If you have spent any time online, there is a large chance you have come across a half-naked guy yelling at you for using seed oils. According to these bastions of nutritional health, everything from food dyes to vegetable choices is killing you, and everyone is lying to you. There are many of these nutritional influencers online, with many of the less obvious grifters having less aggressive messaging advocating for a “natural” life and only consuming “natural” products. Oftentimes, they will bring up the pervasiveness of ultra-processed foods and seed oils and will promote their own alternative products to detoxify their followers.
Promotion of healthy lifestyle choices is incredibly important considering that in America, unhealthy diets and habits have created an epidemic of chronic diseases. It is hard to find choices that allow people to avoid these problems. By educating ourselves about proper nutrition, these issues could be curbed, but unfortunately, many of these online educators are very misleading. In moderation, seed oils are perfectly healthy, soy will not stop testosterone production and aspartame will not give you cancer according to the American Heart Association, National Library of Medicine and World Health Organization, respectively. These fears over our foods have been growing and have resulted in substantial changes in our view of our health institutions and policies.
Frequently, the information that we get about proper nutrition is clouded and hard to sift through. Even in situations where there are clear guidelines, like for aspartame, the credibility and integrity of the researchers are questioned. As a result of the lack of transparency, the guiding force in nutritional information is not health departments but corporate interests.
There are, however, clear culprits to America’s health problems. Decades of research have shown that the high amounts of sugar, salt and fat in the American diet is to blame. The vast majority of Americans do not meet the recommended daily intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and dairy while greatly over-consuming salt, oils and refined grains. This calorie-dense and nutrient-poor diet has created a population where one in three adults have high cholesterol, nearly half have high blood pressure and half are diabetic or prediabetic. The government has implemented a new focus on improving nutrition education and proper labeling. Disparities in America’s understanding of proper nutrition exists and is evident in the widespread popularity of deceitful nutritional information. While education initiatives are important, these efforts put the burden on consumers instead of the food supply infrastructure.
In other countries, such as Hungary and Mexico, taxes on nutrient-poor foods have been implemented. These economic policies target sugary drinks and calorie-dense foods, which cause a reduction in the consumption of sugar and saturated fats. Policies like these could easily be implemented here in the United States, but also highlight another issue with our food system: the lack of diversity and accessibility of nutritious foods in many parts of this country. This has been caused primarily by greedy corporations and bad governmental policies that prioritize energy-dense staple foods.
Ever since the Great Depression, agriculture subsidies have mainly been given to corn, wheat, soybeans and rice. These policies were instituted to ensure that all Americans had food to eat. To remain economically viable, many farms had to switch over to producing these products. Now, farming in the U.S. produces relatively fewer fruits and vegetables, resulting in higher prices for them and much more corn and soybeans. Since more and more corn, wheat and soybeans were produced, the food industry raced to find uses for them. Now, our food supply is filled with them in one form or another. We get excess sugar from high fructose corn syrup, excess refined grains from white flour, and excess fats from soybean oil. These products, by themselves and in moderation, are perfectly healthy, but the sheer amount of them we get every day is killing us.
While there is widespread bipartisan support to reevaluate our current food production structure, the agricultural industry and the food industry spend millions of dollars to maintain this broken system. The issue with American food is not that mystery chemicals are giving us cancer; it’s that corporations have been reducing the quality of our foods in order to make more money, and the current administration is going to make things worse. President Donald Trump has vowed to reduce regulations, increase subsidies and plans to cut funding for supplemental nutrition programs. These policies will only exacerbate the power imbalance between consumers and industrial giants, reducing the likelihood of change.
This doesn’t mean that eating healthy is impossible. Despite the systemic and economic barriers to eating well, by staying informed and making educated choices, these health problems can be prevented.
