The politics of nutrition in North America

Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp. 75-78, 1996 Copyright © 1995 Elsevier Science Lid Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved 0149-7634/96 $9.50 + .00

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The Politics of Nutrition in North America H A R V E Y A. L E V E N S T E I N

Department of History, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada C8S 4L9

LEVENSTEIN, H.A. The politics of nutrition in North America. NEUROSCI BIOBEHAVREV 20(1) 75-78, 1996.-- In the 100-odd years since the rise of modem nutritionalscience,North Americans' ideas about food and health have been influencedby much morethan the scientists'findings.Theyhave invariablybeen affectedby politicalconsiderations.War, fear of revolution, leftist ideology,and the enormous financialstakes of giant food producers have all played important roles in shapingideas about nutrition. Nutrition Science Politics WilburAtwater Recommendeddailyallowances

RussellWilder

NORTH AMERICANS do not usually think that politics affects what they eat. They will point to personal finances, idea,; about health and fashion, or other aspects of culture,, but will normally regard political considerations as playing a negligible role in influencing diet. Although governments have played major roles in funding nutritional research and disseminating its results, it is assumed that this has been merely one aspect of their larger role in helping disinterested science conquer the nation's major health problems. Yet, this has not quite been the case for, since the end of the last century, the history of nutritional science in the United States - - and Canada, which has generally followed its lead in these matters - - has been intimately linked with politics. In particular, what Americans think about the relationship between food and health has very often been shaped by political and economic concerns having little to do with disinterested science. The very introduction of modern nutritional science into late nineteenth century America owed much to political concerns. The key concepts of this so-called "New Nutrition" were the ideas that foods are composed of proteins, ,calories, and fats, each of which performs a specific physiological role, and that the energy they produce can be measured in calories. Wilbur O. Atwater, the government-funded chemist who was instrumental in promoting these ideas, warned that this new knowledge must be used to reshape the diets of the working class if the United States was to avoid revolutionary upheaval. The industrialization and urbanization of the United States in the last three decades of the nineteenth century had been accompanied by spectacular growth in the slums. Radical political movements and labor unions blamed free-market capitalism for these miserable living conditions. Atwater and his followers were alarmed by this, yet their conventional economic theories told them that nothing should be; done to interfere with the free

Vitamins

market in working people's wages. The natural laws of economics dictated that these would always settle at a level providing bare subsistence (6). A way out of the conundrum seemed to present itself, though, with statistics indicating that workers spent over half of their wages on food. If, Atwater and the New Nutritionists reasoned, workers could be taught that the proteins in beans and cheap cuts of meat were the same as those in expensive beefsteak; and that fresh vegetables and fruits, which were mainly water, were a "conceit," they could substitute cheap foods for expensive foods in their diet. The money saved could then go t o better housing and clothing, and the improved standard of living would dispel any thoughts of changing or overthrowing the free-market system (1-3,6). Getting workers to find substitutes for beefsteak was thought to be particularly important because Atwater had arrived at a grossly inflated estimate of how much protein they needed to maintain health and physique. This, too, was connected to political prejudices. He increased the estimates of the German chemist Carl von Voit (which are regarded now as much too high) by almost 20%. The reason: American workers were said to be 20% more productive than German workers (1-3,6). One result was that a whole generation of social workers, and others concerned about the poor, thought, erroneously, that they suffered from severe protein deficiencies (6). American workers did not heed Atwater and the New Nutritionists, which was probably best for all concerned. The advice was given before the discovery of vitamins revolutionized attitudes towards fresh fruits and vegetables. Taking their advice to substitute cheaper foods for beefsteak, fruit and vegetables may well have increased the incidence of vitamin-deficiency diseases such as rickets and scurvy, as well as other ailments. In any event, the German sociologist Werner Sombart turned out to be much closer to the mark 75

