, researchers looked at the combination of four major food additives or a mixture of six typical artificial food colors and found indications of toxicity in both.

And perhaps the most alarming study dates back to 1976 from the Journal of Food Science. In this study, young rats were fed a low-fiber diet along with sodium cyclamate, FD&C Red No. 2, and polyoxyethylene (20) sorbitan monostearate individually and in combination. While the study found that any one of the three food additives given individually had little negative effect, the combination of all three additives resulted in weight loss and the death of all test animals within 14 days. Sodium cyclamate is an artificial sweetener now banned in the U.S., but FD&C Red No. 2, a food dye, and polyoxyethylene (20) sorbitan monostearate, an emulsifier, are still in regular use in the food supply, according to the FDA’s website.

You’re probably ingesting a wicked chemical cocktail every day before tea time.

BPA, another regularly used chemical, has raised a number of concerns. The most recent study found that when participants switched to a diet with minimal amounts of canned foods or plastic food packaging, urinary levels of BPA decreased by more than 60 percent after just three days. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), nearly all Americans have detectable levels of BPA in their bodies, which has been linked to breast and prostrate cancer, infertility, early puberty in girls, obesity, and ADHD. This study indicates how quickly the body will excrete BPA if given the opportunity, but here’s the key: The body must be given the opportunity to do so. Many Americans don’t take three-day fresh food breaks from a diet based largely on packaged and processed foods. What’s more, BPA is just one of the chemical compounds with potentially harmful effects entering into our systems.

Based on the anecdotal information I see in my clients’ food journals, people eating processed and packaged foods are taking in exorbitant amounts of artificial ingredients and additives. Typically, a client will say something like, “I eat a bowl of cereal with low-fat milk, have yogurt for a snack, and a Subway sandwich for lunch.” While this sounds relatively harmless, here’s what it might actually look like based on some popular “health food” items:

• One serving of Kellogg’s Fiber Plus Antioxidants Berry Yogurt Crunch contains more than 13 different additives, preservatives, and food dyes, including Red 40 and Blue 1, which are known to cause allergic reactions in some people and mutations leading to cancer in lab animals. It also contains BHT, monoglycerides, and cellulose gum. In addition, conventional milk often contains residues of artificial bovine growth hormones, known endocrine disruptors as well as antibiotics used in industrial milk production.

• Dannon Light & Fit Peach yogurt contains more than 11 different additives including Red 40, aspartame, potassium sorbate, sucralose, and acesulfame potassium.

• A Subway sandwich of turkey and cheese on nine-grain bread with fat-free honey mustard, peppers, and pickles contains more than 40 different additives, preservatives, and dyes. The pickles and peppers have Yellow 5 and polysorbate 80, the bread has 10 different additives including dough conditioners, DATEM, and sodium stearoyl lactylate, and the turkey contains 10 additives as well.

The person in this example has consumed more than 60 food additives eating breakfast, a small snack, and lunch alone, to say nothing of dinner, dessert, further snacking, and drinks. Consumers Union’s Dr. Hansen told me, “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were up to 100 additives or more that people are taking in on a daily basis.”

And it’s not just food. A number of additional toxins also enter our systems from other industrial sources and often come in the form of phthalate plasticizers and parabens — both of which are used in personal care products, some medications, and even foods and food preservation. Most Americans use some form of shampoo, soap, lotion, and antiperspirant every day, and these toxins, applied to the skin, are absorbed dermally.

According to a 2010 study, like BPA, parabens and phthalates can clear our bodies relatively quickly but only if we aren’t exposed to them on a regular basis. The study states, “For serious health problems to arise, exposure to these rapidly-clearing compounds must occur on a daily basis.” Phthalates are associated with infertility, obesity, asthma, and allergies, as well as breast cancer; parabens are a cause for concern regarding breast cancer.

So what if it’s not the dyes alone, the preservatives alone, or the BPA alone, but some haphazard combination thereof that has yet to be studied or evaluated properly? Jason August, with the FDA’s Office of Food Additive Safety, admitted as much in his defense of food dyes in relation to ADHD recently when he said, “There were other factors in most of these studies that could have been the reason or could have gone hand in hand with the dyes to create these problems in these particular children, including preservatives.”

