What there’s no sign of -- and there hasn’t been for a while -- people who are involved in agriculture policy sitting down and thinking what kind of an agriculture policy we need in a situation where we’re dealing with climate change, if you’re doing rational agriculture policy, you want to have enough food to feed the people, farmers to be able to make a living, and an agriculture system that will promote public health and do the least possible harm to the environment.

Marion Nestle

Categorized in : Politics

The standard four food groups are based on American agricultural lobbies. Why do we have a milk group? Because we have a National Dairy Council. Why do we have a meat group? Because we have an extremely powerful meat lobby.

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funny-inspirational four powerful

The problem with nutrient-by-nutrient nutrition science is that it takes the nutrient out the context of the food, the food out of the context of the diet, and the diet out of the context of the lifestyle.

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nutrition lifestyle problem

Unbelievable as it may seem, one-third of all vegetables consumed in the United States come from just three sources: french fries, potato chips, and iceberg lettuce.

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potato-chips vegetables may

The real reason for health claims is well established: health claims sell food products.

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real claims reason

BASICS OF DIET AND HEALTH The basic principles of good diets are so simple that I can summarize them in just ten words: eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables. For additional clarification, a five-word modifier helps: go easy on junk foods.

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vegetables simple moving

Here we have the great irony of modern nutrition: at a time when hundreds of millions of people do not have enough to eat, hundreds of millions more are eating too much and are overweight or obese.

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nutrition too-much people

Eat less, move more, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, go easy on junk foods.

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junk vegetables moving

There's no question that largely vegetarian diets are as healthy as you can get. The evidence is so strong and overwhelming and produced over such a long period of time that it's no longer debatable.

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vegetarian-diet strong long

The key dietary messages are stunningly simple: Eat less, move more, eat more fruits and vegetables, and don't eat too much junk food. It's no more complicated than that.

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simple food moving

What we know about diets hasn't changed. It still makes sense to eat lots of fruits and vegetables, balance calories from other foods, and keep calories under control. That, however, does not make front-page news.

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balance vegetables doe

These days the biggest issue is how many calories you consume. So all of this stuff distracts people from thinking about calories.

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issues people thinking

When you have a food safety system that's voluntary and not mandatory, you're in a situation in which everybody wants everybody else to go first. So as a normal course of doing business, food companies cut corners and don't want to take the kind of trouble and the kind of testing and the kind of careful procedures that are required to produce the safe food because they don't have to.

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safety cutting want

They (food companies) are putting $36 billion into directing those choices. And their methods are very effective.

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billions method choices

You need to identify the steps at which contamination can occur - those are the critical control points. You take steps to make sure that that doesn't happen. And you monitor and evaluate and test to make sure that your system is working properly. And if it's done diligently and done faithfully and monitored carefully, then they're producing safe food. And no astronaut of which I'm aware has ever gotten food poisoning in outer space.

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tests space safe

I would require every producer of food to follow and have enforced a standard safety plan. We know how to produce safe food. It has a horrible name; it's called HACCP - Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point - and this was a food safety system that was developed for NASA so that astronauts wouldn't get sick in outer space. If you just think about what it might be like to have food poison under conditions of zero gravity, you don't even want to think about it.

Marion Nestle

zero names thinking

We don't have a farm-to-table food safety system. I keep saying this. It came as a big surprise to the FDA that tomatoes were being grown in the United States, sent to Mexico for packing, and then sent back. I mean, they had no idea that our food chain worked like this.

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fda mean ideas

To speak only of food inspections: the United States currently imports 80% of its seafood, 32% of its fruits and nuts, 13% of its vegetables, and 10% of its meats. In 2007, these foods arrived in 25,000 shipments a day from about 100 countries. The FDA was able to inspect about 1% of these shipments, down from 8% in 1992. In contrast, the USDA is able to inspect 16% of the foods under its purview. By one assessment, the FDA has become so short-staffed that it would take the agency 1,900 years to inspect every foreign plant that exports food to the United States.

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fda agency country

Food safety oversight is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two agencies, the FDA and the USDA. The USDA mostly oversees meat and poultry; the FDA mostly handles everything else, including pet food and animal feed. Although this division of responsibility means that the FDA is responsible for 80% of the food supply, it only gets 20% of the federal budget for this purpose. In contrast, the USDA gets 80% of the budget for 20% of the foods. This uneven distribution is the result of a little history and a lot of politics.

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responsibility animal mean

We don't really have any that protect the food supply from farm to table. We have a food safety system that's piecemeal, largely divided between two agencies that don't talk to each other very much. Neither agency can enforce regulations from the farm to the table.

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agency safety two

FDA, which regulates the safety of vegetables, doesn't have those kinds of rules because Congress doesn't want it to. It's not that the vegetables themselves have anything wrong with them; it's that they're contaminated with animal manure. One of the rationales for a single food safety agency is that you can't separate animals from vegetables.

Marion Nestle

fda agency animal