Recently, I wrote here on Civil Eats that it may not be long before the food industry will be proven wrong about their two favorite messages: All calories are created equal, and it’s all about personal responsibility. Well, it appears that science may be one step closer to proving at least half of that equation wrong and that in fact; all calories are not created equal. The latest study, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) this week, found that when it came to weight loss and maintaining weight loss, those who ate a low carbohydrate, high fat diet kept more weight off than those who were on either a low glycemic diet or a low fat, high carbohydrate diet.

While all participants in the study ate the same number of calories, the types consumed varied. The low fat diet contained 60 percent carbohydrates, 20 percent protein, and 20 percent fat. The low glycemic diet contained 40 percent carbs, 40 percent fat, and 20 percent protein (with a focus on minimally processed foods). The low carb diet had 10 percent of calories from carbs, 60 percent from fat, and 30 percent from protein.

Compared to those on the low fat diet, those following the low carb diet burned 350 calories more per day and those on the low glycemic diet burned 150 calories more per day.

The most compelling part of this study is that it calls into question the long-held belief in the scientific and medical communities that all calories are created equal. This is a message the food industry has also seized on since it means they can continue to pump out ultra processed nutritionally void foods and tell Americans to “eat them in moderation.” If all calories are created equal, the food industry says, then there are no bad foods.

But this message doesn’t just come from the food industry, Marion Nestle, a long-time critic of Big Food, has spoken about calories in a similar way. She wrote on her blog that the JAMA study was too small (it had 21 participants) and that more research was needed outside of a controlled setting. She’s quoted in USA Today saying:

Longer studies conducted among people in their own environments, not with such controlled meals, have shown “little difference in weight loss and maintenance between one kind of diet and another.” More research is needed to show that interesting results like these are applicable in real life, she says. “In the meantime, if you want to lose weight, eat less.”

I disagree. As a nutrition educator, I think that telling people to “eat less” is largely ineffective and continues to place the burden on the consumer as part of the personal responsibility credo. On the other hand, telling people to eliminate processed, refined carbohydrates and sugars, while eating plenty of high quality fats, proteins, and vegetables seems to be a more workable solution to stimulating weight loss. Part of the reason this may be so effective is because simple carbohydrates and sugars actually stimulate appetite and cravings, while fats, proteins, and complex carbohydrates like vegetables, beans, and legumes satiate and stabilize blood sugar.

A recent report put out by the World Public Health Nutrition Association found that processing does matter, noting that ultra processed foods are “habit-forming and some would say often at least quasi-addictive. They do displace healthy meals, dishes and foods and thus are liable to cause obesity or else at least mild malnutrition.”

The addictive factor of these foods is highly problematic and there’s evidence to suggest that eating sugar makes you crave and consume more sugar starting with our experiences as babies and even in utero (see a recent article on Gilt Taste for more on this).

And according to Robert Lustig, a professor of clinical pediatrics at UC San Francisco, a low carb diet or a low glycemic diet is what helps keep our insulin levels low, he believes that elevated insulin levels are at the root of obesity. “To borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton: It’s the insulin, stupid. The reason any diet will work is because it lowers insulin. And a diet that doesn’t, like the traditional low-fat diet, won’t work,” he said in a recent Los Angeles Times article.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that once my clients cut sugar and simple carbohydrates from their diets their cravings for these kinds of foods quickly dissipate. It’s only observational, but I see it repeatedly and so do other nutritionists and doctors I know.

Over online at The New York Times, Mark Bittman wrote about the JAMA study with a conclusive evaluation, “The message is pretty simple: unprocessed foods give you a better chance of idealizing your weight—and your health. Because all calories are not created equal.”

But there’s still no consensus among doctors, nutritionists, researchers, or writers.

The implications for coming to a scientific consensus about whether or not types of calories do matter cannot be understated since it could effect regulation for Big Food as well as the dietary recommendations from the government which translates to (among other things) what children eat in school every day. Right now, MyPlate recommends that Americans eat an average of 6.3 servings of grains a day. Even the American Diabetes Association recommends a high carbohydrate and low fat diet. But if the results from this latest study are accurate, all of these recommendations may ultimately prove harmful. Acknowledging that all calories are not created equal and that ultra processed foods are detrimental to everyone would go a long way in changing our crash course with diet related disease and death.

There was a time when corpulence was a sign of wealth and luxury. But in modern day Western countries, quite the opposite is true. In fact, a recent study found that fully one third of homeless people living in Boston are obese. “This study suggests that obesity may be the new malnutrition of the homeless in the United States,” wrote the researchers, led by Harvard Medical School student Katherine Koh, whose study is forthcoming in the  Journal of Urban Health.

And it’s not just the U.S. that is reporting these kinds of findings, a New Zealand study of preschoolers found that 82 percent did not get enough dietary fiber and 68 percent did not have enough long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are found in fish and nuts. Despite these nutritional deficiencies, the researchers also found that fully one-third of preschoolers are overweight or obese.

These findings highlight an interesting contradiction—obesity correlates with malnourishment. Research indicates that lack of proper nutrition—even when people over consume calories—is at the root of obesity. Part of the reason this seems contradictory is because nutrition science has long held that all calories are created equal and that with the right amount of caloric intake, it would be difficult to also be malnourished. Coincidentally, this is also what the food industry would have us believe. In a recent interview in USAToday, Katie Bayne, president and general manager at Coca-Cola said in response to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposed ban on large size sugary drinks, “A calorie is a calorie. What our drinks offer is hydration. That’s essential to the human body. We offer great taste and benefits whether it’s an uplift or carbohydrates or energy. We don’t believe in empty calories. We believe in hydration.”

I asked senior research scientist at MIT and author of several papers on the subject, Stephanie Seneff, for a response to Bayne’s comments. “I hate this calorie is a calorie message,” Seneff said in a telephone interview. “It’s completely wrong. When you eat a high carbohydrate diet, especially a processed foods diet, you’re getting way too much fuel compared to all those other things you need. And this imbalance is what leads to the obesity profile.”

For comparison’s sake, eight ounces of milk provides about 150 calories, along with calcium, magnesium, vitamins A and D, protein, fatty acids, and many other nutrients (largely dependent on what the cows ate and the quality of the milk with organic and grass-fed being the most nutritious). An eight-ounce can of Coke with 100 calories provides virtually no nutrients (the label reads: Not a significant source of fat calories, saturated fat, trans fat, cholesterol, fiber, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium and iron) but it does contain 27 grams of sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

Seneff said that she blames the soda industry in particular because this is where children are consuming large amounts of sugar. “If we did just one simple thing and had school children switch from drinking Coke to drinking whole milk this would have a huge difference,” she said.

Unfortunately, this will never be simple in part because the American Beverage Association lobbies hard to prevent any type of regulation for soda or for marketing it to children. In addition, the USDA’s MyPlate recommends low-fat and fat-free milks, which is what’s served in school cafeterias across the country. Seneff emphasized the importance of whole milk versus low-fat and fat-free milk because she believes the emphasis on low-fat foods in the American diet is largely responsible for our obesity epidemic, among other illnesses. “Children in particular need the fat desperately to develop their brains,” she said. “And this is why we have ADHD and autism. I think these problems are very much a consequence of our obsession with a low fat diet.”

But it’s not just brains that suffer as a result of our low fat diet, Seneff says, and she is not the first to attribute our low fat diet to our increasing obesity rates. The science writer Gary Taubes has been saying so for over a decade. The stigma against fats, particularly saturated fats appears to be waning (I wrote about this last year here on Civil Eats).

Seneff believes the major factors contributing to obesity are a deficiency in consuming fats, particularly animal fats and all of the nutrients that come with those fats; our overly-processed food diet (and specifically our consumption of HFCS); and our lack of exposure to sunlight. What’s more, according to her research, all three of these components amount to the perfect storm of metabolic dysfunction.

Carbohydrates and sugars in our diets compound the problem of our cell’s inability to digest and regulate the amount of sugar in our blood. “The key problem is the highly processed foods Americans eat, which have enormous amounts of carbohydrates, and carbohydrates that are already partially digested so that they move into the blood very quickly as sugar,”  Seneff said.

