Dr. Marion Nestle

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: Consumer panic in this country over a perceived rice crisis—or, as Jon Stewart dubbed it, C”rice”is—compelled U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer to declare last Thursday that good ol’ American ingenuity holds the solution to the world’s current food shortages. Shafer told Reuters:

(box)"Unless we can convince other nations to accept the biotechnology and the good farming practices and the precision farming methods that we use today in the United States to increase yields across the globe, we're going to continue to have these price structure and problems with food and hunger in the world today."(box)

Of course, a lot of folks are saying that our agricultural policies are, in fact, a big part of the problem, particularly the diversion of corn for ethanol. What’s your take?

Dr. Nestle: It's mantra time again! From their beginnings in the early 1990s, to head off critics, agricultural biotechnology companies intoned the agbiotech mantra: biotechnology--and only biotechnology--can produce enough food to feed the world. So far, the results have been less than impressive.

The industry has focused on temperate zone agriculture, rather than tropical agriculture, for two reasons: it's easier to do and people in developing countries don't have the money to buy expensive seeds every year. Temperate zone soybean producers love using genetically modified seeds because they don't have to apply pesticides as often and their yields are good.

But researchers who do such comparisons say yields on organic farms are lower, but only slightly. So now corn farmers are being encouraged to grow corn for ethanol? The nutritionist in me says that's better than growing it for high fructose corn syrup, but not much corn gets used for that purpose anyway. Most of it goes for animal feed.

All of this is unsustainable and needs a major re-think. Maybe it's time for everyone to start growing food, even if it's just in window boxes. In the meantime, we have a farm bill that still hasn't passed and gets worse by the minute. Our agriculture policies are a mess. I hate the idea that it will take a food crisis to bring on better agricultural policies but let's hope some good will come out of rising food prices.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: Frito-Lay’s commemorating this Earth Day, April 22nd, by launching a solar-powered snack food factory in Modesto, California. “A football stadium-sized farm of solar collectors” will start harnessing the sun’s energy to produce the company’s corn-based multigrain SunChips, according to the Modesto Bee.

The project, which called for a “significant” investment on the part of Pepsi-co-owned Frito Lay, was a collaboration with the California Energy Commission, which hopes to showcase Central California’s potential to be a leader in the use of solar-powered farms for manufacturing. And Frito-Lay is laying out another big chunk of change for the obligatory ad campaign to trumpet its solar-powered snack food.

Since America's hooked on salty, crunchy chips, Big Food will keep cranking them out--as long as Agribiz has the petroleum, chemicals, land, and water to keep growing corn for dubious "foods," along with boneheaded biofuels. So, given that reality, should we celebrate the arrival of the pseudo-carbon-neutral empty carb? Or is this just one more case of a corporation putting the “con” in “conservation”?

Dr. Nestle: I hadn’t heard of this but your question reminds me of its food equivalent: Is a better-for-you junk food a good choice? Just because it’s a little bit healthier, does that make it good? Let’s hand it to PepsiCo (Frito Lay’s parent company) for once again getting ahead of the pack in promoting itself as green as well as healthy. PepsiCo was first to get rid of trans fats, and first to self-endorse its “better-for-you” options for snack foods and drinks. It is now trying to position itself as a wellness company, and green to boot. Alas, I can’t help but see this as much more about marketing than about health or environmental sustainability.

If PepsiCo was really serious about health issues it would stop marketing junk foods to kids and stop marketing junk foods in developing countries. I was in India last fall and could not believe how Frito Lay chips managed to be for sale everywhere—even in the most remote villages where nothing else was available. PepsiCo has a truly awe-inspiring distribution system. If PepsiCo was really serious about environmental issues, it would stop wasting the planet’s resources on junk foods altogether and would stop selling tap water in plastic bottles. And I’d love to see it stop marketing to kids too, but that’s another matter.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: When it comes to the importance of eating breakfast, you are an unrepentant (and enviably slender) breakfast-skipper, believing that what we eat matters far more than when we eat.

