Why We're Fat -- Globe and Mail April 15 2006


Trash that burger, drop that Oreo cookie, throw away those French fries, hot dogs, Coke and Pepsi, Doritos, Animal Crackers, Smarties, Chicken nuggets, all salt and sugar from your diet….
These foods are your enemy, they make you fat, make you ill and eventually will kill you.
This is the frightening message of the food police (the nutritionists, dietitions, health authorities, advocacy groups) who believe that the rising rate of obesity threatens our future and that the only way to roll back the damage is to change North Americans’ favourite diet.
Approximately 64 per cent of North Americans are now defined as obese or overweight. The reason is simple. We eat too much. Polled, the public says that overeating is an individual responsibility. And we all know it. Some 90% of women diet at one time or another, and they do so to lose weight. They have spurred a hugely profitable diet food industry, even though everyone knows how to lose weight. You just eat less than 1000 calories a day.
But the food police have gone further. It isn’t’ our fault we’re fat, it’s our food’s fault. We eat unhealthy food. In attacking food itself, they may have stepped into a quagmire, because food is complex, sustenance but so much more and with meanings that extend into our spiritual and cultural lives. It’s scientifically proven that only the food you like to eat, food that tastes good, does you good. To eat is emotional.  Attack the food I love, you are attacking me.
North Americans’ favourite food is processed food and 90% of our dollars go to it. Processed food is one of the great industrial triumphs of North America, feeding 3033 million people with not just the daily calories required to sustain life but with a huge variety of foods at prices that are the envy of a hungry world. Ten thousand pieces of processed food come off the assembly line a year, each one designed to make the consumer salivate. The Food Police rail at the industry’s emphasis on seduction and convenience at the expense of nutrition, at its promotion for example  of Sugar Pops, which are full of the empty calories that define junk food, over healthy whole grain cereal.
And now the Food Police have finally struck gold in the blame game. Trans Fatty Acid, a tentpole of the industry, has been irrefutably linked to heart disease– the No. one killer in North America. What is Trans Fatty Acid, TFA? More than a century ago, vegetable oil was hydrogenated into a solid, TFA, which when added to foods, preserved flavour and lengthened shelf life. The processed food industry has been endlessly ingenious in using TFA to keep cookies fresh, stop oils oxidizing, keep the taste in frozen foods, you name it. A quick scan of the labels on supermarket shelves shows that TFA is in almost everything – from frozen dinners to margarine - and turns up in every fast food.
The drumbeat against TFA’s presence in our food has grown louder and louder. Last May,New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof declared that Girl Guide Cookies containing TFA have killed more Americans than Al Qaeda! (Such is the zeitgeist, he was attacked by a Girl Guide for being sexist).  New York City, the home of the scrumptiously politically incorrect Nathan's Famous Hot Dog is pondering a TFA ban, and in mid-October, Disney announced that TFA is being removed from all Disney food offerings in the U.S.
Now a giant has buckled. Kentucky Fried Chicken, facing a lawsuit from the CSPI, announced this week that it is replacing its TFA cooking oil with low fat linolenic soybean oil in its 5,500 U.S. outlets.
Calmer voices have been overridden. Dr. Elizabeth Whelan heads the American Council on Science and Health, ACSH, a group of doctors and scientist dedicated to desconstructing media-hyped scares such as the Acrylamide scare where Sweden claimed (without proof) that 200 people had died from exposure to it in French fries. Acrylamide may occur in fried food but it is also  a naturally occurring chemical in other foods including saintly Broccoli! And famously, ACSH demolished the wildeyed claims from a single study that eating farmed salmon which contained PCBs threatened cancer. The National Cancer Institute denied the existence of any study linking PCBs in fish to cancer in humans.
 