This is precisely why the FDA needs to be more rigorous with its testing of individual additives and start evaluating the combined effects or “other factors” that August so blithely refers to here.

Chemicals used in all of these industrial products are big business — food corporations own some of the largest personal care companies and they’re profiting on multiple fronts with cheap, industrial ingredients. For example, Nestlé owns 30 percent of the world’s largest cosmetic and beauty company L’Oreal — tightly regulating these substances and evaluating potential harm would be a financial hardship for these corporations.

But the real hardship is placed on the American people who trust that the foods they eat are properly regulated by the government and safe for themselves and their families. How long will the FDA continue to put the health of the American people at risk with its antiquated policy? Let’s hope with pressure from groups like the AAP, changing consumer demand, and continued headlines, the FDA will finally do its job.

Over 5 million children ages four to 17 have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the United States, and close to 3 million of those children take medication for their symptoms, according to the Centers for Disease Control. But a new study reported in The Lancet last month found that with a restricted diet alone, many children experienced a significant reduction in symptoms. The study’s lead author, Dr. Lidy Pelsser of the ADHD Research Center in the Netherlands, said in an interview with NPR, “The teachers thought it was so strange that the diet would change the behavior of the child as thoroughly as they saw it. It was a miracle, the teachers said.”

Dr. Pessler’s study is the first to conclusively say that diet is implicated in ADHD. In the NPR interview, Dr. Pessler did not mince words, “Food is the main cause of ADHD,” she said adding, “After the diet, they were just normal children with normal behavior. They were no longer more easily distracted, they were no more forgetful, there were no more temper-tantrums.” The study found that in 64 percent of children with ADHD, the symptoms were caused by food. “It’s a hypersensitivity reaction to food,” Pessler said.

This is good news for parents and children who would like to avoid many of the adverse side effects associated with common stimulant drugs, like Ritalin, used to treat ADHD — and bad news for the pharmaceutical industry. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that common side effects from the drugs are sleeplessness (for which a doctor might also prescribe sleeping pills), headaches, stomachaches, decreased appetite, and a long list of much more frightening (yet rarer) side effects, including feeling helpless, hopeless, or worthless, and new or worsening depression. But Pessler’s study indicates that up to two-thirds — or 2 of the 3 million children currently medicated for ADHD — may not need medication at all. “With all children, we should start with diet research,” Pessler said.

There are also questions about the long-term effects of stimulant drugs and growth in children. After three years on Ritalin, children were about an inch shorter and 4.4 pounds lighter than their peers, according to a major study published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in 2007. A 2010 study in the Journal of Pediatrics disputed these findings, but all the study’s authors had relationships with drug companies, some of which make stimulants. According to Reuters, “The lead author, Harvard University’s Dr. Joseph Biederman, was once called out by Iowa Senator Charles E. Grassley for the consulting fees he has received from such drug makers.”

This is just one example of how the powerful billion-dollar drug industry designs and interprets studies to suit their interests. Since the 1970s, researchers not tied to drug companies have been drawing connections between foods, food additives, and the symptoms associated with ADHD but many have been dismissed or overlooked by conventional medicine. One of the earliest researchers in this field was Dr. Benjamin Feingold who created a specific diet to address behavioral and developmental problems in children. The Feingold diet, as it is now called, recommends removing all food additives, dyes, and preservatives commonly found in the majority of industrial foods.

There are a multitude of credible scientific studies to indicate that diet plays a large role in the development of ADHD. One study found that the depletion of zinc and copper in children was more prevalent in children with ADHD. Another study found that one particular dye acts as a “central excitatory agent able to induce hyperkinetic behavior.” And yet another study suggests that the combination of various common food additives appears to have a neurotoxic effect — pointing to the important fact that while low levels of individual food additives may be regarded as safe for human consumption, we must also consider the combined effects of the vast array of food additives that are now prevalent in our food supply.

