But Is It Food?

A recent article by Dr. Mercola (June 3, www.nationofchange.org) exposed the formation of a new group, the Alliance to Feed the Future, purporting to “balance the public dialogue on modern agriculture and large-scale food production.” What they are, of course, is a front group of over 50 corporations and organizations devoted to burying the bad publicity about America’s food production coming from books like Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss, and Pandora’s Lunchbox by Melanie Warner. Representing multinational food, biotech, and chemical companies who stand to lose billions if Americans ever wake up to the scandal that is the “foods” they eat, the consortium adopts the tried and tested method of public relations bullshit that has given them their billions up to now: pretend to be concerned about the public’s health, about feeding a hungry world, about caring for people—by pretending to tell the “real story and dispel misperceptions about modern food production technology.” Ah yes, dispel misperceptions. Tell the real story. Believe that, and there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.

            From one angle, though, this is good news. Clearly, the hucksters are worried by the books mentioned above. I’ve already written about Moss’s book. Here I’ll go into some highlights of Melanie Warner’s book, Pandora’s Lunchbox. Like Moss’s, it is at once revealing and infuriating because it lays bare more of the story—this from the chemical additives side—of the crap that is being purveyed to the largely unsuspecting American public. My guess is that in a hundred years, when scholars look back at these times (assuming there is anyone left), they’ll scratch their heads in amazement that Americans could have been so stupid as to eat the adulterated puke sold to them as food. Actually, the question of whether this stuff can be called “food” is a good place to begin. And amazingly, it begins with those conservative darlings, the Koch brothers. Yes, the very same scoundrels who are behind several right-wing think tanks and the election of Scott Walker as governor of Wisconsin, are also behind the fracking process that gave us the Milk Protein Concentrate that now infests cheeses and milk and frozen pizzas and whipped toppings. Not surprisingly, it is an industrial process—a spinoff of the method used to crack crude oil (the Koch’s main business) into various hydrocarbon molecules to give us gasoline. Koch Membrane Systems, that is, developed “highly sophisticated membranes made from a type of plastic called polyethersulfone” to produce the ultrafiltration and microfiltration technology that can take milk apart by “separating it into molecular-sized fractions.” Then it can be made into new ingredients for processed foods: milk protein concentrate to help thicken yogurt and replace real cheese in Kraft’s Singles; whey protein concentrate to give us low-fat ice cream and half and half; casein and caseinate to yield imitation cheese for frozen pizzas and whipped toppings. Of course, the FDA, in a rare moment of conscience in 2002, told Kraft that rules for processed cheese don’t allow the use of milk protein concentrate. Probably figuring that Americans don’t read labels anyway, Kraft responded by simply changing their label: in very small letters, their individually-wrapped Singles now say “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product” rather than “cheese food.” Product, not food. It could stand for the entire American food industry—though neither McDonald’s nor Burger King calls their specialties “cheese-product burgers.” People might find that unappetizing.

            Melanie Warner caps this rather horrifying story with the question: But is it cheese? Loaded with twice the amount of sodium as Cabot Cheddar (no less than 10 sodium-based chemicals are used as emulsifiers, acidity regulators, preservatives and god knows what else), the “cheese” product called Singles is made to last. Possibly worse than the additives is what gets destroyed in the machining of such a product: the beneficial bacteria, called probiotics, that real cheese has as a consequence of its formation in the first place, and its aging in the second place (the longer a cheese ages, the greater the number of living organisms it has). These living bacteria in cheese feed on lactose, breaking it down so we eaters don’t have to. They contribute in other ways to our stomach microbiota, which aid in digestion to such a degree that some researchers call the microbiota of the gastrointestinal tract “an essential organ on par with the brain.” The bacteria there outnumber the cells in our entire body, and contain a hundred times more genes than the human genome; we could not eat without them. Cheese bacteria are even thought to ward off infection and stabilize blood pressure. And the process that produces “processed cheese product” is specifically designed to kill them off. Insane? Of course; but a “cheese product” whose bacteria is killed off doesn’t spoil. It lasts forever. So that’s what you get in your gut from Kraft.

