MarionNestle-BenGreenfield.mp3

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And on the call with me today is the author of the book Food Politics how the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. And also the author of Safe the Politics of Food Safety. Her name is Dr. Marion Nestle, or Nestle, I may be pronouncing that incorrectly. Okay, Nestle. And she is a professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University. Now, these books are all about how the government and how food is influenced by lobbying and by marketing. And my question for you, Dr. Nestle, is why did you actually write this book? What influenced you to pen this?

Well, there were two things that were influences. One was that I was extremely tired of going to professional meetings about childhood obesity in which the only things that was discussed was how to get parents to feed their children better. Nobody was talking about food marketing. And my interest in food marketing came about because I had gone to a meeting at the National Cancer Institute a few years earlier on behavioral approaches to prevention of cancer. And I heard a lot of anti smoking activists, physicians who were involved in helping people stop smoking and promoting, stopping smoking, promoting, talk about the marketing of cigarettes to adults and children throughout the world. And it wasn't that I had never noticed advertising of cigarettes or had never seen it. It's just that I'd never paid any attention to it. And these people showed slide after slide after slide of marketing cigarettes to children in various places. This was the days of Joe Camel. And at the end of seeing those slides, I thought we should be paying attention to food marketing to we should be paying attention and not just accepting it as a normal part of the environment or something that's completely benign, because.

It'S not benign when it comes to our food intake and our food choices. Is that actually affected by something like lobbying and if so, how and how much?

Well, in an indirect way, because lobbyists deal with the federal government about the kinds of dietary advice that federal agencies produce. And over the years, federal agencies have gotten into so much trouble if they tried to put curbs on food marketing or tried to advise the public not to eat certain kinds of foods that they sort of internalized values where you can't say don't drink, you can't say don't drink sodas or don't eat meat or stop eating snack foods. You have to phrase it in a more circuitous way, like cut down on your saturated fat and your sugar intake or your salt intake. They never talk about food, they only talk about nutrients.

How does the food industry itself influence government Nutrition policies, Is it through lobbying or.

Oh, absolutely, through lobbying. They work the same way any other corporate entity works. They hire lobbyists whose job it is to go and talk to federal officials of one kind or another about how there's nothing wrong with their products. Their products are just a matter of balance and proportion. And obesity is about exercise anyway. It's not about food or there's something wrong with the science. I mean, they have sort of standard approaches for dealing with any kind of suggestion that people would be healthier if they ate less of their products. And over the years, these methods have proven very effective.

Now, are there any specific examples that you can think of where, you know, a food company actually influenced a government recommendation in a way that then influenced the food choices that we're presented with or what we eat?

Well, dietary advice doesn't really work that way. One of the things that dietary advice does is it encourages food companies to change their products and it filters down into the society through the media in ways that are not very well controlled. The one of the best examples of changing dietary policy in response to lobbying is advice about sugar. The original dietary guideline in 1980 about sugar was eat less sugar. Nothing could be simpler or avoid too much sugar, I think was four words. So it must have been avoid too much sugar 25 years later. Over time, the guideline got more and more complicated and more and more circumlocution y. So by the time you get to 2005, the guideline was 25 words long and, you know, talked about how people would be healthier if they consumed foods and beverages with smaller amounts. I mean, it just went on for so long you couldn't pay any attention to it. And anytime the government tries to make a guideline that suggests eating less soft drinks, a very important source of sugars in American diets, or anything else connected with sugar, the Sugar association gets busy. I just got a very, very long letter from them yesterday complaining about something that I had said on my blog.

Who did you get a letter from?

The Sugar Association.

Wow, interesting. What did you write about on your blog?

I made some comment about how people were consuming too much sugar and they argued with that statement.

Hmm, interesting. So in terms of food politics, which you, which you wrote about in your first book, how the food industry influences nutrition and health, apparently it also affects food safety. You had a follow up book called Safe the Politics of Food Safety. How do the interaction, or how does the interaction between politics and food safety actually work?

