I WAS IN New York City recently at a conference for health care practitioners on Nutrition and Health put on by Columbia University and the University of Arizona. Andrew Weil started this conference highlighting that we need to address the nutritional illiteracy of physicians.
I couldn’t agree more.
I think that nutrition is the most powerful tool I have in my medical tool kit to reverse and treat disease – and it was something I learned nothing about in medical school. Dr. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, and author of Food Politics painted a very concerning picture of our food culture, and the dangers of our food environment.
What bothers me the most is the widespread belief that personal responsibility is the answer to our obesity and health problems. If people just didn’t eat badly and exercised a little more, we all hear, then our chronic health problems would go away. We are getting so much mis-information about food. Physicians must address the peril of our current food situation.
We live in a culture that makes it nearly impossible to make healthy food choices. A number of food industry and political factors keep us sick and fat. There are now 3,900 calories a day available to every person in America – an increase of 700 calories since 1980. In supermarkets 25% of the square footage is devoted to selling sugar. The Center for Consumer Freedom, a front group for the food industry put $600,000 ads in major newspapers trying to convince us that the obesity epidemic is hype.
Frosted Cheerios are now a health food because they have some whole oats, but also have 5 different types of sugar. And our kids are brainwashed that they should eat special “kids” food.
Political advice focuses personal responsibility, not the effects of a toxic food environment, it focuses on individual choices instead of public health initiatives, and treats all calories as equal, and ignores the science on differences in food quality.
And it makes things way too complex (like the new food pyramid) instead of focusing on simple principles, like eating whole, organic foods, with lots of fiber and or consuming a diet plentiful in fruits and vegetables and omega 3 fats, and low in sugar and junk food.
The consumer is not protected from advertising and marketing of poor quality foods that are calorie dense with little to no nutritional value. Kellogg spent $32 million dollars in 2004 alone on marketing Cheez It to children. And their heart healthy Smart Start cereal has the American Heart Association’s seal of approval yet has 11 different types of sugar on the ingredient list. Frosted Cheerios are now a health food because they have some whole oats, but also have 5 different types of sugar. And our kids are brainwashed that they should eat special “kids” food.
The Institute of Medicine authored a report on marketing of junk food to children and how effective it is in increasing product sales, and on kids requests and preferences, and how bad it is for children’s health. There is now a special alliance of food manufacturers to protect their first amendment rights to advertise to children. I think the framers of the constitution had other things in mind that allowing companies to market toxic foods to children.
I suggest a few simple things to help guide you to shopping in supermarkets and protect yourself (at least a little bit) from a toxic food environment:
- Buy around perimeter of the store (that’s where the healthy stuff is)
- Don’t go down isles (that’s where most of the junk food is)
- Don’t buy food in a box
- Or with more than 5 ingredients
- Or with ingredients you can’t pronounce
- Or with a cartoon on package
Just remember every time you order in a restaurant or in the supermarket you vote with your fork. Choose foods that improve our health, our social structure and that helps us eat healthfully.
My goal is to empower people to make the good choices – and recognize that it takes extra effort because of the powerful forces working against us.
Please share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.
To your good health,
Mark Hyman, MD
I agree that food companies and advertisers bear responsibility for selling toxic foods to uneducated and ignorant consumers. Schools and government bear responsibility for not educating the population on what to eat. But what about educated and medically insured people who choose to make bad decisions about their eating because it’s so easy to take a subsidized pill rather than make a lifestyle change.
The government also bears responsibility for subsidizing agribusiness which feeds the toxic producers instead of cutting breaks for local organic farms.
We need to stop making victims of the susceptible and start helping them ask questions not just about their food, but about all aspects of things not working in their lives. But I guess since food is common to all it is a good place to start to teach about personal responsibility.
Dr. Hyman, I couldn’t agree with you more. As a holistic health counselor and RN, it is my duty to educate my patients and clients about healthy lifestyle changes. The doctor I work for is absolutely nutritionally illiterate, as you succinctly put it. I am trying so hard to put the motivation and enthusiasm into my patients to make better food choices. I simplify it as you did above: eat real food, not food products, eat with the seasons and learn to love to cook real food! I even help people shop and cook. The conventional doctors are not going to help us and we know the government is not going to help us!
But we can take one step toward better nutrition with each forkfull. Thank you for being there for all of us!