In Pessler’s study the children were placed on a restricted diet consisting of water, rice, turkey, lamb, lettuce, carrots, pears, and other hypoallergenic foods — in other words, real, whole foods. This means that by default the diet contained very few, if any, food additives.

As I see it, there are two factors at work in this study: One being the allergic reaction to the actual foods themselves and the second being a possible reaction to food additives, or combinations of food additives, found in industrial foods. Both certainly could be at play in the results of this study, although the discussion of Dr. Pessler’s study thus far hasn’t addressed the latter issue.

One theme in the discussion of the story has been skepticism from mainstream media — the recent Los Angeles Times article (the only major daily newspaper to cover the study) was very skeptical, if not dismissive. The author writes, “Previous studies have found similar effects, but, like this one, they all had fundamental problems that made it easy for doctors to dismiss them.” NPR interviewer Guy Raz asked a question invoking this tone as well, “Now, you’re not saying that some children with ADHD should not be given medication, right?” Pessler does say that there are some children and adults who might benefit from pharmaceuticals but her research indicates that far too many are being medicated unnecessarily — and this is the crux of the story.

The Los Angeles Times article ends on this note: “‘To be sure, the prospect of treating ADHD with diet instead of drugs would appeal to many parents,’ Dr. Jaswinder Ghuman, a child psychiatrist who treats ADHD says. But parents who want to give it a try should be sure to consult their child’s physician first, she warned: ‘It’s not that simple to do appropriately.’”

Call me old-fashioned, but changing your child’s diet seems a lot “simpler” than altering his or her brain chemistry with a daily dose of pharmaceuticals. It does takes patience, trial and error, and commitment to complete an elimination diet — taking a pill to target symptoms certainly requires less effort on the part of the doctors, family, and child. No one is denying that ADHD is a complicated web of symptoms with potentially many contributing factors. But why not start by examining the most basic and fundamental cornerstone of our health — the foods (and non-foods) we put into our bodies?

A version of this post first appeared on Civil Eats.

Breakfast cub: Tony the Tiger says start your kid’s day with big bowls of sweetened corn.Photo: Jim Barker

Feeding hungry children sure sounds nice, but filling hungry bellies with highly-processed junk foods is hardly the answer. Let’s take a look at some of the products Kellogg is promoting as part of this endeavor.

Frosted Flakes — one of the products represented by Tony the Tiger at a National Breakfast Day event in New York last Tuesday — contains 11 grams of sugar per three-fourths cup serving. After the first ingredient of milled corn, the next three read: sugar, malt flavoring, and high-fructose corn syrup — three forms of sugar by different names.

Nutri-Grain bars — a product promoted as healthy — contain more than 30 ingredients (minus the synthetic vitamins) and include high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavors, red #40, TBHQ, and host of other chemicals. Meanwhile, the front of the package reads: “More of the whole grains your body needs,” “Good source of fiber,” and “Made with real fruit.” The only “real fruit” I could find is “strawberry puree concentrate” and it’s listed after high-fructose corn syrup and corn syrup. Each bar contains 11 grams of sugar and 3 grams of fiber.

Even Corn Flakes contain sugar, malt flavoring, and high-fructose corn syrup, listed as its second, third, and fourth ingredients. Kellogg is also offering promotions on Rice Krispies, Mini-Wheats, and Eggo Waffles — the waffles contain partially-hydrogenated oils in addition to high-fructose corn syrup.

But Kellogg Company knows that people are concerned about feeding their kids sugar and chemicals for breakfast every morning, so it has dedicated whole sections of its website to “correcting” false nutrition information. In one section, Kellogg refers to sugar as the “misunderstood nutrient.” According to the website, “Sugar does not cause obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease or hyperactivity.” This statement flies in the face of the most recent research and a host of mainstream studies that say the exact opposite.

One of the most recent studies, reported in TIME Magazine last year, found that consuming added sugars raises the risk for heart disease by raising cholesterol and triglycerides. The American Heart Association’s (AHA) website states, “High intake of added sugars is implicated in numerous poor health conditions, including obesity, high blood pressure and other risk factors for heart disease and stroke.” The AHA is so concerned about the amount of added sugars in the American diet that in 2009, it established upper limits for adults (none exist yet for children, oddly enough). The AHA says that women should get no more than six teaspoons a day and men no more than nine.

