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food system
The Ultraprocessed Foods Corporations Cram Down Our Children's Throats
UPFs make up two-thirds of the calories consumed by children and teenagers in the United States.
May 13, 2024
About forty-five years ago, at a social gathering, I asked an executive of a Minneapolis-based large food processing company if he fed heavily sugared cereals to his children. He smiled as he shook his head. Smart person. His and other major companies producing what is now called Ultraprocessed Foods (UPFs) had scientists and labs. They knew that ever higher doses of sugars, fats, and salts were being poured into nutritionally stripped foods and deceptively promoted to youngsters on kiddy television. They profitably ignored the serious damage they were causing!
These companies’ marketeers succeeded in getting these children, as my mother would say, to turn their tongues against their brains. The children were also shown how to nag their parents into buying junk food and drink. In fact, Madison Avenue advertising firms would give high ratings for ads “with a high nag factor.”
It was about 1980 when obesity rates started rising at alarming rates. Now about 30% of adults are obese, another 35% are overweight. Recently, a Goldman Sachs study estimated that by 2028 up to 70 million Americans will be taking the new weight-loss drugs, whose longer-term effects are yet to be known. Their apparent present success in suppressing extra food intake is already worrying the fast-food chains like McDonald’s that thrive on selling huge cheeseburgers.
It was also about 1980 when the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) staff and its leader, Dr. Michael Jacobson, were appearing in the mass media and on major national talk shows. They graphically showed the public the large amounts of fat, sugar, and salt that were in the hot dogs, potato chips, and soft drinks they consumed. Millions of Americans started changing their food purchases toward multi-grained breads and more fresh fruits and vegetables. Many people became vegetarians. But most consumers remained wedded to misleadingly promoted and greatly diluted UPFs, short on nutrition and long on harm to their health.
During recent decades there has been an increase in peer-reviewed scientific studies showing that certain foods you can easily buy in the markets can increase your life expectancy while others reduce your longevity. Long-time medical and science reporter/author Jean Carper boiled down these findings into a highly usable new little book titled, “100 Life or Death Foods: A Scientific Guide to Which Foods Prolong Life or Kill You Prematurely.” (See my recent column New Book: Choosing Regular Food to Extend Longevity, April 12, 2024).
On May 8, 2024 – the New York Times defined Ultraprocessed Foods (UPFs) as “using industrial methods and ingredients you wouldn’t typically find in grocery stores – like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and concentrated proteins like soy isolate. They often contain additives like flavorings, colorings or emulsifiers to make them appear more attractive and palatable. Think sodas and energy drinks, chips, candies, flavored yogurts, margarine, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausages, lunch meats, boxed macaroni and cheese, infant formulas and most packaged breads, plant milks, meat substitutes and breakfast cereals.”
The Times continued: “In a large review of studies that was published in 2024, scientists reported that consuming UPFs was associated with 32 health problems, with the most convincing evidence for heart disease-related deaths, Type 2 diabetes and common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.” Caution, not all UPFs are associated with these problems.
UPFs make up two-thirds of the calories consumed by children and teenagers in the United States. Still, the giant food companies are getting away with little regulation, especially for their heaviest advertising that pushes their profitable ultraprocessed foods. Have you ever seen TV ads for fresh carrots, radishes, celery, lentils, spinach, kale and asparagus? Unlikely. The mass merchandising ads go for foods, described by a report in the journal BMJ, as “designed by manufacturers to achieve a certain ‘bliss point,’ which causes us to crave and overeat them. They also tend to be low in nutrients, such as fiber, vitamins and minerals.”
We are behind other governments in our official dietary guidelines. Canada and Mexico recommend avoiding or limiting UPFs while the U.S. guidelines make no mention of them. Such is the dominance of giant agribusiness corporations over the indentured U.S. Department of Agriculture and the mostly bought members of the Senate and House Agriculture Committees.
This corporate interference also extends to constantly putting such UPFs into school lunch programs.
Absent taking over the 535 members of corporate Congress by 250 million eligible voters, we are left with parents and their children availing themselves of publications such as CSPI’s Nutrition Action newsletter to become smart buyers and consumers of safer, healthier, nutritious food. If you can, add a home garden to your food supply.
Some of these simple recipes, often called a Mediterranean diet, are in my “Ralph Nader and Family Cookbook,” (2020) with an introduction on how my mother educated us very early on to want to eat nutritious foods prepared to be delicious as well. She baked her own bread, cooked “from scratch” and avoided processed foods with unknown ingredients, such as hot dogs.
Our snacks were fresh fruits and vegetables, including chickpeas, munched while walking to school. For a sweet taste, we were treated to honey and maple syrup. We were taught not to whine because it wasn’t smart and didn’t get us anywhere.