76 about the relationship between working class food and American politics. In 1906 he wrote: "Upon the reefs of roast beef and apple pie are the dreams of American socialists dashed." (10). Instead of the working class, it was the middle class which took much of the New Nutrition to heart. Here again, the government played a leading role. Growing American state universities, whose home economics departments were funded in a large part by the federal government, sent thousands of young women out to teach the principles of the New Nutrition in high schools and colleges. During World War I, when the United States government mounted a campaign to conserve wheat and meat so that they could be shipped to the Allies in Europe, its major tool was the New Nutritionist idea of substitution: eat beans instead of grain-fattened beef, substitute other carbohydrates for wheat flour. The working class, reveling in the opportunities for steak-eating which high wartime wages brought, ignored it. The middle class, more stirred by appeals for patriotism at the dinner table, took the lessons to heart (6). By then, though, the first vitamins had been discovered. These laid the basis for the new paradigm which its advocates labeled the Newer Nutrition. Its emphasis was on the dangers of not having enough of these all-important nutrients. Americans were exposed to horrific photographs of cute little white mice who, when deprived of Vitamins A, B, or D, shed their furry coats, turned blind, and wasted away. In the 1920s and 1930s, as knowledge of vitamins and their role increased, so did the realization that they might be as useful in maintaining healthy corporate balance sheets as healthy bodies. They were, after all, a huckster's dream: tasteless and invisible, they were totally inoffensive in smell, taste or appearance. Difficulties in measuring the vitamin content of foods and ignorance regarding their functions encouraged extravagant claims for the vitamin content of all kinds of products, from Welch's grape juice to chocolate bars. Fleischmann's Yeast claimed that eating four or five cakes of its vitamin B-packed yeast daily, spread on toast or crackers, would prevent or cure conditions such as acne, tooth decay, intestinal canal problems, and "fallen stomach." The most successful promoters were the milk producers, particularly after development of the process for irradiating milk with Vitamin D, the "sunshine vitamin," enabled them to elevate it in the public mind to a kind of miracle food. This was mainly because they were able to turn governments into their most effective publicists. They invaded the schools with posters, pamphlets, movies, and other free promotional material, teaching that youngsters under 18 must drink a quart of their product a day (6). In the late 1930s, when the food industries' monopoly on vitamins was threatened by the development of ways to synthesize them, they tried to have the federal and state governments declare that the new pills and potions medicines were to be sold only at pharmacies. When this failed, and vitamin companies began promoting the idea that food processing deprived foods of vitamins, food processors turned to "fortifying" their foods with added vitamins. Again,

LEVENSTEIN the U.S. government was at the vortex of competing lobbies. At first, it approved of fortification. Indeed, it was at its behest that bread became the first major fortified food. Here the motivation was the fear that the national diet was low in Vitamin B1, thiamin, which was thought to be crucial for national morale

(7). The concern over morale originated in an experiment in which four teenagers put on low-thiamin diets were declared to have become surly and uncooperative something that most teenagers' parents would hardly consider abnormal. However, Dr Russell Wilder, the physician who conducted the experiment, was obsessed by thiamin deficiency. He eventually succeeded in convincing the government and the media that modern milling techniques had robbed white wheat flour of this crucial "morale vitamin." It was vital, he argued, that it be restored to the food supply in order that the nation be able to defend itself against foreign invasion. As a result, not only was thiamin added to flour, but so were iron and other vitamins and minerals thought to be deficient in the national diet (4,9,11-14). Fortification would probably have become an unstoppable steamroller had it not been for other political considerations. The American Medical Association (AMA), ever alert to any threat to physicians' dominance of health care, had waged a dogged fight against vitamin supplements, arguing that the extravagant claims made on their behalf encouraged ill people to take them rather than to seek medical intervention. Pumping vitamins into all kinds of foods was regarded as encouraging the same kind of thinking. As a result of AMA pressure, for the next 25 years or so, the government would not approve of fortification - that is, adding new nutrients to foods. It would only allow enrichment, which replaces those nutrients lost in processing (7). Wilder had mobilized much of his support at a National Nutrition Conference that the government called in 1940 to prepare the nation's nutritionists and food industries for the possibility of war. Perhaps the most important outgrowth of the conference was the list of Recommended Daily Allowances (RDAs) which provided the basis for popular beliefs about proper nutrition for the next 40-odd years. As with the case of the "morale vitamin" and enrichment, the RDA's origins and impact owe much more to politics and economics than to science. At the conference, government officials bemoaned having to provide healthy diets for millions of young men being enlisted into the armed forces without knowing exactly what a healthy diet was. They were also aware that they would likely be called upon to ration foods to the civilian population, yet did not know how far they could go in restricting the intake of certain foods. There was nothing like a scientific consensus on what various vitamins did and how much they were needed. They therefore asked the nutritionists to tell them what was the minimum amount of each known nutrient required for maintaining good health (7). Wilder and the other males on the nutrition committee blithely gave three female home economists one -

