Q & A

(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: You joined a panel of fellow dietary experts on Charlie Rose’s science series this week to chew the fat about America’s fat problem. The scholarly consensus seemed to be that we’re filling up—and out--with processed foods that our bodies can’t handle, which plays havoc with our metabolism, raises our blood sugar levels, and makes us want to eat even more, leading us to consume more calories than we could ever begin to convert to energy, and thereby making us ever fatter.

Dr. Nestle: That's a fair summary of that lengthy conversation. The bottom line is
that genetics matters but even good genes don't do you much good if you overeat junk food and don't burn off those calories with hard work.

kat: One of your fellow panelists expressed the hope that there might someday be a pill we could take that would mitigate the damage from such a diet—a kind of carbo-offset, if you will. Perhaps pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, who sponsors this series, is hard at work developing just such a drug?

Dr. Nestle: No doubt. With 60% of Americans overweight, drug companies would adore to find a magic bullet that would let people eat as much as they want
without putting on pounds. Finding one has been difficult so far--the
existing drugs either increase the risk of heart attacks or cause unpleasant
gastrointestinal symptoms best not discussed in polite company--and for good
reason. Metabolism is set up to defend body weight against starvation. I
count 40-50 separate factors that have something to do with body weight. If
one gets neutralized, the others kick in to compensate. But that won't stop
drug companies from trying. There's too much money at stake.

And I should point out that Coca-Cola is another sponsor--a company that is desperate to keep sales up and would be happy to sell water or anything else if people would buy as much of it as they do classic Coke. It's hard for soft drink companies to deal with the facts. More and more research shows that people who habitually drink sodas take in more calories, are fatter, and have worse diets than people who don't.

kat: You prescribe a wholesale switch to a more wholesome diet. But fruits and vegetables are the perennial wallflowers wilting on the sidelines of the supermarkets, while the packaged foods take center stage and seduce us with their promise of all things sweet, crunchy, fatty, and salty. You often note that the corporations’ primary obligation is to turn a profit for their shareholders. Can Big Food make a healthy profit without making us ill, or are consumers who contract heart disease and diabetes from a steady diet of convenience foods just collateral damage—the cost of doing business--in our capitalist culture?

Dr. Nestle: I think food companies are caught in an impossible dilemma. No matter how hard they try, they can't please Wall Street and public health advocates at the same time. Healthier foods cost more to make (they have better ingredients) and they don't sell nearly as well as junk foods. If companies make healthier foods, they lose money. If they can't keep their bottom lines growing, Wall Street complains and stockholders revolt. If we want marketing to children to stop, we need to allow companies to tick along with lower profits. And we need to change election laws so that our representatives can make decisions based on public health, not corporate health.

(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 : Here’s something I want to get off my chest. Evidence is growing that diet and environment may be key culprits in causing breast cancer, according to a recent report on PRI's Living On Earth. A professor of epidemiology, Dr. Devra Lee Davis, emphasized the importance of "eating low on the food chain." What constitutes a low-on-the-food chain diet?

Dr. Nestle: This is an old idea that received wide attention when Frances Moore Lappé
changed the way everyone thought about food in her book Diet for a Small Planet in 1971. Food chains refer to who eats what. We are at the top of the food chain. We eat animals; animals eat plants or smaller animals; smaller animals eat plants and even smaller animals. The smallest animals eat only plants. This puts plants at the bottom of the food chain. Eating low on the food chain means eating mostly plants. This is better from the standpoint of food resources (it takes several pounds of plants to create a pound of meat) and of health (less saturated fat).

kat: Dr. Davis also noted that low-on-the-food-chain foods “are low in pesticides--the fatter the food, the more opportunities it has to absorb toxic chemicals, so eating a diet that is low in animal fat is important." Why do fatty foods absorb more toxins, if this is not too technical a question to ask?

Dr. Nestle: Of course not. Most toxins are organic compounds that are soluble in fat,
not water.

kat: But are all animal fats created equal? Is all red meat bad, or do
grass-fed meats have health benefits as Jo Robinson's Why Grassfed
is Best claims?

Dr. Nestle: The fat issue is really about ruminants--beef cattle--and you have to be
able to handle some fat chemistry to understand what it is about. As I explain in What to Eat (see pages 176-179 on "Animals: Grass Fed and Grass Finished"), bacteria in the cow's rumen add hydrogen to the otherwise unsaturated fatty acids in grass. This makes beef fat more saturated, which is not so good for heart disease risk. But some of the unsaturated fatty acids get hydrogenated in a different way and form "conjugated linoleic acids " (CLAs). These are trans fats, but somewhat different from the trans fats that get formed by artificial hydrogenation (I describe the structural
differences in the endnote to page 177).

kat: Robinson also maintains that the CLAs in full fat grass-fed dairy
actually lower cholesterol. True?

Dr. Nestle: The research on CLAs is preliminary but suggests that grass-fed beef is
healthier than beef fed corn and soybeans. I am not convinced that the
evidence is all that strong but others would surely disagree.

kat: OK, so the jury’s out on whether grass-fed meat and dairy can reduce your cholesterol levels, but steering clear of factory farmed meats full of hormones, antibiotics, pesticides and chemicals may decrease your risk of cancer, and eating humanely raised (i.e. grass-fed) meats is bound to boost your karma!

Dr. Nestle: I couldn't agree more.