Processed Food Industry and the War on Health

"The prevailing story is that this is the best of all possible worlds -- cheap food, widely available."
"If you don't think about it too hard, it makes sense. To put it in stark terms: The diet is killing us."
Anthony Winson, political economics of nutrition, University of Guelph, Ontario

"We're not going to get rid of all factories and go back to growing all grain. It's nonsense. It's not going to work."
"If I ask 100 Brazilian families to stop eating processed food, I have to ask myself: What will they eat? Who will feed them? How much will it cost?"
Mike Gibney, professor emeritus of food and health, University College, Dublin -- Nestle consultant

"What we have is a war between two food systems, a traditional diet of real food once produced by the farmers around you and the producers of ultra-processed food designed to be over-consumed and which in some cases are addictive."
"It's a war, but one food system has disproportionately more power than the other."
Carlos A. Monteiro, professor of nutrition and public health, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil 

A woman sells candies at a street in Lima, Peru, May 12, 2017.   Reuters

If Professor Gibney -- who in his elder years acts as a consultant to Switzerland-based food processing giant Nestle Foods -- was not in fact in a severely compromised situation with respect to his integrity, his stated empathy for the poor of Brazil might carry some weight. Since he is financially remunerated for his expertise in guiding Nestle in its food processing enterprise, anyone with an ounce of intelligence might set aside his sympathetic comments.

Which, in effect, leave the impression that Nestle and others of its ilk who have converted whole foods to nutrition-poor and calorie-dense substitutes they name as foods -- over-weighted with unwholesome ingredients, including an excess of salt, sugar and fat to give them a palate-pleasing flavour and taste -- care about providing food products for the poor of the world. Or that eating basic staples, traditional and nutritious whole foods are somehow inferior in quality to processed sham foods.

Let alone the claims that whole foods that comprise the basic building blocks of a sound diet are more expensive than highly factory-processed foods transformed into products that bear little actual resemblance to the whole foods that have been used in the process. It is telling that after decades of producing processed foodstuffs for the Western market to capture the attention and buying and eating habits of generations, people who once ate the stuff are now beginning to reject it, partially because public campaigns to inform people of their nutritional deficits are finally getting through.

Just as in the case of tobacco, found to be so horribly injurious to people's health has caused smoking to be recognized as a public health hazard, and cigarette manufacturers have looked elsewhere than in educated Western markets to flog their deadly wares, the processed food industry has veered away from its traditional reliance on Western-based consumers and turned their attention to people living in poverty, elsewhere in the world, vulnerable anew to the attractions inherent in taste-tempting quasi-food.

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Food and Farm Discussion Lab  -- The processed-food impact

Now, Western-style food that has had its nutrition, vitamins and minerals processed out of it, to be replaced by high-fat, -sugar and -salt content is being marketed to people living in the most isolated areas of Latin America, Africa and Asia. Just as women in Third-World countries wanting all the 'advantages' of the West, took to Nestle infant formula and rejected breast feeding thanks to advertising directed toward them, and began to raise undernourished and health-threatened babies by watering down the formula to make it go further, the very same situation now is seen with processed foods.

The multinationals that owe no allegiance to any nation, nor to the concept of humane responsibility to those who consume the valueless products they flog, are fully invested in growing their sales and widening the consuming territory eager for the products they view as integral to their needs as human beings eager for good-tasting food guaranteed to be packed with vital elements required by nature to produce healthy people. Nestle, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and General Mills are busy expanding their markets.

And where better to do so than in developing nations? In so doing, unleashing a tide of human ills upon people from Brazil, to Ghana and on to India, convinced that what is being marketed to them is far superior than the whole foods that constitute their traditional diets. Public relations and fierce advertising campaigns gull the gullible. Who want to believe that if they acquire the same kind of goods available to the wealthy West, they too can live well.

Epidemiological studies and reports out of government, along with the studied impressions of nutritionists and health experts globally have revealed the inevitable, that due to all this pressure and misinformation the transformational alteration in foods from whole to processed, its distribution and peoples' beliefs have shifted eating habits and not for the good. According to public health experts, the shift in food production has created an avalanche of human ills from epidemic diabetes presentations and heart disease; these chronic illnesses have resulted by growing rates of obesity.

Areas of the world that not so long ago struggled with inadequate supplies of food, where malnutrition was endemic, now face a new reality; more people are now obese than those who rate as underweight. Despite which the availability of high-calorie, nutrition-deficient food has generated a type of malnutrition where people present as overweight, yet are in very point of fact, undernourished.

• Traditional long-established food systems and dietary patterns are being displaced in Brazil and in other countries in the South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) by ultra-processed products made by transnational food corporations (“Big Food” and “Big Snack”).
• This displacement increases the incidence of obesity and of major chronic diseases and affects public health and public goods by undermining culture, meals, the family, community life, local economies, and national identity.
• The penetration of transnational companies into Brazil has been rapid, but the tradition of shared and family meals remains strong and is likely to provide protection to national and regional food systems.
• The Brazilian government, under pressure from civil society organizations, has introduced legislation to protect and improve its traditional food system; by contrast, the governments of many industrialized countries have partly ceded their prime duty to protect public health to transnational companies.
• The experience of countries in the South that still retain traditional food systems provides a rational basis for policies that protect public health.

PLoS Medicine Series on Big Food that examines the activities and influence of the food and beverage industry in the health arena