Most of the Kellogg’s products I researched contained an average of 11 grams of sugar per serving, which is close to three teaspoons of sugar. If we assume that the average child weighs about half what the average woman weighs, then three teaspoons is the upper limit of how much a child should safely consume in one day, according to the AHA. That means the child couldn’t eat any other added sugars for the rest of the day (not likely) and that he or she could only eat the single three-fourths cup serving (also, not likely). The AHA says the average American eats an alarming 22 teaspoons of added sugar a day.

According to research by the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, children will eat cereal with less sugar if the option is made available. The report found that the industry strives to reinforce the myth that children will not eat low-sugar cereals. “The industry has funded a number of studies that find that highly-sweetened cereal is good for children, especially when compared to having no breakfast at all,” the report noted. Nutrition information based on these studies is exactly what Kellogg has laced throughout its website. In the section on sugar, you’ll find, “Keep in mind that a little sugar in foods can help the nutrition go down. For instance, picky kids might be more likely to eat presweetened cereal or drink chocolate milk. They’ll love the taste and you’ll love the nutrients they get from these foods.” This may well be true, but a “little sugar” is a lot different than the 11 grams found in a three-fourths cup serving of Frosted Flakes.

The Rudd Center’s 2009 report also found that some rather insidious advertising techniques appeared to be on the horizon. “What was once a simple marketing landscape — television advertising during cartoons — has morphed into a complex web of persuasive messages even adults may not perceive as marketing. Internet games and marketing through social media such as Facebook are just the beginning and do not capture digital advances that will occur in the future,” it stated. With this new Kellogg campaign it appears that day has arrived.

Make no mistake, Share Your Breakfast is an advertising campaign above all else. According to a New York Times article, the campaign is the largest integrated marketing effort, with ads in broadcast, print, digital, print, and social media. The campaign asks users to upload pictures to Twitter and Facebook, in addition to posting them on Kellogg’s website. And while Kellogg has agreed to donate up to $200,000 towards feeding hungry school children, this pales in comparison to the amount the company spends on advertising overall. The Times reports that Kellogg spent $464.9 million on advertising from January through September 2010 and $454 million from January 2009 through September 2009.

Meanwhile, the company is painting a rather rosy picture as to its motivations. “We find there’s a lot of people who don’t have access to breakfast,” Doug VanDeVelde, senior vice president for marketing and innovation at Kellogg told the Times. “We just felt like as the breakfast leader, we should do something about that.”

He’s right, Kellogg and every other food industry giant certainly should do something about the hunger problem, but they shouldn’t be filling already undernourished children with food products that are nutritionally void at best.

How about providing funds to feed kids real food for breakfast? Eggs, plain yogurt with fresh fruit, oatmeal, a fresh fruit smoothie with yogurt, milk, or nut milk, a slice of real, whole-grain bread with almond or peanut butter (skip the Skippy!). All of these breakfasts can be made in five to 10 minutes without the added sugar or hype.

Or better yet, why not apply some of that creative talent along with that large advertising budget and produce breakfasts that are nutritious enough to qualify as real foods? Then we could believe them when they say, “The best to you each morning.”

A version of this post first appeared on Civil Eats.

The low-fat trend finally appears to be on its way out. The notion that saturated fats are detrimental to our health is deeply embedded in our zeitgeist — but shockingly, the opposite just might be true. For over 50 years the medical establishment, public health officials, nutritionists, and dietitians have been telling the American people to eat a low-fat diet, and in particular, to avoid saturated fats. Only recently have nutrition experts begun to encourage people to eat “healthy fats.”

This past December, the Los Angeles Times reported that excess carbohydrates and sugar, not fat, are responsible for America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics. One of the lead researchers in this field, Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said, “The country’s big low-fat message backfired. The overemphasis on reducing fat caused the consumption of carbohydrates and sugar in our diets to soar. That shift may be linked to the biggest health problems in America today.” Another expert, Walter Willett, chairman of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health, declared flatly that “fat is not the problem.”