Seneff is working on a new theory that isolates one nutrient deficiency in particular that manifests as a result of the Standard American Diet. “In my studies, sulfate deficiency is everywhere,” she said. She believes this is at the root of many modern diseases as well as obesity. Where is sulfur found? In foods that are also high in cholesterol, like animal proteins and fish. Certain vegetables, like broccoli, cauliflower, garlic, and onions are also high in sulfate but as Seneff points out, these are often deficient in sulfate and other nutrients as a result of poor soil management and degradation of soil quality.

Finally, Seneff is concerned with our lack of exposure to sunlight, which coincidentally also produces cholesterol sulfate in our bodies. “It’s specifically a deficiency in sunlight exposure to the skin, which is much more than just taking a vitamin D supplement,” she said. “Cholesterol sulfate and vitamin D sulfate are both synthesized in the skin in exposure to sunlight, which is a wonderful way to deliver sulfate and cholesterol to all the tissues. Really, most Americans suffer from a cholesterol deficiency problem rather than a cholesterol excess problem but it’s demonized everywhere and it’s the exact wrong message.”

Another widely disseminated message from the food industry—it’s all about personal responsibility— appears rather faulty when we look at the findings from the study of obese preschoolers. Taylor, the lead researcher in the study, said that regulation had to be part of the answer. “There hasn’t been a massive decrease in the willpower of two year olds,” she said in a recent article. Instead, as the studies have found, it is about the poor quality of highly processed foods.

The study of the homeless in Boston confirms the fact that one can be food insecure while consuming an abundance of calories that lead to obesity. In fact, the term food insecure was coined to indicate that many people now experience access to plenty of calories but a dearth in real nutrition.

If these two studies and Seneff’s new research are any indication, it may not be long before the food industry will be proven wrong: All calories are not created equal, nor is it all about personal responsibility. Until then, pressuring Big Food to properly regulate and label foods might be the only way to curb our nation’s addiction to cheap, nutritionally void products. But time is of the essence—by current estimates one in three Americans will be diabetic by 2050 if things don’t drastically change.

The controversy surrounding New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s recent plan to ban sugary drinks larger than 16 ounces ranges from praise for taking on “America’s expanding waistline” to deriding him as a “nanny” for infringing on our personal choices and freedoms. But what’s largely missing from the debate is a real critique of the true villain in this battle—Big Food.

Those who favored the decision heralded Bloomberg: The Washington Post, in an editorial, writes, “The country need [sic] innovative leaders with a similar determination to take on America’s expanding waistline.” Frank Bruni writes in The New York Times, “Cry all you want about a nanny state, but as a city and a nation we’ve gorged and guzzled past the point where a gentle nudge toward roughage suffices. We need a weight watcher willing to mete out some stricter discipline.”

Those who feel our ability to buy a 32-ounce container of Coca-Cola has become the stand-in for civil liberties, such as the Center for Consumer Freedom, placed an ad in New York City newspapers, featuring Bloomberg as a “nanny” with a tagline that reads: “You only thought you lived in the land of the free.” Jon Stewart did a bit last Thursday lamenting the fact that he agreed with Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who said Bloomberg was taking away our personal freedoms. And a New York Times editorial claimed the Mayor was overreaching, writing: “[T]oo much nannying with a ban might well cause people to tune out.”

In the meantime, Big Food still has free reign to produce and market harmful products with virtually no regulation or oversight. So far, the government has been incredibly weak on regulating food producers and advertisements. Last year, the Obama administration proposed voluntary guidelines for the types of food advertised to children. The guidelines were extremely modest, allowing for two-thirds of processed foods to remain unchanged and placed mostly insignificant caps on the allowance of sugar, fat, and sodium in products marketed to kids. Even these voluntary guidelines were called “unworkable and unrealistic” by one prominent industry group.

This is not the case in Europe. In 2007, the French government ordered all food advertisements to carry warning labels telling consumers to stop snacking, exercise, and eat more fruits and vegetables. These warning labels are found in advertisements on television, radio, billboards, and the Internet for all processed, sweetened or salted food and drinks. Other European countries have taken similar measures. In Sweden and Norway, all food and beverage advertising to children is forbidden. In Ireland, there is a ban on TV ads for candy and fast food and the ban prohibits using celebrities and sports stars to promote junk food to kids. According to Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bebe, snacking is generally discouraged in France and children eat three meals a day with one small snack around four in the afternoon.

Regulations like those in Europe are the kind that could help to encourage new cultural norms around food in this country—and they don’t target the consumer by banning or taxing particular foods but rather they force corporations to label their unhealthy products and abide by advertising regulation.

Professor and author of Weighing In, Julie Guthman, had this to say about the ban: “Ultimately, I would prefer to see regulation at the point of production. If we as a polity think that sugary drinks are detrimental to public health, we shouldn’t allow them to be produced,” she said in an e-mail. This would surely be a more radical solution since it would place the burden on the corporations rather than the consumer. Guthman said the ban is a better idea than a soda tax because, “A regressive soda tax punishes those who have the least ability to pay.” But she’s weary of the ban since it still targets consumers and  “focuses on the size of the drink which would seem to suggest that individual consumers can’t make good decisions. That is terribly paternalistic,” Guthman said.

The idea of a super-size soda ban is a broader variation of Bloomberg’s proposed plan last year to disallow the purchase of soda with food stamps. Critics of this initiative felt it was also paternalistic and stigmatized the poor who would not be able shop like other consumers. The difference with the current soda ban is that all New Yorkers would be affected and it is here that the ban may potentially bring benefit by creating new cultural norms around food and beverage choice.

A 2010 study completed by the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity found that the barrage of fast food advertising makes kids think processed, junk foods are “normal and expected.” The same can surely be said for the increase in portion sizes. As long it is “normal” and culturally accepted to drink a 20, 32 or 64-ounce soda along with that burger and fries people will continue to do so.

As Ronald Bayer, a professor at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia put it in The New York Times, “The behaviors that harm our collective health are not, by and large, the result of bad or foolish individual choices. These “bad habits” are shaped by our culture, social arrangements and commercial interests.”

Ultimately, this ban may prove ineffectual since consumers will still be able to buy the equivalent of the larger size sodas in other ways, like buying two bottles or going to restaurants where refills are free. And of course, sodas are not the only problem when it comes to our unhealthful diets.

Mayor Bloomberg is brave to go head-to-head with Big Food by limiting portion size and trying to create a new norm but this tactic might further distract from the underlying problem of our virtually unregulated toxic and super-sized food supply. If nothing else, the proposed ban highlights the deeply complex and troubling conundrum that our current food system presents. Something clearly must be done—it just seems that regulating and curtailing the powers of Big Food would be a better place to focus our attention rather than merely capping the portion size for one of many sugary, addictive, non-nutritious substances at our never-ending disposal.

A version of this post first appeared in The Atlantic

Conventional wisdom says that weight gain or loss is based on the energy balance model of "calories in, calories out," which is often reduced to the simple refrain, "eat less, and exercise more." But new research reveals a far more complex equation that appears to rest on several other important factors affecting weight gain. Researchers in a relatively new field are looking at the role of industrial chemicals and non-caloric aspects of foods -- called obesogens -- in weight gain. Scientists conducting this research believe that these substances that are now prevalent in our food supply may be altering the way our bodies store fat and regulate our metabolism. But not everyone agrees. Many scientists, nutritionists, and doctors are still firm believers in the energy balance model. A debate has ensued, leaving a rather unclear picture as to what's really at work behind our nation's spike in obesity.

Bruce Blumberg, professor of developmental and cell biology and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of California, Irvine, who coined the term "obesogen," studies the effect that organotins -- a class of persistent organic pollutants that are widely used in the manufacture of polyvinylchloride plastics, as fungicides and pesticides on crops, as slimicides in industrial water systems, as wood preservatives, and as marine antifouling agents -- have on the body's metabolism. Organotins, which he considers to be obesogens, "change how your body responds to calories," he says. "So the ones we study, tributyltin and triphenyltin, actually cause exposed animals to have more and bigger fat cells. The animals that we treat with these chemicals don't eat a different diet than the ones who don't get fat. They eat the same diet -- we're not challenging them with a high-fat or a high-carbohydrate diet. They're eating normal food, and they're getting fatter."

