USDA: Eat LESS

Fruits and Vegetables Should Cover Half Your Plate

Overweight and obesity have already been a problem in our country for several decades.  So it may seem like a no-brainer that our country’s dietary guidelines would, you know, urge us to cut back on the calories.  Unfortunately, this has not been the case.  Typically, government guidelines have skirted the issue, urging us to consume “more lean meats” and “more whole grains”, “more fruits and vegetables” (more, more, more!).  This is because of the huge political clout of food industries that are not to keep on the government telling people to eat less of their products.

But guess what? It looks like change is possible.  Dietary guidelines posted today DO finally urge us to EAT LESS!

And what’s more, they have specified what a plate of food should look like (to those individuals who still eat food off plates on a regular basis, but I digress).  The guidelines indicate that fruits and vegetables should cover half a plate at any given meal. This visual indication is really important, because it indicates not only that we should be eating “more” of these foods, but gives a clear idea of what proportion.

Americans may not follow these guidelines very closely, whatever they are, but at least now we have a policy in place that gives more clear direction towards a real-food-based, health promoting diet.

NYTimes: Dietary Guidelines Urge Less Soda and Smaller Meals

We’re #1

OECD Report Confirms U.S. Has Highest Obesity Rates

Select obesity rates and projections by country (OECD)

A new Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development report confirms what is now a common assumption: The United States has the highest levels of obesity and overweight in the world.  The report also highlights the importance of unified public-private sector prevention strategies in order to avoid the dramatic economic and health costs of obesity on future generations.

From the report:

Rates are highest in the United States and Mexico and lowest in Japan and Korea, but have been growing virtually everywhere. Children have not been spared, with up to 1 in 3 currently overweight. Severely obese people die 8-10 years sooner than those of normal-weight, similar to smokers, and they are more likely to develop diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Obesity is a burden on health systems, with health care expenditure for an obese person at least 25% higher than for someone of normal weight.
Cooperation between governments and the private sector is key to the success of combating obesity.  A prevention strategy combining health promotion campaigns, government regulation and family doctors counselling their obese patients would avoid hundreds of thousands of deaths from chronic diseases every year. It would cost from USD 10 to USD 30 per person, depending on the country. Failure would impose heavy burdens of future generations.

Health: OECD Says Government Must Fight Fat [OECD]

Poverty and the Hierarchy of Food Needs

Can’t Touch This?

I recently read this post about the treatment of the overweight poor by (previously unknown to me) blogger Michelle Allison, who writes as The Fat Nutritionist.  The piece reads as a wrist slap to nutrition and healthy eating advocates who chastise the poor eating habits of people in low socioeconomic classes.

As a self-described member of the “fatosphere” and activist for fat acceptance, Allison is not an impartial source on this issue, (as is evident in this post as well as elsewhere in her blog), nevertheless I think she begs an interesting question which is worth considering:  Should we be judging the eating habits of those who can barely get enough to eat?

We should examine this question in the context of the strong correlation between socioeconomic status and obesity/ overweight. The poor are the most likely to suffer from overweight and related diseases, but are our efforts to change their poor dietary habits insensitive and counterproductive?

How Policy Impacts What Kids Eat

A fully-funded Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill would improve food in schools

We are at a critical moment in food policy and health policy.   The Child Nutrition Act, which governs the School Lunch and Breakfast Programs, WIC, Child and Adult Care Food Program, and other federal programs that provide food to children, is up for reauthorization this year.  The program must be reviewed and reauthorized once every five years, so we have a rare chance to greatly improve the quality of the food kids eat in schools.  Which is currently terrible: cheap, highly processed, and full of fat, sugar, and salt.

Tom Philpott over at Grist puts it into perspective: “Currently, we spend about $11 billion annually on school lunches — less than a month’s worth of military spending.  At that level, school administrators typically have less than a dollar a day to spend on ingredients for each lunch they serve.”  The result?  Kids are eating this and this and THIS.  Basically, we’re poisoning our kids and condemning them to a life of obesity and diabetes.  It’s no joke.

So changing the way our kids eat in schools is the first, and perhaps most fundamental step we must take if we are going to take the issues of childhood obesity and diabetes seriously.  The Administration seems to be doing so.  Obama initially proposed a $1 billion per-year increase in funding, representing $10 billion over ten years.  That would represent a significant jump in funding, but still wouldn’t be enough to make the changes we need to how our kids eat in schools.

Ellen Gustafson, You are Ambitious

Can we fix our flawed food system in 30 years?

One of the developments I missed out on during my travels was the launch of the 30 Project, an initiative by Ellen Gustafson of the Feed Foundation which was announced at this spring’s TedxEast Conference (her Ted Talk video is above).

The premise of the 30 Project is the following:  there are a billion hungry people on this planet, and a billion who are overweight.  These two problems are about food and are attributable to the same source, which is our global food system.  So in order to address both hunger and obesity/overweight, we need to change the food system.  And since the changes in the food system that have happened in the last 30 years are largely at the root of the problems we see today, the objective is to achieve changes in the next 30 years that will scale back, or undo the negative consequences of our industrialized food system.

The reason I say this is extremely ambitious is because it requires diving headfirst into the equivalent of a political and economic death match.  In order to make a real impact, even over the course of 30 years, the changes Gustafson needs to make are radical.  And the opposition has great quantities of money and power invested in ensuring that the impact of reforms are minimal.

In order to achieve true changes to our food system, Gustafson and all those who are fighting the same mission must mobilize enough social and political capital in order to overcome these interests.  Whatever she does, it will have to be Big.

The 30 Project

The Feed Foundation

Ellen Gustafson Bio

Earlier: Cheap Food is Expensive

Nutrition Conference Fail

What do Europe’s top public health experts eat at a conference on nutrition and obesity prevention?  If you’re picturing apple slices and carrot sticks, or (since we’re in Spain) a Spanish potato omelet, you’d be wrong. Dead wrong.