Last month, Martha Rose Shulman of The New York Times Recipes for Health section wrote that she’s taken the “no low-fat pledge.” Shulman writes, “I took a pledge the other day that will surprise my longtime followers. It even surprised me. I pledged to drop the term ‘low-fat’ from my vocabulary.”

Shulman, an influential food and recipe writer with over 25 books to her name, has long promoted low-fat and light cooking, but now writes, “There are many recipes in my cookbooks from the ’90s that now look and taste dated to me. I’ve put back some of the oil and cheese that I took out when editors were telling me to keep total fat at 30 percent of total calories — a concept that is now obsolete even among policymakers.”

She and a room full of “nutrition scientists, dietitians, doctors, chefs, and food service titans” recently listened to experts on nutrition debunk some of the common fat myths. Dariush Mozaffarian, who codirects the program in cardiovascular epidemiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and is an assistant professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, was also there and said, “No randomized trial looking at weight change has shown that people did better on a low-fat diet. For many people, low-fat diets are even worse than moderate or high-fat diets because they’re often high in carbohydrates from rapidly digested foods such as white flour, white rice, potatoes, refined snacks, and sugary drinks.”

These are clear indications that an important tipping point in the mainstream understanding of fat and nutrition is underway. But it did take some time. Back in 2002, Gary Taubes wrote about it in The New York Times magazine, laying out a fine deconstruction of the low-fat premise presented to the American people. He pointed out that the science behind this recommendation was never proven and was actually based on “a leap of faith” (more on this here).

In 2001, Hu, writing in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, noted, “It is now increasingly recognized that the low-fat campaign has been based on little scientific evidence and may have caused unintended health problems.” Or, as Michael Pollan pithily puts it in his In Defense of Food, “The amount of saturated fat in the diet may have little if any bearing on the risk of heart disease, and the evidence that increasing polyunsaturated fats in the diet will reduce risk is slim to nil.”

This brings up several important issues in the fat debate. It is still widely held that what matters are the types of fat we consume. Even in Shulman’s article on her fat re-education, there are contradictions — it’s clear she just can’t get her head around the idea that saturated fats may indeed be healthy. She writes:

Saturated fat — the kind found in animals and dairy products, as well as in any hydrogenated fat — is also regarded as a less healthy fat because it raises L.D.L. cholesterol, or ‘bad’ cholesterol in the blood, and this kind of cholesterol is related to heart disease. But even saturated fat is not so bad compared to refined carbohydrates, the doctors say, and if we were to eliminate it from our diet we would also be eliminating many foods that are also rich in healthy fats, like fish, whose omega-3 fatty acids are vital to good health.

But as Pollan points out, the idea that saturated fats are a less healthy fat just isn’t true, as the picture is fairly complex. Indeed, most foods are composed of a many different types of fats. For example, half the fat found in beef is unsaturated and most of that fat is the same monounsaturated fat found in olive oil. Lard is 60 percent unsaturated and most of the fat in chicken fat is unsaturated as well, according to Taubes’ 2008 book Good Calories, Bad Calories. In his New York Times article he writes, “Even saturated fats — AKA, the bad fats — are not nearly as deleterious as you would think. True, they will elevate your bad cholesterol, but they will also elevate your good cholesterol. In other words, it’s a virtual wash.” Taubes continues, “Foods considered more or less deadly under the low-fat dogma turn out to be comparatively benign if you actually look at their fat content. More than two-thirds of the fat in a porterhouse steak, for instance, will definitively improve your cholesterol profile (at least in comparison with the baked potato next to it); it’s true that the remainder will raise your L.D.L., the bad stuff, but it will also boost your H.D.L. The same is true for lard. If you work out the numbers, you come to the surreal conclusion that you can eat lard straight from the can and conceivably reduce your risk of heart disease.”

Nearly every day new research and studies come out debunking popular fat myths; despite this, misinformation persists. On the Mayo Clinic’s website, saturated fats are lumped in with trans-fats under the banner “harmful dietary fat” and the site claims that saturated fat can increase your risk of cardiovascular disease and Type 2 diabetes.