            This is the central idea in Warner’s book (she calls it a paradox; it is really a massive understatement): “the fact that nutrition and convenience are sometimes deeply at odds” (59). And the conflict happens because of the violent industrial processes that are used to convert real foods (like oats, milk, wheat, chicken) into malleable and long-lasting “products.” The fracking of milk is one example. Another is what happens to grains to make Cheerios, Froot Loops, and Cheetos. As I said in my last post, my father refused to allow American cereals in our house, instead buying us wheat germ, which he insisted was the healthiest part of the wheat and which was routinely removed from commercial grains and flours. He was right. Though Harvey Kellogg—who invented the original Corn Flakes—was a health nut, his brother W.K. was a marketer who really built the giant company. First he ‘improved’ Corn Flakes by removing the germ as well as the bran from the corn, leaving only the starchy center. He did this to make the cereal longer lasting: the enzymes in the beneficial germ cause corn and wheat oils to go rancid. But that was only the beginning. The real killer process came later. Known as “extrusion,” it takes place in huge machines that Warner describes as “oversized jackhammers.” Inside a long barrel, “starch, sugar and protein molecules are ripped apart by twisting screws that generate large amounts of heat and pressure” in a process referred to as “plasticization.” (You couldn’t invent such apt terminology!) This precisely describes the “harsh and nutritionally devastating way of processing cereal”, which “swells the starch granule,” until it breaks, “spilling its guts into the solution it’s in,” thus forming a thick, homogenized mass that can then be molded into any “fun” shape the maker wants. Cheerios. Alpha Bits. The only problem is that the nutrients that are lost in the process are those essential vitamins A, B1, C, E, and folate. Nor are the nutrients the only things that “flash off” in the production: so too does natural flavor, color, and everything else of value. All these are then put back in—in their industrially isolated form, of course—so the resulting construct tastes and looks less like cardboard, and can be advertised as “super-nutritious” cereal.

            Nor is this all. The “mush” that is shaped into “cereal” no longer has the crunch or fiber our stomachs have evolved to work on in digestion. Warner writes that this

“appears profoundly to alter energy metabolism and the dynamics of hunger and satiety. When starches arrive in our stomachs already broken down, they enter our bloodstream rapidly (sugar rush), causing a spike in insulin and potentially fostering a dynamic that can lead to the condition known as insulin resistance, which is a precursor to type II diabetes (64).

Rats fed on 40 brands of such cereal for 12 weeks showed countless nutritional deficiencies, lacking among other things the key phytochemicals like carotenoids, flavonols, and polyphenols. Of course, food scientists are busy synthesizing all these things, including a fake fiber that is now being added to cookies and other snacks—this time by rescuing waste water from french fry factories, isolating the starch leached off from the fried potatoes, and then treating the starch with chemicals to “strengthen the joints between molecules so they can’t be broken during digestion.” This synthetic “fiber” mimics the action of fiber requiring more digestive action, but is it really fiber? The World Health Organization has doubts, as does the Institute of Medicine; though the FDA, of course, approves.

            I could go on. I could write about the GRAS (generally recognized as safe) scandal, where the FDA, faced with the 5,000 or so additives in food, decided in 1958 that some of these, like spices, salt, vinegar, and yeast, were well-known enough to be GRAS, and therefore wouldn’t need to be submitted for full review. Except that food companies began slipping other chemicals through this loophole. As if this weren’t bad enough, in 1997, the GRAS rules were eased even more, so that a company using a new additive could simply assess its safety on its own, and notify the FDA that it was safe. So at this moment, just about anything goes. Or the horrors of soy, especially soybean oil—now used almost exclusively to fry those French fries everyone loves so much, but which has toxic aldehydes “so reactive that they can interfere with both enzyme and hormone production as well as protein synthesis” (137). Soy oil, by the way, is made with hexane—the fraction of crude oil used to make gasoline (again, not because it’s the only process, but because hexane allows the extraction of 99% of the oil from soybeans, rather than the previous 70%!) Not to worry, though; Monsanto and DuPont are even now creating a genetically modified soybean to make the oil’s profile more like olive oil. Of course, that won’t help the omega 6 problem, but then, one can’t have everything. Oh, and soy protein, produced mostly by a corporation called Solae, is used everywhere to “bulk up” meats and keep them juicier longer—which Solae describes as being necessary for meats going through “high abuse circumstances.” Like the chicken made by Tyson, which is pounded and beaten under high pressure to the point where the resulting mush can be bulked up with soy protein (no one knows in what amount) and shaped to make its dinosaur nuggets, BBQ Chicken Chips and Popcorn Chicken Bites all the kids in school lunch programs love so much.

