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.