Diane
Dr. Hyman,
Thank you so much for this! My 2 year old son is already being affected by the powers of advertising. He has a little play kitchen, (he loves to help me cook)it came with some play foods, some that are whole foods and some that are packaged foods. One in paticular are the cheese crackers that resemble the “Cheez-it” brand of crackers, he now finds them and asks for them every time we’re at the grocery store together!! I am also ready to start a restaurant revolution. I am so sick of having to purchase an adult sized meal for him every time we go out. The Kid’s Menu is nothing but fried, cheeze filled garbage with no vegatable option. I don’t understand the concept of feeding children differently than we feed ourselves. I am a Holistic Health Coach and I have made it my life’s work to educate the masses. My husband is a phys ed teacher in a very low income community in Brooklyn, and he sees first hand what kids are eating. He spends his days illustrating the effects of the crap they are putting in their bodies, but it’s a hard message to send home to a family that does their food shopping at the corner bodega. We all have to do what we can to help educate others, but I sure hope we can eventually get some help from our government and our health care providers. Thank you for promoting this knowledge to other Doctors, all I want for myself and my clients is to be able to ask the Doctor a question about nutrition and get a knowledgable answer.
Dr Mark, great article! I really appreciate you taking the time to write such excellent informative articles such as this,I find the information motivating,educational, inspiring and encouraging.
As a nurse working in hospitals it was here that I came to truly understand the absolute importance of nutrition. I was looking after an Asian woman whose family brought in all her food because the family said the hospital could not provide her the kind of food she was accustomed to eating. She made a faster recovery than any other patient on that ward.
The article you wrote is indicitative of a major systemic problem and there does not seem to be any solution in sight at this stage. Unfortunately the institutions that are supposed to understand health are influenced by too many vested interests.
I agree also that leading a healthy lifestyle, eating fresh fruit and veg and avoiding the forbidden foods can definitely prevent disease and illness. I have recently changed my Western diet as I have moved to Malaysia and in 2 mths I lost 10lbs. I was not classed as over weight to start with but avoiding processed foods and drinking lots of water has had a massive impact in a short space of time. People need a little education and direction in their food choices so they can break the habit.
I was astonished to learn that our company will be selling Dairy Queen’s Dilly Bars as a fundraiser at an upcoming Walk for Diabetes! You heard that correctly. Of course, DQ is donating their product so how can we turn them down — and DQ certainly benefits from tax breaks and product promotion, etc. Talk about a contradiction in terms. Meanwhile, as in so many cases, it would cost to much to offer healthy options at a fundraiser. Healthy food costs more, period, as Dr. Hyman says above. But would you rather pay more now to have glowing health, or “pay” a heck of a lot more later in healthcare costs, lost work time, stress/anguish over disease? I heard a quote recently — “I could never give up my meat and steaks and eat a plant-based diet…that’s WAY too radical!” So, isn’t cracking open your ribs and cutting into your chest also a little radical??
First, I do understand that some people make terrible eating choices. I understand that some people are obese because they do eat too much and exercise too little. However, Obesity is one of the few disorders where the patient is blamed from the start. And I for one am sick of that cop out by the medical profession. Obesity is often a symptom for an underlying health disorder. Systemic inflammation often preceeds obesity.
For example, Celiac’s disease is now so common that 1 in 133 people has it and 97% of those people are undiagnosed. That’s up from 1 in 700 about 50 years ago (before convenience foods ruled the day). Roughly 40 percent of Celiac’s are not underweight, but are overweight, particularly if they are mature adults at onset. So any number of people are walking around as obese people with undiagnosed Celiac’s disease or gluten intolerance, and our cultural reliance on manufactured foods may be a contributing factor to triggering the huge increase in this disorder.
In our industrial food system gluten and gluten derivatives have become so widely used that it’s very difficult to avoid in processed foods. Corn is so widely used in food processing that it’s nearly impossible to avoid. Food intolerances can make you both ill and fat, yet we have practically no reliable tests to sort out the problems. It’s up to the individual to sort out after dieting and exercise fails to produce weight loss.
Our readily available food supply in every grocery store has shifted from one of whole foods to one of processed foods. It’s not surprising that people see fresh food as a condiment and processed foods as their core meal item. Cooking is a lost art for most families. Many modern cookbooks start with a canned or boxed product as the main ingredient. That’s not exactly cooking from scratch using fresh whole foods.
You’ve said elsewhere, “Food is not just a source of calories, it is also a source of INFORMATION” and what most people have available to their cells is the equivalent of “look,look, see Spot run” not the nutritional encyclopedia our bodies actually need. One way the body adapts is to slow down the metabolism to match the available nutrients. How can you ‘eat better’ when you don’t understand what’s wrong with what you eat now? Industry and advertising says that ‘you’ are the problem, not their product.
Even ‘diet foods’ come in a box or a can.
It’s not just a matter of making different choices. The choices available have to actually be different. People don’t really understand that changing from a box of enriched pasta, to a box of organic pasta is not a significant nutritional improvement. It’s still a highly refined processed food, even if it is convenient.
When roughly 2/3 of the population is obese, we need to quit blaming the obese for making ‘bad choices’ and start looking for the common source of the problems – the food supply. We have become a nutritionally illiterate nation and the food companies want to keep us that way. Well, knowledge can be shared and if we want to win in saving our population from obesity, chronic ‘lifestyle’ diseases and an early death, it’s going to be ‘each one, teach one’. We are going to have to do it from the grassroots.