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POLITICS AND NUTRITION night to come up with such a list. The women seethed when the men left them holed up in a Washington hotel room while they went out "on the town." Naturally, the women, having to deal with experts' recommendations which 'were all over the map, were unable to come up with a list. However, a larger committee was formed which, in the ensuing months, examined the various estimates. Then they made the crucial decision that, to avoid making recommendations that might leave anyone with a diet deficient in nutrients, they would lean towards the high estimates. Then, they would add on to these an extra percentage, normally about 30%, to provide a "margin of safety." Realizing that they had not produced the minimum "requirements" they had been asked for, they called their numbers "allowance.s" (7). The crucial distinction between "allowances" and "requirements" was soon ignored or forgotten. The R D A s - - which were far in excess of what those who made them up thought were adequate for the vast majority of the public - - assumed a place in the national nutritional pantheon in the guise of minimum requirements. They also became the basis for the Five Food Groups that the government chose as the major vehicle for educating the public about nutrition. (It started as eiLght groups, but no-one could remember what they were.) As in the case of milk and vitamins, this pie-chart of the five kinds of foods one was to eat every day was enthusiastically propagated by the food-producing industries and the government departments of agriculture which were their handmaidens. All food producers could buy into the chart because it was the perfect political instrument - - there was no food th~,t did not have a place in one of the groups. Producers of every single food could claim, truthfully, that it was on the government's list of foods that were necessary for good health, and many of them now did. The R D A s did come back to haunt the U.S. government, though. For 20-odd years after World War II, it had joined the food industries in proclaiming Americans "the best-fed people on Earth." Yet, in the mid-1960s, there came the disturbing discovery that many Americans were living on manifestly inadequate diets. This discovery of hunger in America soon became a political issue,. Politicians such as Senator Robert Kennedy and the young African-American activist Reverend Jesse Jackson flayed the government for allowing hunger to exist in the land of plenty. Hunger turned out to be too subjective a phenomenon for government action, so the campaign was redirected towards :malnutrition, which seemed a more quantifiable problem. By using the RDAs as minimum requirements, advocates for the poor were able to assert, as Jackson did, that up to 40 million Americans suffered from malnutrition. The R D A s were also used, or rather misused, to calculate the "poverty line." The U.S. Department of Labor calculated the cost of a hypothetical shopping basket which would supply the R D A s and, using estimates that workers spent about one-third of their incomes on food, multiplied the cost by three to reach the figure

(7).