Parents are protectors of their children. They have to be especially on guard to protect their children from pervasive direct mass marketing, using influencers, peer groups, and abduction of their youngsters into the Internet Gulag. The earlier in their child’s life that parents do their job, the easier it will be. Children so liberated can become active allies of Mom and Dad, showcasing their special knowledge. (See, “You Are Your Own Best Teacher! Sparking the Curiosity, Imagination, and Intellect of Tweens” by Dr. Claire Nader).
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People Should Control the Food System, Not Corporations
Why you should ditch the official EXPO and go to the People's EXPO instead
Jun 01, 2015
For those among us interested in how we can feed the world, we would recommend a visit to the alternative People's EXPO instead of the official Milan (Italy) EXPO 2015, a massive exhibition supposedly aimed at bringing the global community together to 'make progress on issues of international importance.'
Twenty million visitors are expected at the EXPO 2015 in Milan, a EUR1.3 billion exhibition themed around "feeding the planet, energy for life."
Giant food corporations like Nestle, McDonald's and Coca-Cola are using this space to hobnob with governments and portray themselves as companies feeding the planet sustainably.
But the picture painted at the EXPO is an unconvincing one.
The globalization of food production in recent decades - supported by unfair trade agreements - has led to corporate food monopolies. A small number of companies now dominate the supply of seeds, agricultural chemicals , processing, logistics and food production. For example, in 2011 four retailers controlled 85% of the German national food market, and three retailers controlled 90% of the food market in Portugal. In 2009, just five retailers controlled 70% of the market in Spain.
Why is it a problem that a handful of multinational corporations control our food supply?
Because the social and environmental impacts of this concentration of power are devastating.
"We produce enough food to feed the world's population today and in the future. What we need urgently is fairer distribution of resources and access to food dictated by need and not just by wealth and profit."
The corporate food system, heavily dependent on chemicals and fossil fuels, alongside cheap raw materials, makes a massive contribution to climate change - it is responsible for up to half of global greenhouse gas emissions. This cannot continue if we are to reduce greenhouse gases to safe levels for future generations.
Small-scale farmers and small food companies worldwide are driven out of business, while multinational companies drive a race to the bottom: their unsustainable production practices lead to the overexploitation and collapse of biodiversity and ecosystems. These market-dominating corporations routinely pay farmers below their costs of production; bully them into unfair contracts and can reject whole fields of produce at a whim whenever the price is not right for them.
Some of the companies represented at the EXPO are key players in the push for even more corporate control and for trade agreements which would undermine food safety and standards. Leaked and published negotiating texts of the current EU-US trade negotiations, known as TTIP, provide a good example of how EU leaders are ready to trade away European food safety standards following intense lobbying from the corporate agribusiness sector.
Although no decisions will be taken at EXPO for the future of food and farming, a lot of resources have been used to give credibility to an industrial food system, based on monocultures, hybrid seeds, and chemical pesticides and fertilizers. This food system is promoted heavily by agribusinesses and some governments as the best way to feed the world, while in reality it benefits multinational corporations at the expense of people and planet.
Conversely, it is small-scale food producers that are feeding the majority of the world today, especially the most marginalized peoples. They produce over 70% of the world's food supply, and have developed the model of 'agroecology' which is emerging as the best way to feed the world. Agroecology is a set of farming practices and a political movement that makes food production work in harmony with the natural world, and creates new models of food societies and economies for example by bringing farmers and consumers closer together. In February 2015 in Mali, representatives of millions of small-scale food producers from every sector came together to define agroecology and committed to map out the next steps to scale up agroecology in order to feed the world.
At the People's EXPO running this week, small scale food producers, farmers' movements, activists and researchers will discuss the real challenges of the current food system and the solutions: agroecology and food sovereignty - the right of people to healthy and culturally appropriate food produced through ecologically sound methods.
These are the people who know how to feed the planet now and in the future. In Latin America, 60 percent of farming, including meat, comes from small-scale farms. In Asia, the global rice powerhouse, almost all rice is grown on farms of less than 2 hectares.
The real challenge to feed the world is finding more ways to support sustainable, regenerative decentralized farming systems (pdf). We need more short supply chains, more local markets, and more systems that improve the well-being of small-scale farmers. We need more biodiversity of seeds, crops and animals, to make food production resilient to a changing and unpredictable climate - all themes being discussed at the People's EXPO.
Friends of the Earth believes that we need to put agroecology and food sovereignty at the center of our food supply, with small-scale producers feeding local communities. Re-localizing the way we produce, process, and distribute food can help shift our economy so that it addresses the problems of climate change and biodiversity collapse, as well as the rising levels of social and economic inequality.
This means transferring power from companies and financial institutions to devolved democratic bodies like local food councils that give local people and communities a say. People should be in control of the food system, not corporations. There are many grassroots practical examples showing that this is possible.
We produce enough food to feed the world's population today and in the future. What we need urgently is fairer distribution of resources and access to food dictated by need and not just by wealth and profit. EXPO 2015 will be a very expensive diversion to prop up the corporations and a failing food system that so desperately needs re-building.
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