Snacks at Spain’s NAOS Conference on Obesity Prevention

I spent yesterday morning at Spain’s Ministry of Health for it’s annual Strategy for Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity Prevention (NAOS) Conference, a gathering of public health experts from Europe and around the world who discuss issues related to obesity prevention.  NAOS is kind of the Spanish equivalent of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign (their slogan is “Eat Healthy and Move”) although it has been in place since 2005.

This year, the NAOS conference focused on how to curb marketing of junk food — now known as HFSS, for High Fat, Salt and Sugar — products to kids.  The morning’s distinguished speakers included a panel of public health experts from Spain, France, Norway, Portugal, and the U.K.,  as well as the head of obesity prevention at the World Health Organization.

The issues were interesting and I’m happy I went.  But something left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.  So I’m not even going to talk about the conference here — I’m going to talk about the coffee break.

USDA Releases New Dietary Guidelines

News From DC

New USDA Dietary Guidelines For Americans have been released today.  Per U.S. law, these guidelines are revised and re-released every five years.  For the next month, the USDA will be vetting comments on the guidelines in advance of the release of the final document.

Unfortunately this means that for the next month food industry lawyers/scientists/lobbyists will be figuring out how to warp, discredit, or water down many of the recommendations.  (In the past they have generally succeeded at this.  For a thorough documentation of how this process works, and how incredibly political this document is, please read Marion Nestle’s Food Politics.)

The report is absolutely huge, but the sections I’ve looked at do look promising with respect to what the panel recommends.  For one thing, the focus on the need to prevent obesity and overweight is clear  (USA Today’s article on the guidelines is headlined  “Obesity is century’s greatest public health threat.”)

In order to address the obesity issue from a preventative standpoint, the panel recommends a “total diet” approach to eating, which they define as the following:

Cheap Food is Expensive

It’s not our fruits and vegetables that get the major subsidies

I strongly suggest checking out Tom Laskawy’s post today over at Mark Bittman’s blog, where he points out the way simplistic economic portrayals of our food costs conceal the high price we pay for cheap food.

He especially takes issue (and I agree with him) with the following quote from an NPR interview with Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack:

“I would say consumers do benefit from the way in which we structured our farm programs, at least as of today, because of the fact that our food is less expensive than it is any place else in the world. Folks in America have a great deal more discretion of what to do with their paycheck.”

While it’s true that food is “less expensive” in the U.S. — Americans spend less of their income on food than any other country — it conceals the truth of why and what kind of food is so much less expensive.  Namely, it’s the highly processed (mostly corn- and soy-based) packaged foods, which are also the least healthy.  And why are they cheap?  Because our government pours huge subsidies into these crops, encouraging industrial farms to overproduce, which artificially depresses the price.

‘Chefs Move To Schools’ Launches at White House

Culinary World Will Help to Address Poor Nutrition in Our Schools

I could not be more excited.  Chefs are gathering in the White House today for the launch of the Chefs Move to Schools program, a component of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative to fight childhood obesity.

The program creates a roundtable of chefs who will attempt to address the large-scale issues related to nutrition in schools, but perhaps more importantly, encourages them to establish direct relationships with the schools themselves. The idea is that each chef will “adopt” a school, teaching kids about food and cooking and starting initiatives like school gardens.

The chefs are helping to disavow the idea that kids won’t eat healthy fresh things. They will, especally if they are presented in a fun way:

Chef Todd Gray of Equinox succeeded in getting kids to wolf down a cucumber and bread salad and a smoothie with blood orange and beet juices.

I couldn’t be more thrilled — Not only will the chefs have an impact on the schools they choose to adopt, but the media attention that this is sure to get will be pivotal to drawing attention to the serious problem of how we feed our kids.  And that’s how we’ll achieve change on both the cultural and policy levels.

This is just too awesome.  Michelle Obama, thanks for giving me the best one-week blog birthday present EVER!

Up-to the minute coverage on the launch at Obamafoodorama

Chefs Move to Schools: A nutritious program kids can sink their teeth into [Washington Post]

Chefs Move [Via Let's Move]

Confessions of a Saltoholic

Salt Makes Food Taste Good, But Maybe I Shouldn’t Use So Much of It

Outside a Madrid municipal government building, signs entreat Spaniards to limit their salt intake.

Saturday’s New York Times article about food industry pushback on salt use was very apropos as I was just thinking how I need to divulge some of my personal inconsistencies when it comes to the issues I advocate.

Yeah, I already owned up to the fact that I’m not perfect (shocking, I know!), but I think it bears fleshing out a bit more in order to preempt the haters smart people who will inevitably call me out for failing to follow my own advice from time to time.

I think it’s also important because a lot of people have this idea that some people “get it” in a way that they never can, in a way that’s intimidating.  Like Martha Stewart casually entreating us to make our own puff pastry (an insane pursuit, I’ve tried it), the average person might find issues like these baffling when they’re confronted with someone who seems like they just have it so together that they feel like they can never reach that level.

I feel this way, for example, about exercise:  When I hear friends of mine who train for marathons lament that they “only” ran ten miles that day, it makes me feel completely inadequate.  And it makes starting to make small step changes seem almost impossible, even pointless.

So let’s just go ahead and make it clear that I’m not the has-it-perfectly-together girl, and I’m certainly not standing on a pedestal looking down at everyone else’s eating habits.  Furthermore, I’m not a nutritionist and I don’t have any formal training (yet) on these issues, so everything I’m suggesting here should be taken with a grain of salt. Or in my case, many.

And here I will reveal hypocrisy numero uno:  I am a salt fiend.