Marion Nestle: How the Food Industry Hijacked Nutrition

The net result: two out of three peo­ple today are over­weight or obese, and the life expectancy of our chil­dren is actu­ally shorter than that of their parents.

While mis­lead­ing and ill-motivated dietary infor­ma­tion con­tin­ues to hit the news daily, there are for­tu­nately voices of rea­son becom­ing more res­o­nant and even begin­ning to affect gov­ern­ment deci­sions. For many years, one of these voices has been that of Marion Nestle.

Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health*—as well as Professor of Sociology—at New York University. She has served as a nutri­tion pol­icy advi­sor to the Department of Health and Human Services and as a mem­ber of nutri­tion and sci­ence advi­sory com­mit­tees to the US Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration. She is the author of sev­eral best-selling and highly respected books, among them Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health; Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety; and What to Eat, and has addi­tion­ally pub­lished two titles focus­ing on pet food: Pet Food Politics and Feed Your Pet Right.

She was also lib­er­ally quoted in the film doc­u­men­tary Food Fight, detail­ing how our mod­ern food sys­tem came to be the way it is.

Part of the prob­lem Nestle sees is that, for far too long, the food indus­try has mostly been focused on profit over nutri­tion. “Just look at the mar­ket in gen­eral,” Nestle told Organic Connections. “All you have to do is observe the way the food indus­try behaves and see that sales take prece­dence over any­thing else. That’s the way Wall Street works. If you look at news­pa­per accounts of quar­terly reports, it’s clear that growth every 90 days is crit­i­cally impor­tant for any cor­po­ra­tion. For food cor­po­ra­tions it’s par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult because there’s so much food available—twice as much as any­body needs, or as the coun­try needs as a whole.”

An all-too-typical exam­ple of how profit is such a prime moti­va­tion can be seen in fig­ures Nestle cites in her book Food Politics in rela­tion to food mar­ket­ing to chil­dren. “Soft drink com­pa­nies unapolo­get­i­cally name 8- to 12-year-olds as mar­ket­ing tar­gets,” she says. “McDonald’s pro­duces com­mer­cials, adver­tise­ments, and a Web site specif­i­cally aimed at chil­dren 8–13. In January 2000 Quaker Oats began a $15-million, 5-month cam­paign devoted entirely to pro­mot­ing sales of its heav­ily sug­ared Cap’n Crunch cereal to children.”

Does all this adver­tis­ing work? Apparently it does—both on chil­dren and their par­ents. In her 2006 book What to Eat, Nestle observes, “Unbelievable as it may seem, one-third of all veg­eta­bles con­sumed in the United States come from just three sources: french fries, potato chips and ice­berg lettuce.”

Four Factors in Food Marketing

Nestle points out that the food industry’s mar­ket­ing imper­a­tives prin­ci­pally con­cern four fac­tors: taste, cost, con­ve­nience and pub­lic con­fu­sion. For the taste fac­tor, the gen­eral trend is for sweet, fatty and salty, as these fla­vors sell the most. For cost, the empha­sis is on keep­ing costs low both for con­sumers and—especially—for the man­u­fac­tur­ers. Convenience, of course, is a prin­ci­pal dri­ving fac­tor due to mod­ern lifestyles.

But the most inter­est­ing of these four is pub­lic con­fu­sion. “People obtain infor­ma­tion about diet and health from the media—newspapers, mag­a­zines, tele­vi­sion, radio and, more recently, the Internet,” Nestle explained. “Media out­lets require news, and reporters are par­tial to break­throughs, sim­ple take-home lessons, and con­tro­ver­sies. Virtually every food and bev­er­age com­pany is rep­re­sented by a trade or public-relations firm whose job it is to pro­mote a pos­i­tive image of that item among con­sumers, pro­fes­sion­als and the media.”