The link to cardiovascular disease is a tenuous one at best — the idea being that saturated fats raise your cholesterol and triglyceride levels which in turn leads to cardiovascular disease. But according to the most recent studies, including one reported in the Los Angeles Times article, this is not true. “Contrary to what many expect — dietary fat intake is not directly related to blood fat. Rather, the amount of carbohydrates in the diet appears to be a potent contributor,” Marni Jameson writes.

And during a symposium called “The Great Fat Debate: Is There Validity In the Age-Old Dietary Guidance?” at the American Dietetic Association’s Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo,four leading experts agreed that replacing saturated fat with carbohydrates is likely to raise the risk of cardiovascular disease. Walter Willett said, “If anything, the literature shows a slight advantage of the high-fat diet.”

And as for diabetes, there is no data to support the notion that a high-fat diet increases the risk for diabetes. Again, if anything, the opposite appears to be true. In a 2008 study reported in the Los Angeles Times article, obese men and women with metabolic syndrome (a precursor to diabetes) that went on a high saturated-fat, low-carb diet saw theirtriglycerides drop by 50 percent and their levels of good H.D.L. cholesterol increase by 15 percent.

But old dietary habits die hard, and convincing people that what they’ve been told for the past 50 years is just plain wrong is a hard sell. Not only that, but the continued recommendations to eat low-fat versions of foods (as in the USDA’s latest dietary guidelines and on the Mayo Clinic’s website) don’t help. Americans are confused about nutrition and disease and it’s only getting more complex with corporations claiming to make healthier foods (see Mark Bittman’s take on McDonald’s oatmeal and my take on Walmart’s health-washing).

Keep in mind, there is one type of fat that is implicated in high cholesterol, atherosclerosis, heart disease, and diabetes: trans-fat. Trans-fats raise bad cholesterol, lower good cholesterol, and increase triglycerides, they also promotes inflammation and insulin resistance, according to a 2000 article in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition. This points to the one basic axiom that always hold true: Eat real, whole foods and nothing else — now, if we could only just all agree on what those are.

A version of this post first appeared on Civil Eats.

Photos: Roger H. Goun, Lord Mariser, and Gage Skidmore

Once again, the Tea Party heavyweights are using food to cast First Lady Michelle Obama as a proponent for an all-controlling nanny state. Last month, the first lady’s efforts to rein in the junk-food industry drew the ire of right-wing scolds. More recently, her promotion of breast-feeding, particularly among African-American women, drew controversy. At around the same time, the Internal Revenue Service announced that breast pumps would be eligible for tax breaks.

Strangely enough, some conservatives leapt to attack the simple notion of encouraging breast-feeding — which has been shown in many studies to reduce the incidence of childhood obesity. Tea Party star and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) accused the first lady of pushing a leftist agenda intent on making “government the answer to everything.” On Laura Ingram’s radio show last week, Bachmann said: “To think that government has to go out and buy my breast pump … You want to talk about nanny state, I think we just got a new definition.”

Bachmann’s claim that the government is buying breast pumps is nonsense. The IRS simply announced it would allow people to deduct breast-feeding expenses from their taxes. And since breast pumps can be costly (I found them online in the range of $75 to $350), the tax break would be a relief to many working mothers. But for Bachmann and her ilk, any government intervention to support healthier options is fodder for harsh criticism.

Last month, I wrote about America’s vexed relationship with fast food and Sarah Palin’s attempts to discredit the work Obama is doing with her Let’s Move campaign. Last year on the Laura Ingram show, Palin came out swinging against the first lady saying, “Instead of a government thinking that they need to take over and make decisions for us according to some politician or politician’s wife priorities, just leave us alone, get off our back, and allow us as individuals to exercise our own God-given rights.”

Palin made a contentious remark of her own about Obama’s breast-feeding statements, saying, “No wonder Michelle Obama’s telling everybody, ‘you’d better breast-feed your baby.’ Yeah, you’d better, because the price of milk is so high right now!”