            But I think you get the picture. The American food industry is a virtual war machine, beating and pounding and extruding natural foods (well, sort of natural; the mayhem that’s perpetrated on natural grains in GM and pesticide and herbicide farming constitutes a crime against nature even before it gets to the Kellogg’s and Kraft’s of our world) into the living death that is processed food. No wonder those who eat it come to resemble zombies so much. This really gets to the final point of Warner’s book. She points out that even where the rare food executive tries to focus on nutrition and health, the deck is so stacked in favor of profits that it is impossible. In 2011, for example, a new head of Pepsico named Indra Nooyi, tried to remove artificial ingredients from their snack products like Tostitos, emphasized sales of fruit and vegetable drinks, and gave talks about healthy snacks and drinks. Then, according to Warner, “investors and Pepsi bottlers freaked out.” In a 2011 report in Beverage Digest, Pepsi-Cola, the company standard, had slipped to third most popular beverage behind both Coke and Diet Coke. Analysts attributed the drop to “increased focus on its better-for-you portfolio.” And one Pepsi bottler put it all in perspective with this complaint: “Is she (Nooyi) ashamed of selling carbonated sugar water?” Nooyi, as expected, did a 180, initiating a huge advertising campaign to restore the primacy of “carbonated sugar water.” The moral of the story: morality is for losers. The only path for an American corporation is the constant battle to be Number 1.

            What Warner does with this story, though, is to let corporations off the hook. She essentially ends her book with the truism that Americans cannot expect corporate food manufacturers to do anything other than what they are now doing—giving the public what it appears to want, and seeking ever-larger profits doing it. Those that try a different tack are quickly punished by loss of sales and profits and revolts from their stockholders. Therefore, it is up to mothers and families to get healthy: “the choice about what we feed ourselves and our children is ultimately ours,” concludes Warner.

            This is true, of course. But Warner herself has shown, chapter and verse, how the deck is heavily stacked against the consumer. Corporations invest billions of dollars to con harried mothers into buying easily prepared (mostly pre-prepared) foods, processed foods heightened with chemicals that mimic and often out-perform natural tastes, in a massive fakery that few can resist. They are aided by government agencies that fear antagonizing the huge businesses that they depend on, and thus validate their piracy. What is needed, in the face of all this, is outrage. American consumers need to be outraged by the selling and promotion of “carbonated sugar water.” They need to be outraged by the massive advertising that convinces their children from their earliest years that food is “fun,” that food is “sweet,” that food comes in plastic from machines rather than from the good earth. They need to be outraged by being the subjects of a massive experiment in the chemicalization of food, of the poisoning of their bodies. Then they need to be make their outrage known—to the representatives at both the state and national levels, to the agencies charged with protecting their food, the FDA and the USDA, to the reporters who mostly remain silent about the scandal that is the American food industry, to the food industry itself—up to and including demanding jail terms for executives who continue to feed them poison. And then they need to stop buying the shit that is fed to them and return, by whatever means necessary, to the knowledge of what real food really is. And the practice of preparing it, eating it, enjoying it as it was meant to be enjoyed before these purveyors of adulterated slop got a prime place at their table.

