OUR FOOD IS KILLING US
“DESPITE BEING THE WEALTHIEST NATION IN THE WORLD, WE HAVE CREATED A FOOD SYSTEM THAT RELENTLESSLY ENCOURAGES THE OVEREATING OF EMPTY CALORIES THAT ARE LITERALLY MAKING US SICK.”
A FEW YEARS AGO, KEVIN HALL SET OUT to debunk a theory, espoused by a growing number of nutritionists, that Americans were getting fatter and sicker because of the complex industrial and chemical processing that food companies were using to make their products appealing. Hall believed the explanation had more to do with Americans simply eating too many calories, fats and sugars. The notion, that extra processing might be causing the problem struck him as “ridiculous.”
To prove it, Hall, who runs a research laboratory that studies the regulation of metabolism and body weight at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), ran a controlled experiment that he thought would show beyond a doubt that processing wasn’t as important as nutrients. He paid 20 volunteers $5,000 apiece to move into an NIH facility in Bethesda, Maryland, for one month. He divided the volunteers into two groups. One ate mainly healthy food derived from simple ingredients with minimal processing, such as Greek yogurt, beef tender roast and shrimp scampi with spaghetti. The other group ate Honey Nut Cheerios, Chef Boyardee beef ravioli, Eggo pancakes and other processed foods—the kind most overweight people in America eat. Both groups were served an identical number of calories and amounts of sugar and fat, but the volunteers were allowed to eat as much as they wanted.
Hall, it turns out, had it all wrong—processing, in fact, made all the difference. The subjects in Hall’s study who subsisted on Cheerios and Chef Boyardee gained one pound per week on average and consumed in excess of 500 calories a day more than the group with the healthier diet. What’s more, when they later switched to a natural diet, they dropped the extra weight. The conclusion: whatever food company chemists are doing to food, it makes people fatter.
Spurred by these results and others since then, public health advocates and nutritionists are now calling upon regulators to put in place measures similar to those used to curb the influence of tobacco companies in the 1990s, such as limiting the marketing of certain kinds of food to children and actively discouraging the consumption of key ingredients—chief among them, sugar. The nation’s food crisis is playing out in ways eerily reminiscent of the early days of tobacco smoking more than half a century ago, before regulators caught up with Big Tobacco. (It’s no coincidence that many tobacco companies later acquired food companies.) This time, it’s Big Food peddling harmful and possibly addictive products.
At issue is the explosive growth in a broad
