“When it comes to the mass production and consumption of food, strategic decisions are driven by economics — not science, not common sense, and certainly not health,” reads the back of Marion Nestle’s influential book: Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. Nestle is a renowned nutritionist, award-winning author, consumer advocate, and scholar, and served as the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University until her retirement in 2017. She has written six award winning books including the celebrated Food Politics. Her research examines socioeconomic influences on nutritional advice, food labeling, and marketing strategies. The Global Center for Climate Justice recently corresponded with Professor Nestle about nutritional endorsements, diet myths, and how business interests control food marketing.
K: How is food "political?"
M: Politics is about power. Who holds power in the food system? Follow the money. Food is a trillion-dollar-a-year business in the United States alone. Decisions about what foods to produce depend on business interests, not public health.
K: What are the drawbacks of industry-funded research?
M: Industry-funded research is well documented to almost invariably produce results that favor the sponsor’s business interests. This has been found to occur at an unconscious level; recipients of funding are unaware of setting up biased research questions, do not recognize their biases, and deny them. This research confuses dietary guidance and influences food choice.
K: How does a consumer find reliable health advice, especially since guidelines are often changing?
M: Guidelines have not changed in decades. Eat vegetables, don’t gain excess weight, avoid junk food. That’s all there is to it. Anything that contradicts that should be viewed with suspicion.
K: For example, the food pyramid taught in public schools is very different from the recommendations on your website; food such as eggs in the media goes back and forth as being healthy. What is the reason for these differences in food pyramids/recommendations, and why does the media switch their support/disapproval for certain food items so frequently?
M: Basic dietary advice is boring and does not sell newspapers. Research on single foods is extremely difficult to do, mainly because one food hardly makes a difference in diets of great variety.
K: What are some of the most outlandish results from industry-funded studies that you have uncovered?
M: The most obvious are studies that show excessive sugar and soda intake to be harmless, and that physical activity is more important than diet in what you weigh.
K: How has industry-funded research affected the recommendations given by the FDA and USDA?
M: The FDA doesn’t do recommendations; it does food labels and food safety. The food industry has a great deal of input into both. USDA does dietary recommendations. It cannot easily recommend eating less of foods containing saturated fat, sugar, and salt because of industry pressures. Instead, it focuses on nutrients.
K: How does the food industry put pressure on the FDA and USDA? Specifically, what tactics do they use? If any individual cases come to mind, please mention them.
M: Lobbying, providing information, going to Congress. The meat industry worked through Congress to tell the USDA not to allow discussion of sustainability in the 2015 Dietary Guidelines.
K: Donald Trump was greatly influenced by big business during his presidency, impacting his policy and political appointees. What should President Biden do to reverse this damage now that he is in office?
M: Appoint agency staff more interested in public health than in business profits (he is doing that to some extent).
K: The number of class-action lawsuits against food and beverage companies has grown in the past few years? Why do you think this is, and what are the recurring themes throughout these class actions?
M: These replace what should be government oversight. The public has no other recourse against food products that make people sick and business interests that undermine public health. Themes? I’d say that the cases typically argue that the product caused harm and the producers of the product knew it but did nothing about it, in order to maintain their stock prices and profits at the expense of public health.
This exchange with Professor Nestle reveals that dietary recommendations are guided by economics, not science. Big food dominates public health policy and allocates monstrous sums of capital to ensure that nutritional advice benefits corporations, regardless of the health impacts on the consumer, the environment, and our climate. For additional information, visit Professor Nestle's blog, https://www.foodpolitics.com/, in which she further illuminates the power structures behind nutritional endorsement and food marketing. She releases weekly critiques of industry-funded research and their absurd outcomes — it's a must-read!
Delve Further into Food Politics:
Food Politics by Marion Nestle, www.foodpolitics.com.
Marion Nestle Bio - The Future of Our Food and Farms Conference - 2002, www.ibiblio.org/farming-connection/fffconf/2002conf/nestlebio.html.
Nestle, Marion, and Michael Pollan. Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health. University of California Press, 2013.
Nestle, Marion. What to Eat. North Point Press/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