77 Concern over hunger soon faded, mollified in part by a food stamp program which eventually enrolled one in ten Americans. Middle class attitudes towards food were affected much more by the other great upheaval of the sixties, the rise of the New Left and Counterculture. These helped breed a suspicion of large organizations - - particularly corporations. The New Left soon imploded into a galaxy of sects and the Hippies were co-opted by the style merchants, but their distrust of big business remained. In particular, the misgivings they fostered about what the food industries were doing to foods helped lay the basis for acceptance of the new paradigm, which can be called Negative Nutrition. Both the New and Newer Nutritions had set Americans to worrying that they were not getting enough nutrients. Now they began to worry that they were eating too much of various things. Not only were the food giants pumping their products full of dangerous additives, Americans were told, but many of the foods themselves were harmful to health. Panicky food processors now squared off against each other, attacking each others' foods as unhealthy. Egg producers brought Professor John Yudkin over from the University of London to appear on talkshows, telling Americans that it was sugar, not cholesterol, that caused heart disease. Sugar producers funded research on the dangers of artificial sweeteners. But what had begun as a general onslaught against corporate capitalism was soon co-opted by these very forces. Most food companies found ways to turn the very products that were being condemned by righteous young activists, into "Natural," "Lite," and "cholesterol-free" foods. During the course of this, they helped to reinforce their position as the nation's most important purveyors of nutritional information. One wonders, for example, how elevated the national level of cholesterol-phobia would be, were it not for the warnings of the dangers of the nasty chemical which have been appearing, implicitly and explicitly, in advertisements for margarine and vegetable oil for 25 years (7). In 1993, a nutritional Armageddon of sorts took place on the political level. For over 10 years, it had seemed apparent to most mainstream purveyors of nutritional advice that North Americans consumed too much animal fat. Yet powerful beef and dairy interests in both the United States and Canada were able to resist a re-writing of government nutritional guidelines which reflected this. Finally, in 1993, their veto was broken. In both countries, mild warnings against eating too much saturated fat were included in new nutritional guidelines which went part of the way, at least, towards having North Americans return to the kind of diet which most of their ancestors had fled Europe to escape. One wonders, though, if this would have been possible had other powerful interests, such as vegetable oil and grain producers, not been enthusiastic over the new guidelines. In any event, if the past is any guide, the new guidelines' impact on public attitudes will likely be in direct proportion to the extent that they can fatten important economic interests' profits. We are dealing, in the U.S., with a country in which Coca-Cola routinely spends

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more on advertising than the federal government does o n n u t r i t i o n e d u c a t i o n (5). N o s o o n e r h a d t h e d a i r y a n d b e e f i n t e r e s t s s u c c e e d e d in p e r s u a d i n g t h e g o v e r n m e n t to set t h e g u i d e l i n e s ' u p p e r limit o n t h e p e r c e n t a g e o f calories in t h e d i e t d e r i v e d f r o m fat at 3 0 % , r a t h e r t h a n t h e 20 o r 2 5 % u r g e d b y m a n y e x p e r t s , t h a n

the National Dairy Council began shipping pamphlets to t h e schools telling c h i l d r e n t h e y s h o u l d c o n s u m e " n o less t h a n 3 0 % o f c a l o r i e s f r o m fat." (8). F o o d is a m u l t i - b i l l i o n d o l l a r business. T h e r e is n o w a y that telling p e o p l e w h a t t h e y s h o u l d e a t will e v e r b e t h e sole r e s p o n s i b i l i t y o f scientists.

REFERENCES 1. Atkinson, E. The science of nutrition. Boston, MA; 1892. 2. Atwater, W.O. The chemistry and economy of food. Proceedings, 3rd Annual Session, National Convention of Chiefs and Commissioners of Bureaus of Labor. Boston, MA; 1885. 3. Atwater, W.O. The pecuniary economy of food. Century Mag. 34:437-446; 1888. 4. Cargill, G.R. The need for the addition of vitamin B1 to staple American foods. JAMA 113:2146-2151; 1939. 5. Hoffman, L. The great nutrition hassle. Palo Alto: Mayfield; 1978. 6. Levenstein, H.A. Revolution at the table: The transformation of the American diet. New York: Oxford University Press; 1988. 7. Levenstein, H.A. Paradox of plenty: A social history of eating in modem America. New York: Oxford University Press; 1993.

8. New York Times. 29 January 1995. 9. Science News Letter. 11 January 1938; 12 April 1941. 10. Sombart, W. Why is there no socialism in America? Translated by Hocking, P.M.; Husbands, P.T. White Plains, New York: Sharpe; 1906. 11. Vitamins for war (editorial). JAMA 115:1198; 1940. 12. Wilder, R.M. Nutritional problems as related to national defence. Am. J. Digest. Dis. 8:242; 1941. 13. Williams, R.D.; Wilder, R., et al. Induced vitamin B1 deficiency in human subjects. Proceedings of Staff Meetings, Mayo Clinic 14;1939. 14. Williams R.D.; Wilder, R., et al. Observations on induced thiamin (vitamin B1) deficiency in man. Arch. Int. Med. 60: 785-789; 1940.