Lawrence DiStasi

Salt, Sugar, Fat

I am grateful I grew up when I did, just prior to WWII, with an Italian immigrant for a father. He simply refused to allow most “American” foods to cross our threshold. We never had ready-to-eat cereals like Wheaties or Corn Flakes (both the epitome of health by today’s standards), nor sliced white bread, nor any processed foods, or even those that came in cans (with the possible exception of canned peas, used for a low-cost and not very enticing dish called ‘peas and pasta’.) We ate pasta a lot—we called it spaghetti or macaroni in those days—with various kinds of sauces. We ate meat sparingly, and usually cuts that today are found only in specialty shops: kidneys, liver, tripe. We ate chicken bought fresh from a chicken shop that had them live in wooden cages, and stew meats in nutritious stews my mother made from fresh ingredients. And we regularly ate fish, including calamari, smelt, shiners (now known as ‘white bait’ and used mainly by fishermen to catch larger varieties) and various kinds of shellfish. My father called fish “brain food,” and he was right. We also ate real (i.e. aged) cheeses, the most memorable being a type of provolone that had actual milk worms oozing from its flesh, and which my father attributed to its being “real” and alive—which was accurate, though it was banned by a squeamish FDA long ago. With five children there was never quite enough food, so we grew up hungry but healthy. And we always ate together as a family.

            Not so today’s kids, especially those who live in urban “food deserts” which, abandoned by supermarkets, survive on “convenience stores” purveying mostly snack foods and sodas and junk like Hot Pockets and Lunchables loaded with the Salt, Sugar and Fat that gives Michael Moss’s book its name. I mourn for these kids, whose parents have to thread their way through the American food minefield in hopes of finding real, nutritious foods. Mostly, though, they are barraged with TV ads touting the latest chemical concoction that food companies have spawned to make more profits, and to habituate their future customers, the children, to addictive substances like salt (leading to high blood pressure and strokes), sugar (leading to obesity and diabetes and swollen hospital rolls) and fat (leading to clogged arteries and heart attacks). Mostly, they are fed on “convenience” foods that can be popped into the microwave and eaten on the run. Mostly, they are left to their own devices when it comes to foods, and that means, as I noticed recently when I was getting gas at a Chevron station with a “Food Mart,” Hispanic high-schoolers lined up several deep, their hands bursting not with books but with huge sodas to wash down plastic packs of potato or corn chips or ready-to-eat junk like Hot Pockets. These “snacks” (called “crack snacks” in a Philadelphia neighborhood that has been trying to boycott the ubiquitous convenience stores strategically located near schools) are time bombs, condemning several generations to the misery of hospital care before their time. And the food industry knows it, the USDA and the FDA and the FTC know it, the Congress knows it, and yet it goes on, greased by the money that these huge food corporations like General Foods and Nestlè and Cargill donate to the “people’s” representatives who are supposed to be giving voice to the voiceless.

            Moss’s book tells this whole story by dividing it into three sections: one for sugar, one for fat, and one for salt. It’s enough to make you sick. Though it’s far too detailed to do justice to, a few segments will give you the flavor. Consider, first, a core idea: that these “foods” (in quotes because many people have observed that they are not “real” foods, having been processed to the extent that they resemble, and taste like—without their sugar, fat, and salt disguises—cardboard or plastic) are addictive in the same way that drugs or alcohol are. Take sugar. Kids naturally prefer sugar and reject bitter more than adults; but they are also being taught—by what they eat and what they see on TV—that all food is supposed to be sweet. What’s worse, testing at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia has shown that sugar is an analgesic like aspirin that will “reduce crying in a newborn baby.” So children not only prefer sweet, many of them are medicating themselves with sugar, which food companies know and therefore add to everything. Karen Teff, a food scientist who has found that sweet liquids (the kind in most processed foods) can circumvent the body’s natural controls, sums it up this way:

            “I’m still shocked at what goes on in this country. Where every single food has some sweetened component that wasn’t normally supposed to be sweetened. Honey wheat bread, honey mustard. Foods that were associated with non-sweet or that had slightly bitter components have now been made sweeter. There is absolutely no tolerance now for foods that are not sweet” (Moss, p. 21)

But what food companies have been doing for years is investing millions in research to find what is called the “bliss point” for their products—the optimum point at which the brain’s pleasure centers are rewarded. Nor is this simply research into appetite or taste buds; it also investigates the emotional component in responses to food. One of the primary food researchers and consultants, Howard Moskowitz, for example, did research on craving. He found that hunger is a poor driver of cravings, and that we are driven to eat by other forces like emotional needs, and then taste, aroma, appearance and texture; and that one ingredient, sugar, can satisfy them all. Food companies have known this for a long time, and as early as 1949 came out with Sugar Frosted Flakes—a sugar coated “cereal” that was so successful that the Post company followed with Sugar Krisps, Krinkles, Corn-fetti and a host of others that kids went nuts over. Other food companies followed suit so that today, the cereal aisle in supermarkets has more varieties (over 200) than any other. More alarming, when sugar added to dog chow was found to prevent bacteria from forming, sugar became a major way to preserve processed foods (and Gaines Burgers for dogs, also afflicted with obesity), allowing them to sit on the shelf almost indefinitely.

