Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (34 page)

Finally, the panel was granted access to the federal government’s research on where Americans were getting all this fat, and the findings were stunning.
Topping the list of culprits was cheese, followed by pizza, which is basically a vehicle for conveying cheese. Together, cheese and pizza contributed more than 14 percent of the saturated fat being consumed. Second on the list was red meat in its various forms, which accounted for more than 13 percent of the fat in our diet. In third place—at a bit less than 6
percent—were all those grain-based desserts like chocolate cake and cookies, which are laden with oils. The list stretched on, meandering through the grocery aisles, from boxed frozen dinners to candy. Chips, from potato to corn, contributed only 2.4 percent of the saturated fat in our diet.

Taken together, the agency’s report on saturated fat—the health trouble, the overconsumption, the dominance of cheese and meat as the biggest sources—would seem to lead to a logical conclusion: We should stop eating so much cheese and meat. Which was precisely the conclusion reached by some of country’s smartest independent thinkers on nutritional health, including a man named Walter Willett, who leads the nutrition program at Harvard’s School of Public Health. Willett is
blunt in urging people to cut back on cheese and red meat. Red meat, he says, should be slashed from the current average of one serving a day to no more than two servings a week. Moreover, red meat that has been processed into bacon, bologna, hot dogs, sandwich meats, and other products with added salt is best avoided altogether. Numerous other foods can supply the protein that people require, including chicken and fish, while their calcium needs can be met through vegetables and, if need be, a supplement.

But here is where consumer advocates and the consumer advocacy at the USDA diverge, and strikingly so. For starters, the 2010 guide
buried the information about where we are getting all our saturated fat, slipping it into a single chart that appears on page 26 of the 95-page report. More significantly, nowhere in the document was there any explicit talk about reducing consumption of meat and cheese. Mum on this matter, too, was the reader-friendly graphic, shaped like a dinner plate, that was released in 2011 to help convey the message of better eating to the greatest number of Americans, including children.

Following the release of the guide, Willett and Margo Wootan, the director of nutrition at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, publicly confronted a spokesman for the USDA’s nutrition center. Appearing on a popular radio talk show based in Washington, D.C., in February 2011, Willett and Wootan accused the agency of being reluctant to point a finger not only at cheese and red meat, but at any specific food or product known
to be a contributor to poor health.
“If you really want people to reduce solid fat intake, you’ve got to talk about reducing consumption of red meat, consumption of cheese, ice cream, and other products like that,” Willett said. “That needs to be said
clearly
.… Unfortunately, I think the fingerprints of big beef, big dairy are still all over these guidelines.”

In reply, the deputy director of the nutrition center, Robert Post, launched into several familiar points that did little to assuage his critics. The agency was acting with full transparency, he said, opening the panel’s meetings to the public and not just industry representatives, with everyone’s input posted online. In his view, the science of nutrition revolved around nutrients, not particular foods, and the best strategies for achieving optimum health required the consideration of a person’s entire diet.
“The idea isn’t to eliminate any specific food,” he said.

If that was all the People’s Department did in its guidelines—
not
name names when it came to helping people improve their diets—nutritionists might not have been so angry with the agency; people might still have been able to figure out for themselves that cheese and meat were the most obvious things to cut back on. But the USDA went further toward helping the food industry. The 2010 guide did, in fact, mention cheese. In a section titled, “Foods and Nutrients to Increase,” cheese was included among the foods that people should eat
more
of, not less. As for meat, the guide suggests eating more seafood for its omega-3 fatty acids, a “good” fat that appears to lower the risk of heart disease, but meat is touted throughout the report with the added assurance that neither it, nor milk products, have been specifically linked to obesity: “These foods are important sources of nutrients in healthy eating patterns.”

The agency offers one caveat with these recommendations: The cheese and meat we eat should be of the non- and lower-fat varieties. But there was a problem with this nuance, out in the real world. Since nonfat cheese tastes awful and the low-fat varieties aren’t much better, grocery stores mostly offer the full-fat varieties. Meat is even more problematic. There are no whole cuts of red meat in the grocery store that fall within the USDA’s definition of “low-fat,” which is 3 percent fat or less.

The closest they come to this standard is 5 percent fat, known as extra-lean, and 10 percent fat, known as lean. A piece of lean meat just over three ounces has four-and-a-half grams of saturated fat, nearly a third of the recommended maximum for a day’s intake. Nonetheless, this was precisely the kind of meat that the USDA was urging people to eat.

These lean-type meats—even with their third of a day’s saturated fat in each serving—aren’t what people envision when they think of meat. They often lack the deep flavor and silky mouthfeel that comes from a highly marbled steak, where the heated fat swims over the tongue to send signals of joy to the brain. But even if more people
wanted
to follow the USDA’s advice and eat lean meat,
finding it in the grocery store would be no piece of cake. In fact, it can require considerable skill in the game of hide and seek. (Shopping for meat is not like shopping for cereal, where sugar content is required, by law, to be listed on the box.) A little explanation in the ways of Washington is needed to understand why.

Another federal agency, the Food and Drug Administration, quite apart from the Department of Agriculture, oversees all of the food in the grocery store except for the meat and dairy. The FDA has its own issues in balancing the needs of consumers and the needs of industry, but starting in the 1990s it took a major leap forward on behalf of consumers: It required food manufacturers to spell out on the packaging exactly how much salt, sugar, and fat their products contained so that shoppers could make better assessments of what they are eating.
^†
By contrast, the Department of Agriculture is only now starting to move in this direction with meat—and an awkward start it has been. In selling most meats, grocery stores are merely required to post a guide—listing the fat content of generic cuts—somewhere in the vicinity of the cooler. This chart can be placed high, it can be placed low, it can even be placed on the other side of the aisle; in short, it can be made very easy to miss. To help out, the beef industry
has created an online guide that discloses the fat content of generic cuts of meat, and suggests that consumers who want less fat look for clues on the label, including the words
round
or
loin
.

