Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (20 page)

Where is the fat in our diet?

In animal foods
. Over half the fat in the American diet comes from animal foods, with red meat alone contributing almost one-third. Although our consumption of butter and lard has fallen drastically (Americans eat about one-quarter the butter we ate in 1910),
¹⁴
we’re eating much more fat in meat, poultry, cheese, and margarine. We’re eating two or three times as much of these foods as we did in the mid-1940s.

In fattier meat
. Not only do we eat more meat and poultry, but those products contain more fat today than in our grandparents’ time. As we’ve seen, one important effect of grain feeding is to put on more fat. During their last 120 to 150 days before slaughter, cattle are fattened up (or “finished,” as cattlemen say) so they will receive USDA’s “choice” or “prime” grade rating and command a premium price. A choice-grade carcass has about 63 percent more fat than one fed less grain and graded only “standard.” (In the last several years the meat industry has begun to respond to the public’s concern about fat by offering more lean meat and even a few reduced-fat processed meats, such as hot dogs.)

In snack foods
. Just as important in explaining our increase in fat consumption are snack foods—french fries, potato chips, corn chips, crackers, and other snack foods. Eating potato chips, we get 63 percent of calories from fat—fully double the recommended proportion for our total diet. Even in Ritz crackers, we get 46 percent of the calories from fat.
¹⁵

In other processed fat surprises
. Ironically, some of the processed foods we purchase in an attempt to avoid fat or cholesterol have more fat than the product we are trying to avoid. Nondairy coffee whitener, for example, has three times the fat of natural half-and-half.
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Prepared foods such as TV dinners and fast foods also contribute to the fat surge in the American diet. In a Big Mac or Kentucky Fried Chicken or a TV dinner, Americans are getting about half their calories from fat.
¹⁷
At home we
could
eat a meal with just as much fat, but once we pass under the Golden Arches we have no choice.

The vegetable oils most commonly used in processed foods—coconut and palm kernel oils—contain largely saturated fats, the type medical authorities warn us against. Virtually all of the fat in powdered coffee whitener is saturated fat.
¹⁸
So is the fat used in processed foods such as “breakfast bars” and some imitation ice creams. Thus, even though we might never use coconut or palm oil in our own kitchens, if we eat a processed diet we get plenty of these saturated vegetable fats. They now account for 16 percent of total vegetable oil consumption.

Dangerous Change No. 3: Too Much Sugar

Since the turn of the century Americans have doubled their daily sugar dose; just since 1960 it’s gone up 25 percent. One-third of a pound of sugar is now consumed each day for every man, woman, and child in America.
¹⁹

T
HE
R
ISKS

The problem with sugar is both what it does to us and what it displaces. The link between sugar and tooth decay is well established. In virtually all societies studied, the incidence of tooth decay rises as people eat more sugar. Half of all Americans have no teeth at all by the time they reach the age of fifty-five.

Sugar also fills us up with calories while giving us no nutrients or fiber. Filled on sugar calories, we inevitably eat less of other nutrient-rich foods such as breads and cereals, fruits and vegetables. Unfortunately, sugar makes us need the nutrients in these foods even more. Sugar increases the body’s need for thiamin and perhaps the trace mineral chromium as well, according to Dr. Jean Mayer.
²⁰

W
HERE
I
S THE
S
UGAR IN
O
UR
D
IET
?

As with fat, Americans are not buying more sugar and confections directly. In fact, Americans are eating significantly less candy today than they did in the early 1940s. Candy has its ups and downs, but per capita intake has been falling steadily since 1970.
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The household use of sugar has dropped to half of what it was in the early 1900s.
²²

We are eating more sugar because it is being added
for us
by the food-processing corporations and we are eating more of their processed foods.

Since the early 1900s the per capita consumption of sugar in processed fruits and vegetables has tripled. So much sugar is added to processed fruits and vegetables that Americans eat almost as much sugar in these foods as they do in cake and candy. Since the early 1900s, the per capita use of sugar in beverages, mainly soft drinks, has increased almost sevenfold.
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By 1976 the equivalent of 382 twelve-ounce cans of soft drinks—each with six to nine teaspoons of sugar—was consumed for every person in the country—up about two and one-half times just since 1960.
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(The next time you reach for a Coke, remember that you’re about to drink the sugar equivalent of a piece of chocolate cake, including the icing.) Fully one-quarter of our intake of cane and beet sugar now comes from soft drinks.
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Among processed foods, cereals and baked goods give us the most sugar; the country’s second most popular breakfast cereal, Sugar Frosted Flakes, is
half
sugar.
²⁶

Dangerous Change No. 4: Too Much Salt

Americans now eat 6 to 18 grams of salt (sodium chloride) a day—10 to 30 times the average human requirement, and as much as three times the recommended level.
²⁷
Dietary Goals for the United States
recommends that we eat no more than one teaspoon of salt (5 grams) a day (about 2,000 mg of sodium). Since the average human
requirement
for salt is probably one-twentieth the recommended maximum of one teaspoon, there is virtually no danger of insufficient salt even if we never add salt to any food ourselves.
²⁸

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Health scientists are widely agreed that high salt intake markedly increases the risk of hypertension, or high blood pressure, and they estimate that as many as 40 percent of the older people in the United States are susceptible to hypertension. High blood pressure increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. High-salt diets also cause edema, or water retention, in some people.