            None of this sugar mania went without criticism. In 1969, Dr. Jean Mayer of Harvard and an advisor to President Nixon, organized a White House Conference of Food Nutrition and Health. His pioneering research on obesity, which he called a “disease of civilization,” led to the discovery of how the desire to eat is controlled by the amount of glucose in the blood and brain, greatly influenced by sugar in food. Mayer contended that “cereals containing over 50% sugar should be labeled imitation cereal or cereal confections” and should be sold in the candy section. This scared the food industry to death, but as usual, the changes it made were mostly cosmetic. Kellogg’s said it could live with the designation “breakfast foods” instead of cereal, while Post changed the name of its iconic Sugar Frosted Flakes to “Frosted Flakes.” But more alarming news was to come with President Carter’s appointee to head the FTC, Michael Pertschuk. Pertschuk recommended a ban on all advertising to children. But with $600 million in annual revenues at stake for media companies (food manufacturers were spending twice as much advertising their cereals as on the ingredients that went into them!), the lobbyists struck back. They got the Washington Post in an editorial to ridicule Pertschuk as “the national Nanny,” and blamed the FTC for trying to “protect children from the weakness of their parents” (this is hauntingly like a current TV message, which insists that government has no business advising kids what to eat, which is the job of parents; it’s also reminiscent of the furor that broke over New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg trying to limit the size of sugared drinks.) The lobbying worked: Pertschuk was ousted as FTC chairman, and the new head said “we’re not going to engage in social engineering.” As if protecting the health of children were some kind of Commie plot. As if 20,000 commercials a year watched by children between the ages of two and eleven, more than half of them pitching sweetened cereals, candies, snacks, and soft drinks four times every half hour, were some kind of sacred corporate right to be protected. As if these devils—in 2008, the cereal industry began touting sugar as a kind of brain food that increased attentiveness: “a clinical study showed kids who had a filling breakfast of Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved their attentiveness by nearly 20 percent”—deserved to be protected in order to hook children on what has become a drug (Coke executives spoke, around 1995, of their “heavy users,” meaning those who drank two or more cans a day; even average Americans were drinking 40 gallons of sugared soda, on average, each year, for 60,000 calories and 3,700 teaspoons of sugar each). As if the food execs weren’t still scheming night and day and funding scientific studies to tell them how to get even more soda and sweet drinks like Kool Aid—with no nutritional value at all—into its already addicted consumers!

            I tell you, this stuff gets me so enraged I can hardly write about it.

            So perhaps I should just end with Lunchables—trayed bologna and cheese and crackers put together on an assembly line for a kid’s instant lunch; ramped up a year later to become the Fun Pack that added a Snickers bar, and a sugary drink. Or Hot Pockets (see below). Or Oreos—now being marketed in India to teach millions of Indian kids the “Twist, Lick and Dunk” ritual; just imagine a billion Indians hooked on Oreos! Or pink slime. Yes. pink slime has been in the news fairly recently, and Michael Moss was the journalist who broke the story, so it’s appropriate. The stuff was invented, ironically, because of the public demand for leaner cuts of beef to reduce those dangerous saturated fats. The problem is that leaner cuts are tough without the fat, so the industry sought technological solutions as usual: tenderize these course cuts either by piercing the meat with steel needles; or by taking beef scraps that used to be used for pet food and putting them through a high-speed centrifuge to spin off all but 10 percent of the fat. This latter process leaves a mush that is then formed into 30-pound blocks, frozen, and shipped to meat plants where it’s combined with other beef trimmings to make hamburger. Great. It’s cheap after all; cheaper than lean meat from South America; so cheap that even the USDA used it for school lunch programs for poor kids. 

