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Human Nutrition Unit Biochemistry Building, G08 University of Sydney NSW 2006 Australia E-mail: s.truswell{at}biochem.usyd.edu.au
Food Politics is a book that deserves to change national and international attitudes, as Carson’s Silent Spring did in the 1960s. It is a study of how powerful agribusiness and food companies distort our scientific concepts of healthy eating and drinking, in the process paying congresspersons, co-opting nutritionists, and wrecking the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The public nutrition system is seriously out of balance.
The author is chair of the Department of Nutrition at New York University. She has experience as a nutrition policy adviser for the US Department of Health and Human Services and was a member of the advisory committee for the 1995 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. While other nutrition academics have researched small byways of metabolism in the laboratory, Nestle has done the difficult research on food politics in the United States. Her journals for this rare type of nutrition research include the Federal Register, acts of Congress, General Accounting Office reports, the Wall Street Journal, Food Chemical News, Food Regulation Weekly, and Illinois Agrinews.
In the first of the book’s 5 sections, Nestle describes how food companies and farmers’ associations have weakened consensus nutrition advice by putting pressure on nutritionists and government agencies. She recalls how the familiar US Department of Agriculture food guide pyramid was toppled after intervention by the Cattlemen’s Association, only to be officially adopted a year later more or less unchanged. (Nestle was one of those working behind the scenes to rescue the pyramid.)
Part 2 of the book, "Working the System," records how food companies lobby government officials and congresspersons. Today’s government officials can be tomorrow’s well-paid lobbyists in the revolving-door system of politics. Like other companies, food companies find ways to provide financial support to politicians’ campaign committees. Food companies have an explicit strategy of co-opting academic nutrition experts by identifying the leading experts and then hiring them as consultants or awarding them research grants. As well as winning friends and disarming critics, companies may take critical community commentators to court—and have vastly more money for legal costs.
Part 3 of the book is about the exploitation of children: the direct advertising of candy, chewing gum, soft drinks, ice cream, salty snacks, fast food, and cookies to underage consumers and deals between soft drink companies and schools. Children learn by example, and the foods and drinks offered in school overrepresent products at the top of the pyramid.
Part 4 was the most troubling to me: how dietary supplements have been deregulated in the United States through the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA) of 1994. Not only are vitamins and minerals now inadequately regulated, but herbal products of uncertain origin are similarly spared proper scrutiny. The FDA has been downsized and given impossible tasks. The onus is on beleaguered regulators to prove (in restricted time) that a health claim is demonstrably wrong and defend this position in court. Since the passing of the DSHEA, the FDA has not banned a single supplement. Nestle says that the FDA had only $6 million allocated in 2001 for regulation of dietary supplements, with only 5 full-time workers! Tortilla chips laced with St John’s wort and calcium-supplemented chocolates are marketed as supplements with health claims.
In Part 5, "Inventing Techno Foods," the chapter "Go Forth and Fortify" discusses the problems of the addition of vitamins and minerals to foods that do not naturally contain such nutrients and of products that are 50% sugar. Understanding how the different nutrients add up over the day is confused by the multiplicity of RDAs (recommended dietary allowances), DRIs (dietary reference intakes), and daily values. The ultimate techno food, olestra, and its 30-y regulatory saga are discussed in the last chapter
The book is consistently well written and up-to-date. Statements are supported by 50 pages of reference notes. Food Politics can and should be read by interested persons who are not nutrition professionals. To help them, Nestle has prepared an 11-page appendix that summarizes issues in modern nutrition.
Food Politics concludes with Nestle’s suggestions of what might be done to improve the situation, some of which are naturally more achievable than others. For me, the 3 most urgent problems are that US government agencies dealing with nutrition should not be supervised by Agriculture but by Health, that almost all Americans (and other affluent societies) are eating too much, and that the DSHEA has brought a return to the days of permitting "flagrant and brazen quackery" (page 233). Everyone concerned about nutrition should read this brave and thoroughly researched book, including congresspersons and shareholders of food companies.