Nestle also describes how dietary research tends to focus on a sin­gle nutri­ent at a time. Research on a sin­gle nutri­ent is more likely to gain media inter­est and thus to gar­ner head­lines. The prob­lem is that sin­gle nutri­ents don’t func­tion in iso­la­tion in the body. But this approach allows a pizza com­pany to pro­mote the cal­cium in the cheese top­ping on its fast-food pizza as help­ing to build strong bones.

“Food com­pa­nies, research groups and their lob­by­ists can take advan­tage of the results of single-nutrient research to claim that prod­ucts con­tain­ing the ‘ben­e­fi­cial nutri­ent’ pro­mote health,” Nestle said. “If peo­ple are con­fused about nutri­tion, they will be more likely to accept such claims at face value.”

As Nestle shows, lob­by­ing gov­ern­ment agen­cies is a big part of bring­ing these claims into the main­stream. She illus­trates that food lob­by­ing has grown dra­mat­i­cally in the last half-century. In the 1950s, only 25 groups of food pro­duc­ers dom­i­nated agri­cul­tural lob­by­ing. By the mid-1980s there were 84 such groups. By the late 1990s there were hundreds—if not thousands—of busi­nesses, asso­ci­a­tions and indi­vid­u­als attempt­ing to influ­ence fed­eral deci­sions related to every con­ceiv­able aspect of food and bev­er­age pro­duc­tion, man­u­fac­ture, sales, ser­vice and trade.

Nestle says that in addi­tion to lob­by­ists, food com­pa­nies co-opt nutri­tion pro­fes­sion­als as spokes­peo­ple to estab­lish an image of their prod­ucts as nutritious—and infor­ma­tion from them is also con­sid­ered “news­wor­thy” by the media. Intentional pub­lic con­fu­sion appears on prod­uct pack­ag­ing too—and Nestle cited an exam­ple: “I’ve just picked up a box of General Mills’ Total cereal, and in big print on the front it says, ‘Blueberry Pomegranate.’ So it’s ‘Total Blueberry Pomegranate cereal—100% nutri­tion.’ Anybody look­ing at that will think that not only is it going to meet all his or her nutri­tional needs but it’s got blue­berry and pome­gran­ate, which by this time are known to be quote ‘super­foods’ unquote. The thing is, there is no blue­berry or pome­gran­ate in the cereal—none, zero.

“If you’re a food com­pany, your job is to make peo­ple want to buy your prod­uct. There’s noth­ing wrong with that; that’s the way busi­ness works. It’s just that when they do things that I con­sider mis­lead­ing, I think they cross an eth­i­cal line, or in some cases a legal line.”

Turning the Tide

In addi­tion to nutri­tion con­fu­sion, another prob­lem is the fact that a large per­cent­age of con­sumers have spent their entire lives liv­ing with the exist­ing food sys­tem. “If we want to do some­thing about child obe­sity, we have to reverse a lot of the changes that led to it in the first place,” Nestle advised. “Society has changed an enor­mous amount in the last 30 years since the early 1980s, when obe­sity wasn’t such a prob­lem. And those changes will be extremely dif­fi­cult to reverse, in part because peo­ple have grown up liv­ing with this sys­tem and don’t know any other sys­tem. Just like they can’t remem­ber when it was okay for kids to walk to school, they can’t remem­ber when foods weren’t pushed on tele­vi­sion to the extent that they are now. Just like they can’t remem­ber when it was okay for kids to play out­side by them­selves after school, they can’t remem­ber when there wasn’t food in the schools all day long—and when there weren’t soda machines in schools. They can’t remem­ber when kids weren’t being mar­keted to all the time.

“Those rep­re­sent huge soci­etal changes. People can’t remem­ber when food wasn’t avail­able absolutely every­where. The exam­ple I like using is book­stores: When did it become okay to eat in bookstores—or libraries, for that matter?

“These are changes in soci­ety that occurred as a result of food indus­try pres­sures to sell more food to more peo­ple in more places.”

