This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The China Study" by Colin Campbell. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.
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“Big Food” is an influential industry–their positions as key economic players in the U.S. gives them influence in the government. But how closely tied are food and politics? And how does it affect American citizens?
We’ll look at extended examples of ways the food industry influences policy, and we’ll cover how this affects you.
Bedfellows: Food and Politics
Food is one of the biggest threats facing the American people. Our eating habits kill more of us than tobacco use, accidents, or any other lifestyle factor. Yet the government promotes the consumption of meat and dairy, foods that hundreds of studies say cause disease. Why? Is the government for the people, or at the expense of the people?
Problems With the Government’s Approach to Health
The government has released some questionable dietary recommendations over the past decades. Let’s look at why they’re releasing unhealthy guidelines and how it affects the consumer.
Food and Politics Problem #1: The Need to Get Reelected
The government is closely tied to the food industry, and elected officials need to represent their constituents to get reelected.
For example, in 1976, Senator George McGovern headed a committee that drafted dietary goals based on a survey of the science linking diet to heart disease. He recommended that Americans decrease their consumption of fatty animal products and increase their consumption of fruits and vegetables.
But the goals were so controversial in the senate (because of their recommendation to decrease consumption of animal products) that the committee had to substantially revise them. McGovern and five other senators from agriculture states lost their 1980 reelections, in part because of their involvement with the dietary goals.
Keeping donors and influential industries happy informs the actions of many government officials. The politics of food is a big deal.
Food and Politics Problem #2: Politicians Write Guidelines
The government has the power to establish nutrition guidelines, even though officials usually have no particular expertise in nutrition and eat the same diet that kills thousands of their constituents every day.
Government employees have power over nutrition guidelines at various stages of their development. They provide the money for the researchers devising the guidelines. They also choose the chair of the committee, who then chooses the other members. The government can then pick and choose what it likes from the resulting report.
Example, Problem #1: The Government’s Ties with Industry
When the lines between the three start to blur, the public suffers. The following examples of the link between food and politics come from researcher T. Colin Campbell’s book The China Study.
The government’s Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee writes the reports that provide the foundation for government dietary recommendations. In 2015, the committee established relatively conservative recommendations.
Committee members looked at the scientific evidence and concluded that the healthiest diets were ones high in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat dairy and low in red meat, processed meat, refined grains, and sugar-sweetened foods. They also determined that healthy diets were higher in plant foods and lower in animal foods.
While these recommendations may not sound too controversial, 30 Republican senators and 71 Republican representatives in the House tried to block the report’s publication. They said that the committee’s findings regarding meat were inconsistent with, and even contradicted, years of research on the health benefits of lean red meat.
The Republicans citing this research had no background in science or nutrition. They were acting on behalf of their donors. The senators opposed to the recommendations had accepted over $1 million from the food industry the year prior. Half of that came from the beef industry. Representatives in the House that were opposed to the recommendations had accepted $2 million from the food and agriculture industries the previous year. This is the world of food and politics, and this is legal.
These Republicans won their case. Government officials removed all recommendations they viewed as harmful to the animal-food industry. They changed the focus of the report to individual nutrients rather than whole foods, a tactic that misrepresented the scientific evidence and made the recommendations harder for laypeople to understand.
They also got rid of the old summary, which recommended a diet high in plant foods, and replaced it with five broad principles, including one vague suggestion to maintain healthy eating patterns and another to choose “healthier” foods and drinks. Nowhere in the summary did they define “healthy.” They let the reader (and the food industry) decide what it meant to maintain healthy eating patterns and what constituted a healthy drink. Many of the principles were imprecise enough that they could mean whatever the reader wanted them to.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The China Study summary :
- Why animal proteins (meat, milk) might cause cancer, diabetes, and other diseases
- Why the medical institution is structured to hide the truth about disease and food
- The precise diet you'll need to eat to live longer and feel happier