            Enter Beef Products, Inc. of South Dakota. Given that the “defatted” material in the meat blocks derived from parts of the cow carcass most exposed to feces (you can imagine where those parts are)—which harbor the bacteria E. Coli that can cause stomach poisoning—Beef Products figured something had to be done to kill those feces pathogens that sometimes got smeared (ugh!) on the meat. So they fumigated the meat with ammonia, whose smell sometimes lingered on the “hamburger” sold to places like McDonald’s. Not good. Besides the smell, though, there arose the question of whether this “meat” should even be called “meat;” as USDA microbiologist Gerald Zirnstein noted: “I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent labeling” (228). Zirnstein gave it the name “pink slime,” and Michael Moss published his story on pink slime in 2009. The response, of course, was rapid: McDonald’s, sensing a public relations disaster, discontinued using it. Yet even with all the bad publicity, the USDA and Barack Obama’s Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, were undaunted. In March 2012 Vilsack continued to promote the low-fat benefits of pink slime:

            “That’s one of the reasons we have made it a staple of the school lunch program. We are concerned about obesity levels, and this is an opportunity for us to ensure that youngsters are receiving a product that is lean and contains less fat” (229).

            This gets to what is the heart of the matter for me. The food that increasing numbers of Americans rely on (Frito Lay early on saw baby boomers as a growth industry because of their lifestyle habits: having “abandoned the traditional concept of breakfast, lunch and dinner…they replaced them with convenient snacks—pulled from cupboards, convenience stores, or the office vending machine”) is less and less derived from the farm, and more and more from the factory. It is “processed food,” and it is invented in huge laboratories (Nestle, the world’s largest food company, has a research center employing 700, including 350 “scientists”) that all large food companies now use to invent new ways to deliver machine-created food necessarily drowning in sugar, fat and salt to disguise the horrid taste it would otherwise have (one of these bad tastes is WOF, “warmed-over flavor,” the wet-dog-hair taste of meat that has to be heated again, after first being cooked). And to make it last virtually forever. Machines were first used to make comparatively benign cereals like Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. Today, they are used to make Doritos 3D, a puffy spherical version of the flat potato chip that increases the ‘surprise factor,’ which is said to be “good for consumption.” Or to fabricate Cheetos, an almost perfect food (for profit) that gives no signal to the brain about its high calories or fat, and so induces unlimited craving. Or to create Hot Pockets, whose 8-ounce Pepperoni and 3-Cheese Calzone (Americans now get most of their saturated fat from “cheese”, which is of course not real cheese with beneficial bacteria in it, but “imitation cheddar” and “imitation mozzarella” made with machine-fractured “milk protein concentrate”) delivers 10 grams of saturated fat and 1,500 milligrams of sodium, both close to the recommended daily limits. In addition, this Hot Pocket delivers 6 teaspoons of sugar (nearly as much as a can of Coke!) and enough chemical preservatives among its more than 100 ingredients to keep it on the shelf for 420 days, at least.

            Does such “food” have anything to do with real food? Even Nestlè knows what a disaster it is. Because although it claims that Hot Pockets “meet the needs of millenials,” Nestlè has also bought Novartis, a company that specializes in gastric surgery. You know what this is: gastric bypass surgery literally closes off a portion of the stomach for those who can’t seem to lose the weight they know is killing them. The trouble with gastric surgery, though, is that it doesn’t always work, and never works to reduce the craving for food. Indeed, some people keep eating to the degree that they burst the surgical bands the surgery has implanted, and require care in emergency rooms. Regrettable. But Nestlè, like a good profit-craving corporation, has found opportunity in this as well. It has begun to market yet another line of foods, liquid foods like Peptamen, or Optifat, that are ingested through a tube, so gastric surgery patients can cope more easily with their smaller stomachs.

            As Moss comments: this leads us to the image of “teenagers gorging on Hot Pockets, only to end up drinking Peptamen through a tube for the rest of their lives” (337). But Nestlè? Not to worry; it’s covered no matter what.

            There’s much more to this rich, disturbing book, and I would urge anyone with an interest in food, or children, or the perils of corporate capitalism to read it. It will disturb you, enrage you (not least because of the collusion Moss documents between the U.S. Government and Big Food that has allowed the corporate criminality involved in processed food to continue and expand for a half-century and more), and enlighten you. My hope is that it will also ignite a fire that will force the government, finally, to regulate American food production and stop the perversion of America’s eating habits that are now threatening to engulf the entire planet.          

