Why You Shouldn't Entrust Your Eating Habits to the Media, the Government, or Food Science
Alongside 11 other fantastic presenters, The Reluctant Eater spoke at Ignite Boulder on Wednesday night. Ignite is a worldwide movement of people getting together to present and share ideas but with a twist: 20 slides, each advances automatically after 15 seconds.
My first public speaking gig in 11 years went off without a hitch, except, as you'll see, due to a technical glitch not all of the slides advance after 15 seconds. I spent so much time cutting down my speech that I wasn't prepared to have extra time, and there is a little bit of dead air! Enjoy - A Whirlwind Tour Through 8 Decades of Food Advice: Why You Shouldn't Entrust Your Eating Habits to the Media, the Government, or Food Science.
This graph shows you why the Sweet Surprise campaign promoting High Fructose Corn Syrup effectively shot itself in the foot. The top blue line represents worldwide Google searches for the phrase "high fructose corn syrup" since 2004. The bottom blue line represents the number of times "high fructose corn syrup" appeared in Google News stories over the same period of time.
2004 - Little to no awareness of high fructose corn syrup.
2005 - Shhh....it's still quiet.
2006 - Dumdedumdedum, whoops...a small bump in the road.
2007 - We're still in the clear...keep putting that sludge into food products.
2008 - Somehow we continue to get away with this....OH MY GOD!!!!
That, my friends, is how you design a horrible, horrible roller coaster.
The key is in the numbered flags, which represent major news stories: lawsuit settlements, scientific analysis, debunking scientific analysis, ruling against the Mexican HFCS tax, etc. Notice that across the entire four years, major news coverage regarding high fructose corn syrup did not translate into increased consumer awareness or interest (when people are interested in something, they Google it). The two lines do not seem to correlate at all.
From a news perspective, things appeared to get rough in 2007 and 2008, with many more bursts of stories covering this overlord of cheap calories. But yet, the googling trends remain flat.
What in the name of government subsidies happened in August of 2008? That's right: the Sweet Surprise Campaign launched with primetime TV commercials promoting high fructose corn syrup. I've written about itbefore (and you should absolutely click thru and watch them), but if Google is any guide (and it is), the Corn Refiners Association screwed up big time and brought attention to a problem that barely existed.
But don't stop now, your commercials continue to amuse and entertain the enlightened eaters in TV land. At a time like this, there is really only one thing to say:
I don't know why it didn't occur to me to check back in on our friends at Sweet Surprise. Perhaps I figured they'd give up on their advertising campaign promoting high fructose corn syrup? Thankfully not! If their last two commercials didn't sway you, this one certainly will:
Sweet Surprise Ad 3 - Grab some popcorn (don't worry, it's healthy because it's made from corn) then click on "Brothers", and sit back and enjoy the show.
These ads are so beloved, that "tribute" ads are popping up all over YouTube. I've done the dirty work for you, below are my two favorites:
I pledge to put up their next commercial as soon as is humanly possible. If anyone happens to see it before I do, please drop me a note so we can all bask in its awesomeness.
Thanks to Deadspin for the scoop. Jay Cutler, quarterback of the Denver Broncos, currently stars in commercials for McDonalds. Well, I probably would too if given the chance (and maybe donate my resulting paycheck to a worthy, health food related cause?), but not as a diabetic.
This isn't quite like a lung cancer patient pitching cigarettes, but it's close.
I'm not sure who engrages me more: the chicken who crossed the road, or the slaughterhouses advertising department on the other side.
This is a continuation of A Tour through Food Headlines: 1935-1965. Using Google News Archive, I searched old newspaper archives for the phrase "healthy food" and took one of the first few relevant results from each of the last 8 decades.
In the first article, we caught glimpses of the important issues and general mindset of the time period: meat saftey in the 1930's, sugar rationing in the 1940's, scrawny nervous girls in the 1950's, and reducing your food budget in the 1960's. Amusingly, many of the articles I looked at spoke explicitly to woman, plainly acknowledging them as the cooks of the household.
How quickly things change as we approach our modern food culture...
"That means 1) one daily serving of leafy, green or yellow vegetables. 2) At least one serving of citrus fruits, tomatoes, cabbage or salad grens. 3) At least one serving of potatoes or other vegetables and fruits. 4) At least one serving of milk or a milk product .... 7) Optional: one serving of butter, margarine or polyunsaturated oils."
My comments: 1975 marked the year in my research (I was only looking in 10 year intervals) that dieting came up on the first page of results. While searching for accompanying photos, I also began to stumble across fast-food related imagery for the first time.