To Dr. Whelan, the health risks of TFA are greatly exaggerated “with recommendations to avoid them having as little scientific basis as saying all of us should purge every grain of salt from our diets."
She has a point. TFA naturally occurs in meat and dairy and occurs when vegetable oils such as Canola are heated.According to Dr. Massimo Marcone, an adjunct  professor in food science at the University of Guelph, “Any time we heat an oil a certain amount of TFA is formed, the higher the temperature the more TFA are formed.” To ban all TFA would be to ban most of what we eat. That’s why the FDA, the US government food safety watchdog, cannot ban TFA totally. Just to confuse consumers, the FDA has set no daily limit on ingesting TFA. Dr. Marcone says “How much is considered high? Depends on who you’re talking to.”
But - Wait a minute, the thoughtful consumer may say, haven’t I been here before?.Don’t I remember the fat frenzy of the 1970s when BUTTER and animal fats were the prime threats to the heart. When consumers were urged to eat low fat foods, to eat margarine instead of butter, to steak. At that time, the Ralph-Nader inspired Center for Science in the Public Interest attacked McDonalds for using tallow, a saturated fat said to raise cholesterol, to deepfry its potatoes. The CSPI recommended that MacDonalds use soybean oil vegetable oils containing  TFA! Today the CSPI is fulminating against TFA.
Further confusion The food police have spent more than twenty years urging consumers to eat carbs not fats.  But Dr William Willett, the chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health says in his new book Eat, Drink and Be Healthy  that in the past four decades we have reduced calories from fat in our diets from 40 percent to 33 percent. Yet the disease rate remains at the same level, and obesity and Type 2 diabetes are soaring.
What happened?
Fat can be satisfying, he says, so when we cut down on it, we are hungry, and we eat more carbohydrates.
Unfortunately, carbohydrates increase weight as effectively as fat. Willett explains that pasta, potatoes, white bread and white rice all cause spikes in blood sugar levels, which you don't get with fat, protein or slowly absorbed carbohydrates from vegetables, fruits or whole grains.

Willett summarizes that cutting all fats and increasing carbohydrates does little to protect against heart disease and may ultimately cause some harm.


So what kind of food should we eat?. Natural food. A vision of Elysian fields with happy peasants gorging on organic food locally grown without the synthetic chemicals that are de rigueur in processed foods?
Local organic food as a viable alternative to processed food has been brilliantly promoted by Alice Waters who opened her organic restaurant Chez Panisse  in 1970 in Berkeley California. Today, California is the organic capital of North America where pregnant pigs are pampered, cows treated kindly, hens allowed to run free, succulent fruit and veg flourish in a clean, unpoisoned environment. Properly managed, it has been claimed that organic methods could make enough food for us all.
“Of course it would be best to eat fresh food” agrees Dr. Marcone, “But in the cities we need to get food to the people.” In a direct contradiction of the meaning of organic as fresh and local, most of the organic food we eat is imported.
At this time, organic is under 3 per cent of the North American market. Agriculture has always been the environment's enemy, and organic growing takes up more land than conventional growing. There is no proof that organic food is better for us than conventionally grown food with pesticide residues. .
Organic is not safer, as the recent recall of toxic spinach and carrot juice from California shows.
The case of the poisoned spinach is educative. The spinach, grown organically by a company called Earthbound, was found to contain the e coli H7: 157, the pathogen that poisoned the wells in Walkerton, Ontario; it spread through 23 states and Canada, killing one and sickening at least 146.
The pathogen may have been transmitted via the excrement of wild pigs. The pigs may have drink from streams poisoned by the run off from a nearby ranch. As the landscape fills up with larger and larger herds of animals (including organic), the danger of poisoned aquifers and streams increase. In this environment, organic crops like Earthbound’s spinach are no safer than conventionally grown crops.
Lectures about healthy food are giving consumers indigestion. The Food Police may have given high fives to the KFC ban on TFA but  consumerland is skeptical.. Hart Oldenburg of Winnipeg writes: “Get real. KFC, you and your cohort fatteners, cut calories in half and open new branches under my thehalfportionplace web banner! You can now use whatever fat is the tastiest!”

In 2001, the first study on consumer reactions to healthy food advice and sponsored by the National Cancer Institute reported that the more negative and confused people feel about dietary recommendations, the more likely they are to eat a fat-laden diet that skimps on fruits and vegetables – the foods that, it is generally, agreed we must eat daily.

