Food is a political issue
We eat to survive and what we eat can influence our health for good or bad. But if it was only that simple. Tony Wardle explains why...
Knowledge is power! And where the impact of food on health is concerned, that knowledge has been guarded as jealously as Scrooge tended his pennies.
So, how do you break this knowledge log jam? You could try your doctor - but it probably won’t help much because doctors have almost no knowledge of the subject. Historically, diet and nutrition took up one day in their seven-year course and even that was optional.
There’s the press, of course. The story on p.15 is a clear illustration of why trust of the media is probably not a good idea. Many health writers have no nutritional training - often no scientific training of any kind. They will urge you to eat oily fish for the sake of your heart and never mention the mercury and deadly PCBs and dioxins that all oily fish now contain. If there’s a faddy bandwagon to leap on, they will jump and encourage you to do the same.
There must be an independent body that tells it like it is - the British Nutrition Foundation, for instance! It talks the talk but certainly doesn’t walk the walk. The BNF is funded by the food industry and in particular the meat industry. Principal paymaster is the Meat and Livestock Commission (MLC) and that close relationship is reflected in almost everything it writes. Some of the BNF’s wilder claims have recently been removed from its website - little nonsensical gems such as teenage vegetarian girls being three times more likely to suffer iron deficiency anaemia. Unfortunately, some of its old habits cling on.
“Vegetarians have been found to be at reduced risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). This may be owing to the fact that vegetarians tend to be more health conscious. CHD is a complex disease and it is inappropriate to blame any single food for its causation.”
To pretend that good scientific research doesn’t allow for lifestyle differences and fails to compare like with like is, of course, also nonsense. Fortunately, the World Health Organisation (WHO) is not so coy as the BNF.
“Although a large number of dietary factors have been investigated, those most frequently linked to degenerative diseases (coronary heart disease, stroke, various cancers, diabetes mellitus, gastrointestinal disorders and various bone and joint diseases) are the high consumption of energy-dense foods of animal origin and foods processed or prepared with added fat, sugar and salt”.
When a while back the BNF’s director claimed that vegetarians were risking their health because humans are meant to eat meat - and have two kilograms of bacteria in their gut designed specifically for the purpose - it really did seem as though the organisation had totally lost the plot.
Challenged to substantiate his claims, he refused to do so and maintained that the MLC, who had issued the statement, had done so without his permission. The MLC, on the other hand, claimed that the statement had been written by the BNF and approved by its director and they had simply acted as postman.
Either way, it reveals an unhealthy closeness between a so-called independent nutritional body and the meat industry and leaves consumers where they were at the beginning - desperately devoid of objectivity.
So where else can you go? There’s always government and its advisory bodies. The idea that they offer independent advice turned up its toes with the outbreak of BSE/vCJD. Denials of a threat to human health were shouted from the roof tops in order to protect the meat and dairy industries.
In 1997, the new Labour Government did appear, momentarily at any rate, to allow science to triumph. Its advisory body, the Committee on the Medical Aspects of Food and Nutrition Policy (COMA, but now called the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition - SACN) issued a preliminary report on diet and cancer which called for a dramatic reduction in the amount of meat eaten by almost everyone in the country.
A few weeks later, COMA revised its findings. People eating the national average of 90g per day should ‘consider’ a reduction while those eating 140g per day should actually reduce their intake. Such a feeble recommendation did what it was meant to do and left the status quo intact.
What had brought about this change of heart? - apart, of course, from massive lobbying by the meat industry and its main champion, the Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (MAFF). The reasons were so blatantly threadbare that reading between the lines was easier than reading the lines themselves.
Frank Dobson, then Secretary of State for Health, said: ‘I discovered that the report’s recommendations for the level of consumption of red and processed meat at which consumers should consider reducing their intake had not been discussed by all the members of the COMA committee. I ordered that the report should not be published until the committee had discussed the figure to be recommended. At no time has there been any difference of opinion between Jack Cunningham (then Minister of Agriculture) and myself’. Pull the other one, Frankie boy!
After MAFF’s appalling handling of BSE/vCJD, its name was changed to the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). Nothing else changed - except for… the Food Standards Agency (FSA).
This new quango was handed to Sir John Krebbs, who proudly claimed that the FSA was independent of government and would act as the consumer’s watchdog. That claim lasted about as long as it took to say.
Many of us believed that the real issues worrying consumers had purposely been excluded from Krebb’s brief - the constant overuse of drugs and antibiotics in livestock production which have helped to create deadly antibiotic-resistant forms of E.coli, campylobacter and salmonella food poisoning bacteria and the hospital superbugs, MRSA and VRSA. It also had no responsibilty for the unhygienic conditions in factory farms, from which most meat comes.
So what did Sir John decide should be the subject of his first report? Organic carrots! He claimed that there was no evidence to show they were healthier than intensively grown carrots. He based it on one report and ignored several previous reports which had identified carrots as one of the most pesticide-ridden vegetables on sale. Clearly, the FSA is another institution designed solely to maintain the status quo.
As for independence - it didn’t take long for a mole to reveal that the FSA had completely reversed its position on an import and slaughterhouse health control after intervention from government.
So who’s left? There has been one consistent champion of sensible advice on diet and health and it is the WHO. In 1991, it produced an earth-shattering report (or it should have been) called Diet and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases. It identified animal products, saturated fat, salt and sugar as the primary cause of degenerative diseases.
It concluded: ‘Policies should be geared to promoting the growing of plant foods and to limiting the promotion of fat-containing products.’ It went on to attack the vested interests that keep animal products at the forefront of the Western diet, saying the changes it proposed ‘...can thus be expected to meet with considerable opposition.’
How right it was. Some insiders claimed this was likely to be the last truly objective piece of work from the WHO and, judging by a recent report, their cynicism seems well founded.
An independent consultant recently disclosed that the food industry has now infiltrated the WHO, just as the tobacco industry did, and exerts undue influence over the all-important policies to limit the amount of animal fat, sugar and salt we consume. Their methods include the placement of sympathetic scientists and courting tame journalists. This influence, according to the consultant, also extends to the WHO’s associated organisations. Foremost in exerting influence is the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) founded and funded by Heinz, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, General Foods, Kraft (owned by tobacco giants Philip Morris) and Procter and Gamble.
When you realise that livestock production and fodder, together with the end products of meat and dairy, constitute the largest industry in existence and is the engine of world trade, only then does the whole sorry picture begin to make sense. When you add in the wider food industry, the combined power is awesome.
While it does its damnedest to keep profits up and knowledge down, our children are literally dying as a result (see page 14). What has happened to their diet, and the way it is adversely affecting their health, is an international disgrace and an evolutionary disaster.
It is into this whirling vortex of self interest, corruption and political duplicity that the VVF has launched. To say we have a job on our hands would be the understatement of the century. But we’re here, we’re independent and we intend to be effective. We rely on science not back handers and have no commercial interests. We are a charity that has to challenge and change the world to be effective - but no one said it was going to be easy.