Before that happens though, the American people have to wake up to what everyone is born knowing: real food is a gift of the earth. It does not come out of a tube, or a soda can, or a plastic container, or a machine.

Lawrence DiStasi

America Diabetica

A segment on the PBS Newshour on June 6 presented some alarming cases and statistics concerning sugar. A 16-yr-old Pueblo Colorado teen was featured as one of millions of American teenagers now exhibiting Type 2 Diabetes—a disease that used to be limited to older adults. This vastly overweight girl was said to be socially isolated (she is homeschooled) and sedentary, with a working mother who cannot be around to monitor her food intake. The result is that she spends her time gorging on typical American junk. Doctors and professionals at the Centers for Disease Control are alarmed, since their projections now show not only that 1 of every 4 American teens already has type 2 diabetes (where insulin is either not sufficient to break down glucose, or the cells ignore the insulin that’s produced); but worse, that 1 of every 3 children born in the year 2000 will develop the disease!  That’s one-third of the country. A Doctor Zeitler laid out the grimmer prospects: whereas in adults with diabetes, the average time from diagnosis to a first major cardiovascular event—heart attack, the need for bypass surgery—is about 15 to 20 years,

Everything that we have seen so far suggests that these kids have a progression rate that's at least as quick, if not a little faster, which means that (for) this kid who has their onset of diabetes at 15, we may be looking at their first major cardiovascular event by the time they're 35. (this PC use of plural pronouns drives me nuts, but that’s what he said. LDS).

Read that again. Kids with diabetes now will be having heart attacks at 35, if they’re lucky. And if the projections are correct, that means 1 of every 3 Americans will be taxing our already overburdened health-care system with more surgeries than ever. Not to mention the other complications from diabetes like loss of toes, limbs, and insulin therapies.

            This trend, of course, has been accelerating since at the least the 1970s and probably since WWII. And the culprit is not hard to find: sugar consumption. One statistic I found showed that since only 1983, the average American consumption of sugar has risen every year to the point in 1999 (the year of the study) where it reached 158 pounds yearly per person—a 30% jump in 16 years. That may be about the time when the geniuses who operate the American food industry discovered that until-then unusable surplus corn could all turn a profit—by being made into high-fructose corn syrup. And what to do with all that corn syrup? Why lace every imaginable American processed food with it—especially our beloved soft drinks. The result is that by 2009, the American Heart Association was noting that average Americans were now consuming 22 teaspoonfuls of added sugar a day (that was average; teenagers 14 to 18 were consuming 34 teaspoonfuls of added sugar per day). Compare this to the recommended average of 9 teaspoons for men and 6 for women. And again, we’re not even counting naturally-occurring sugars such as lactose in milk or fructose in fruit; we’re talking added sugar—“the sweeteners and syrups that are added to foods during processing, preparation or at the table.” As in killer foods like cakes and cookies and puddings, plus the sugar in all our favorite goodies like ketchup and snacks and Thai foods and McDonald’s fries and chicken tenders and those super-sized soft drinks the state of New York has recently tried to limit (to 16 ounces; whereupon, from the outcry by the restaurant industry, you’d think mother’s milk was being rationed), and the city of Richmond CA has recently proposed taxing, with the tax revenues going to fund sports programs for sedentary kids (again with aggressive campaigns by the Beverage Industry to oppose the tax as more “government interference” in American lives.)

            No wonder we’re a nation of sugar-crazed, overweight diabetics.