A widely reported study that came out in January in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) would seem to dispute this finding: it confirms the belief in the energy balance model, and has been cited as proof by many researchers working in the field. I asked an author of the study, Dr. George Bray, professor of medicine at Louisiana State University, about the myriad of additives and industrial ingredients in our food that were not accounted for in this study. "It doesn't make any difference," he said in a telephone interview. "Calories count. If you can show me that it doesn't work, I'd love to see it. Or anybody else who says it doesn't -- there ain't no data the other way around."

The participants in the AJCN study were given low, normal, and high amounts of protein and 1,000 more calories than needed. The study does not take into account the content and form of calories, how they were processed, or with what additives or industrial chemicals.

Bray doesn't believe that additives or how foods are processed or produced will ultimately affect the outcome of studies. In fact, he completed research in 2007 that he refers to as his "Big Mac study," which fed participants three meals a day for three days giving one group fast-food items like Big Macs and the other group foods made "from scratch." Bray says the results showed that the type of food made no difference: "At least in an acute study measuring glucose tolerance, insulin, and things -- they don't make any difference. Now, if you fed them over a longer time period, it's clearly going to be the quantity that matters, largely."

One study conducted at Princeton University indicates that types of calories do matter. Researchers found that rats drinking high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) gained significantly more weight than rats drinking sugar water, even though the amount of calories consumed was the same. The rats drinking HFCS also exhibited signs of metabolic syndrome, including abnormal weight gain, especially visceral fat around the belly, and significant increases in circulating triglycerides.

Miriam Bocarsly, the lead author of the Princeton study and a Ph.D. candidate there, said in a phone interview: "The question of calories in, calories out is a very good one and is highly debated in the field. You have traditional nutritionists who say 'energy in energy out,' but we have this result and at this point all we can really say is that this is what is happening in the rat model. Something is obviously different between HFCS and table sugar, and the next question is, What is that difference?"

Blumberg says that fructose itself is an obesogen. "Crystalline fructose doesn't exist in nature, we're making that," he says. "Fructose is not a food. People think fructose comes from fruit but it doesn't. The fructose that we eat is synthesized. Yes, it's derived from food. But cyanide is derived from food, too. Would you call it a food?"

Robert H. Lustig, a pediatric neuroendocrinologist and a professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, also believes that fructose is an obesogen. "I personally do lump fructose in with [obesogens]," he told me in an email. "There are those who don't, because fructose is a nutrient, and they want to think of an obesogen as a foreign chemical. But because fructose tricks the brain into eating more in a free-range situation, it has some properties consistent with an obesogen."

Lustig is another researcher and doctor who finds fault in the calories in, calories out model. "I don't believe in the energy balance model, which is calorie-centric," he says. "I believe in the fat deposition model, which is insulin-centric. The reason is that by altering insulin dynamics, you can alter both caloric consumption and physical activity behavior. This has been my research for the past 16 years." What Lustig means is that by increasing circulating insulin -- often as a result of consuming too much fructose -- people become hungrier and more fatigued, which results in overeating and little motivation to exercise.

Another possible obesogen that has made headlines recently is bisphenol-A (BPA), which is found in an overwhelming number of food items and packaging material. Frederick S. vom Saal, curators' professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia, receives funding the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences for his research on BPA. "We do animal experiments with chemicals like BPA, and we dramatically alter the way fat is regulated in those animals," vom Saal said in a phone interview. "And they're not changing their food intake."

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that "nearly all" Americans tested have BPA in their urine, "which indicates widespread exposure to BPA in the U.S. population." The American Chemistry Council has called for a ban on BPA in baby bottles and sippy cups (which California and several other states have already done), and some food manufacturers are already moving away from using BPA in their packaging. On Monday, Campbell's Soup announced it will stop using BPA in the lining of its cans. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is scheduled to decide by the end of March whether to ban the chemical's use in all food and beverage packaging.

Vom Saal believes that BPA is only the most prominent example of many substances in our food supply and environment that functions as an obesogen. "If people really want to solve the obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease epidemics," he says, "it isn't a wise thing to be ignoring any contributor to this. And we're not obese just because of HFCS, or because of BPA. I also know that nicotine and PCBs and other chemicals are implicated in diabetes and metabolic disease as well."

The energy balance model diverts responsibility back to the consumer because conventional wisdom says the spike in obesity is the result of people consuming more foods than ever before.

Lustig echoes vom Saal's belief that a wide range of substances in our food supply and our environment are likely leading to obesity and metabolic disease based on hosts of studies of various substances. These include soy-based infant formula, phthalates (used in many plastics), PCBs (found in coolant and electrical equipment), DDE (a type of pesticide), fungicides, and atrazine (a common pesticide).

If the obesogen theory comes to be accepted and casts doubt on the energy balance model, the food industry will be in trouble. It would be harder to keep promoting diet and "health" foods that may be low in calories but that also contain an array of substances that may actually prove to contribute to weight gain.

The emphasis that industry places on personal choice puts the onus back on the individual and leaves the consumer with tough decisions to make about industrial food products and additives. The food industry does not disclose what kinds of potential obesogens, like certain organotins or BPA, are in its products, because these substances are not required to be listed on labels and are difficult for the FDA to regulate. With an emerging debate in the scientific community and an absence of information on labels, consumers are left making their best guess on the safety and health of foods.

"People say to me all the time, 'What do I do?'" vom Saal says. "And the answer is, there's not much we can do, because industry has no legal mandate to tell you, and so they refuse to tell you the way they're using these chemicals. How do you avoid something you are blind to?"

The energy balance model also diverts responsibility back to the consumer because conventional wisdom says that the spike in obesity and diet-related disease is the result of people consuming more foods than ever before. But a review of the literature in The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality, and Ideology by Michael Gard and Jan Wright asserts that there is no evidence that food intake levels have increased in industrialized countries, or that activity levels have declined. According to Gard and Wright, some studies even suggest a reduction in energy intake over the past several decades.

Julie Guthman, a professor of community studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, points out in her new book, Weighing In, that the amount of calories consumed across racial lines and income levels varies little, according to a study by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). This is despite the fact that obesity and overweight do vary across racial lines and income levels: Poorer people tend to be more obese, and African Americans and Latinos have higher rates of obesity than do whites. This means there must be some other mechanism, Guthman says, besides excess calories, in the varying levels of obesity. In her book, she refers to the possible role of environmental factors like exposure to obesogens and other toxins, stress, and non-nutritional aspects of food.

Guthman would like to see stronger regulation on the part of the government, and a discussion that focuses more on how food is produced and not just on how much is eaten. "I think people would like to say that weight loss is simple and that it's all about changing personal behavior," Guthman says. "So there's an emphasis on trying to make people have better lifestyles or on changing the built environment."

This seems to fit with Marion Nestle's approach to educating people on weight loss. Nestle is the co-author of a new book on the subject, Why Calories Count. "BPA, PCBs, and other such contaminating chemicals can't possibly be good for health," she said in an email. "But it's really hard to prove that they cause demonstrable harm. They might have something to do with obesity -- I suppose it's not impossible -- but why invoke complicated explanations when the evidence for calories is so strong? Let's say obesogens affect a body weight regulatory factor, which they very well might do. But so what? Weight is regulated by more than a hundred biological factors, and these are redundant, which means that if something goes wrong with one of them the others fill in the deficit."

The "so what," Guthman says, is that "We really don't understand the science enough, and there's new evidence in the science that completely re-shifts how we think about these things."

According to Blumberg, the food industry would like to discredit emerging research on obesogens. "What industry typically does is fund studies that produce the opposite conclusions, thereby shedding doubt on the science," he says. "If you take BPA as an example, the vast majority of studies performed by independent government and academic scientists show that it has numerous deleterious effects on health. In contrast, not a single industry-funded or -conducted study has found any hazard associated with BPA."

Can we afford to continue to frame the discussion simply in terms of calories in and calories out? Or by looking only at conventional categories like fat, protein, and carbohydrates and diary, meat, grains, and vegetables? Given the proliferation of industrial pollutants and the ultra-processing of foods in our current food systems, it seems that we can't.