In 2012, the
USDA required this information to be placed directly on packages of ground beef, but even this came with a gift to the meat producers. At the industry’s urging, the Department of Agriculture allowed them to put the word
lean
on their packages even when the meat is not lean by the agency’s own definition. For example, the fattiest hamburger sold in stores has six or more grams of saturated fat in three ounces. And yet the label approved by the USDA will read: “70 percent lean, 30 percent fat.” Of course, there is a good reason the industry wants to use the word
lean
. According to surveys done by consumer advocates, the lean-fat labeling causes shoppers to think the meat has less fat than it really does—if they are looking at the label at all. For many, if not most, people, the decision-making stops at the price, and here, too, there is a perverse real-world issue that cancels out the federal advice to eat lean meats: The more fat that meat has, the less it costs. In 2012, stores were charging $1 more a pound for the leaner grades.

In one respect, it’s hard to blame the USDA for pulling its punches on meat and cheese. Long ago, the manufacturers of processed foods, having identified the agency’s nutritional guide as a key battleground, devoted considerable resources to influencing the 2010 panel before their work even started. USDA records show that seven of the panel’s thirteen members were nominated by the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association. The members I interviewed all vouched for their independence, but the association—in its nomination letters to the USDA—made its position clear: If the panel was going to be talking about healthier diets, it needed
“to include expertise and perspective related to food product development,” and thus, it needed members who
understood
the industry’s needs and challenges. For instance, one of its nominees, Roger A. Clemens, was the associate director of regulatory science in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Southern California, but earlier in his career he had
spent twenty-one years developing products for Nestlé, which gave him, he told me, a deep appreciation for matters like the essential role that salt plays in shielding processed food from harmful bacteria.
^‡

At the same time, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, whose members include Kraft, Kellogg, Nestlé, PepsiCo, and almost every other major manufacturer of processed foods—more than three hundred companies in all—joined other food industry groups and individual companies in pressing the panel to tread lightly in considering their big concerns, especially salt, sugar, and fat. This lobbying took the form of letters and supporting documentation submitted to the panel, through which the companies sought to challenge the panel’s assessment of the health risks posed by these additives. The food manufacturers also recited the hurdles they face in reducing their own dependence, such as the diminished texture and taste in cereal with decreased sugar or fat loads.

This intense lobbying effort went on for months, with hundreds of submissions to the USDA, but a single day’s mail, July 15, 2010, provides a representative view of the war over fat that was waged by consumer and manufacturer alike. The typical
consumer’s view was voiced by Bonnie Matlow, a librarian from Shepherdsville, Kentucky, who also happened to be diabetic. “It is a shame entire generations have lost the ability to cook a good meal from local ingredients,” she wrote to the panel, “because money was shifted to corporate farms to underwrite the growing of energy dense, nutritionally deficient grains that require supplementation to justify its inclusion in the guidelines, unpronounceable preservatives to last on the shelf, and sugar/HFCS [high-fructose corn syrup] to be palatable.”

That same day, a 17-page letter arrived from the USDA’s other, more monied constituency. The sender said he represented an industry with $2.1 trillion in annual sales, 14 million jobs, and $1 trillion in “added value
to the nation’s economy.” It was from the Grocery Manufacturers Association, and it started off with a gripe: “We find that the Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee report repeatedly suggests that Americans would benefit from consuming less processed foods. This supposition is not science-based, discounts the value of the U.S. food supply, and perpetuates a misguided belief that processed foods are inherently nutrient poor.” To the contrary, the association said, food processing allowed for a huge variety of fortified, convenient foods to be eaten year-round. The association then did its best to persuade the panel from being any more specific if it did persist in urging Americans to eat fewer processed foods. (In a separate letter written three months earlier, the association had said, “There are no inherent ‘good foods’ or ‘bad foods,’ ” and it reiterated this notion that better nutrition was instead a matter of total diet.)

The GMA also spent more than a page of its letter arguing against the panel’s move to lower the recommended daily maximum for saturated fat, saying, among other things, that the previous, higher limit was easier to achieve and thus “more consumer friendly.” But while the manufacturers ultimately lost on this matter when the panel held firm and lowered the rate, they pointed out that the change posed little real threat to them. Merely lowering the maximum limit
without
offering specific advice on how to accomplish this would do nothing to alter America’s eating habits. “Reducing saturated fat intake from 10 percent to 7 percent is an abstract concept to consumers,” the association told the panel.

Trekking out to Virginia to lobby the Department of Agriculture officials who speak for the health of consumers, of course, is only one small part of the job description for those who represent the food industry. Much of their time is spent prowling the corridors of agency headquarters on the National Mall, where their influence is free from any significant challenge. There, the food manufacturers don’t spend much time pressing the USDA to go easy on its regulations, though that is certainly part of their mission. Instead, they have used their power to turn the agency into a partner in promoting their products. And when it comes to meat and
cheese, this relationship has gotten the food companies out of some of their toughest jams—like how to get even more meat and cheese into the shopping carts of Americans, even as they are growing more leery of fat.

T
he Department of Agriculture’s role in promoting cheese and meat began in earnest in 1985, when the Reagan administration sought to curb the federal government’s subsidies for milk. As John Block, the incoming secretary of agriculture, saw it, the problem was too much production, so he set out to shrink the nation’s milk cow herds. But the proposed fix for Big Dairy—the government would pay for slaughtering 339,000 of their cows—caused some grief for Big Beef. All that meat would flood the market and send beef prices plunging.