We are what we eat: expensive garbage

Posted on | May 22, 2008 | 3 Comments

Yesterday, I gave myself the pleasure of taking a stroll through a local supermarket with my favorite expert on nutrition: my daughter, Regina Baker.

Gina, who has just completed her first year at the School of Health Science and Human Performance at Ithaca College, doesn’t have enough letters after her name to qualify as an “expert” in the minds of most people, of course. But you’d never know it, if you could listen to her.

“Enriched cereals are okay, I guess,” she told me in the cereal aisle, “but they are not as good as what you would get from a natural source basically because they are not interacting with the natural chemicals that they’re supposed to interact with.”

We were reading labels on processed food. It’s amazing what you find out when you read the labels on processed food.

One of the things you learn is that there is excess sugar or excess sodium — and sometimes both — in just about everything.

Most of the processed foods we looked at had an average of 3 different kinds of sugar in them. Of course, some things are no surprise. So-called “heart healthy” Honey Nut Cherios has four different kinds of sugar. Frosted Strawberry Pop Tarts contains 10 different kinds of sugar.

But you’d be surprised at some of the other processed foods we found loaded with sugar. Pringles Potato Chips has three kinds of sugar in it. Perdue Breaded Chicken Breasts has seven kinds of sugar in it. Healthy Choice Country Breaded Chicken Dinner has a total of 13 different sugars on the menu for that evening.

Chicken broth has sugar in it. Bacon is cured in sugar. In fact, if you pick up a box of Morton Iodized Salt and read the ingredients, one of them is dextrose.

Yep, that’s right. They even put sugar in salt.

What was particularly distressing is the garbage that goes into the processed foods people often buy to feed to their children. Products like Chef Boy-ar-dee Mini Ravioli, Kraft Lunchables and Oscar Meyer Bologna are loaded with sugars and salts (Gina found six different sources of sodium in that bologna).

“They put fatty acid chains in this?” Gina said, reading the ingredients in Kraft Easy Mac. “What the hell … why?”

Too much sugar in too much of our food, leading to obesity and diabetes. Too much sodium and not enough potassium to counteract it, because processing removes most of the potassium from the foods it is naturally found in, which can stress a weak heart or aggravate kidney problems or increase hypertension or perhaps cause stomach cancer.

And then there are the trans fats.

“They take a fatty acid chain and add hydrogen to it, also known as hydrogenation,” Gina explained. “This is not something that naturally occurs, so it turns into a bad fat known as a trans fat. Usually when you see trans fats you can expect cholesterol, the bad cholesterol, aka LDL. More heart disease, heart attacks, strokes, that jazz.”

And none of this even addresses the possible impacts of things like bioengineered seed or fertilizer-and-pesticide-drenched crops. We have no idea what that stuff might be doing to us because nobody has researched it yet.

Have you ever stopped to wonder why, in spite of all our technological sophistication and advanced medical science, we Americans are such a sickly bunch?

According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the United States spends over $2 trillion annually on health care costs — although 20% of that is administrative costs, government public health activities, investment and the like. Of course, 80% of $2.6 trillion is still more than $2 trillion …

More specifically, we spend $394 billion on heart disease and stroke, $174 billion on diabetes, $78.5 billion on obesity and $219.2 billion on cancer and a cool billion on kidney disease — every year. Just this short list gets you close to $1 trillion ($866.7 billion, to be precise).

So, why have health care costs almost tripled since 1990? Well, one reason, again according to the Kaiser Family Foundation is this: “The nature of health care in the U.S. has changed dramatically over the past century with longer life spans and greater prevalence of chronic illnesses.” (emphasis mine)

Kaiser says that the major proposals for helping to bring health care costs down fall under three categories:

1. increasing consumer involvement in purchasing health care
2. government regulation
3. improving the quality and efficiency of health care delivery

What I find peculiar is that, with the exception of the one blindingly obvious example (i.e., obesity), nobody seem to be making the connection between food and health. In other words, one thing we can do to bring down our health care costs is to stop eating like crap.

Or maybe I shouldn’t call it peculiar. To quote Michael Pollan (from an op-ed piece called “You Are What You Grow,” published in the New York Times a year ago):

Among other things, [the farm bill] determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports … . For the past several decades — for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

That’s because the current farm bill helps commodity farmers by cutting them a check based on how many bushels they can grow, rather than, say, by supporting prices and limiting production, as farm bills once did. The result? A food system awash in added sugars (derived from corn) and added fats (derived mainly from soy), as well as dirt-cheap meat and milk (derived from both). By comparison, the farm bill does almost nothing to support farmers growing fresh produce. …

A public-health researcher from Mars might legitimately wonder why a nation faced with what it’s surgeon general has called “an epidemic” of obesity would at the same time be in the business of subsidizing the production of high-fructose corn syrup. But such is the perversity of the farm bill: the nation’s agricultural policies operate at cross purposes with its public-health objectives.”

One thing that seems pretty clear from all this is that anybody who cares about their family’s health is going to have to practice the kind of defensive shopping that I do, where buying groceries takes me longer perhaps than the average shopper because I read labels and buy with certain standards in mind. Don’t look to Washington for leadership on this one.

The federal government will spend a bucket of your money on health care, public service announcements, public education programs and the like. But the one thing they won’t do is ride herd on the agri-business corporations that manufacture this ‘Barbie food’ (as Gina calls it).

Heaven forfend they do anything that might interfere with those corporate profits!

But there are some other trends afoot that could counteract the way our system of food distribution is both killing us and causing us to go broke at the same time.

I’ll tell you more about that when I wrap up this series tomorrow.

[tags]food, health, agri-business, food prices[/tags]

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