Well, in exactly the same way food companies don't want to have to practice standards, food safety procedures, because they're inconvenient. They get inspected, which they don't like, and they may cost them a little bit more money. And the entire pressure on food companies is not only to make a profit, but it's to grow that profit every 90 days. That's what Wall street likes. It likes to see corporate growth. And if a company isn't growing, it's dead in the view of Wall Street. So in order to, food companies are forced to in a food environment in which there's roughly twice as much food available in the country as the population needs. So it's an enormously competitive industry. And for food companies to grow their profits under this kind of economic pressure, they have to cut corners. And safety is a really easy corner, or appears to be a really easy corner to cut. And if you look at the really big safety problems that we've had in this country over the last five or six years, you can see that every single one of them was about sloppiness, cutting corners, not being as diligent and as careful as they really need to be. And the fda, which now has the ability to enforce standards of food safety, has not been given enough money by Congress to do that. Also under pressure from food companies, which really, they don't want to pay for it, and they don't really want a serious regulatory agency because they don't want to be regulated.

What would be an example?

They think they can do it better on their own, although all of the evidence shows that if you're not inspecting and if you're not being really, really diligent in watching food safety procedures, companies cut corners.

What would be an example of a recent food safety issue that was a result of such a problem?

Oh, I suppose the peanut butter recall of a couple of years ago where that particular company had actually had its products tested and they tested positive for salmonella, so the company sent the tests out to another lab that gave them a result that they liked better. Or a pistachio company sent out pistachios that were found to have salmonella, and they recalled them and then repackaged them and sent them out again.

Interesting. So when it comes to the solution for these issues, what is the solution? Do we all hole up in our homes and only eat out of our backyard gardens? Or what do you think is the way that something like this can be solved? The issue with food safety and food politics affecting what we're consuming?

Well, it has to be solved on two levels. It has to be solved by people making better choices and buying foods that are likely to be safer and healthier for them. And because of the way our food system works and the fact that big companies, if something goes wrong in one of these big companies, it affects a lot of people. So that eating locally and regionally and growing your own food and cooking your own food and buying at farmers markets are really good ideas. It's not that these foods are going to be perfectly safe, but if there are problems, they're going to affect many fewer people. So that would be one way is you make your own decision about what you're going to buy and you put your food dollars where your belief systems are. I think that's exercising democracy at the grassroots level. At the same time, you have to deal with the political system. And for this, we need a better food safety regulatory system. And that means working through Congress, buying your own congressman, I think is the best idea. You know, lots of people could get together and buy their own, I suppose electing honest officials who are interested in public health, rather corporate health, and working, working with organizations who are trying to do these things.

Gotcha. So your books again, they're titled Safe Food and then another one called Food Politics. I'll be sure and put a link for each of the books in the show, notes for folks if they want to read more about what Marian has to say. Because the goal of this interview today was to just make you aware, but we only scratch the surface of what she talks about in her books. I'd highly recommend that you read it if you're concerned about what you're eating, perhaps even what your children are being exposed to on a marketing and a lobbying level when it comes to the things that they're eating. So, Marianne, thank you for coming on the call today.

Oh, I'm very happy to do that. And may I add one thing?

Absolutely.

And that is that I hope you'll also link to my new book, which is coming out this month, called why Calories Count From Science to Politics. And it will tell you everything you ever wanted to know and a lot of things you probably didn't about how calories work in the body.

Interesting. I'll definitely have to check that one out. You know, I've gone through Taubes. Good Calories, Bad Calories. This looks like it's, like, it's probably a good read as well. So I'll link to it. I'll throw that in there, folks, so you can get it.

I hope it's a good read. I hope people really enjoy it. And I think you'll learn a lot if you do.

Cool. Thank you. All right, folks. Well, this is Ben Greenfield and Dr. Marion Nestle signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.