http://www.foodincmovie.com/sign-the-petition.php
THE AMERICAN NUTRITIONAL INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
For many years, I have known a Son of (what FOOD, INC. calls) the "Nutritional Industrial Complex". This man was a lifelong farmer and graduate from Kansas State University (originally an agricultural and technical college), who had majored in biology and who had worked for years with the chemical and agricultural firms around the state of Kansas. Despite all of this Kansan's background in the farming industry and his hatred of what he had seen around him for decades, including his own losing of his father's farm during the many 1980s/1990s farm bankruptcies that swept the USA, this Son of "Nutritional Industrial Complex" in America could and would not critique his own education and the KSU extension agencies that had promoted mono-cultural agriculture and a humongous dependence by farmers on petrochemicals since WWII.
Michael Pollan, who appears in FOOD, INC., was asked recently what the "Nutritional Industrial Complex" is. Pollan explained, "Well, there is a very kind of cozy relationship between nutritional science, as it's practiced in the universities and in the government, and the kinds of advice that emerges from that research, and the food industry, which does a very good job of taking any shred of new information like, oh, maybe fiber prevents colon cancer, and then go to town with really dubious health claims about it. A lot of the research is very tentative and it's changing. I mean, the great open secret about nutritional science is it's a very young science, to put it charitably. They really don't know a lot. They still haven't gotten straight whether we should worry more about fats or carbohydrates with regard to heart disease. So, but whenever they come out with a new finding, the industry uses that to sell more food to people."
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/2/8/michael_pollan_on_food_rules_an
Pollan doesn't say that this alliance that works against
good nutrition was not always intentionally so, i.e. created on Madison Avenue or at
Cargill:
"And so, the great example in our own time is the low-fat campaign, a big public health campaign, really begun by the government in the 1970s under Senator George McGovern's leadership at - he was chair of the Select Committee on Nutrition. And they thought they were doing something really good, which was telling people to eat less meat and cut down on saturated fat. But this was seized on by the industry, which took what had been a critique of what they were doing and turned it into a very clever new way to sell new food. So they reengineered the whole food supply to have less fat, but more carbohydrates. And so, people binged on low-fat foods, like Snackwells was the great example. Remember that line of--you know, it was basically no-fat junk food that Nabisco came out with, and it was all over the supermarket for a few years there in the '80s. And people felt, well, if one of these is better for me, a whole box is even better! And so, people binged on low-fat food. And since the low-fat campaign started, we have gotten an average of eighteen pounds heavier. So it hasn't worked. And the reason it didn't work was--well, there are two theories. One is, maybe the science about fat was wrong, which is increasingly becoming clear, not certain, but clearer. Or, maybe whenever you demonize one nutrient, you're giving a free pass to another, and you're allowing the industry to come up with what it always wants to do, which is another "eat more" message. And they did. They're really clever."
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