It’s unclear why Bachmann or Palin wouldn’t want to foster an environment that makes it easier for mothers to breast-feed their babies. Bachman’s implication that this is unpatriotic and an infringement on American rights is baffling given the fact that all politicians at least pay lip service to the importance of motherhood — to attack breast-feeding, as Bachmann and Palin have, is to attack healthy mothers and babies.

There are a host of studies to show just how important breast-feeding is. The Centers for Disease Control has an entire section on its website dedicated to explaining the benefits of breast-feeding. Just this past January, the surgeon general issued The Call to Action to Support Breastfeeding and lists a myriad of benefits when it comes to breast-feeding on her website. The benefits include: Protecting babies from infections and illnesses such as diarrhea, ear infections, and pneumonia; preventing the development of asthma; preventing obesity; reducing the risk of sudden infant death syndrome; and a decreased risk of breast and ovarian cancers in mothers.

These are substantial health benefits and they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to all that breast-feeding does for both mother and baby. Obama’s focus is that nursing prevents obesity and diabetes because breast milk contains the protein adiponectin, which lowers blood sugar. Low levels of adiponectin are linked to obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, and heart disease. (For more detailed information on the benefits of breast-feeding I recommend Nina Planck’s book, Real Food for Mother and Baby.)

The surgeon general also lists the economic benefits of breast-feeding; something you’d think might pique Palin and Bachman’s interest. According to the website, a study published last year in the journal Pediatrics estimated that if 90 percent of U.S. families followed guidelines to breast-feed exclusively for six months, the U.S. would save $13 billion annually in reduced medical and other costs. The site also says that for both employers and employees, better infant health means fewer health insurance claims, less employee time off to care for sick children, and higher productivity.

And finally, Mutual of Omaha found that health care costs for newborns are three times lower for babies whose mothers participate in the company’s employee maternity and lactation program. Add to this the fact that the federal government is one of the biggest buyers of baby formula through its nutritional programs for women and infant children, and as the New York Times article rightly points out, a tax break for breast-feeding could reduce government spending — something Bachmann and Palin both advocate.

While neither Bachmann nor Palin have come out against breast-feeding (Bachmann says she breast-fed her five children), to imply that Obama’s campaign to encourage women to nurse is somehow akin to a nanny state is harmful to the health of our nation’s babies and mothers. We currently face a national health crisis largely fueled by a toxic food supply that does not support easy access to healthy options. On the other hand, breast milk is the perfect food for newborns — and given the proper guidance and support, access is not a problem for most women.

Every politician should back an idea that makes breast-feeding easier and more affordable than it already is. According to the CDC, 75 percent of mothers in the U.S. start out breast-feeding but those rates fall to only 43 percent by six months and only 13 percent of babies are exclusively breast-fed. Among African-Americans, the rates are much lower — 58 percent of mothers start out breast-feeding but the rate falls to 28 percent by six months and only 8 percent are exclusively breast-fed.

One of the more startling statistics I’ve come across is the fact that one out of five 4-year-olds is obese and children of color are at higher risk. The magnitude of the health crisis we currently face is unprecedented and strong measures must be taken in order to reverse these trends. Michelle Obama is right to follow up on the surgeon general’s call for greater awareness on breast-feeding. Anything to help reduce the surging obesity rates in this country is a step in the right direction.

Related:

• Rush Limbaugh opens his fat mouth about Michelle Obama’s fat butt

A version of this post first appeared on Civil Eats.

We pledge allegiance.Photo: Keo 101

“When I hear the word organic I think of Birkenstock-wearing hippies in Cambridge or Berkeley,” one of my clients told me recently. Other clients have referred to whole, organic foods as “yuppie food.”

There’s no doubt that food choice and diet is an indicator of class and culture. But what perplexes me is this notion that eating a diet of processed, sugary junk foods is what “real Americans” eat.

According to food historian Felipe Fernandez-Arsmesto, author of Near a Thousand Tables, food has always been a marker of class and rank in any particular society. “Food became a social differentiator at a remote, undocumented moment when some people started to command more food resources than others,” he writes, and later: “Class differentiation starts with the crudities of basic economics. People eat the best food they can afford: the preferred food of the rich therefore becomes a signifier of social aspirations.”