            This brings to mind the very viability of carbohydrates themselves. Because while it was not long ago that runners and other athletes were recommending “carb loading,” there has more recently emerged a growing chorus of food gurus who insist that ever since humans invented agriculture, the major portion of our diet that comes from grains and other carbohydrates like tubers has led to a plethora of diseases like diabetes and arthritis. I heard one of these guys on the radio the other day, and he was quite convincing. His book, Neanderthin, argues that based on his own experience (and apparently little or no research), the optimum diet for a human is the “paleo” diet: mostly meats, plus tubers that you can dig with a stick, and fruits and veggies that can be eaten raw; all of these being foods that the guts of our hunter-gatherer ancestors allegedly evolved to process. At first glance, this seems reasonable. Grains are indeed inedible in their natural state. They convert quickly to sugars when eaten processed and cooked. And many of them have compounds that can be toxic. But looked at more closely, it appears that the easy notion that hunter-gatherers, like chimpanzees, were natural carnivores who got most of their calories from meats, doesn’t quite compute. It turns out that chimps get more of their calories from fruits and tubers and insects than from meats—a once-a-month rarity, according to Jane Goodall. Humans, similarly, are not naturally-evolved carnivores at all—our teeth are useless for tearing meat from a carcass or bringing down prey, and our jaws are designed for grinding rather than for tearing meat and swallowing hunks whole like carnivores. Nor are our guts designed with enough carnivore-type acids to easily process raw meat.

            In short, most of us need carbohydrates alright. The only question is, what kind and in what proportion should we eat them. The answer seems fairly simple. We should get about half of our carbs from ‘good’ carbs—the kind with lots of fiber. These are the carbohydrates that get absorbed slowly into our systems, thus avoiding those harmful “sugar spikes.” Sadly, these are the carbohydrates that Americans tend to shun: whole grains, vegetables, fruits, and beans. But shunned or not, we need carbs that are not processed ahead of time, or refined, carbs that come in their natural garments rather than in glitzy packaging designed to appeal to ignorant children. Because it’s the processing—the bleaching of flour, the polishing of rice, the mass production of easy meals that require only a minute in the microwave or that come in cardboard containers from the take-out counter—this processing is what powers the rapid ‘bad’ carbohydrate train to sugarland. And thus should be avoided. What is wanted are foods that have texture, substance, that require chewing and time digesting: brown rice and whole wheat and leafy vegetables and all the fruits and nuts loaded with the fiber that slows down that sugar train. The benefits being that slow carbs avoid the peaks and valleys in blood sugar levels that lead to diabetes; and, as a side benefit, tend to lower serum cholesterol in the blood. In sum, somewhere between half the calories in good carbs, some fat, and up to 35% protein (from meat, eggs, milk products, etc.) is a generally recommended balance.

            The trouble, of course, is that in our industrial-food marketplace, this is a balance harder to achieve than ever. Practically all food these days is processed (more profit)—if it’s not genetically engineered to be resistant to poisonous pesticides and herbicides (i.e. to allow poisons to be used with abandon). Still, the advantaged among us can still manage to find such a balance—if we can resist the easy fix of the microwave or the takeout counter, that is. For the disadvantaged, though, it’s a different story—and they are the ones most at risk for diabetes. For the disadvantaged, the neighborhoods they inhabit, such as those in Richmond CA, have been stripped of real stores, of supermarkets or even old-style mom-and-pop groceries carrying at least a few fresh fruits and vegetables. Instead, they are left in ‘food deserts’ to rummage among packaged foods in liquor stores or fast-food restaurants peddling the worst fat-laced processed crap American ingenuity can package for them in bright colors fit for TV commercials. Super-sized drinks. Fat-laced, artificially-colored mystery meat stuffed between mushy-soft white-flour buns. Desserts as the logical extension of sweetened and fat-laden French fries. With some of these teens slurping down a super-sized coke with a package of chips for breakfast, and similar junk food all day long. All of it promoted 24-7 on TV and billboards as mom-centered, community-creating, fun-fostering purveyors of patriotic America. When in truth, the whole American food perplex, full of exotic choices, is the essence of the great shill, the great deception, the great epidemic, the logical apotheosis of diseased capitalism we now have and will have even more exclusively in what is to come: our own America Diabetica.

            And lest you hadn’t noticed, it’s all a perfect emblem for the corruption in this increasingly dysfunctional system, where the poor are targeted by the richest corporations on whom to dump their profit-making garbage; and any attempt to rein in this gross exploitation and outright murder is pilloried as “excessive regulation” of the “free” market by an overly intrusive government.  That is, government takes the hit, and corporations reap the profits from this sorry-ass spectacle: the richest society in planetary history mindlessly eating and polluting itself into an early grave.  All the while braying to itself and the world about its precious “freedom.”

Lawrence DiStasi