So what's your take on the article in Tuesday's NY Times, "Skipping Cereal and Eggs, and Packing on Pounds," which cites a study showing that "the more often adolescents eat breakfast, the less likely they are to be overweight"?

Dr. Nestle: I read the original paper in Pediatrics, and you can too by clicking HERE. The excellent research team from the University of Minnesota asked a simple question of 4,700 middle- and high-school students: “During the past week, how many days did you eat breakfast?” The researchers correlated the answers, which ranged from 0 to 7 days per week, with the kids’ BMIs. They did a follow-up 5 years later, capturing about half the original respondents. As the New York Times reported, the kids who ate breakfast were thinner to begin with and gained less weight than those who didn’t.

I’m not at all surprised by these results. Nutritionists always say kids need to eat breakfast and I do too. There are loads of studies that correlate breakfast-eating with better learning and general health. Many of these were funded by cereal companies, but no matter. I believe the results. What I’m less sure about is whether the results have anything to do with breakfast itself or with education, wealth, and other markers of socioeconomic status. Breakfast-eating is a marker for a lot of other family characteristics. The Minnesota researchers know this. They point out that studies generally find that kids “who skipped breakfast on a daily basis had a higher BMI, were older, nonwhite, and from a lower SES.” Breakfast eaters, in contrast, eat better diets and are more physically active. So breakfast-eating tracks with other healthful practices in kids.

But what about adults? As I keep saying, one of the great things about being an adult is that you get to eat what you want when you want to. I, for one, gave up eating breakfast as soon as I could get away with it. I don’t start getting hungry or even remotely interested in food until 11:00 or so in the morning and that’s when I want to eat—not before. I wrote about this in What to Eat and cannot count the number of not-hungry-in-the-morning types who have thanked me for taking the pressure off. If adults ate only when they felt hungry and didn’t eat when they didn’t feel hungry, weight control would come a lot easier.

But kids going to school? That’s another matter. The Minnesota researchers did not fuss much about what the kids were eating as long as they were eating at all, but it breaks my heart to see kids eating sodas and chips first thing in the morning. We need to do a lot better job of making sure that kids eat decently, a health practice that tracks with all kinds of health behaviors and learning.

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: The War on Christmas is really getting personal—now, as you noted on your blog, Santa himself is under siege. It’s bad enough that Santas in Australia have been advised not to say “ho, ho, ho" on the grounds that it’s offensive to women, but now we’ve got our own acting U.S. surgeon general, Steven K. Galson, saying that a thinner Santa would be a better role model for our kids.

Santa’s just the latest icon ordered to undergo a makeover; the Cookie Monster’s had to cut way back on his intake of baked goodies; Ronald McDonald’s dropped a clown suit size or two; Mr. Potato Head is now “healthy” Mr. Potato Head, decked out in running shoes and clutching a water bottle (hope it isn’t leaching bisphenol A!)

Are these calorie-counting characters just more silly corporate spin, or are kids really influenced by this stuff? Why aren’t we looking to real-life role models to inspire healthier habits in our kids?

Dr. Nestle: Ah Kerry. You do ask the toughest questions. And this is a tough one: what will it take to encourage kids to eat healthfully. Somehow, I doubt it's going to be an exercising Mr. Potato Head or skinny Santa.

I often show a slide of the svelte Ronald McDonald in my talks and it always gets a laugh. Everybody knows an oxymoron when they see one. Here's the problem: companies have to sell more food to make money. Its corollary: eating less is very bad for business. Well, here's what we know about why kids eat the way they do. For starters, advertising and marketing work. The marketing-to-kids enterprise has one main goal: to make kids think they know more about what they are supposed to eat than their parents do.

And the "supposed to eat" means foods in packages, with cartoons on the labels, heavily processed, sweet and salty, and in funny shapes and colors. And food companies back this goal with $15 billion or so a year in marketing.