“What new scientific paradigms like this do is shake up the existing science,” Guthman says. “People are resistant to it because so much is embedded in the old paradigm — once you open that up, the science is open to all sorts of other claims.”

If there were any lingering doubts as to whom our elected representatives really work for, they were put to rest Tuesday when Congress announced that frozen pizza was a vegetable. The United States Congress voted to rebuke new USDA guidelines for school lunches that would have increased the amount of fresh fruit and vegetables in school cafeterias and instead declared that the tomato paste on frozen pizza qualified it as a vegetable. For this we can thank large food companies -- in this case ConAgra and Schwan -- which pressured Congress to comply with their financial interests. It simply doesn't suit the makers of frozen pizza, chicken nuggets and tater tots for schools to offer real food in the form of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Many conservative lawmakers are also insisting that the federal government shouldn't tell people what to eat. This is the same argument Sarah Palin used against Michelle Obama's Let's Move! campaign to the rallying cry, "nanny-state."

But the government clearly does not control the food Americans eat. Corporations do. In this case ConAgra and Schwan are quite literally determining what the vast majority of our school children will be fed in school cafeterias: A veritable chemical concoction made to look like pizza. These are the ingredients for the "traditional 4x6 school pizza" made by ConAgra:

CRUST: (Enriched wheat flour (bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, soybean oil, dextrose, baking powder (sodium bicarbonate, sodium aluminum sulfate, cornstarch, monocalcium phosphate, calcium sulfate), yeasts (yeast, starch, sorbitan monostearate, ascorbic acid), salt, dough conditioners (wheat flour, salt, soy oil, L-cysteine, ascorbic acid, fungal enzyme), wheat gluten, soy flour).SAUCE: (water, tomato paste (31 percent NTSS), pizza seasoning (salt, sugar, spices, dehydrated onion, guar and xanthan gum, garlic powder, potassium sorbate, citric acid, tricalcium phophate and soybean oil (prevent caking)), modified food starch). SHREDDED MOZZARELLA

CHEESE: (Pasteurized part skim milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes). SHREDDED MOZZARELLA

CHEESE SUBSTITUTE: (Water, oil (soybean oil, partially hydrogenated soybean oil with citric acid), casein, milk protein concentrate, modified food starch, contains 2 percent or less of the following: sodium aluminum phosphate, salt, lactic acid, mozzarella cheese type flavor (cheese (milk, culture, rennet, salt), milk solids, disodium phosphate), disodium phosphate, sorbic acid, nutrient blend (magnesium oxide, zinc oxide, calcium pantothenate, riboflavin and vitamin B-12), vitamin A palmitate).

It's not even pizza, much less a vegetable. (And if you think that's bad take a look at the ingredients for the "Pepperoni, Reduced Fat Pizza").

This vote by Congress makes it abundantly clear who calls the shots when it comes to feeding our nation's children. According to The New York Times food companies have spent $5.6 million lobbying against these new rules.

Meanwhile, writer Ed Bruske brings up an important, related point on The Slow Cook. He writes:

[This] also provides a vivid illustration of what happens when you go after the foods kids most love in the lunch line. Pizza is the all-time favorite school lunch food, followed by potatoes in all their guises. Essentially, the proposed new guidelines would sharply cut back on foods kids really like, and replace them with things they hate: vegetables, beans and whole grains. Turns out there are huge amounts of money at stake behind the foods beloved by the 32 million children who participate in the national school lunch program. Frozen food companies are protecting their share the best way they know how: using their clout with their local congressman.

He goes on:

Other efforts to mess with pizza also have failed. In Berkeley, for instance, elementary school children get a rectangular pizza made with a locally-produced whole wheat crust. Middle schoolers, however, insist on a round pizza, which has to be sourced through a wholesale food distributor ... As I've learned sitting in on meals at my daughter's school the past two years here in the District of Columbia, children will go to great lengths to avoid the foods adults consider "healthy." Vegetables, beans and whole grains -- they typically get dumped in the trash. Kids will spend inordinate time picking the spinach out of fresh-cooked lasagna, for instance, before wolfing down the pasta.

So, the real question is, why do children want pizza, potatoes and pasta while vehemently eschewing green vegetables, beans and whole grains? This hasn't always been the case. Keep in mind that industrial food as it exists today has only been around for roughly 60 years. Much of what we take as the truth about what kinds of food kids love and hate is largely dictated by the food industry itself. The idea that kids won't eat vegetables is a construct invented by the food industry and reinforced by well-meaning parents, school lunch programs and government officials.

Herein lies the brilliance of the food industry -- not only has it created a myriad of products but it also created the idea that children want industrial food products above all else. While most Americans have bought into this notion, it's simply not true. Children 100 years ago couldn't have possibly eaten the industrial foods they are eating today. But listening to parents and children now, you'd be convinced that they will only eat industrial foods. Bruske writes that the middle schoolers in Berkeley "insist" on round industrial pizza.

How was this notion started? The food industry literally shapes and changes the palates of our children. Constantly eating sugary, salty and fatty food products adjusts taste preference to the point that simple, real foods taste bland and unappealing. While the food industry insists that it only advertises to children "to influence brand preference," a study published in the journal Appetite found that the food industry works to, "fundamentally change children's taste palates to increase their liking of highly processed and less nutritious foods."

This makes it all the more outrageous that Congress won't stand up to Big Food to say it will not allow financial interests to trump the health and well-being of America's children. With one out of five four-year-olds now obese, the health of our nation's children is in such a sorry state that the food movement may have some unlikely allies on this front. According to the Associated Press, a group of retired generals criticized the move by Congress, calling the decision a national security issue since obesity has become the leading medical disqualifier for military service. Amy Dawson Taggart, the director of the group called Mission: Readiness said in a letter to members of Congress before the final plan was released, "We are outraged that Congress is seriously considering language that would effectively categorize pizza as a vegetable in the school lunch program."

But this is what Congress has done. It has let the American people down and failed to protect our children. As Michele Simon astutely points out, "Congress has hijacked the USDA regulatory process to do the food industry's bidding." How much longer will we allow Big Food and our government to propagate lies about food and compromise the health of our nation's children for their financial and political gain? Please join the movement and attend Occupy Big Food's rally this Saturday from 1 to 3 in Zuccotti Park.

How much do you know about your Thanksgiving turkey? If you buy your turkey from a typical grocery store–and most Americans do–you might not realize that the approximately 46 million turkeys consumed every year come from a factory farm. But if Thanksgiving is truly about offering gratitude for what we have, it seems fitting to also be grateful to the turkey that many of us will eat for dinner. We ought to think about how that turkey lived before ending up on our tables. With that in mind, let’s first take a look at the life of a turkey in an industrial farm.

Turkeys on factory farms are hatched in incubators mostly on large farms in the Midwest or the South. A few days after hatching, turkeys have their upper beaks snipped off. Once the beak is removed, the turkey can no longer pick and choose what it wants to eat. In their natural environment, turkeys are omnivores. But in a factory farm, turkeys are fed a steady diet of corn-based grain feed laced with antibiotics.

Industrially produced turkeys spend their first three weeks of life crammed into a brooder with hundreds of other birds. In the fourth week, turkey chicks are moved from the brooder to a giant window-less room with 10,000 other turkeys where bright lights shine 24 hours a day. With the lights constantly blaring, natural sleeping, eating, and fertility patterns are completely disrupted and the turkeys are, for the most part, kept awake and eating non-stop. Turkeys have an instinct to roost, or to clutch something when they sleep, but on the floor of a crowded room there is no such opportunity. If this is starting to sound like torture to you, you’re on the mark.

As a result of these unhealthy and crowded living conditions, farmers must feed the turkeys a constant supply of antibiotics. Pesticides are also widely used to inhibit the spread of disease. Antibiotics are also known to promote weight gain in farm animals and this connection is being made in humans now as well. In an effort to maximize the more profitable white breast meat, farmers have genetically selected and bred the white broad breasted turkey, which become so top heavy that they can no longer stand or reproduce and as a result, all industrial turkeys are created by artificial insemination. Turkeys are then brought to slaughter, often in a brutal way.

