Who Defines "Healthy Food"?

Caption: Welcome to every supermarket in America. You are looking at aisles of food seen from above.... OR are you really looking at aisles of expensive marketing and mis-information?

The New York Times just printed an article about a new "Smart Choices" labeling program that is being adopted by many major food companies, including Kellogg's, Kraft Foods, General Mills, Unilever, and Tyson Foods. The "Smart Choices" label is prominently displayed on the front of food items to indicate healthier choices. This new labeling effort is being driven by the food industry and invokes the question:

Who gets to define "healthy food" or "smart choices"?

"The Smart Choices Program was motivated by the need for a single, trusted and reliable front-of-pack nutrition labeling program that U.S. food manufacturers and retailers could voluntarily adopt to help guide consumers in making smarter food and beverage choices." --Smart Choices Program Website

Caption: One version of the new "Smart Choices Program" product label

According to the Smart Choices Program, Froot Loops, is a "Smart Choice," yet the first ingredient is sugar and Froot Loops contains no fruit, contrary to what the name seems to imply.

Author and Professor Michael Pollan has written extensively about healthy foods in his books The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Pollan's motto for eating is simple:

Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not Too Much.

In his article Unhappy Meals, Pollan extrapolated on this motto with a set of recommendations for how we should approach food. We have abbreviated and condensed his recommendations below for your reading pleasure:

1. Eat food. Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these.

2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. They’re apt to be heavily processed, and the claims are often dubious at best. When Kellogg’s can boast about its Healthy Heart Strawberry Vanilla cereal bars, health claims have become hopelessly compromised. Don’t take the silence of the yams as a sign that they have nothing valuable to say about health.

3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number — or that contain high-fructose corn syrup.

4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.

5. Pay more, eat less. The American food system has for a century devoted its energies and policies to increasing quantity and reducing price, not to improving quality. There’s no escaping the fact that better food costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care. Not everyone can afford to eat well in America, which is shameful, but most of us can: Americans spend, on average, less than 10 percent of their income on food, down from 24 percent in 1947, and less than the citizens of any other nation. And those of us who can afford to eat well should.

“Eat less” is the most unwelcome advice of all, but in fact the scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. To make the “eat less” message a bit more palatable, consider that quality may have a bearing on quantity: I don’t know about you, but the better the quality of the food I eat, the less of it I need to feel satisfied. All tomatoes are not created equal.

6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves. ...by eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less “energy dense” than the other things you might eat. Vegetarians are healthier than carnivores, but near vegetarians (“flexitarians”) are as healthy as vegetarians.

7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around. Let culture be your guide, not science.

8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. To take part in the intricate and endlessly interesting processes of providing for our sustenance is the surest way to escape the culture of fast food and the values implicit in it: that food should be cheap and easy; that food is fuel and not communion.

9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.