What's the Food Industry Up to & How Can You Opt Out of Their Program?

It's been an interesting year in the food business. As obesity gets more press and concern from public health officials, the very companies whose products have contributed to the development of this modern epidemic are lining up to create new "food products" that allegedly address the problem. No one knows if the new products will make things better or just give us a new set of problems a decade down the road. Buyer beware.

Consider the "food industry," which should more accurately be named the Consumables Technology Industry. Food is a product of nature. Food grows. Genuine food producers work with nature to get food from plants and animals. The concept of "food manufacturer" should seem bizarre. But it's become accepted, through repeated exposure to ads and articles, that artificial products are the nutritional equivalent of food.

Consider the mess caused by nearly 50 years of recommending margarine and shortening, the primary sources of trans-fats in the diet, over butter, lard, and tropical oils. In 2002, the National Academy of Science concluded that there is no safe level of artificial trans-fat in the diet! Several decades ago, the edible-oil industry embarked on a successful "educational" campaign to convince doctors that animal fats, which humans have eaten for millennia, were responsible for the rapid rise of heart disease in the middle of the 20th Century. Medical professionals began to recommend margarine made from polyunsaturated oils (corn, soy, safflower) to their patients. Only recently have health authorities partially recanted by timidly suggesting tub instead of stick margarine to reduce the level of dietary trans-fat. When the Center for Science in the Public Interest went ballistic over tropical oils in baked goods in the '80s, the food industry responded by replacing them with hydrogenated vegetable oils, so more artificial trans-fat flooded the food supply. Lipid (fat) researchers who sounded the alarm about the quantity of artificial trans-fat in our food supply had their funding cut off by the edible-oil or food company sponsors.

Now the Consumables Technology Industry has produced fatless butter flavor, beerless beer flavor, and plenty of new artificial sweeteners and fats are in the production pipeline. Coming soon to a grocery store near you: more nutrition-free pseudo-food.

In the 1970's the natural food movement started with the radical idea that real foods, produced by nature and prepared with time-tested techniques, were superior to laboratory concocted "food products." Medical organizations were so hostile to the idea you'd have thought we'd suggested the earth was flat.

The natural food movement was not about "health food," though mainstream critics would equate them in order to ridicule the emerging movement. Natural foods adherents were early skeptics of low fat health claims and the idea that highly processed soy meat and cheese substitutes were "natural" (the impetus for developing these products was to find a use for the solids remaining after soy oil production). There was disagreement between the people who considered fructose a healthful sugar and those who considered it a highly processed food with its own problems (the latter group was correct). Some natural foods adherents were suspicious of supplements. The movement wasn't necessarily vegetarian either - that came largely from spiritual communities. Of course, adherents of many of these beliefs participated in the development of the co-ops. Co-ops were full of people who held different views about diet, but were in general in agreement that food is best in the forms presented by nature.

In the coming year, Jennette Turner will present a series of articles outlining how you can eat for better health with real, whole, traditional food. Kiss the "food industry" goodbye.