Another Post About Issues

This week's issue is new dietary guidelines!

One of the comments on the above article really made a lot of sense to me. Maria in Texas writes:

A lot of this started when the government put out the food pyramid. Experts said it was wrong, had too many carbohydrates (since it treats fruits & veggies as one category and breads & cereals as another, and they are they same type of food source - carbohydrates) and people would gain weight. The government ignored this because of the food and sugar lobbies, and that is exactly what happened. Double the amount of carbohydrates you tell people to eat and they get fat. This still needs to change.

The other major contributing factor is the food industry. If a company does not produce 18-20% growth, it is not "hot" or in demand by Wall Street. Therefore, companies pursue this 20% bogey at all costs.

International opportunities are limited as most of the rest of the world would never consider eating the over-processed, over-salted, and over-sugared food that is the standard diet of Americans. Population growth doesn't help much, especially since the fastest growing demographics in America is immigrants, and the first generations generally continue to eat as they did in their home countries. They can't get a lot of pricing on food either - maybe a couple percent a year, but that doesn't help nearly enough.

So that leaves food companies trying to get 10-15% plus volume growth per year in a stable population. They spend millions of dollars trying to figure out how to get people to eat more sugar, pasta, breakfast cereals, cookies, potato chips, and ice cream. The sad truth is, the food company bosses can't get their bonuses unless they come up with new ways to get Americans to eat substantially more food every year. Clearly it has worked.

Another contributing factor comes from restaurants. There is a perverse logic in food pricing. If a restaurant (and that includes all categories - from fast food to 5-star) sells you a reasonable portion size, they make very little money. They need sell you 2-3 times as much as you should eat to cover the costs of running the restaurant and make profit - especially if they can't sell liquor. Most people eat whatever is put in front of them - I can't tell you how many times I've seen a single person eat an entire pasta bowl that had enough food for a whole family, and then remark (proudly?) that they've finished the entire bowl. Then the restaurants claim these large portion sizes as great values for the consumer. Once again, in order to keep their jobs and get bonuses, restaurants must encourage people to significantly overeat.

In addition to the millions spent trying to convince consumers to eat more, there are millions spent lobbying to keep healthful, truthful information out of the reach of consumers. Just look at the sugar lobby. Study after study links increased consumption of sugar to increases in obesity, but the sugar lobby insists that eating more sugar does not result in weight gain. Really???

Of course individuals have a responsibility for what and how much they put into their mouths, and their activity level. We now have an active food culture that did not exist even a decade ago. One of the unfortunate and perhaps unintended consequences is that people now feel that they are experts in food and nutrition from all the information they get on food television channels and internet website, and many of them cling fiercely to their mis-information and un-truths with an almost religious fervor. Which will likely make the clearly necessary re-education of the American population virtually impossible.

The sad truth is, no matter how big a proponent of personal responsibility one is, one has to admit that there are a lot of very powerful forces that have strong vested interests in making sure that Americans continue to eat too much of the poorest quality food possible. And until someone has enough guts to publicly call these obesity pushers out, point out their ridiculous claims (sugar lobby, anyone?), there is very little hope that this situation will be arrested, let alone reversed anytime soon.

What do you think?