If that wasn’t enough to make you reconsider your Butterball, there’s more. Thanksgiving is also a time when we honor the abundance of the harvest represented by the bounty on our tables. But supporting a Big Turkey farm (or any factory farm) contributes to the devastation of our natural environment and imperils the safety of our food supply.

According to the USDA, factory-farmed animals in the U.S. produce 61 million tons of waste each year–130 times the volume of human waste. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that hog, chicken, and cattle waste has polluted 35,000 miles of rivers in 22 states and contaminated groundwater in 17 states. Polluted runoff from factory farms and other industrial farms is the biggest water pollution problem in the U.S., according to the EPA.

Human health is impacted in other ways by factory farming. Just this past August, Cargill announced a recall of 185,000 pounds of ground turkey due to Salmonella contamination. With recalls and food-borne illnesses on the rise as a result of conditions in factory farms, it seems wise to avoid these foods for that reason alone.

Factory farmed meat is also implicated in long-term health consequences. Resistance to antibiotics is now a growing concern among many in the medical field and it is largely due to the 29 million pounds administered to factory-raised animals every year. As it stands today, one out of six cases of Campylobacter infection, the most common cause of bacterial food poisoning, is resistant to the antibiotic most used to treat it. And nearly all strains of Staphylococcal infections have become resistant to penicillin, while many are developing resistance to newer drugs as well. Indeed, 80 percent of all antibiotics used in this country are used on factory-farmed animals according to an FDA report.

And finally, there is the nitty-gritty of nutritional value in these factory-farmed foods. Studies show that pastured-based meat and dairy are far more nutritious than their conventional counterparts. They are richer in antioxidants; including vitamins E, beta-carotene, and vitamin C and contain far more Omega-3 fatty acids. Turkeys that are raised on grass and allowed to roam around and practice normal turkey behavior are healthier, safer to eat, good for the environment, and get to live a happy life. Our best option is to eat high quality meat and a lot less of it.

So in the spirit of Thanksgiving, let’s be grateful to the turkey that we’re eating and opt out of supporting a system of abuse and environmental destruction. Eat a pasture-raised turkey or make a vegetarian alternative for this year’s Thanksgiving feast.

Eat Wild is a valuable resource for pasture-raised meat and animal products. Brooklyn Based also lists pasture-raised turkeys available for sale in New York City. Slow Food USA has information and resources for heritage breed turkeys. Meatless Monday offers 10 tips for cooking a meatless Thanksgiving.

A petition has been created by Occupy Big Food to tell Butterball—the number one producer of turkeys in America—that Americans are no longer going to purchase turkeys that are inhumanely treated, or support a factory-farm system that creates dire environmental and health consequences. Please go to Occupy Big Food for more information and sign the petition here.

Erin Fairbanks of the Farm Report interviewed me last Thursday on Heritage Radio Network. We talked about nutrition, food, and the corporate control of the food supply. Here's the link to the full interview and the write up the station wrote: The Farm Report - Episode 98 - Nutrition with Kristin Wartman

Certified Holistic Nutritionist Kristin Wartman joins the Farm Report with Erin Fairbanks today to bust some food myths and expose some of the evils of big industry agriculture and food. Find out what makes a healthy diet and hear about some of the common mistakes people make in trying to get healthy. Hear why Kristin thinks food and democracy go hand in hand and why all concerned foodies should be occupying Wall Street and making their voice heard!

If you are paying attention to Occupy Wall Street--and by now most people are--the anti-corporate message is coming through loud and clear. Most participants at the events now spreading across the country say they are no longer willing to let powerful corporate interests determine the course of their lives. These Americans realize that a participatory democracy is essential. As it stands today, 75 percent of the population are obese or overweight and many are chronically ill with diet-related diseases. They are also largely dependent on an increasingly unhealthful and contaminated food supply that is heavily controlled by corporate interests. It's obvious that this is our moment to drive a very important point home: Upending corporate control of the food supply is a fundamental change that must occur if the "99 percent" are to be healthy participants in a true democracy.

This could be a catalyzing moment for the food movement with a real chance for average Americans to see and hear the connection between corporate control of the food supply and our nation's health crisis. Indeed, the declaration of Occupy Wall Street addresses issues the food movement has been working on for years. The declaration states, "They have poisoned the food supply through negligence, and undermined the farming system through monopolization."

Author and activist Naomi Klein has been an outspoken advocate and participant in Occupy Wall Street. When asked how it connects to the food movement she said, "The protest is about the corporate takeover of democracy of our lives in every way. The food movement is inherently anti-corporate and it is inherently about rebuilding a real economy." She continued, "The food movement is where a lot of the leadership is. Occupy Wall Street is not just about banking legislation. The food movement is paving the way for what needs to happen in manufacturing and I think it's all connected."

Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University agrees. "Of course Occupy Wall Street connects to the food movement," she said. "If we had a healthier financial system, we might be able to fund better food assistance, universal school meals, a rational and effective food safety system, and production agriculture that promotes sustainability and affordable food that is healthier for people and the planet. The food movement needs to be there and its voices heard."

While powerful players like Goldman Sachs and Fannie Mae were on the lips of nearly every American after the 2008 financial crisis, the names of industrial agriculture corporations remain largely unknown. But consider how much power they wield. Take Monsanto as an example. When Monsanto began selling its genetically modified Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996 only two percent of soybeans in the U.S. contained their patented gene. By 2008, over 90 percent of soybeans in the U.S. contained Monsanto's gene. This is especially alarming given that soybeans account for the largest source of protein feed and the second largest source of vegetable oil in the world. According to the USDA, in 2008-09, the farm value of soybean production was $29.6 billion, the second highest among U.S. produced crops -- and soy is ubiquitous in processed foods. It ends up in the meat, milk, eggs, and farmed fish many Americans consume (as a result of it being in animal feed) as well as thousands upon thousands of packaged foods usually in the form of soy protein isolate, soy isoflavones, textured vegetable protein, and soy oils. Soy accounts for a fifth of the calories in the American diet.

Monsanto has also produced genetically modified seeds for corn, canola, and cotton with many more products being developed including seeds for sugar beets and alfalfa. (To see how ferociously Monsanto protects its patented seeds watch the Oscar-nominated documentary Food, Inc.) As for corn, the highest valued U.S. produced crop, 93 percent of it is genetically engineered. Physicist and internationally renowned activist Dr. Vandana Shiva points out that the notion that genetically engineered food will improve the food supply and improve nutrition is a myth. "These are illusions that are being marketed in order for people to hand over the power to decide what to eat to a handful of corporations," she said in an interview on her Website.

Another corporation with broad reach and control over the foods we eat is Cargill, which rivals Monsanto in its control of the food supply. It is the largest privately held corporation in the nation, owning Cargill Pork and Cargill Beef, the second largest beef producer in North America. According to Anna Lappe's book Diet for a Hot Planet, Cargill also owns dozens of subsidiary businesses, is one of the largest commercial cattle feeders in the U.S., the world's biggest processor, marketer, and distributor of grains, oilseeds, and other agricultural commodities, and controls 80 percent of the European market for soybean crushing with a similar share for animal feed manufacturing.

If you eat any processed or packaged food, or anything from a typical restaurant or café, you can guarantee that Monsanto or Cargill played a role in those foods somewhere along the line. As Dr. Shiva points out in much of her work, these companies contribute to the toxification of our food supply. It's not only the lack of nutritional value in many of these highly processed foods, but also the actual toxins that are added to genetically engineered foods. Bees, butterflies, cattle and other animals have been dying as a result of these crops, so how are they affecting humans? (You can listen to Dr. Shiva discuss this here).

If America's health crisis is any indication, corporate control of the food supply is taking the ultimate toll. American children born in 2000 are the first generation not expected to outlive their parents as one in three is likely to develop diabetes in their lifetime, with those rates even higher for black and Latino children. The corporate monopolies over the food supply and the government's role in facilitating corporate control translates into control over the health of the American population.

Occupy Wall Street illustrates a basic tenet of democracy; we must participate for it to function properly. We must also participate in our food system to develop local food economies that function with our interests in mind. Our first steps must be learning and teaching others about where our food comes from and how to access healthy food. We must also boycott companies like Monsanto and Cargill whose sole interest is profit, not our health or protecting the environment.

