Read Online 21 Pounds in 21 Days by Roni DeLuz - Free Book Online Page B

the list of beverages young people drink most. Americans literally eat and drink all day long—and we don’t see anything wrong with it.
    How did an entire society’s eating habits change so quickly? According to one of the nation’s leading nutritionists, Marion Nestle, PhD, MPH, professor and former chair of the department of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, Americans are experiencing the flip side of what she calls the “paradox of plenty.” During most of human history, the food supply has been erratic. Our bodies literally adapted to survive in either “feast or famine,” primarily famine since food has usually not been plentiful. But we’ve advanced so quickly technologically that American industry now produces an overabundance of food, particularly corn and soybeans. In fact, if you add up the number of calories each person living in America needs to maintain a healthy weight and compare that to the number of calories food companies produce, you’d find there’s twice as much food available as we need to be healthy. Not surprisingly, food producers want to sell as much of this food as profitably as they can. Their strategies range from inventing innovative (read: overcivilized) products and making them look sumptuous in television ads to lobbying government officials to buying out experts to advertising to children, who don’t know that they’re being manipulated. It does not matter to them if selling more food occurs at the expense of publichealth, Dr. Nestle writes in her book Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. “The leading [health] conditions related to diet—coronary heart disease, cancers at certain sites, diabetes, stroke, and liver cirrhosis, for example—could be reduced in prevalence or delayed until later in life if people ate less of the dietary components that increase disease risk. Advice to eat less, however, runs counter to the interest of food producers. 5
    In an interview on Amazon.com’s streaming video show Amazon Fishbowl , Pollan charges that Americans are “deliberately confused by an industry that spends $36 billion a year on marketing messages precisely to persuade us to eat more, and eat at different times, eat in the car, eat in front of television, and eat highly processed foods, because that’s where the money is.” Dr. Nestle says the food industry intentionally keeps us confused about whether foods like chocolate, coffee, and eggs are good or bad for us and whether food labels like “low fat,” “low calorie” and “natural” really mean as much as they imply. Though I am not an expert on food industry economics, recently I witnessed an example of food-marketing hype firsthand. I saw packages of carrots that were labeled low fat. A low-fat label on a carrot? What nonsense! Of course they’re low fat—they’re carrots!
    Food manufacturers do so much marketing—and very effectively—that they have changed the meaning of food from something we use to nourish ourselves, which is how we thought of it only one generation ago, to something we consume whenever we want to celebrate something, nourish, reward, comfort, or rev ourselves up. No wonder so many of us now live to eat rather than eat to live.
    Where does the government stand on all of this? Some experts charge that the FDA experiences a conflict of interest inherent in its mission statement: that it must choose between promoting foods American farmers grow and directing consumers not to eat too much. “No government agency has the funds to promote dietary recommendations in competition with food advertising,”Dr. Nestle writes. As a result, she claims, “The major sources of nutrition advice for most people are the media and the public relations efforts of the food industry itself.” In his 2004 testimony before Congress in hearings