Unfortunately, true infor­ma­tion about the state of our food sys­tem rarely reaches the major media. Once in a great while, how­ever, some­one like Jamie Oliver will man­age to make it there. “I was dubi­ous about Jamie Oliver, but I have been con­verted to a total fan,” Nestle said. “I think what he is doing is absolutely amaz­ing. Yes, it’s real­ity tele­vi­sion, and, yes, it’s all about him. But I like the way he’s just in there get­ting his hands dirty up to his elbows, deal­ing with peo­ple on things that nobody wants to talk about and telling the truth as he sees it, no mat­ter how uncom­fort­able it is. And, yes, it’s exploitive; but he’s get­ting a huge audi­ence and peo­ple are talk­ing about it, and I think that’s good.

“I also like the way he has exposed some of the sys­temic as well as per­sonal aspects of obe­sity. He’s not totally focused on the per­sonal; he’s also demon­strat­ing, in a way that I think is a big eye-opener for a lot of peo­ple, how the Department of Agriculture’s rules, for exam­ple, make it so dif­fi­cult to serve health­ier food in schools.”

It’s clear that some­thing sub­stan­tial must be done. The gov­ern­ment finally passed a new school-lunch program—but when bro­ken down on a per-meal basis, it doesn’t help much. “I was dis­ap­pointed that the increase in reim­burse­ment is 6 cents per meal,” Nestle remarked. “That doesn’t really address the prob­lem in any way whatsoever.”

Government Adds to the Problem

It would seem that orga­ni­za­tions such as the USDA should have a man­date to improve the health of the coun­try. But there appears to be a built-in con­flict of interest.

“The Department of Agriculture is full of con­tra­dic­tions,” said Nestle. “First, while it sub­si­dizes corn and soy­beans, it is also respon­si­ble for dietary advice to the pub­lic that tells peo­ple to eat more fruits and veg­eta­bles. But fruits and veg­eta­bles aren’t subsidized.

“The sub­si­dies for corn and soy­beans mean that corn sweet­en­ers and corn oil and soy oil are cheaper than they would be if the true cost of pro­duc­ing those foods were fac­tored in. That has encour­aged processed-food mak­ers to use a lot of soy oil and high-fructose corn syrup, because they’re cheap.”

Going Back to the Beginning

In look­ing over this entire sit­u­a­tion, it might seem dif­fi­cult to find a place to start in revers­ing this out-of-control sys­tem. Nestle has some strong advice in this regard, however—in a sim­i­lar way to other pio­neers such as Alice Waters and Chef Ann Cooper.

“The school food issue is a very impor­tant one and a very good place to start, because peo­ple can go into a school and make a dif­fer­ence. It’s not that hard to do. I mean, I would pick an eas­ier school than Jamie Oliver did—he picked one that is as dif­fi­cult as any could be. But there are plenty of schools in which changes are being made, and they are very impres­sive changes.

“This is true even of pub­lic schools in more dif­fi­cult places. There are lots of schools in New York City, for exam­ple, where peo­ple are work­ing on them one by one to try and bring them to the point where they can do a bet­ter job.”

But the bot­tom line is—do some­thing. “If you don’t act, noth­ing will hap­pen,” Nestle said. “Not doing any­thing is a deci­sion to allow the sys­tem to pro­ceed as it has been pro­ceed­ing. If you want to take action, there are plenty of ways. Individuals have made a big dif­fer­ence in lots of dif­fer­ent ways. Some of it is leg­isla­tive; some of it is on a local level.”

More infor­ma­tion:

Read Marion Nestle’s excel­lent Food Politics blog at www.foodpolitics.com. Follow Marion on Twitter: @marionnestle.

Food Politics is avail­able from the Organic Connections bookstore.

*Paulette Goddard Professor: an endowed pro­fes­sor­ship that is part of a major bequest to New York University from the estate of noted film actress Paulette Goddard.