Writer, activist, and academic Raj Patel said that while Wall Street is certainly behind many problems with the food system, there is an even deeper connection between the two. "At its best, the food movement is about learning to see the politics in our everyday lives and then to take a stand against injustice," he said. "That's what Occupy Wall Street is doing--creating a space to learn, demand, exchange and organize."

Occupy Wall Street understands that the corporations cannot be allowed to control our political systems. Similarly, when corporations control the food supply we are left with an unsafe and unregulated food supply and a population in the midst of a dire health crisis as a result of corporate carelessness and greed.

Milk is truly one of the oldest, simplest whole foods - and we certainly drink a lot of it. According to the USDA, Americans consumed an average of 1.8 cups of dairy per person, per day in 2005. 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?"

Milk protein concentrates

Yet another product that ends up in industrial dairy products is milk protein concentrates. MPCs, as they're called, are made by ultra-filtration -- milk is forced through a membrane to remove some of the lactose. MPCs have less carbohydrates and more protein than other milk solids and are often used in protein bars and drinks as well as in some processed cheeses, according to Metzger. Nonfat milk solids are approved for food use but MPCs are not considered GRAS, or generally regarded as safe by the FDA.

"MPCs have undergone a change," says Bunting. "They cannot be reconstituted into anything called milk." He suspects that the protein in MPCs is not as digestible as that in milk, but it has never been tested. He says Kraft, in particular, uses a lot of MPCs.

Lorraine Lewandrowski, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in Newport, N.Y., is also concerned about MPCs. "MPCs are derived from milk, but they're not really milk," she said. "There have been a lot of complaints by farmers concerned about MPCs being added to cheese to boost production." She says that typically around 10 pounds of milk yields one pound of cheese. MPCs -- many of which come from overseas -- can increase yields considerably.

Planck is troubled that most MPCs are being imported from countries such as New Zealand, Mexico, and China. "We cannot trust foreign governments with the safety of these ingredients," she says. According to Metzger, MPCs must appear in ingredient lists, but the country of origin doesn't have to be labeled.

An alternative

Milk doesn't have to contain nonfat milk solids, MPCs, or any other additives. Mark McAfee, founder of Organic Pastures, offers an alternative in California. "What is in our bottle comes straight from grass-fed, pasture-grazed cows. All we do is chill it and test it," he said.

In the New York region, where the sale of raw milk is illegal, small dairies leave their milk unhomogenized and pasteurize it at low temperatures to avoid damaging the milk molecules. Unfortunately, most Americans don't have access to real milk from a local dairy farmer whose operations are transparent. "The real issue is trust," Bunting said. "If people could buy from someone they trusted, we wouldn't even need pasteurization. It extends shelf life, but it's not a safer product."

Even when milk is produced regionally, farmers still encounter processing hurdles. Lewandrowski raises 60 cows on pasture and knows them each by name. But since she can't afford her own bottling facility, her grass-fed milk gets mixed with that from farms across the region (many of them large-scale dairies that feed their cattle grain and keep them in confinement) and gets shipped off for use in a myriad of dairy products. "People tell me I should bottle my own milk," she says. "But I don't have the $50,000 it would cost."

Meanwhile, industrial milk production is being shaped to increase profits in counter-intuitive ways. "Americans are drinking more skim milk, while they're consuming more milk fat, in the form of ice cream and half and half," says Bunting. In some areas, he points out, school districts have banned whole milk and are serving students skim milk."Part of the idea is to take that fat and use it somewhere else more profitable," he says.

McAfee agrees, "They have butchered milk into its parts and now make more money because of the low fat craze."

So how can Americans gain access to real, unadulterated milk? This would require a re-localization of dairy production, which would mean more dairy farmers. "Look," Bunting says, "if you don't want industrial processes, then we need more people producing food." Of course, in order to make that work, we'll also need a much more robust support system for dairy farmers, and a larger base of consumers willing to pay more for milk produced on a smaller scale.

This piece was also published on Grist.org

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?

For something that's so often mixed with anti-caking agents, salt takes a lot of lumps in the American imagination. Like fat, people tend to think of it as an unnecessary additive -- something to be avoided by seeking out processed foods that are "free" of it. But also like fat, salt is an essential component of the human diet -- one that has been transformed into unhealthy forms by the food industry. 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-Sat 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 that:

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 its 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.

Chemicals and additives found in the food supply and other consumer products are making headlines regularly as more and more groups  raise concern over the safety of these substances. In a statement released yesterday, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) asked for reform to the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976. The group is particularly concerned about the effects these substances have on children and babies. 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 remains ambiguous. Meanwhile, in 2010, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported that the FDA is not ensuring the safety of many chemicals.

Yet while the FDA drags its heels 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 Body Burden Web site, 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 fourteen 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 Web site.

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 prostate 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 client’s 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 ten different additives including dough conditioners, DATEM, and sodium stearoyl lactylate, and the turkey contains ten 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 five 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 Centre 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 and 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 two of the three 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. While no one is denying that ADHD is a complicated web of symptoms with potentially many contributing factors, why not start by examining the most basic and fundamental cornerstone of our health—the foods (and non-foods) we put into our bodies.

One in four children goes without breakfast each morning, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a tragedy to be sure—but are Kellogg’s breakfast products the solution? Last week Kellogg announced its new project called Share Your Breakfast, part of a national advertising campaign. The project asks Americans to upload their breakfast photos to the Web site shareyourbreakfast.com, and for each breakfast photo shared, Kellogg Company will donate up to $200,000—the equivalent of one million school breakfasts to help feed children from food-insecure households. 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 Web site to “correcting” false nutrition information. In one section, Kellogg refers to sugar as the “misunderstood nutrient.” According to the Web site, “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) Web site 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 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 Web site. 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 Web site. 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.”

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.

Published on Grist and on Civil Eats.

Every five years, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) publishes dietary guidelines for Americans. The 2010 dietary guidelines are in and to spare you the trouble of reading the 95-page report, here are the key points: Enjoy your food, but eat less; avoid oversized portions; make half of your plate fruits and vegetables; switch to fat-free or low-fat (one percent) milk; compare sodium in foods like soup, bread and frozen meals and choose the food with lower numbers; drink water instead of sugary drinks. These are decent and reasonable guidelines for the most part, and in general, the response from experts has been subdued—no one is jumping for joy, but no one is up in arms either. Marion Nestle is excited that the guidelines direct Americans to eat less; Michael Pollan is happy that the guidelines contain some common sense.

Some are critical of where the guidelines fall short. Dr. David Katz told the Boston Globe that, “Most Americans don’t have the skill-set to build nutritious meals,” and wonders why the guidelines haven’t addressed this underlying problem even as it’s telling Americans to cook at home more often. Still others are critical that while the health of Americans is steadily deteriorating, the cornerstones of the USDA’s guidelines haven’t changed all that much.

I’m a bit underwhelmed myself, but there are several things the USDA should be applauded for. The advice to drink water instead of sugary drinks, cut down on processed foods with high amounts of salt, sugar, and fat, and to eat less. Sound advice, though nothing groundbreaking.

I thought they might take into account some of the latest research on saturated fats, which have increasingly been show to be a critical part of a healthy diet. I was also hoping they would stress the importance of completely eliminating sodas and processed foods more aggressively. Instead, what we’ve gotten is the usual party line on how bad saturated fats are and a somewhat muddled message on processed foods.

One of the biggest flaws in the report is the recommendation to use fat-free or low-fat dairy products. This recommendation comes on the heels of recent research reported in the Los Angeles Times this past December that excess carbohydrates and sugar, not fat, are what’s responsible for America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics. In addition, the USDA needs to take a firmer stance on the elimination of highly processed and refined foods.

Good nutrition includes a balance of good, healthy fat. It does not include a steady stream of highly processed carbohydrates in the form of refined grains and sugars. As I see it, there’s a serious contradiction in the USDA’s recommendations: Telling American’s to limit their intake of refined grains and sugars does not work with also telling them to limit their intake of saturated fats.

Quite often in my practice, I see that people crave poor-quality fatty foods like French fries or chips because they’re deficient in high-quality fats, like omega-3s found in fish, nuts and seeds, or grass-fed meat, eggs, and dairy products. When I recommend they switch to good, clean sources of protein and fat, their unhealthy cravings go away.