Fast forward to September 2006.  The McClatchy News Service headlines "Fast Food is getting Bigger, Meatier with the debut of Burger King's BK Stackers which include a Quad Stacker option of four slabs of beef, four slices of cheese and up to eight slices of bacon smothered in a creamy sauce - a 1,000 calorie, 68 grams of fat treat.
"This burger might better be called the quadruple-bypass special," says Jeff Novick, director of nutrition for the Pritikin Longevity Center. He thinks consumers are reacting to the constant lecturing about eating healthfully. "It was like people threw up their hands, frustrated. Pretty soon there was some restaurant bragging about serving deep-fried Twinkies."
Emboldened, the fast food chain A&W is running an ad showing a Millenium gen couple leaving a nouvelle cuisine eatery, giggling over the tiny portions – three green beans and charred tomato coulis. As they part she says shyly “How about a burger?” Next thing they’re chowing down as they look into each others’ eyes. When the waiter asks How about dessert? She says “This is dessert.”
Backlash in adults took time. For children the negative reaction is quicker. For long the Food Police has rightly fought against the junk food vending machines in school halls and the French-fry dominated diet of cafeterias. Now the British government has banned them, and prompted by the wrath of celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who last  year sensationalized the horrors of junkfood school meals in his TV program, have pumped hundreds of millions of pounds into providing school meals.

One year later, the Daily Express’s headline screams “How Jamie and school meal fascists turn kids into junk food addicts”. All over Britain, children are rebelling against the new healthy food. Joanne,14, a pupil at a large London comprehensive, is sucking her Triple Power Push Pop as she delivers a common opinion of the nutritious pasta and rice dishes. “It’s disgusting.”

What the government failed to understand was that you can’t legislate taste in a free society. Dr. Marcone is among those hopeful that repeated exposure to healthy food will in time change the children’s tastes. But how will this be done? By locking kids into the lunchroom as they do at the Rawsome Secondary School in Yorkshire?  Two mothers of the involuntary lunchers started smuggling in fast food through the fence, fearing their children would otherwise starve.

And how can you erase the memory of taste? The British, who spent 12 years during and after World War II on highly nutritious food rationing, couldn’t wait to taste again rich chocolate,  butter and beef.
Dr. Marcone warns that  worrying about food can actually start to change your body’s chemistry so “it’s important to be happy about the food supply.”
This is just what art teacher Paul Finkelstein is teaching his students in his Culinary Arts Program  at the the Stratford Northwest Secondary School in Ontario – food as one of life’s pleasures, to be savoured not gulped, to be respected as a source of nutrition, to be eaten for its taste…. .  
The program grew out of the success of the Screaming Avocado, the healthy food café which Finkelstein opened three years ago with school funds. Today some 200 students (out of a student body of 1200) are enrolled in Finkelstein's program and each morning some 20 take a double credit class which includes choosing the day's menu. They make the bread, pick the organic vegetables in the garden Finkelstein started in the school yard, and prepare lunch - dishes like roast leg of lamb, slow-roasted pork, homemade pork and bean. An average crowd of 200 daily pay $3 for the scoff, about the same number as cough up more than $4 for French Fries and pop at the cafeteria. "We make money from it" says Finkelstein who ploughs the profits into lunches for students at the delectable Church Restaurant in order to educate their palates.
Finally, spare some sympathy for the food police.  Our growing obesity is also caused by something beyond their control: the nature of our society at once permissive and litigious. In the New York Times, Franklin Stone of Common Good, an organization dedicated to restoring common sense to American law, writes “To alleviate the obesity crisis, we need to focus as much on providing children with increased opportunities for active, stimulating and creative free play as on changing the way they eat….
Unfortunately, the fear of legal liability has resulted in the loss of significant opportunities for exercise.

Playgrounds are boring to anyone over 5 when they are stripped of seesaws, slides, swings and jungle gyms, and hiking trails and sledding hills are being closed.

A Massachusetts elementary school has just banned the game of tag.”

Time was when 90 minutes of physical education in schools was mandatory. But a Heart and Stroke Foundation study in 2004 found that by Grade 12, only 36% of students in a little over half the Ontario schools take elective phys ed.
In Britain, now the fattest country in Europe, Journalist Andrew Hagan posits that bad eating is a pattern in modern life which has "too much leisure, too little purpose, bad schooling, low motivation." To stop eating, we must have something to do that inspires us to want to change. "Work" suggests the novelist Alasdair Gray "as if you're living in the early days of a better nation."
Gina Mallet is the author of Last Chance to Eat, the Fate of Taste in a Fast Food world, winner of the 2005 James Beard Award for Writing on Food.