W
HERE
I
S THE
S
ALT IN
O
UR
D
IET
?

Again, as with fat and sugar, the problem is not so much that Americans are reaching for the saltshaker more often. The greater problem is that many Americans eat two to three times the recommended daily intake without ever seeing a grain of salt. In a Kentucky Fried Chicken dinner, for example, you consume a teaspoon of salt—enough for a whole day.
²⁹

Not only does fast food come salt-laden, so do many processed foods. (See
Figure 5
.) A mere ounce of processed Swiss cheese—less than you might put in a sandwich—has almost one-quarter teaspoon salt. Natural Swiss cheese has one-sixth that much.
³⁰
A frozen beef dinner contains almost a full teaspoon of salt, 20 times as much as an unsalted hamburger.
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Two hot dogs give you one-half teaspoon, as does a cup of Campbell’s soup.

Almost all canned vegetables are salt-heavy. Fresh or frozen corn, for example, has almost no salt; but a cup of canned corn has 20 percent of the salt recommended for a whole day. Even processed foods that we think of as sweet are really salty, too. One piece of cake made from a devil’s food cake mix contains as much salt as a 1½-ounce bag of potato chips.
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Other salt-laden foods are cured meats, such as smoked ham, chipped beef, and corned beef, and the pickles Americans love on hamburgers.

In addition to the invisible salt in processed foods, Americans are eating more and more salted snacks. In 1980 Americans spent almost $4 billion on potato chips, nuts, corn chips, pretzels, and prepopped popcorn.

Dangerous Change No. 5: Too Little Fiber

Until very recently, most of us did not know that lack of fiber in the diet was a risk; most of us didn’t even know what fiber was. Scientists define dietary fiber as the skeletal remains of plant cells that are not digested by our bodies’ enzymes.

Figure 5. Sodium* in Fresh versus Processed Foods

As significant as any other change in the human diet over the last 20,000 years is the “fiber revolution.” The diets of our early ancestors probably contained ten times the dietary fiber of contemporary diets.
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Our long digestive tract undoubtedly evolved to handle this higher-fiber diet. The antifiber revolution has taken its most extreme form in the United States, where today 70 percent of our calories come from food containing little or no fiber.
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The fiber in fruits, grains, beans, seeds, and vegetables differs, and serves different beneficial functions. Some, for example, shorten the time it takes food to pass through the intestines; others promote the growth of bacteria useful in altering potentially harmful substances. So it is important to eat a variety of fiber.

T
HE
R
ISKS

Of all the diet-disease connections, the role of dietary fiber may be hardest to pin down, since the fiber content of our diet has no direct biochemical effects but promotes physical and secondary physiological changes. Nevertheless, low-fiber diets have been implicated in heightened risk of bowel cancer and other intestinal diseases. “Dietary fiber appears to aid in reducing the onset and incidences of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, diverticulosis, colon and rectal cancer, and hemorrhoids,” states Dr. Sharon Fleming of the Department of Nutritional Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley.
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More than one scientist believes that fiber in the diet appears to be even more strongly linked to reduction of blood cholesterol levels than does a lowering of fat consumption.
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Another problem associated with lack of fiber is plain old constipation.

W
HY
S
O
L
ITTLE
F
IBER IN
O
UR
D
IETS
?

Whole cereals, fruits, vegetables, and legumes (peas, beans, lentils) are good fiber sources. But we are eating less of many of these fiber foods and more of foods without fiber. For example, we eat less than half the flour and cereals our grandparents ate in 1910,
³⁷
and the refined cereal products we do eat have been stripped of their fiber. A slice of white bread has only one-eighth the fiber of a slice of whole wheat bread. (See
Figure 6
.) Since 1930 we have cut our fresh fruit consumption by one-third.
³⁸
The amount of dried beans in our diets has dropped by a third since its peak in the 1930s. One of the few fiber foods whose consumption is not declining is fresh vegetables.

As with fat, the real reasons for lack of fiber in the American diet are the increase in animal foods (which have no fiber to begin with) and the increase in processed foods (which have theirs removed).