There is one important caveat to all of this worth mentioning, which of course is nowhere to be found in the USDA’s guidelines. Buying the cleanest dairy, poultry, eggs, and meat — pasture-based, no hormones, no pesticides, no antibiotics—is important because pesticides, hormones, and other toxins are stored in fat. This means if you’re drinking a glass of full-fat milk or eating a pat of butter from cattle raised on an industrial dairy farm, you’re taking in concentrated amounts of these toxins.

As Mark Bittman points out in his debut opinion column for the New York Times this week, “Food Manifesto for the Future,” concentrated feed lot operations must be a thing of past. He writes, “The concentrated system degrades the environment, directly and indirectly, while torturing animals and producing tainted meat, poultry, eggs, and, more recently, fish.”

Of course, too many people in this country don’t have access to clean food and this is where structural and institutional changes must come in, another aspect of our food system that the USDA’s guidelines don’t delve into enough.

In the meantime, here’s what I wish the USDA guidelines would have said: Eat a primarily plant-based diet that includes plenty of fresh, clean vegetables, beans and legumes; eat fresh fruit in season; eat moderate amounts of pasture-based animal and dairy products in their unadulterated form; eat moderate amounts of whole grains; use fats like butter, olive oil, coconut oil, nuts, and seeds; minimize refined carbohydrates and added, refined sugars; drink plenty of fresh, filtered water; eliminate all sugary beverages.

If the good food movement can gain enough steam over the next five years perhaps this will become a reality.

This post also appeared on Civil Eats

Since Wal-Mart’s announcement on Thursday that it will “reduce sodium by 25 percent, eliminate industrially added trans fats, and reduce added sugars by ten percent by 2015,” some experts on food policy and health are claiming this is a step in the right direction, an encouraging sign of progress. Still others think the jury’s out and it remains to be seen if the initiative will prove beneficial. From a nutrition perspective, I find both of these claims faulty. If we intend to take the obesity and diabetes epidemics seriously, and if we truly care about the abysmal state of health of the American people, we cannot put our faith in an empty Wal-Mart promise that barely scratches the surface of our country’s food and health crisis. Wal-Mart is well aware that in order to stay ahead of the curve with effective marketing they’d better jump on the bandwagon of promoting “healthier” food options. And just as we have seen green washing in large corporations, now we are seeing health washing — it abounds these days: The new McDonald's commercial for a healthy oatmeal breakfast, Wendy’s French fries with real sea salt, and now Wal-Mart’s claim that it will cut the amount of sugar and sodium in their processed foods and remove 300 trillion calories in their foods overall. This makes for good press coverage, but the truth is these goals are miniscule in the face of a toxic processed food supply.

These token changes are actually irrelevant when considering that many of these foods already contain nearly twice the amount of sodium the CDC recommends we consume in an entire day. As for sugar, the AHA says that women should consume no more than six teaspoons of added sugar a day, and men no more than nine. Meanwhile, one, 12-ounce Coke contains 8 teaspoons of added sugar; a 25 percent reduction would still amount to six teaspoons — the upper limit of how much sugar a woman should consume in an entire day.

Clearly the “changes” are intended for PR and marketing advantages only. These kinds of so-called improvements to industrial foods are not helpful and have actually been shown to be counterproductive and harmful.

Remember the Snackwell effect? When presented with low-fat cookies, consumers ate more than they would of normal cookies, thus increasing their overall caloric intake and sabotaging their efforts to lose weight. I worry that the new labels Wal-Mart intends to put on packages of food with reduced amounts of sodium and sugar will have the same effect as customers load up on “healthy” foods that are free of trans-fats and lower in sodium or sugar. Why not eat two cans of soup? Why not drink two sodas?

Blurring the lines between what’s healthy and what’s not only hurts consumers more as it makes the job of finding healthy foods harder and more confusing. This muddying of the waters is precisely the goal of these corporations. If it were clear to the American people what they were actually being sold, I imagine there’d be a lot less buyers. Putting their hard-earned money towards food and drink that’s ultimately harming them seems strange indeed. This is yet another example of the American Fast Food Syndrome at its best, but with a slightly different twist. This time, the corporation at hand is trying to make its processed foods appear healthier and thus appeal to Americans on two fronts: they can eat processed food, participating in what’s considered the normal American diet, while also feeling better about eating these new “healthier” foods.

Expecting Wal-Mart to make processed foods healthier is like asking Phillip Morris to make their cigarettes healthier. Healthy compared to what?

Wal-Mart claims it will reduce the price of fresh fruits and vegetables as part of its initiative as well and this is really the key to improving the health of Americans. But why can’t the government step in and subsidize fruits and vegetables like they do the corn, soy, and wheat that go into nearly every processed food item? Why are we relying on a private corporation to police itself? This is truly a case of the fox guarding the henhouse.

Michelle Obama is well intentioned in bringing attention to our country’s diet-related health problems, but it seems she’d be better off asking her husband to address the deeper, underlying issues at hand rather than asking a corporation like Wal-Mart to make superficial and meaningless changes.

A version of this post was published on Civil Eats

Working with people as a nutritionist, I’m often met with resistance. I try to explain making healthful food choices without using trigger words like organic, sustainable, or even local. “When I hear the word organic I think of Birkenstock-wearing hippies in Cambridge, Massachusetts or Berkeley, California,” 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 the “real” Americans eat. According to food historian Felipe Fernandez-Arsmesto, food has always been a marker of class and rank in any particular society. He writes that, “Food became a social differentiator at a remote, undocumented moment when some people started to command more food resources than others.” He goes on to write that, “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 recently wrote 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 with “real” America.

But there’s some perverse logic at work here and it strikes me as vaguely similar to the 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 lack the knowledge that industrial food is a recent development in the history of agriculture. While 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 is simply food and 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.” She adds later, “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 the food product’s 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.

These messages, from advertisers and politicians alike, are drowning out a sensible approach to healthy eating and improved quality of life for many Americans. 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 don’t have it. What they do have 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, educating on 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 is 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, while rejecting 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.

Originally published on Civil Eats

Thanks to Michael Pollan, many Americans are now aware that when a food boasts a health claim it usually means it’s actually not that healthy after all. But there’s one food that consistently flies below the radar despite its numerous health claims when found in processed and packaged foods: Soy. A long-time staple in the American health food repertoire, it is a prominent example of Pollan’s observation. And the research is mounting that soy foods are not only questionable in terms of their benefits, but in fact, may be hazardous to your health. Most recently, the Cornucopia Institute conducted research on the processing of soy foods and found that the industry commonly uses hexane—a petroleum-based solvent and known neurotoxin—to process soy ingredients found in many “natural” food products.

Thanks to their research and consumer concern, the Cornucopia Institute announced last week that some companies have voluntarily changed their processing practices and eliminated hexane from their products. Unfortunately, there are still well over two dozen “all-natural” nutrition bars and veggie burgers that still use hexane to process soy.

But hexane processing is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems associated with eating soy—and many of the health problems are unknown to the general public.

In 1999, the FDA approved the health claim that soy is “heart healthy” and reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease. But this wasn’t without controversy. Two researchers for the FDA, Daniel Doerge and Daniel Sheehan stated that they were opposed to the labeling of foods containing soy as heart healthy since there was “abundant evidence that some of the isoflavones found in soy…demonstrate toxicity in estrogen sensitive tissues and in the thyroid.”

The two researchers refer to numerous studies that show the estrogenic quality of soy isoflavones have harmful effects on many in the population. Isoflavones are a type of phytoestrogen, or plant-based estrogen that mimics human estrogen. It functions similarly to other endocrine disruptors (which I wrote about here on Civil Eats) and binds to our estrogen receptors. Consuming soy elevates estrogen levels, which is correlated with increased risk for breast cancer (and other estrogen-sensitive cancers as well), as 80 percent of U.S. breast cancers are associated with estrogen supplementation. In one study reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, women who already had breast tumors were given a soy drink for 14 days and their breast tumor growth increased significantly.