So what is the antidote? Teach kids how to cook! Teach them where food comes from and what it tastes like. Encourage them to explore the food world. And while we are at it, how about doing some things to change the food environment to make it easier for parents to make healthier choices for their kids? Let's do some policy changes: restrictions on marketing to kids, vending machines and competitive foods out of schools, and lots of safe places to play. And a few celebrities leading the way might help. Volunteers, anyone?

(With a click of her mouse, EatingLiberally’s kat corners Dr. Marion Nestle, NYU professor of nutrition and author of Food Politics and What to Eat:)

Kat: Gary Taubes' new book, “Good Calories, Bad Calories,” presents the hypothesis that carbohydrates, not fat, are to blame for the obesity epidemic, and that the evidence linking a high fat diet to heart disease is unconvincing.

So why the widely held consensus that eating too much fat is bad for us? According to Taubes, it boils down to peer pressure, or a kind of group think phenomenon among nutritionists and scientists who blindly regurgitate the conventional wisdom that excess fat consumption contributes to heart disease. He calls this an “informational cascade,” and credits it with a flood of fallacies about fat’s supposed role in our current health crisis.

Taube’s theory got an approving nod from the New York Times’ resident contrarian John Tierney (aka “the thinking man’s John Stossel”) in Tuesday’s Science Times, but Tierney admits that Taube’s hypothesis remains unproved because the pro-low fat contingent won’t even allow it to be properly studied. Another New York Times science writer, Gina Kolata, began her review of Traube’s book by heralding him as “a brave and bold science journalist,” but concluded it by saying “I’m sorry, but I’m not convinced.”

You described the “Snackwell’s phenomenon” in What to Eat, whereby consumers eat a whole box of high-carb, fat-free cookies because they think “fat-free” equals “low calorie.” The low-fat fad has given rise to all kinds of dubious “innovations,” such as hogs bred so lean that they haven’t got sufficient fat on their backs to be able to survive outdoors. Lost in all this low-fat baloney is the fact that some fats are good for us, and others (such as saturated animal fats) aren't. Do any truly credible scientists dispute that?

It seems to me that most of us are simply eating too much of everything, be it fats or carbs. But I’m not a nutrition professor, just lucky enough to know someone who is. What’s your take on Taube?

Dr. Nestle: Gary Taubes' book arrived while I was in India and I can't comment on it because I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I gather that it comes down hard on carbohydrates. I continue to be impressed by how difficult it is to separate the health effects of fat, carbohydrate, and protein from the calories they provide, the foods that contain them, the diets as a whole, or the rest of the lifestyle that goes along with the diet.

Finding out what people eat is hard to do. Determining the health effects of dietary factors or patterns is even harder to do since humans make such awful experimental animals. Plenty of things about human nutrition are reasonably well established--the basic nutrients that are required and the amounts that prevent deficiency diseases, for example.  But it is much trickier to figure out the effects of nutrients on chronic diseases that are also affected by activity levels, cigarette smoking, alcohol use, and social factors such as poverty, stress, and lack of control. I can't help but be skeptical of journalists who think they have answers to questions that scientists have been grappling with for years.

In a situation in which questions remain, is it better to say nothing or to give the best advice possible based on existing knowledge? Intelligent people may differ on this point but I am convinced that people really want to know what diet is best for their health and want help making food choices. What seems amazing to me is that despite decades of arguments over fat v. carbohydrate, basic dietary advice for preventing chronic diseases hasn't changed in 50 years. I summarize this advice in What to Eat as don't eat too much (eat less, move more); eat plenty of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains; and don't eat too much junk food.

Oh, and the calorie question. It's not that people are overeating 50 to 100 calories a day (the amount in one or two Oreo cookies) and gaining weight. Most bodies can easily compensate for small differences in caloric intake and output. But, as I hear from pediatricians all the time, kids these days are consuming hundreds of calories more than they need, and sometimes thousands. Metabolism--in kids or adults--just can't handle that level of overload. In that situation, carbohydrates may be harder to handle than fats, but both will end up in the body as fat if those calories aren't used up in physical activity.

Fortunately, my precepts leave plenty of room for enjoying delicious food, and aren't we lucky to have so much around.