But this isn’t true in modern-day America. The preferred food of the rich is now considered elitist and scoffed at by many Americans. In fact, there is data to suggest that even though many Americans can afford higher-quality foods, they chose to eat cheaper and less nutritious foods. Jane Black and Brent Cunningham wrote an op-ed recently about this in the Washington Post:

Many in this country who have access to good food and can afford it simply don’t think it’s important. To them, food has become a front in America’s culture wars, and the crusade against fast and processed food is an obsession of “elites,” not “real Americans.”

I would argue that the advertising agencies that work hand-in-hand with the big players of industrial food should take much of the blame for this change. Within the span of three short generations, Americans have come to accept industrial food as their mainstay — not only have they accepted it, they defend it like they’d defend the American flag as a symbol of their patriotism and allegiance to the “real” America.

Prisoners of the mad men

There’s some perverse logic at work here, and it strikes me as vaguely similar to “Stockholm syndrome” — a paradoxical psychological phenomenon in which hostages express adulation and positive feelings towards their captors. While Americans are not experiencing a physical captivity, they are deeply mired in a psychological condition in which they’re captive to industrial food products and the corresponding ideologies that are ultimately harming them. Call it the American Fast Food Syndrome.

Part of the problem is that most Americans don’t realize that industrial food is a relatively recent development in the history of agriculture. Although human beings have been cultivating food for more than 10,000 years, industrial agriculture as we know it today has only been around for about 60 years. To many Americans, industrial food — food processed and packaged into cheap, convenient calorie-delivery vehicles — is simply “food.” They assume this is the way it has always been. Americans have all but forgotten that food might be the product of a farm and not a factory.

I think it’s safe to say we’ve reached peak indoctrination: two out of three Americans is obese or overweight and one out of five 4-year-olds is obese. This is more than just a coincidence as we embrace our American industrial food diet wholeheartedly.

The fact that food advertising is a completely unregulated force doesn’t help. Advertisers spend billions of dollars on campaigns to make us want to buy their products. In her book Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna Lappé writes of a sly technique advertisers often use. The food industry “is skilled at inoculation messaging, and part of its success comes from the ‘we’re one of you’ pitch … The message, whether from Perdue, Nestle, or Cargill, is that these companies are like us; they care about the same things we do. It’s a message that forms another strand of the inoculation strategy.”

This “we’re one of you” ideology coupled with industrial food products’ corresponding affordability is slick marketing at its best.

You may remember a similar strategy used by Sarah Palin and John McCain in their 2008 presidential campaign. Palin’s constant invocation of Joe the Plumber, Joe Six Pack, and soccer moms was the same “we’re one of you” rhetoric. Palin worked this angle again recently when she came running to the defense of the “real” Americans as she personally gave out cookies to elementary school students in her effort to stop the food police from depriving children of their god-given right to eat sugar-laden, processed foods. (Tom Laskawy wrote about GOP’s anti-good-food backlash for Grist.)

These messages, from advertisers and politicians alike, are drowning out a sensible approach to healthy eating and improved quality of life for many Americans.

Free your mind and your waistline will follow

I know that when people stop eating processed foods and start cooking whole foods, it’s nothing short of a revelation. My clients experience a transformation when they cut out junk foods — they lose weight, improve chronic health conditions, and feel better than they ever have before. Unfortunately, many Americans who really need guidance on healthy eating and cooking won’t get it. What they will get instead is a constant barrage of advertising for cheap industrial foods, paired with the all-American rhetoric of Sarah Palin and her ilk.

Until all Americans see industrial food for what it really is, education about healthier food options will remain a cultural battle. We can blame specific ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup or trans-fats indefinitely, but for a large portion of Americans, their cultural identity seems to be  tied up in Big Macs, fries, and Cokes. As long as the food industry continues to succeed at imbuing their products with a particular sense of American authenticity, and as long as Americans continue to buy this image — and reject the organic, sustainable, and local food movement as part of some liberal agenda — we will remain a country in the midst of a dire health and food crisis.

A version of this post first appeared on Civil Eats.