In another study the researchers for the FDA refer to, consumption of soy is linked to brain aging, shrinking, and the development of Alzheimer’s disease. In this 35-year Hawaiian study of 8,900 Japanese men and 500 of their wives, tofu intake was the only factor that correlated with an increased occurrence of Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers wrote, “This finding is consistent with the environmental causation suggested from the earlier analysis, and provides evidence that soy (tofu) phytoestrogens causes vascular dementia.”

Perhaps most alarming is the use of soy-based infant formulas. They pose such a risk that the health ministers of the United Kingdom and New Zealand have advised parents not to use soy formula. Studies have found that soy-fed infants have estrogen levels an average of seventeen thousand times higher than infants fed human or cow’s milk.

For men, estrogen-rich soy is also problematic. The Israeli Health Ministry warns men to exercise caution in regards to soy consumption as it has been shown to lower virility—since eating soy reduces testosterone and increases estrogen. In one study presented at the 2007 conference of the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, researchers found that in subfertile men, those eating the most soy had forty-one million fewer sperm per milliliter than those who consumed none. The average amount consumed was equivalent to half a tofu patty. In the womb, excess estrogen causes abnormal sexual development and low sperm counts in boys and men.

As is clear from these studies, the phytoestrogens in soy are quite powerful. While other foods (flaxseed, garbanzo beans, and oats, for example) also contain some amount of phytoestrogens, soy contains the highest amount—and since it is often used in such large quantities as a replacement for meat or dairy, it’s more problematic than other foods. Proponents of soy often refer to the long history of its use in Asian cultures but they fail to mention just how much is typically eaten. In Japan the average amount of soy consumed on a daily basis is two tablespoons, in China it’s two teaspoons where it’s eaten as a condiment rather than a replacement for animal products.

In America however, since soy is in thousands of processed foods (usually in the form of soy protein isolate, soy isoflavones, textured vegetable protein, and soy oils) it accounts for a fifth of the calories in the American diet—not to mention the actual soy foods and drinks that some use as a replacement for meat or dairy. Soy isoflavones were actually denied status as “generally regarded as safe,” or GRAS, as a food additive by the FDA due to the many uncertainties surrounding them. A senior scientist for the FDA wrote, “Confidence that soy products are safe is clearly based more on belief than hard data.”

What’s more, unfermented soy (tofu, soymilk, soy cheese, ice cream, yogurt, soy protein shakes, soy protein isolate) contains high amounts of phytic acid which blocks mineral absorption—particularly calcium, magnesium, iron, and zinc; and soy is an unusual protein that is difficult to digest. Soy is also a goitrogen, meaning it depresses thyroid function and interferes with the absorption of thyroid hormones as well as the crucial mineral iodine.

Fermented soy (miso, natto, tempeh, and soy sauce), most commonly eaten in Asian cultures, is easier to digest and contains far less phytic acid. In addition to choosing fermented soy products over others, choosing organic soy products means avoiding the 91 percent of soybeans produced in this country that are genetically modified and highly contaminated with pesticides.

Why haven’t you heard many of these facts and figures when it comes to “heart healthy” soy? Soy production is a major player in the industrial food system. According to the USDA, in 2009 the total acreage of soybeans planted in the U.S. was 77.5 million acres, accounting for the largest source of protein feed and the second largest source of vegetable oil in the world. In 2008-09, the farm value of soybean production was $29.6 billion, the second highest among U.S. produced crops.

So let’s remember Pollan’s decree: “a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.” And in fact, this applies to nearly every health claim, even the ones that you might not suspect. It’s good to note, too, that when the food in question is one of the largest players in the industrial food system, you can bet we’re not getting the whole story.

Originally published on Civil Eats

As shocking as the news is that the United States Department of Agriculture facilitated a cheese bailout with a $12 million marketing campaign to help sell Domino’s Pizza, I believe there is much more to the New York Times story as it affects average Americans and their ever-expanding waist lines. The story makes a strong case for the correlation between saturated fat consumption and obesity. Michael Moss nails the issue of the USDA’s two-sided policy: promoting cheese consumption in the form of Domino’s Pizza, while simultaneously working to fight obesity by discouraging some of these very same foods.

But as I see it, cheese in itself is not the problem—the issues are deeper and more complex than that. Conventional wisdom says that saturated fat is bad and at the root of the American obesity and diabetes epidemics. The Times article says, “[O]ne slice contains as much as two-thirds of the day’s maximum recommended amount of saturated fat, which has been linked to heart disease.” But let’s look a little deeper at this claim.

Animal products, the primary sources of saturated fats, are foods that human beings have eaten since our beginnings. In fact, often times these were the only foods around in the form of wild game or fish and seafood. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived on these animals as well as foraged vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds and other plant materials.

These foods were unadulterated and in their full-fat form.

More recently, Americans ate animal products in their full-fat and whole form up until the turn of the century. In the 1950s the lipid hypothesis was developed, which claimed that saturated fats were the cause of heart disease. This prompted government and medical establishments to promote low-fat alternatives to traditional fats—like using margarine instead of butter, or soybean oil instead of lard.

Well-meaning scientists in the 1950s were trying to determine what could account for the steep rise in heart disease, which at the turn of the century, accounted for less than 10 percent of all deaths but by 1950 rose to 30 percent. Heart disease is now the leading cause of death in the U.S. and claims more than 600,000 lives every year.

But if saturated fats were the cause of heart disease, wouldn’t the rates be steadily declining as Americans obediently switched to low-fat and fat free products? What accounts for this disconnect? While natural animal fats were disappearing from the American diet, highly processed and refined foods were replacing them. The use of margarine quadrupled, the use of vegetable oils tripled, and egg consumption declined by half between 1900 and 1950. And after World War II, hydrogenated oils or trans-fats became commonplace.

There is a body of research now that suggests the lipid hypothesis is faulty and that the addition of processed oils, refined flour, sugar, and chemical additives to the food supply is really what accounts for obesity and its related risks of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and a host of other health problems. A study completed this year and reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that, “There is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of coronary heart disease or coronary vascular disease.” And in the current issue of the Journal of the World Public Health Nutrition Association, there is a report attributing the rise in obesity and diabetes to the “ultra-processing” of foods rather than the food items themselves. The author, Professor Carlos Monteir, writes, “The most important factor now, when considering food, nutrition and public health, is not nutrients, and is not foods, so much as what is done to foodstuffs and the nutrients originally contained in them, before they are purchased and consumed. That is to say, the big issue is food processing—or, to be more precise, the nature, extent and purpose of processing, and what happens to food and to us as a result of processing.”

Prior to the 1900s, humans were not eating much of what is commonly eaten now simply because it didn’t exist. Human beings have never eaten the combination of refined carbohydrates, refined sugars, trans-fats, additives, chemicals, antibiotics or artificial bovine growth hormones that most Americans are eating today. And as for that Domino’s Pizza—it contains all of the above.

According to the Domino’s website, there are about 60 ingredients in a deep dish pepperoni and cheese pizza, including refined wheat flour, poor quality oils, trans-fats, sugar, preservatives, artificial flavors and a myriad of chemical additives. In addition to the listed ingredients, add the antibiotics and bovine growth hormones that are regularly administered to dairy cattle and end up in the cheese on your pizza. Artificial bovine growth hormones are known endocrine disruptors (which I wrote about two weeks ago on Civil Eats) and are being studied now for their role in contributing to obesity, diabetes, and other health problems. Mysterious ingredients like “natural flavor” or “artificial flavor” as well as “modified food starch” “butter flavor” and “carrageenan” are often sources of MSG—another known endocrine disruptor. One preservative listed, BHT, is a petrochemically derived substance with a wide range of toxic effects and is a suspected carcinogen.

To be sure, eating too much cheese (or too much of anything for that matter) will amount to weight gain, but this is only part of a larger, more troubling problem as Americans continue to eat large quantities of unnatural, processed ingredients, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and hormones. There are no studies to date that evaluate this combination of ingredients and what they do to our bodies when ingested on a daily basis. But there are statistics—and given that two-thirds of the U.S. population is obese or overweight, and that the leading causes of death are all correlated to poor diet—it’s not too hard to connect the dots. Unfortunately for the American people, the U.S. government is working in the interest of the dairy industry and corporations like Domino’s Pizza and sending a clear message that their welfare is far more important than the health of its citizens.

Originally published on Civil Eats