Where did that USDA Food Pyramid come from anyway? And isn't everything you need to know about it contained in the headline of the second article? It's taken us hundreds, if not thousands of years to develop complex scientific theories, so why is it that we believe "scientific" food wisdom, especially when it changes difinitively every few years?
Some of the hottest new food fashions are hardly nutritious: croissants, with 65 percent fat (compared to 2 percent in bread); many not-so-lean and salty gourmet frozen dinners; quiches loaded with fat, salt and cholesterol; fatty and salty toppings stuffed into nearly fat-free baked potatoes; upscale yogurts made with high-fat milk and sugared fruits and flavorings; soft drinks artificially sweetened with medically controversial NutraSweet. And, ironically, the health-food industry, which helped to fire the interest in wholesome foods, has lost its innocence. Now, it pushes a bevy of highly processed candy bars, cookies and chips, often aligned on racks near the health-food store checkout counter.
My comments: Here is where we start to see the beginnings of the same trap we are currently in. The diet culture starts to kick in, leaving consumers confused and making potentially worse choices. If the soda is "diet", then I can drink more of it! If we process out all the "bad" parts, I don't have to feel guilty anymore.
Consumer demand for healthy fast food has started to change the face of the industry. Wednesday's anticipated "light menu" launch by Taco Bell will try to capitalize on the consumer demand for more healthy choices, but according to El Pollo Loco Director of Marketing Lou Franson, the giant PepsiCo subsidiary's good intentions are off the mark.
"Healthy food -- such as the flame-broiled chicken, pinto beans and Spanish rice that we have served for more than 20 years -- is a rare find in the fast-food industry," he said.
My comments: At first I had to laugh - was he actually convinced that flame-broiled chicken, pinto beans and spanish rice counts as "healthy food"? Then I had to remind myself that the point is to eat real food (not necessarily "health food" which can be highly processed), so maybe in a sense, that is a much healthier meal than what you'd get at Taco Bell. Take a look at the present day article - 13 years later, Taco Bell still serves up 75% of your daily calories in ONE salad.
Students can pick up fast foods, including hamburgers, french fries, fried chicken and doughnuts, on the way to and from school, Austin says. Some high school students can go off campus at lunchtime to eat it, she notes. "Five days a week we send children to an environment where there's an abundance of high-calorie, low-nutritional-quality, inexpensive food."
My comments: I have little idea of what goes on foodwise in public schools, but from what I have read: we should be afraid. Schools sign contracts, yes endorsement deals, with large food companies (like Coca-cola) to make sure they receive prominent placement in the hallways. There is a growing movement that sugar is one of the main causes of modern day child behavior problems, including ADD and ADHD. Why is that a surprise?
If you liked this article, please let me know...so I can do more like it in the future! Also, if you haven't already, read Part 1.
Apparently, there is enough of a building consumer push towards healthier food that the industrial food complex (I love how evil that phrase sounds, don't you?) is running political food ads. High fructose corn syrup is getting a bad rap these days, and according to them, for no good reason.
Obviously it's perfectly natural and healthy - it's made of corn after all! Well, here are a few other things made from corn:
If this list seems surprisingly alphabetic, I merely took the first 6 items from this list of corn uses, provided by some sort of Canadian corn advocacy group. Frankly, I thought it would take longer than 5 seconds of googling to prove my point. Take a look for yourself, there is other stuff like: candy, potato chips, licorice, mayonnaise, soda, whiskey, etc. None of which you can really make a case for as foods we "should be eating".
Yes, high fructose corn syrup won't kill you, immediately. But it's no coincidence that the number of children developing diabetes in this country correlates nicely with the rise in sweeteners (primarily high fructose corn syrup, or HFCS) being processed into just about everything at the supermarket. Why not eliminate the middle man and have us all just put our lips around the spout on the back of one of these?
The big joke with the punchline of these commercials is that you won't have any problems "in moderation". There is already enough hidden sugar in our diets (real sugars and all the ingredients that end in -ose) that we aren't even aware of (in sauces, dressings, breads, cereals, etc), that it is absolutely irresponsible to suggest that we have room for more in the form of popsicles and red sugar-water/juice, as depicted in the commercials.
So, despite fact that the "opposers" in the commercials have a strong enough stance against HFCS that they would condescendingly mention it to a friend (only the truly committed take it that far), they are instantly swayed back to the other side by one eloquent sentence? No, the people who are already anti-HFCS will not be phased by this ridiculous bit of self-serving propaganda. It is the people who were on the fence. And sadly, those are the people who can really make a difference, because there are a lot of them.
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