WHO - the watchdog that has learned to bite its tongue
One reason for the success of the TV comedy Yes Minister was the inescapable feeling that, underlying the comedy, was truth. In one episode, Jim Hacker was persuaded to rein back his anti-smoking campaign because, if successful, too many people would survive to claim an old age pension and it would bankrupt the state. The script was based on genuine cabinet papers.
It was a lesson in understanding that health is not the only consideration in public health policy. It was also a lesson in comprehending that politics is about more than truth. Politicians will introduce and defend polices they know are doomed to failure simply because they think the public wants them - witness the present public health policy, prisons policy and the transport department’s rush to build new roads. But it isn’t just public opinion that makes them tug the forelock but also naked power and influence. And it isn’t just governments who succumb.
Considerable opposition
A series of profound statements accompanied the World Health Organisation’s report of 1990 - Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases. Little gems such as:
“Diets associated with increases in chronic diseases are those rich in sugar, meat and other animal products, saturated fat and dietary cholesterol… If such trends continue, the end of this century will see cardiovascular disease and cancer established as major health problems in every country in the world.” You can’t be more forthright than that, nor more accurate!
It looked at the global picture for food production and tried to tackle disease at its very roots: ‘Policies should be geared to the growing of plant foods including vegetables and fruits and to limiting the promotion of fat containing products.’ It then added: ‘Farming policies which do not rely on intensive animal production systems would reduce the world demand for cereals. Use of land could be reappraised since cereal consumption by the population is much more efficient and cheaper than dedicating large areas to growing feed for meat production and dairying.’
It concluded with what was probably the understatement of the decade: ‘The nutritional objectives in this report’, it said, ‘can be expected to meet with considerable opposition.’ So powerful was that opposition that barely a single one of the WHO’s recommendations was implemented and so pernicious has been the undermining of this global institution that what fangs it once had have been blunted, if not entirely removed.
About face
April 2003 saw the long awaited publication of the update to its 1990 report which carries the same title. If you analyse the 2003 version, it takes the same overall view as the 1990 report - it makes clear that the worldwide dietary trend towards high saturated fat and refined carbohydrate foods, coupled with sedentary lifestyles, is the principal cause of the enormous rise in noncommunicable diseases such as diabetes, obesity and heart disease. But… and there’s a big but!
The championing of plant-based diets as the way forward for health, which dominated the first report, has been entirely watered down. Its previous plea that healthy diets should be chracterised by the ‘frequent consumption of vegetables, fruits, cereals and legumes…’ has gone. Its view that ‘foods of animal origin are no longer viewed as dominant items in an optimum healthy diet’, has disappeared without trace.
So what’s happened? Has science suddenly done an about face and discovered that plant foods are not all they’ve been cracked up to be? In fact the opposite is true, as this edition of veggiehealth shows, and the evidence supporting plant foods has continued to grow in strength over the last decade until now there is simply no counter argument.
The WHO had its arm twisted and almost broken by the tobacco industry. Similar strong-arm tactics were tried by the sugar industry after the 1990 report was published, with 40 ambassadors writing to the WHO demanding that the recommended 10 per cent maximum sugar level must be removed from the report. It wasn’t but the sugar industry then moved their attention to the EC Eurodiet guidelines and threatened, with the support of their powerful political allies, to block the entire report if the 10 per cent limit recommendation wasn’t removed. They were successful and after a series of panic meetings, it was replaced by a recommendation that sugar shouldn’t be eaten more than four times a day.
Blackmail tactics
Now, in 2003 and with the support of the Bush regime, the sugar industry has become even more emboldened, demanding that the 10 per cent maximum level should be increased to 25 per cent and threatening to lobby Congress to remove its $280 million funding for the WHO. If it was prepared to reveal its blackmail tactics so publicly, it beggars belief to think what it must have done to the WHO in private with the support of tame politicians.
We reported in the last issue of veggiehealth that an independent consultant had revealed that the food industry had infiltrated the WHO since the publication of the 1990 report and was exerting undue influence over its policy making. Top of the list was the so-called International Life Sciences Institute, founded and funded by Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, General Foods, Kraft and Procter & Gamble - some of the biggest food and drink companies in the world. It would be naive in the extreme not to think that the meat and dairy industry, which dwarfs all others in term of size and political clout, has not also been at work behind the scenes.
Beyond rhetoric
If it is read with a critical eye and between the lines, the 2003 report does offer some indictment of animal products and does link them with ill health. What it fails to do is repeat the call of the 1990 report and state forthrightly that there must be a massive reduction in the amount of animal products consumed worldwide if health statistics are to improve. In its closing sentence it says: ‘Beyond the rhetoric, this epidemic [of chronic degenerative diseases] can be halted - the demand for action must come from those affected. The solution is in our hands’.
Yes, the solution is in our hands and what needs to be done isn’t a mystery. But before those whose health is suffering are likely to act with determination, the conflicting messages from governments and NGOs alike must be ended and health advisory bodies everywhere must tell it like it is. And that means relying on science, resisting the pressures of an unscrupulous industry and having the courage to stand up to politicians, who are equally as guilty in this unedifying tale of deceit.
The profits of big business are being put before human health - which is bad news for us but good news for big business because ill health and the myriad pills and potions it spawns, is yet another huge profit centre. Maybe that could explain why the messages on health emanating from our own Department of Health are as weak and feeble as they are and why they have done little to curb the burgeoning epidemics of degenerative diseases and improve our children’s diet.
Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases, World Health Organisation, 2003, Technical report series 916.