[Diet-related diseases from UPFs (ultra-processed food, or junk
food) kill over 600,000 Americans a year. By contrast, at current
rates, Covid-19 will kill 100,000 people in the US next year.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

TELLING AMERICANS TO ‘EAT BETTER’ DOESN’T WORK. WE MUST MAKE
HEALTHIER FOOD  
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Mark Bittman
December 4, 2022
The Guardian
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_ Diet-related diseases from UPFs (ultra-processed food, or junk
food) kill over 600,000 Americans a year. By contrast, at current
rates, Covid-19 will kill 100,000 people in the US next year. _

‘For a healthy population, we must mandate or at least incentivize
growing real food for nutrition, not cheap meat and corn and soya
beans for junk food.’, Mohamed Osama/Alamy

 

Diet-related chronic disease is the perennial number one killer in the
United States, responsible for more deaths than Covid-19 even at the
pandemic’s peak. Yet we cannot manage to define this as a
“crisis”. In fact, our response is lame: for decades we’ve been
telling people to “eat better”, a strategy that hasn’t worked,
and never will.

It cannot, as long as the majority of calories we produce are
unhealthy. It is the availability of and access to types of food that
determines our diets, and those, in turn, are factors of agricultural
policy. For a healthy population, we must mandate or at least
incentivize growing real food for nutrition, not cheap meat and corn
and soya beans for junk food.

As omnivores, humans have choices, but most choices available to
Americans are bad ones. Literally: 60% of the calories in the food
supply are in the form of ultra-processed foods (UPFs, or junk food),
which are the primary cause of diet-related diseases. That means
almost no one can make a “good” choice every time, and many of us
can barely make good choices ever.

And it’s not enough to say “eat plant-based”, because most junk
food is in fact made from plants; the future of food, especially when
you add environmental factors, is plant-centric but minimally
processed – plants in close to their natural form, in diets that
resemble those eaten traditionally by almost everyone in the world
until the 20th century. To make that happen, we must address the
functioning of the entire food system.

Government mandates around public health, environmental protection and
even literacy can yield desirable results: laws or regulations around
seat belts, tobacco, light bulbs, recycling, public education, have
all improved public welfare. Yet no such efforts have been made in
diet, where the mantra of “behavior change” stands in for good
policy.

Junk food and meat are both damaging, but must be considered
separately: The case for reducing the consumption of junk food rests
largely on the facts that UPFs dominate the calorie supply of
industrialized nations, and that diet-related diseases (diabetes,
heart disease, a dozen cancers) kill around 600,000 Americans per
year. (By contrast, at current rates, Covid-19 will kill 100,000
people in the US next year.) Increasingly, studies show that it
isn’t simply “sugar” or “inflammation” or “saturated
fat” that causes these diseases, but rather a still-to-be-determined
combination of factors inherent in UPFs.

We can reduce the consumption of junk food quickly with better
labeling laws, taxes on the most egregious offenders (especially
sugar-sweetened beverages) and limits on selling junk food on
government property and to minors. All of these are being explored in
various municipalities in the US and even countries abroad.

While eating meat itself isn’t necessarily unhealthy, producing 10
billion animals per year – in the US alone – for consumption has
devastating effects on our health and environment. Negative effects
abound: astronomical land and resource use, greenhouse gas generation,
antibiotic exposure and resistance and the environmental damage and
carcinogenic impact of factory farms themselves. Unprocessed food from
the plant kingdom is less expensive, less damaging and in countless
ways healthier than industrially produced meat.

Although few are in favor of outlawing meat, it’s important to move
beyond a fetishization of “animal protein” as critical to human
health (it is not), and to acknowledge that meat consumption in
industrial nations must be reduced. We can begin doing this by making
production less damaging (Senator Cory Booker’s recent Industrial
Agriculture Accountability Act would do this), which would reduce both
yield and consumption.

Good moves here include restricting the barely regulated use of
antibiotics in animal production; reducing monopolistic practices and
supporting small farms, as well as local and regional production and
consumption; limiting the (currently almost unregulated) emissions
produced by factory farms; and defining and penalizing the kind of
animal cruelty accepted as “routine” in factory farms.

Of course, meat production also would be curbed by encouraging the
growing and consumption of what the US department of agriculture calls
(without irony) “specialty products” – fruits and vegetables.
The more land that produces crops other than corn and soya beans
(mostly used for producing UPFs and animal feed), the less meat and
junk we’ll eat. This could be accomplished first by emphasizing
subsidies to encourage the growing and sale of real foods, and by
making sure that those food programs receiving federal dollars promote
truly plant-forward eating.

Rectifying the gross historic injustices in US land distribution,
which has historically disadvantaged or shut out farmers of color,
women and queer farmers, and encouraging new farmers to grow good food
well, is also a critical step.

None of this is, as critics argue, a return to more primitive methods
of farming, but a recognition that a blend of modern technology and
good policy would support farming that serves the worlds’ citizens,
not its corporations.

The “nudges” and behavioral incentives so popular with economists
a decade ago are largely impotent. What would work are rules around
production and consumption, and the sooner we begin to implement
these, the sooner we will address the critical food-related issues of
public well-being.

Mark Bittman is on the faculty of Columbia’s Mailman School of
Public Health and the author of Animal, Vegetable, Junk

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